Chapter Text
You, the Comtesse de Mirande, are asleep while the few dozen guests in attendance attempt to keep themselves entertained at your subdued, hazy party. Some hostess you are. The Baron de Lévesque is outside, as always, probably too close to the bonfire, whittling away at his seemingly endless supply of Carolinean tobacco – you're sure he smokes even under the withering sun. The Vicomtess de Plamondon is keeping warm in another fashion; she and the Madame de Plamondon are engaged in mutual feast in your Chambre Mauve, under the innocent mahogany-framed gaze of two jovial youths tumbling down a hill. And two pickled eyeballs.
The guests who aren't smoking or fucking are mixing wine and conversation with harmless but amusing results. Mostly harmless. Your favorite wool rug, a silver-blue oval that reminds you of your lake in winter, now has a soggy maroon patch along one edge, courtesy of the ancient Comte de Simard. He will not be receiving a bill as you still owe him for a set of lace drapes you singed, what, twenty-five years ago? Has it only been twenty-five? And you prefer to cut your elders slack when you can; it's good manners and the karma will pay off sooner or later. Assuming the undead are subject to the laws of karma.
Our good comte was likely busting a gut (you worry this might be literal someday) with his equally venerable pal the Vicomte de Mirabeau, and when those two get together they never can control themselves. You feel they ought to just fuck and cohabitate already. The thought that they tried that seven hundred years ago and damn near burnt down an entire province about it never crosses your mind; you were never privy to the knowledge to begin with. Almost no one is.
That all said, that you are entertaining almost none of your guests with your knelt and naked slumbering against your wife is no matter. This eternal lifestyle requires a well-cultivated ability for self-entertainment and they shall find other diversions as needed. Let yourself busy yourself in the starvation that is like endless banquet tables with nothing upon them but the flowers of your dear Maëva's savory, teasing praise. And her skin, fuck, her skin, taut and fresh as only the living can provide, ripe with the fragrant blood of the sun. Even insensate, you need her. Even insensate, you bite her. Oh, you eager, dwindling creature... the sight of you trying so hard fills me with pride... even insensate, you hear her, you whine. She slips her index and middle fingers between your messy lips, and your whining turns to gasps.
I noted earlier you are entertaining almost none of your guests because the Madame de Bonheur, wife of your oldest friend the Comtesse de Bonheur, watches you with a great big fucking smile on her face as she chats up your Madame de Mirande. Two wicked, remarkable humans without a care in the world, drunk on the spectacle of a writhing, helpless, more-than-half-starved vampire suckling at the fingers of a mortal. They use their given names even around the other nobility; they get off to that too.
But soon, achingly soon, betrayal strikes: you feel a graze against your incisors as your wife removes her juicy, vibrant fingers from your mouth and smears your saliva across your cheek. Your eyes cloud, and her thigh hair fuzzes into a blond blur. Bloodless begging, indecipherable, trickles from a corner of your mouth.
The Madame responds, "shhh, ma fille, rest yourself a moment. You've been working so patiently for hours. I've not even excused myself. Let my absence drive you onward."
The withdrawal of her fingers and her voice, of her presence and her blood, spikes your hunger. Your dream turns.
–––
You stagger and lurch across aging gray brick and fresher, grayer concrete, around dead sycamores, through folding chairs and tables barely sturdy enough to support the layers of ash upon them, against clouded massive glass panes offering a view into expired boulangerie, dead chocolatier, rotting boutique, and finally you grab hold of the handle of a frail wooden door. At your touch, the door falls backward and slips out of your grasp, splintering not like wood but like ceramic on the floor of apparently a once-café. Utilitarian white and black stoneware mugs, tables for two, a narrow counter crammed into a narrower room all confirm this for you.
There is no red in this room. You exhale nothing and move on.
Every building towers over you. Their eyes, three to five vertical layers of single or paired aging windows. Their mouths, previously maroon, blue, orange, maybe green facades with names like "Restaurant Ladess" or "Cépe et Figue" or "Un Demanche Á Paris" desaturated through age. Occasionally this is punctuated by a cathedral of one saint or another with always-shut iron doors. Your hands refuse to touch them, and your feet would refuse to carry you inside. So you look elsewhere for a person to drink.
