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Mizrak let the heavy covering fall from his shoulders where he stood, next to the half-covered window.
What a curious sensation.
He had spent his whole life passing beneath the sun, feeling its warmth upon his face, paying it no mind even when the first cool breaths of the worship hall made him shiver, once with the chill and once with the presence of God. Now he stood next to the half-covered window. He had turned his face to the sun just that morning. Now his body trembled as if he had passed a dozen scared lifetimes since then.
But he was not afraid now. He passed a hundred new sensations through his mind, one after the other, orderly, methodologically, like worshippers waiting patiently to receive the body of Christ. The drapes drawn across the château window pinged pleasantly, the specks of sunlight that danced on the surface of the velvet curtains ringing like small silver bells at Christmastime. Where the light pierced the room, it roared like rushing rivers, pouring into the room and spreading through it. It smelled faintly like rich spices, or perhaps that was the last echoes of the vampire gentry that now lay burning upon pyres or simply in the street where they had been slain by him.
Just this morning, he had severed heads and hands for the sake of the girl he had been charged with protecting. He had severed heads and hands for the sake of fighting until the very end.
Now Olrox had stolen him from the devil.
Olrox had stolen him from the devil, as he had stolen him from the monastery a dozen lifetimes ago— or perhaps just the other day.
Mizrak’s body still itched to fight. No matter how distant a memory the battle seemed, his limbs still remembered how to parry, how to spin and slice and evade a stab to counter it with a cut of his own. His eyes remembered how to search for fangs and pointed ears, and his feet still itched to nimbly dodge slashing talons. Beneath his skin, a shudder ghosted slowly down his spine. He could only speculate on what he looked like now, but he had cut down enough vampires to suspect the usual features, these bastardisations of the image of God in which man is made: pointed ears, fangs, a deathly pallor, hands that ended in claws that could not clasp each other in prayer. He searched for something silver— a chalice, a candelabra, a piece of armour— until he recalled that Olrox had stolen his reflection as well.
His mind swam as new sensations took him two by two. He heard the buzzing of timbers as they pressed together within the walls of the house, nails creaking with every moment as the house took slow breaths with the rhythm of the wind. He heard the rustling as the heavy covering shucked from his shoulders settled by his feet. Velvet called to him in hoarse whispers. Shifty sheets of silk whispered secretively among their own folds, their secrets their own to keep. Silver sang a teasing song from here and there around the room and somewhere down the hallway. Even in the shadows, where Olrox laid at perfect ease, the sun still screamed the same old song. After these dozen lifetimes, he could no longer imagine walking beneath the sun to the sound of silence.
Olrox watched him, his shirt opened until it met the waist of his trousers. That was as much as he could have been convinced to lose before Mizrak was stolen from Olrox by the allure of the delicate ray of sun that pierced the room through the window. Olrox had been quicker to convince Mizrak to strip himself of his dirty clothes, the maille shirt that had been pierced and continued to pierce his open wound with sharp and broken links, the attire bearing the symbols of a god that he could no longer face in this perverted form. They had watched together as his wounds stitched back together, his body learning how to heal as the blood Mizrak had accepted from Olrox transformed him into something new, something monstrous, something out of reach of both God and the devil. It was then that he had caught sight of the sun and grew curious. He had shielded his eyes and crept slowly from the bed, unclothed as Adam had been in the garden, but neither embarrassed nor tempted by his serpent. Olrox had allowed him to indulge this strange curiosity. Mizrak had reached for the light, and for a moment had imagined his hand passing through the ray, wholly human and unharmed. But the moment his skin had passed beneath the ray, it had scorched and smouldered, taking soon to burning. In disbelief and shock together, he had thrust his arm out, and so more of the flesh had smoked and blackened, and then all his body had ached for this pain again (where was the pain in his body, that he had earned so well earlier in battle?) and he had raised his foot and it was then that Olrox stole him away from the sun at last. He had held him back, as he always had from harm, until Mizrak remembered his new condition. Olrox had covered him with the red cloth then, and Mizrak had accepted them between numb fingers to hold about himself until he had lost the will to do so.
Now Mizrak looked to his serpent where he lay upon the bed that they had stolen from some noble or lord. The scene finally matched Olrox’s gold-hemmed attire and proper manners. His hair laid over his shoulders, coiled like incarnate temptation. Mizrak caught another scent, then. Iron, and some other ancient taste, mingled on his tongue. His stomach clenched, and his shoulders fought to fall in exhaustion. Hunger passed hot on breath through his lips and he pounced like a proper vampire onto the one who had turned him. The closer he got, the faster all of the new sensations overwhelmed his mind— four by four now, and eight by eight— the sight of the taste of iron, the smell of the textures of brocade silk and damask that surrounded them, the taste of temptation. The closer he got, the louder the instinct screamed at him to open his mouth and feed.
