“Drink,” you urged, pressing your bleeding wrist to my mouth. “If you don’t drink, you will die.”
I pressed my lips tightly together, though your blood had already passed my lips. I should have been dead long ago, but somehow I was still alive, renewed vigor rushing through my veins.
“I cannot make you,” you huffed, halfway between a plea and irritation. “The choice is yours.”
Grudgingly, I parted my lips and took your blood into my mouth like mother’s milk. If this was to be my only wretched salvation, so be it.
An indescribable fire bloomed in my chest, filling me with heat and light. It was a purifying kind of fire, like I was being scorched clean from the inside out. The ragged wound in my neck seared as though I had been bitten by something poisonous, but the agony of my bruised muscles and broken bones dulled and then, miraculously, disappeared.
Then the hunger started. Quietly at first, a stirring in the back of my mind, the gentle warmth of a watering mouth.
Suddenly it seized me, and there was no hope of denying it. I felt like I hadn’t tasted a drop of water in weeks, like I couldn’t even remember the taste of food. I needed the pulsing, salty nourishment streaming from your wrist, more and more of it.
I clamped my ice-cold fingers around your arm and dug my teeth into your skin, sucking the blood right out of your veins. I didn’t have my hunting teeth then, but I gave it my best attempt, even as you wrenched your wrist away from my slick mouth.
“Easy, Constanta. You must remember to breathe. If you don’t start slowly, you’ll make yourself sick.”
“Please,” I rasped, but I hardly knew what I was asking for. My head was swimming, my heart was racing, and I had gone from nearly dead to viscerally alive in a matter of minutes. I did feel a little sick, to be honest, but I was also reeling with euphoria. I should be dead, but I wasn’t. Terrible things had been done to me, and I had done a terrible thing too, but I was alive.
“Stand up, my dark miracle,” you said, pulling yourself to your feet and holding your hand out to me. “Come and face the night.”
I rose on shaky knees into a new life, one of delirium and breathtaking power. Blood, yours and mine, dried into brown flakes on my fingers and mouth.
You swept your hands over my cheeks, cupping my face and taking me in. The intensity of your attention was staggering. At the time, I would have called it proof of your love, burning and all-consuming. But I’ve grown to understand that you have more of the scientist obsessed than the lover possessed in you, and that your examinations lend themselves more towards a scrutiny of weakness, imperfection, any detail in need of your corrective care.
You tipped my face and pressed your thumb down against my tongue, peering into my mouth. An urge to bite swelled up within me, but I smothered it.
“You need to cut your teeth or they’ll become ingrown,” you announced. “And you need to eat, properly.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said, even though it was a lie. I just couldn’t fathom having an appetite for food, for black bread and beef stew and a mug of beer, after everything that had happened to me that day. I felt like I would never need food again, despite the hunger gnawing at my stomach like a caged animal.
“You will learn, little Constanta,” you said with a fond, patronizing smile. “I’m going to open whole worlds to you.”
You kissed my forehead and smoothed my filthy hair away from my face.
“I will do you a twofold kindness,” you said. “I will raise you out of the dirt and into queenship. And, I will give you your vengeance.”
“Vengeance?” I whispered, the word harsh and electrifying on my tongue. It sounded Biblical, apocalyptic, beyond the grasp of human experience. But I wasn’t human anymore, and you hadn’t been for a long time.
“Listen,” you said.
I fell silent, ears perking up with newfound sharpness. There was the clanking of armor and the low chatter of men, far enough away that I would never have been able to hear it before, but not so far that we couldn’t close to distance between us and them in a matter of minutes.
Liquid rage pooled in my stomach and lit up my face. It made me strong, that rage, hardening to solid iron in my limbs. All of a sudden, I wanted to destroy every man who had beat my father until he stopped moving, held torches to our home while my brother screamed for them to spare the children inside. I wanted to break them, even more slowly and painfully than they had broken me, leave them bleeding out and begging for mercy.