Extended long enough, hunger develops a cyclical nature. One gets a little hungry, then very hungry, then so hungry they don't feel hungry at all, then even hungrier and they do feel an all-encompassing hunger, a murderous hunger. If you keep going past that, you do continue to oscillate between hungry and not hungry, starvation and quieter starvation, but by that point everyone else has given up and eaten or died or eaten themself and died. You, however, possess such a capacity (dare I say, a hunger?) for hunger that the cycle itself fuels you like the Earth itself flushing a stagnant river through a water wheel.
Deprivation, for you, in your world of excess, is meditative, calming, soothing. For you who wants for nothing except want itself, it provides want. It returns you to the vampire's womb, the coffin, sharpening your mind down to an infantile need that appreciates any blood, any warmth, any touch.
From above, fingers caress your hair and you begin a slow but turbulent descent from reverie. Her fingers? Her fingers. The spry and bloody fingers of the Madame de Mirande. They dip through the surface of your hair and into your skull like ducks in a canal, and pluck your semi-coherent spirit up, up and into a world of candle smoke and voices murmuring, the occasional spike of laughter. It is too much for you, literally; your drained-dry ears and eyes fail to receive any stimulus originating further away than a metre or two.
Which is fine, really, all you need is your wife – the rest of the world means nothing to you – just your wife. And that vital energy surging forth from her heart. And those heavensent hands of hers stroking your dusky, fraying hair. And that voice like a June festival. And those eyes, that pure amber that reminds you of eyes you once knew, eyes you once lost, eyes you yet keep. So while you're lost in all that, and in the work of gnawing her thigh like a cob of sweetcorn ("keep going, ma cherie, you're so dreamy when you feed! you're doing so well!" – you gasp and clench your thighs together), I'll give your cherished Madame de Mirande a bit of interiority, lest I recount your endless haze of red, and hands, and thighs, and eyes until the novelty washes away into the surf. For our readers, I mean. The novelty will never be lost on you.
–––
You, Maëva de Mirande, the latest (you are not loath to concede this) Madame de Mirande, recline atop your chair older than you, in your salon older than you, in your château older than you. Each and every last guest clears you by decades, if not centuries, other than your fast friend, your dear Madame de Bonheur (your senior by a mere few years), and of course tonight's supper, energetically wriggling about in a cage in the kitchen. As if he could free himself. As if it would result in anything but a less-clean death than the one on his life's docket. Guests who make their way through the dining room occasionally feed him grapes or a sliver of Roquefort or Reblochon. Sometimes they even peel the rind off for him!
You are the most youthful, vivacious, energetic being within the bounds of our story and as such, the most powerful, and you know it. Even if everyone else does not. Your house, your rules, and your guests follow your rules. Or at least they indulge your fantasies. It's just good manners. A smile lurks in your heart; you love their manners and what they have afforded you. You also love the sunlike mains hum that permeates your body as the wife you've de-fanged nibbles and tongues your thigh as might a particularly cowed wolf.
Let me pause. I am painting the wrong impression of you. I wish not to hang a portrait of you in shadow, smeared with blood, backlit by fire. My dear Maëva, you are no sadist. Not really. Just a bit, maybe. Okay, more than a bit. A lot. A great deal. I'm sorry for doubting you. Please put the knives away. Taking pleasure in the deaths of others or their simple perceived inferiority does not make you a bad person. You've found yourself plunged into a strange world and to cope with strange norms you became a strange woman.
No, you are loving, truly loving. What your dear Comtesse craves more than anything on this Earth, more than anything in your clothes or your body, is your regard, your admiration, your praise. And to sweeten it, you deprive her of it for weeks at a time, so when (as now) you do whisper ah, ma douce affamée, you never cease to amaze me with your patience, your persistence, you've such a grace about you when you abstain, I implore you to keep fighting, you'll break right through me, just a little further, the words burst inside of her like popcorn, and she quivers and weeps thin, red tears. Which, in turn, elicits your own fluids. How mutual your love!