Olrox tilted his head. He knew well the instinct to feed, though he had learned to manage it and carry himself like a human instead of an animal. The sensation of fangs in his throat only echoed with the ghost of a forgotten memory, though. He closed his eyes and let Mizrak suck and lick the blood from the wound, grunting softly as he learned the taste of another’s blood. Mizrak bit him again once the wound failed to sate his new appetite, and again, and now he sank his flat teeth into Olrox’s flesh as well. Olrox hummed his discontent, but he knew there was little he could do to dissuade the newly born-again vampire.
At last, Mizrak sat back, straddling Olrox’s lap, his dark eyes nearly black in the shadows, those dark eyes dazed as the world settled down around him. Scents fell in line behind those things that he could smell, and sounds fell in line behind those things that he could hear. The world ordered itself through his mind as it cleared and settled. This first taste of blood beyond the transformation sealing his destiny along this strange and twisted road he walked around Hell. His eyes lingered on the wounds he had made as they slowly closed. Mizrak’s gaze poured over Olrox’s collarbone, down his chest and to the waist of his trousers. As the world settled down to its regular order all around him and his most necessary hunger had been sated, his lips trembled for that other kind of hunger.
Mizrak’s whisper trembled as if he still feared Hell.
“Take it off,” whispered he. Finally, it came time to finish what the first kind of hunger had interrupted. Mizrak touched the shirt, but the sight of his own hands made him freeze. He opened and closed the new claws, cold dread settling back in his stomach as they moved in time with the command of his mind. Olrox took those trembling hands in his own. He sat up and untucked his own shirt, finally unbuttoning that last button and taking it from his shoulders.
When Olrox’s shirt joined the rest of his clothes elsewhere, Mizrak found his feet beneath him on the floor. For a man who had lived his life bound to a vow of chastity, he stood nude with ease. That was a comfort to Olrox before it was erotic, or anything else. He took all the clothes around his waist down at once with one swift motion. Once those, too, were forfeit, he looked back to he who had accepted his love. It was Mizrak’s hunger, after all.
Olrox offered himself to indulge it. So he sat there, at the edge of the bed, as Mizrak’s new eyes saw him as he saw himself.
Slowly, the vampire who still looked so much like a man knelt, one knee down and then the other. He winced from the memory of old battle wounds. Olrox smiled. With his fangs still behind closed lips and eyes downcast beneath thick eyelashes, Olrox could cup Mizrak’s head in his hands and pretend that he was still his holy man, that he had not seen him keeled over and bleeding from a mortal wound. Here, in this moment, the battle could have never happened, and Olrox would not have had to steal another lover from the devil.
Mizrak’s eyes fluttered as he settled between Olrox’s legs. He opened his mouth, his tongue placed over his lower teeth but not his sharper upper fangs. Olrox’s brow furrowed as he watched Mizrak’s jaw close and he pressed his tongue alone to Olrox’s cock. He hummed as the sensation stole his focus from the memory of the shallow breaths his lover had fought for in his arms.
“Ah.” Mizrak opened his mouth again and pressed his tongue to the same path again, taking just the head of Olrox’s cock into his mouth. His new fangs pressed dangerously against the pleasure. Olrox had teased many men with his own teeth and sharp eyes before, he mused, but he himself didn’t shudder in the same kind of pleasure. Mizrak lowered his head slowly, letting Olrox slip slowly into his mouth, finding a place for his teeth and tongue. He filled his mouth as his eyebrows knit for focus. Olrox sighed as Mizrak filled his throat as well.
The clumsy sensations as Mizrak began to move, bobbing his head as his new fangs interrupted and intruded, caught Olrox’s heart in a different kind of way— not sultry or seductive, as he had been to his men, but something else— charming in inexperience, like a virgin’s first time. Mizrak’s throat trembled as he voiced his frustrations with a hum and Olrox’s head fell back.
“Ah, love,” he whispered. He held his head in his hand, not nearly enough hair to grip. His encouragement fuelled his lover’s hunger and he sucked and swallowed with more desperate need. Fangs scraped the sensitive point of pleasure and pain and Olrox shuddered. Mizrak had learned quickly to love the taste of blood. So this was how it felt, again, to be a vampire’s plaything. He let his lover hear his arousal, as if he couldn’t feel it on his tongue, on his voice with every breath. Mizrak’s hasty, unpracticed worship seemed to cast every aspect of his being to the side. His usual devout ritual, his every purposeful movement, had demonstrated such a faith in God that Olrox could nearly have been convinced to believe in it. Mizrak’s conviction, the pride with which he wore the cross across his broad chest, set him above all the other monks, all the other men in France and the New World.
