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Xena knelt over her prey, her teeth bared, saliva dripping from her bottom lip. Her mouth dropped to the girl’s neck, her clawed hands holding the girl’s supple flesh as she poked through the skin with her teeth. At first there was the blinding taste of blood and pleasure, then with a shove she was ripped away from her meal and forced to the ground. The vampire whimpered, the girl had guts. She lay in the ground, in the dirt and the dust, as the girl leapt to her feet and thrust a broken plank of wood towards her chest.
The vampire looked up and met the blonde’s eyes, there was a fierceness woven into the green of her irises, and her face was fixed in a frown. A line of blood dripped down her neck and onto her chest. The wood was pressed to the vampire’s chest, but Gabrielle hesitated before plunging it deep into her heart. She wanted to watch the vampire’s face fall, to realise she had been beaten. She stared into the heart of the creature’s eyes and saw the red pulsing away, fuelled by her own blood. Gabrielle swallowed, this was more than a mere creature of the shadows, a fiend in the dark. This was a woman in desperation. Her lips were stained blood red and her fingers were arched into claws. Her nails had grown long from inattention, and her hair was ragged, unkempt, straggling around her waist.
“Don’t move.” The blonde said sternly, her voice hiding a tremble. She bent down over the vampire and lowered her weapon. She felt stupid, she knew this was stupid, but she did it anyway. She reached out for the woman’s hand.
Xena wanted to shrivel into a tiny ball and scurry away into the night. This was humiliating, her grand hunt, her greatest prey. And now she was being offered this? Offered mercy. She spat on the ground and rolled away, squatting onto her haunches like a mouse.
Gabrielle stood back, watching her. She pulled off her pack and took out her notebook. She scrawled a brief description and dropped the sharpened plank on the ground.
Xena watched her like a hawk, licking the remaining drops of blood from her teeth. She inched forward and sniffed the air. The girl smelt nice. She smelt metallic because of the blood on her, but she also smelled flowery, fresh, like a meadow in spring. Xena hadn’t smelt the familiar scent of her soulmate for a few centuries, the smell punctured her and stopped her in her tracks. She straightened her back and stood at her full heigh, moving so that she loomed over the smaller woman. She breathed out a sticky breath, she smelt like tar and roadkill. This was no way to greet an old friend.
Gabrielle was taken by surprise when the vampire got close to her again, she expected her to pounce. She expected to feel the sting of teeth on her neck, but instead all she felt was the vampire’s scorching kiss. She shivered, the nerves in her lips on fire as Xena pressed into her, as if trying to suck out her soul. The vampire bit gently on her lip until blood was drawn and she lapped it contentedly, her hand reaching up for the blonde’s face to hold it. Her skin was so soft. Xena hardly remembered what it felt like to touch her now because her head was swimming.
Gabrielle’s lungs ached for air but she couldn’t pull away. The pain was telling her to, it was tugging her back into the rest of the world, but she refused to let it. There was something so potent about the monster. She’d trained for this, she’d been told to avoid physical contact – that a vampire’s skin is poisonous to humans. She hadn’t listened, and now she was paying for it. She felt intoxicated.
Xena eventually let her go, gently removing herself and slinking back into the cover of the shadows. Gabrielle looked on after her, wondering why she hadn’t been attacked. Her hand came up to graze at her bottom lip, it was throbbing but not bleeding. There was no blood left for her to bleed, surely?
Xena tried to turn her back on the girl, but found she couldn’t. She looked down at her hands. They were scratched and dirty, but the burn around her finger remained. The scar of the ring that had been scorched into her flesh on her love’s last day of living. Her blood tasted the same. Was Gabrielle really living again? Only time would tell. Xena felt like the moment she left the scene of this sordid crime the girl would wash away into the night the way the sea washes away messages in the sand.
“Don’t go,” she whispered softly, and Gabrielle obeyed her.