I swallowed dryly and crossed the room to the bed, running my hand over the curve of your back as I bent down to kiss her.
Her mouth was warm and willing, and when she made one of those soft sounds against my lips, I shuddered. She tugged me down gently onto the bed, forming the shape of that word again before the buck of your hips snatched her breath away. Please.
“You,” I said, kissing her with more urgency as I allowed you to make short work of my laces. “Are a torment.”
Desire makes idiots of all of us. But you already knew that part, didn’t you?
Magdalena sighed into my kiss and I knew I would kill for her, die for her, do it all over again and then some. I had never wanted a woman like this, not even Hanne, not to the brink of such total desolation. It reminded me of the way I loved you, and that shook me to my core. One body could not hold such fervor, such feeling, I thought. It might rip me in two.
Your lips sought mine while she was still wrapped around you. I ran my hand down the smooth plane of her stomach, then lower still.
“Can I please?” I asked breathlessly.
Magdalena nodded, and then made a delicious little sound when I circled her with my fingers. She writhed and mewled under our expert ministrations, calling out my name and yours in turn.
Then, at the moment of her climax, you sank your teeth into her neck.
She convulsed and cried out, but she held you fast. As though she were welcoming the pain and the change, not rejecting it. I reeled, my mind addled by pleasure and the scent of hot blood wafting towards me. This was happening too fast, I wasn’t ready for this, I wasn’t ready to share my life forever with another one of your wives, I wasn’t…
You kissed me firmly with blood-slick lips, and then I was gone. You guided my head towards the pulsing wound at her throat, and I sucked the sweet red liquor from her skin while she murmured my name, her hands tangled in my hair. I had never known such perfect tenderness, such absolute ecstasy.
It terrified me.
We shared the wine of her in sips, alternating between drinking from her and kissing her, kissing each other. I could scarcely tell the difference between your two mouths in the dark, that’s how close the three of us were.
Magdalena obediently opened her mouth for you when you opened the vein in your wrist, and drank from you with a determined ferocity I didn’t expect to see from someone who was not yet one of us. There was a flash of her steel again, as compelling as it was frightening. She would not be made the world’s victim, that much was obvious.
My blood wasn’t as potent as yours, and I didn’t know if it had matured enough to offer the powers we enjoyed, but I opened a vein for her all the same.
We passed the night drinking from each other and making love, taking full advantage of the heightened sensitivities that flooded Magdalena’s system. None of the servants bothered us, and none of the dinner guests came looking for us.
They were well-trained, after all. And as Magdalena wound her fingers around my wrists and covered my chest in hot kisses, called me sister with that mischievous smile on her face, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being trained, too.
We took our leave the following night, our carriages loaded down with Magdalena’s finery. She left the manor in the care of one of her highest-ranking servants, promising that she would return sooner rather than later. I wonder if she knew that sooner had a way of becoming much, much later when you lived as long as we did. But she was young, optimistic. Maybe she didn’t believe that taking up with you meant the total obliteration of her previous life.
She would learn, in time.
She was vain and petulant and my rival besides, I reminded myself as we headed out into the ocher light of dusk together. I was determined to see her worst qualities and keep her at arm’s length even as we travelled pressed together in the coach. But she was also brilliant, and beautiful, and so sure of who she was and what she wanted out of the world. She held my gloved hand in hers whenever the carriage went over a bump. She fed me little bites of treacle from her traveling bag and she dozed against me with her mess of curls tickling my cheeks. She invented word games to keep us diverted, and woke me every evening with a little kiss in the corner of my mouth.
I fell in love with her quickly, even as my head railed against the stupid machinations of my heart.
There was an uncontrollable fire in her that was hard to look away from, much less resist, and the more time we spent together, the more my admiration for her grew. I knew I was lost when I caught myself lying awake dangerously close to dawn in a tavern room on the French border, watching her face while she slept. Every little flutter of her eyelashes fascinated me, and I catalogued the curve of her face as though I had been commissioned to paint her portrait. Even after you stirred awake and pulled me against you, shushing me back to sleep, all I saw in my dreams was her face.