But it wasn’t the worship of God that had drawn Olrox to him, had it?
It had merely been the passion.
Now Mizrak’s passion clouded Olrox’s mind, sowed little seeds of desire beneath his flesh and breathed life into them.
“You are perfect, my love.”
Olrox said this, though he was sure that Mizrak couldn’t hear him. He damn near couldn’t hear himself. When the pleasure escaped him in a gasp and a shudder, Mizrak faithfully swallowed him on his knees.
Mizrak’s back heaved as he fought to, then realised he no longer needed to catch his breath. He opened his mouth again, this time to tenderly touch the fangs that now nestled among his teeth. Still, he sat on his knees upon the floor, cushioned by its rich rug.
“I will not know what I look like, now,” Mizrak whispered, “will I?”
He would never know what Maria would see when she looked on the face of the man with whom she had rushed to battle against evils that loomed against the sun. Though he could touch them, he would never know the form of his pointed ears the way that the whole world would. And his eyes— could he even remember their original hue? He huffed.
“Will I learn how to use these blasted things?” He bared his fangs. Olrox tilted his face upwards with one finger to plant a kiss upon his forehead.
“Will I be your teacher first, or your mirror?” Olrox asked. Mizrak pursed his lips. He still had his own hunger, too.
“Teach me.”
“Lay down, my love.”
Again, Mizrak knew who Olrox meant by his love, and again he accepted it. Olrox could keep him forever, now. The vampire settled into the bed with the pillows beneath his head and back and Olrox settled between his legs. There was plenty of room for them both on the bed. Olrox kissed his lover low on his stomach, then again beneath his naval, in the crease of his hip and high on his thigh. He pressed his tongue to the muscle as Mizrak flinched in anticipation. Would it hurt? Would it hurt anymore?
Olrox drew his fangs lightly across the muscle, only enough to suggest how they could pierce and drink from his flesh. These new heightened senses sent shudders through Mizrak’s whole body, better than any shameful orgasm he had ever wrought from himself where he could convince himself that God’s gaze was averted. Perhaps it was this new skin tempting him to indulge wanton pleasure like an animal. Olrox bit gently down. Perhaps it was simply this new lack of shame. Mizrak’s lover kissed the wound. He swallowed Mizrak’s cock, as he had done to him before. The suggestion of his experience in this sort of thing made Mizrak shudder with the first shame that he had felt since he had been turned. How many men had he been with? Why had he chosen Mizrak to love? Why had he chosen Mizrak to turn into this thing? He pressed the pad of his own finger to his new-formed fang. It was then that Olrox looked up, emerald eyes as piercing and seductive as they had been when they had first met. Mizrak choked on the sight as Olrox freed his lips and wiped his mouth.
“You do have fangs,” Olrox said, as if Mizrak couldn’t have already discovered them. “Not too short, but fitting for your mouth.”
Mizrak nodded.
“And my ears?”
“Pointed,” Olrox said, and he kissed Mizrak’s stomach again, “in a usual way.”
And so Mizrak nodded. Olrox kissed him from stomach to chest, lingering longer and longer the closer he got to his lips.
“What about my eyes?”
Olrox studied them for a moment. Mizrak took his lower lip between his teeth as Olrox wrapped his hands around the cock that went untended-to, now. He stroked him slowly, in lieu of his mouth.
“The most beautiful ruby red,” Olrox said. Those beautiful ruby reds fluttered closed, then open again as Mizrak had his second hunger sated. Olrox kissed his cheek, and then Mizrak grabbed him by the hair and held him close for another kiss to devour his lips. They traded the tastes of each other there, bruising and rough at first as they exchanged their teeth and tongues. As Mizrak came undone, their kiss faltered and Mizrak gasped, whispering something in the same cadence as a fevered prayer, though the invocation was only his lover’s name:
“Ah, Olrox, please, Olrox.”
Olrox kissed him again once neither type of hunger no longer clouded their minds. Mizrak reciprocated him with his tongue, just as he had on their first fortunate night together. The shadows, Olrox mused, were the same in every era. No matter what stood in the way of the sun, the denial of the light was the same. Olrox could lose track of time here, without the sight of the Revolution to take him to the present or his European clothing to remind him what kind of man he had to dress himself up like. Mizrak chose to break the kiss at last. He looked again at his hands. It was difficult to judge the hue of one’s skin in the dark. Of all the memories of Olrox’s first nights after being turned, this memory was particularly vivid. Olrox laid next to Mizrak and allowed him to sate little hungers as they inspired him to touch him, to explore the new sensations of the same flesh beneath different fingers.
He could lose track of time here.
Indeed, he and his lover had both cheated the devil.
They could have an eternity together, in the dark, if they chose.