Carpe Victim

Carpe Victim-2

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Misty. Midnight. I'd just ended my nightly meanderings, finishing up by a place I always found more serene than anywhere else: the cemetery on the hill, its brickwork base and wrought iron fence struggling to keep the hill from spilling its contents into the street. I always found its derelict beauty, especially in the moon and mist, placidly reassuring.

I'd dropped and stubbed out one cigarette, fished out another. Some of us don't smoke. It is, after all, a useless exercise since we don't breathe, but "coffin nails" (such a deliciously perverse name) can't hurt a creature like me. If anything, they're a comfort. So I smoke to my long dead heart's content.

I'd set the unfiltered Camel between my lips and dug out my matches. Struck the light and held it up. You stood beneath a dying street lamp across the street. I smiled at the irony:  one mortal light fading out over another. I'd been watching you awhile, fascinated—and puzzled by my fascination. Fascinated, perhaps, because you refused to look my way though you were aware of me. Did you think I didn't notice your surreptitious glances? Oh, I noticed. I draw my share of looks, both now and in the past.

I'd been considered more than passably attractive as a human male, tall and muscular, as most of my fellow Norse were. My eyes reflected the blue-grey of the sea though, now, they might better be described as "gun metal blue." Back then, my hair grew in skewed, ragged curling wildness. When it turned grey before I turned twenty, however, I suffered no end of grief, such things being considered ill-omened among us. To have endured so much superstition and fear for what we now know—thanks to Watson and Crick—were merely twists in DNA.

Ah, the marvels of this modern world.

For a time, your game amused me. But hunger was greater, and I was so very hungry. Tiring of the stalemate, I decided to leave but paused a moment more, a moment too long. Your dark,suffering eyes, worthy of El Greco's brush, fastened on me—just once.

I couldn't look away.

The cigarette hung, balanced precariously, from my bottom lip, forgotten. Luscious, heady anguish—yours—sliced through my defenses. Awakened my cravings as if I'd only just smothered them, as if She had only just left me. That single glance burned into my memory's core, burning, burning, until I smelled actual burning flesh. Mine, the match singeing my fingers. I dropped it. Ground it out. Cursed extensively in Old Norse and whatever other languages sprang easily to mind. I dug the matches out of my bomber jacket. When I looked again, you were gone, no longer manning your post under the lamp. I glanced around: no trace of you. Shaking the box, I realized I'd used the last one and cursed again. Patted myself down, trying to find another, any other, light.

Watch out, She would've cautioned. You might get what you're after.

"D'you need a light?"

"How origi...," the tang of sea salt skittered by on a stray breeze, whispering in the air. Stoppered the words in my throat. For a moment, the ground pitched and roiled beneath me, and I could've sworn I tasted salt spray, felt it stinging my face and hair. I should have looked first. Somehow, you had doubled back without my noticing, no small feat with a creature whose senses are as acute as mine. You stood within breathing distance of me—if I needed breathe as humans do. If I thought you attractive from a distance, up close you were...devastating.

Though you topped me by a good four inches—and I was tall for my time—you seemed smaller, perhaps because your body conveyed such quiet, inviting vulnerability. Shoulders hunched. Hands burrowed into jacket pockets. Voice full of such exquisite, subdued need, and your skin: pale, sallow-tinged ash. A trick of the street light, perhaps? You struck me as sickly, as though you hadn't known sunlight in a very long time—but, then, who was I to speak? My time out of the sun was measured in centuries. If you were ill, what was that to me? My nature inoculated me to any and all diseases—social and otherwise—you might harbor. And your eyes, ah, your eyes shone with such lambent pain, I could've fallen on you then if I'd had full command of myself.

I didn't. I could only stand and stare. "Ye—es, thanks. Kind of you."

If you heard me stammer, you said nothing. You pulled a cheap, plastic lighter from a back pocket. Handed it to me. Watched me suddenly and wholly forget how to make my hands and fingers work. I finally thumbed the lighter into life, only to have my trembling and a slight breeze extinguish the spark.

"Here. Let me." Your hands cupped mine, your skin the dry whisper of corn silk flaking to dust against my palm. Your thumb pressed mine to strike the wheel. Between us, the scent of my past intensified, taking on hints of cedar and moss, the woods, leavened by the ever-present sea spray, and I realized: you, the redolence came from you.

Lighter flickered into flame. Your hands guided mine to ignite the tobacco. I inhaled sharply, inhaled, as well, the cedar-moss-woods scented essence now mingling with the tobacco. Welcomed the smoke scalding its way down my throat, searing my lungs, until I expelled it. Welcomed the acrid smoke, too, for the reprieve it granted me from your enthralling scent. Repeated the action, trying so damned hard to rebuild my composure, futile when I knew you watched. When your hands still touched mine.

"Uh, thanks." I pushed the lighter back. Tried to break contact that I might clear my head.

"Keep it." Your fingers curved around mine, swallowed my hand in yours. Pressed the lighter on me. Your thumb stroked the fleshy web between my thumb and forefinger.

"That really isn't—."

"No, really—keep it." You leaned down. Put your face right in mine where I couldn't deny the strength of your aquiline nose or the fullness of your lips or your scent infiltrating my defenses.

An image, carried on that brisk sea breeze, sliced through my thoughts: you stepped into me, the low, brick wall and decrepit wrought iron fence caught me, trapped me, your knee between my thighs, your hands inside my jeans, cupping my ass, your palms feverish against my dead-cold skin, pulled me tight so you could grind yourself into me, your erection as demanding as the brick and iron scraping my back.

While I sprawled beneath you, my own hard-on, centuries' dormant, now an unbearably painful demand straining my jeans, my arms tangled in the fence, too shocked or stunned to move, to save myself from drowning in your essence.

"Liar," taunts my present mind.

Then, you smiled, a smile so cocky, so self-assured, the image dissipated like the smoldering in my lungs. "I don't smoke."

You turned, walked away. Set me free, and I sagged into the fence, the wrought iron creaking its protest. But did you free me? I, who need no breath, couldn't stop panting. Couldn't stop trembling. Couldn't will myself limp again. Watched you long after you faded into the distance, your scent in my psyche, clouding my senses. How many cigarettes did I smoke after that?

I nailed the coffin well and truly shut.

I followed you, then, matching my trails to yours that night—and the following, each night bleeding into the next. As I stalked, I studied you. You seemed to heal, your skin regaining a healthier tone. Your body filled out. Your eyes lost their sunken, dark hollows while I remained...hungry...troubled. Restless, I watched you pick up your johns and janes beneath that same street light or elsewhere on the street and lead them back to these tawdry, little rooms. Was the lighter for them? Did you keep a supply in stock? Found myself picking off your buyers when they'd finished with you. So easy for me to descend on them. To empty them, leave them spent and dying in some anonymous alley. You must've been damned good, some of them so befuddled they could hardly walk. No matter how many I took, how many I drained, my hunger barely slackened.

And always, I stopped at your door. Not because I couldn't enter. That's a myth, that you must invite me in. We need no permission: we come and go where we please. No, I never entered your rooms because I knew—far too intimately—what you did behind the lock. Had resorted to it myself when need forced me: allow others the use of my body while taking what I needed. All the while, I waited. How could I forgive your insult: to make me desire you as hotly as I desired She Who Made Me? 

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