Maëva, you are kind, and playful, and cheerful, I say as you tangle your fingers up in your wife's hair, you tug quite suddenly her needy mouth away from your reddened, bite-pocked leg, and as she lips at the air like a beached shark, you share a hearty laugh with Claudine de Bonheur. I must sound insincere but I am being genuine, truly. I mean it. You're lovely. Power play is an expression of your love, and everyone here knows it, and there is no false pretense about it.
Here, as proof of my honesty, another toy for you:
A man in fresh, ostentatous attire enters your salon and flinches before his second boot grazes the chestnut floor. Then he freezes up, stares at your wife, stares up at you, back down at your wife, scratches his neck, scowls, manages to smother the scowl when he realizes where he is, spins on a heel in an attempt to exit the room before your aura falls upon him. But you are too keen and he is too late.
"Ah! You must be the Comte de Carré! Welcome to the Château de Mirande! A pleasure to make your acquaintance, and I must say you do look sharp this fine night. Please, won't you come greet the good Comtesse and I?" Somehow, there is no malice in your voice. Refusing to let him escape without an exchange of polite speech is violence enough.
His honor will not allow him to flee – nor will his sense of self-preservation – and he whirls back around once he manages to strain a fresh grin through his teeth. It looks like a chicken pressed against a wire fence. You smile a vulpine smile, and beckon him over with much enthusiasm.
Up close, he looks about your age and not much less vital than you. He is clearly dead, as evidenced by the kaleidoscopic flecked red of his eyes, the scars on his neck, the dim and artificial bloodfire inside his cheeks and hands. But it's clear he's freshly turned. You wonder who would take enough of an interest in this obvious stick in the mud to grant him unlife. Perhaps that squareness is what they found so appealing. Realizing you'll get to torment him for as long as you're around, you think you grasp the allure.
"I am indeed the Comte de Carré, Madame. It is a pleasure to meet you." His words are precise and clipped as if piped by an experienced confectioner.
"Bonne soirée, Comte de Carré. I am the Madame de Mirande. Enchantée."
You stroke your wife's ravishing three o'clock hair (a sigh escapes her), and you beam up at the Comte, encouraging him to introduce himself to the obviously oblivious woman.
He cannot bring himself to do so. He opens his mouth and closes it. The air in the room grows still. Abruptly, you chirp, as your dear blood addict bites you with surprise force, then you fawn over her. "Ma fille, look how fierce your bite has become! Bien joué!" This breaks the tension (for you and Claudine, anyway). As reward, you take the Comtesse's nearest hand and place it on your lap, tucking her pinky in the crease between leg and abdomen. You tilt her head skyward, and it almost falls to one side but you lock it in place with a fixing glare. Then you ask, "My lovely rose-eyed dear, would you be so kind as to greet our new friend?"
Mesmerized by a goddess, she nods, and after the longest minute in the Comte de Carré's young unlife, she manages to string a few mumbles together: "Bonne soirée, Comte de Carré. Enchantée..."
You cackle, you pinch her cheek, you roll joyously in your chair. "Isn't she so graceful? She managed all that despite her hunger, and despite this..."
In one hand, a knot of your wife's hair in your secure grip, tilting her head back, angling her face upward. Slipping pointer and middle fingers between her desaturated lips, you slowly, so slowly, open her jaw, displaying her life-reddened teeth... and two empty holes where fangs really ought to be. To drive the point home, you slip a fingertip into one of the blank spaces, then worm it into the wet socket that you can tell your guest fears may never fill out again. The Comtesse's tongue hangs over her bottom lip like a wet towel. It's clear the display of her wound and the sensitivity of her gums are overwhelming her; she emits sweet squeaks like she's about to come right then and there, but it becomes apparent she's too drained even to reach orgasm. A pity.
Bending over, you whisper to her that she introduced herself with such eloquence, eliciting a delighted squeal from the little vampire. Having lost interest in her guest, she resumes her prayer at the altar of your thigh. You guide her head further down your leg, past your knee, to your calf, which you flex against her cheek as cajolement. Her mouth starts low, and her tongue curls against the sensitive, pale flesh of your ankle. Poorly, you stifle a moan, as well as the urge to stick your toes in her adorable petite mouth right then and there.
Then you fake embarrassment to either preserve or destroy the Comte's patience. "Ahaha... but I do apologize for the Comtesse's incomplete introduction. As you can see, she is quite occupied." Your sunny amber eyes display a more honest apology, or perhaps a threat.
