I danced and panted, kissed and screamed and let that music crash through me. She gave me a shot of expensive tequila that tasted like almond candy and let me press up against her like a promise. When Seti dug her nails into my palm I went with her, and I watched her drink blood from a woman’s inner elbow while the woman was grinding back against Seti. Then Seti kissed me, lips tangy with blood, and it was a little horrifying, to be honest.
“When you’re one of us, that will be the only glorious taste in the world,” she whispered later, sprawled on Esmael’s bed. “I know it disgusted you. Do you want to be the thing that craves it? You can’t survive forever if you hate yourself.”
From the chair by the fire, Esmael huffed slight disagreement. Naturally.
I sprawled on the bed, too, my head dangling off and my legs stretched across hers, but I could see him upside down. My pulse throbbed pleasantly in my skull, and in a few other places.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Your art,” Esmael said distractedly, staring dramatically into the fire. The same answer he’d given when I asked why he thought teenage girls make the best vampires.
“Ugh,” I said.
Seti laughed.
Esmael glanced at me. “I think art should be developed. You’re fine now, but as I’ve said, imagine what you can make in a hundred years.”
Suddenly Seti was on her knees, crouched over me. She reached, grabbed my hair, and dragged up my head. Her vivid brown eyes were alight with passion. “Imagine what you can change in a hundred years!”
I sat as best I could, still in her grip. Her intensity transferred through her hands into me, and I felt like I was trembling at the edge of something important.
She said, “What are you angry about? We can make it better. We can shape history, because we can do it a little at a time, child. A heart here, a mind there, then another and another—around the world. Having a goal—that’s how you survive the years.”
“Seti likes to seduce community leaders and write angry blog posts,” Esmael said.
He was there behind me, faster than humanly possible.
“It works, you tax-paying stooge,” Seti snarled.
His hand gasped her throat and she released me. I scrambled away, but Esmael was smiling. “Socialist whore,” he hissed.
I grabbed a quilt from the foot of the bed and went up to the roof as their wrestling deteriorated into sex. It was frigid outside but oh so clear, and the pink in the east, past the rest of the city, wasn’t the color of blood at all.
* * *
I made a list for my mom of everything in the world that I’d change. It only had one line.
* * *
The fifth night of the ritual, Esmael came to the house, a bungalow from the 1920s two streets off from the millionaire tax bracket that surrounded my high school. I was in my bedroom smearing pastels to the light of a few candles that smelled variously of spruce, wassail, and orange juice. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.
“Did Grandma let you in?” I asked, handing him the heavy paper. Most people took my work by a corner, careful not to smear charcoal on their fingers, but Esmael took it like the gift it was.
“No, she is unaware I am here,” he said thoughtfully, studying the strokes of black and dark orange. It was a rough pomegranate, cut open in one ragged slash. It bled its thin juice, and five tiny pips lined the bottom of the page, little smears of red pressed there by my pinkie. If the light was better, maybe you could see the ghost of my fingerprints in it. I hoped so.
Esmael’s lips parted and he breathed in, smiling tenderly at me. “Very well, my Persephone, come for your next seed.”
I held out my hand and he lifted it, licked my palm, and drew a breath that tickled the fine hairs on my arm. He pulled me nearer and kissed my wrist, licking and sucking softly until my knees were weak and I dug my fingers into his hip bone. My art fluttered in his other hand as he settled it upon the bed and bit into me.
After, he held me in his lap as his blood swept through my system.
“You don’t have to say goodbye yet,” he murmured. “To any of them. Not until you want to. Or not until they do.”
That was nice, I thought, knowing I would say goodbye fast anyway. A lingering death sucked. A death you knew was coming—or a goodbye you knew was coming—sweetened everything to the point of pain. Waiting to say goodbye would be just like that. I ground my teeth together to stop thinking about it.
“Do you do this often?” I asked, eyes closed. We were both in my desk chair, and the candle nearest us on the desk smelled vividly like a fresh, unadorned Christmas tree.
“Yes.” His arms encircled me gently, supportive and cold. “Most don’t live past the first year, but those who do are nearly always young women. You need to live, I think, because of what’s been denied you. You’re already hungry, every young girl I’ve ever met has been hungry—that makes the transition easier. You know how to live with hunger. And anger—Seti is right about that. Not just any anger, not old masculine anger, sharpened with toxicity, but true anger, the kind that fills you up like a light.”
I said, “I don’t feel angry.”
“You are.”
* * *
I opened El Café the next morning and Sid came in to lean on the counter and flirt over Americanos and last-minute calculus.
When my shift ended, she drove me to school. That time of morning the lot was full, so we parked on a side street and crunched through slush to the main building. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I shrugged. There were so many possible answers.
Sid had a knit cap pulled down over her ears so you couldn’t see any of her short hair. Her coat was long and her boots tall, but her bare knees were pink and chapped by the two-minute walk.
“Are you angry?” I asked her when we hit the wide sandstone staircase, stopping her with a gloved hand on her shoulder.
“With you? Should I be?” Her brow lowered.
“No, no, just—just in general. Angry at the state of the world. At, like, systemic oppression and the patriarchy and … what a shitbag this country is.”
“Sure.”
“Sure?” I pursed my lips, pretty sure that if your answer was so whatever, the real answer was no. I charged up the steps and slammed into the door, dragging its weight out and open.
Sid caught up to me. “Is this about your mom?”
I actually snarled, like a fucking vampire. Teeth bared.
“Shit,” she snapped, and shoved past me.
As she strode away, the swing of her short uniform skirt very clearly stated, Well I’m angry now, bitch.
I thought about Persephone and her six pomegranate seeds. She went with the god of death half the year and for the other half returned home to her mom. The best of both worlds. Maybe that was what I was angry about.
* * *
That night, the sixth night, I asked Seti, “What if I want to kill someone?”
“Do it with a tool a human could use, so as not to draw attention. Have a drink, but use a knife to the throat.”
I shuddered, wondering if someday I’d be so old a monster I could say such a thing so easily.
“It’s difficult to drink enough blood to kill a full-grown man,” she continued, pulling me down the stairs into a speakeasy. “Unless you do it slowly. We rarely get into the big arteries because they’re more difficult to control. Too much force and you end up gagging, and blood spray on clothing is suspicious.” She touched her finger to my bottom lip. In a sultry voice, she added, “It’s best for us when we have to suck a little bit.”