Given a chance to respond, he instead clams up.
"You can see, can't you?"
Piano wire inside him snaps. One of the high notes. D7, perhaps. You hear it plink against the inside of his ribcage.
"Ah, yes," he eventually responds, "I can see that the Comtesse is focused on other matters. It is no trouble. Fascination... ensnares us all."
"That it does, Comte."
Madame de Bonheur brushes some nothing off of her coat and smirks at the Comte. It looks like a smile, but trust me, it's a smirk. She's perhaps more of a sadist than you are. You are perhaps her understudy, her apprentice. You'll surpass her in no time! Honest!
She has less patience than you. "Madame de Bonheur," she insists, "ravi." The Madame is not particularly ravi.
Her greeting thrusts itself through his immortal heart, evoking his good manners. "My apologies, Madame. Ravi." The Comte is not particularly ravi, either.
"Now, please," you interject, "we've imposed upon you quite enough and shan't take up any more of your time. I ask that you enjoy the rest of your evening at the Château de Mirande. We've got a feast preparing in the kitchen. Go on and stoke your hunger, I implore you."
He bows and pretty much teleports out of the room. You hear the sound of two people bumping together in the adjacent room. Then the joyous voice of the Comte de Simard:
"Cheer up, mon frere! You'll get up to worse in no time at all! Much worse!"
You and de Simard and de Bonheur drown out your laughs in one another's. The Comtesse de Mirande has been giggling silently since de Carré entered the room. Let's check in on her.
–––
There is, in your brash and astonishing wife, a great flowing rush of blood. She is as sanguine as she is blood-soaked. You know it. You just know it. It's all over her insides. You can see the iron whispering through her veins. You can taste the sodium of her proteins filtered through the sweat glands of her skin. You can even smell the plasma in the fluid occasionally leaking into the silken undergarment that snuggles her loins.
Whether or not you are conscious of all this is another question entirely. A question you cannot consider because you are not conscious of the severe deficiency of blood in your brain. The answer is, no, you are not. You are helpless, murmuring, confused, zombielike. Deprivation thorough of blood in your body has deprived your brain of complicated thoughts and your legs of the power to stand on their own. Slumped in a kneel, one hand on your wife's thigh, another slack on the cold, cold floor, all you can manage is to kiss and lick and nip at the hot, hot flesh she so generously offers you. Her gentle hands reposition you from time to time, and though it hurts to have to start your work again when you were almost there, really, you could feel her skin about to break, her blood about to flow, the protest slips from your mind as yet another fresh section of her fills your mouth.
You don't even understand that without the energy and fangs necessary to do so, you have no hope whatsoever of running her through and sharing in her puissance rouge. So you, bloodless, brainless, thoughtless creature at you are, continue to merely bite and suckle upon her as a teething infant might, as a still-blind pup might, as the pathetic and nigh-insensate starveling you are. Less sure yet is your tongue, which drifts here and there at the whims of stray involuntary muscular contraction, smearing in no particular direction the gentle blonde hairs that haze her.
At times, your wife tenses or squirms; you know by the surge of blood to her abdomen, to her groin. It electrifies her skin and swells her blood vessels and muscle. In response, your hunger thickens from a vision-clouding mist to a maddening acidic fog and you work even more furiously to free the savory nectar from the skin which imprisons it, which, petal-soft as it is, deprives you. As does her hand, which slides under your frail chin, lifts it up to point your aimless eyes into her incinerating suns.
They feel as if they might burn right out of your skull.
Then she smiles, she tells you how beautiful your mouth is and how hard you're working, what an austere pallor you have to you, watching you is my finest joy, ma petite requinette, she sticks a finger inside you and caresses your itchy teeth, your sensitive gums, and it is as if you could withstand Earth's star again, and a deeper you springs joyously across a cloudburst of sky-warmed wildflowers. More than blood, this is what you crave. Her affection.
Overwhelmed, your blood sinks; a bit of it drips from your naked genitals onto the floor.
And in so doing, that spare energy drains from your mouth, and your hunger becomes the dull, droning ache of an aching, dull drone. Bites lose vigor, licks lose ferocity. You revert from beggar to wastrel. Your wife cackles, or giggles; it is impossible to tell.
–––
Beyond your impaired senses, conversations die. Sinister people grow silent. Candles flicker, dim, fade, melt, or extinguish. The Vicomte de Mirabeau clings to his ancient ex-lover, who is the sole remaining source of casual joy in your château. Well, apart from you, but you are more focused entrancement than "casual joy". You take hunger quite seriously.
The Comte de Simand bows, offers an earnest comment allez-vous?, proffers an interregnal Aksumite gold coin. A leaden businesslike voice responds No, thank you. Best hold onto it. Never know when such currency will be worth spending, then claps the old vamp on the shoulder. That voice swirls into your salon, ensconced within a fatal whirlwind of a woman. She is a projection of 150 centimeters onto 200. She looks like she could turn into razors. All eyes slide to her as if by magnetism. Even you, focused and unfocused as you are, halt your labor and gaze up at your sire.
From behind a daysky blue hat with a wide, cocked brim, a cocked-ier grin, cirrus eyes, the Marquise de Durand surveys the room. What she sees: in the corner, that silent immaterial student in gray, the Baroness de Charbonneau, two humans she doesn't personally know, and you, in a place and way she's seen you decade in and decade out.
The lead in her throat transmutes into helium. "Ma fifille! Ma belle fée! Ma poupette! You never change, do you?" Yes, the italics were not merely for typographical convenience earlier. She really does talk like that. I refer my readers back to the razor imagery. But in this moment we've never heard a gentler blade – if she beheaded us all we'd thank her for the attention.
She bends down, wraps her arms around you, and lifts you into the air. Spinning around, she might look to some like a child with an overstuffed animal. Don't be fooled; the love is genuine, the harmlessness is not. Your heart surges with new blood (a vampire's heart is not a mere engine; it is more like a bonfire that, when suffused with emotion (or, yes, blood) grows furious), your cheeks flush, you cheer like you're five again. This is not quite enough to break your spell. Color has returned to the world, but your brain (which is like an engine (of terrible ideas)) will take some time to fire on all cylinders.
"Ah! It is so so good to see you." With a raised boot gesturing, she ushers your wife out of her chair and sets you upon it. She wipes the spittle off your lips with a kerchief that smells just like her. With a talon of a fingernail, she begins to guide your messy hair into a moderately-respectable appearance. "I apologize deeply for missing your wedding. Cross-ocean travel, even now, is no convenient thing. I promise I will be an absolute pillar at your next one. I promise. Je te le promets."
Your wife reflexively winces at the phrase "next one". It's no fait accompli, she thinks.
"It is no great matter, Maman," you stammer. But she sees you holding back tears, and she squeezes your hands, and with those crystal eyes, je promets, je promets, je promets.
Your maman turns to your wife and evaluates her first as feast material, then as servant material, then as relationship material – humans are both material and immaterial to her – then, finally, as a potential person. The scrutiny is withering; even your fierce thornlet bakes under Mother's hot glare. She...
...she does not look away. To do so would earn her a death agonizing, and suffer you a loss agonizing. But your sire does not allow the weak. At times this has had you searching yourself for what she deems to be strength within you. You still do not know what it is.
After the longest minute in the latest Madame de Mirande's life (and truthfully it was much longer than a minute, it always is), your mother knocks the wind out of her with a bear's hug and releases her only just before she threatens to deflate entirely. You had told your wife this is step two of the evaluation process and you were not sure if you were joking. Then she regards your wife with eyes smiling human smiles.
"Don't let ma fifille push herself too far. Even after all this time, she's still not learned her limits." She turns to you and sighs. "Or she refuses to admit them. Children can be so stubborn. It is on you, dear Maëva, to enforce them. Let's see, looks like..."
"Twenty-three days, seven hours, thirty-three minutes," answers your wife.
"Yes, that's what I reckon exactly. And that's more than enough. Something terrible always results from terrible hunger. You will feed her at once. I don't care how."
Your wife does not acquiesce; that would imply protest or disagreement. But even her obeisance is a form of defiance. Or so she thinks. In reality, how she feeds you truly does not matter. The Marquise de Durand has seen worse. Much worse.