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Blood. So much blood. It's never enough.
Ellen bites into the space between Thomas' breasts and tastes his warm, sweet lifeblood. Swallows it down with near abandon as she savors the hoarse groan he lets out.
"You're hurting me," he whispers. His voice is so weak.
Ellen snarls. Digs her fingers into the flesh between his ribs. Rips and spreads his chest wide open, exposing his heart, beating so slow, so faint.
Thomas cries when he spends inside her.
Like a starving animal she tears into his dying chambers. Only to wake screaming, boxed in, laying unclothed in cold earth.
The lid of her casket slides away. Orlok reaches down and lifts her up, holds her to his chest. Whispers in the ancient tongue he favors, speaking in deep, hushed tones until she settles, feels once again grounded inside her own body.
They are quiet for a time. Standing there in the dark of the crypt.
Orlok is tense. There is always a stiffness to him, that corpse-like rigidity that never fully eases. But he has risen many times now to her screams, her frantic cries. He knows what — who — her dreams are focused on. "…still you crave the boy."
She doesn't apologize. Refuses to. It is her right to miss her husband. It is her curse to now hunger for him.
"We are drawn to our kith and kin," he told her, the first night she woke feeling sick with the violent desire to hunt Thomas down and devour him completely. "Distance will ease it."
"Did that work for you?" she'd asked.
Orlok never answered the question. But when the dreams, the visions, the pull that tried to tug her back to Wisburg never let up, Ellen realized that was answer enough.
It isn't as though Orlok does not give her plenty of pleasure and exquisite pain. Enough to make her delirious, to keep her more often than not in a state of ecstasy. He offers her sensations she could never have thought possible.
Blood and sex fill her nights now. The darkness of her casket, body frozen and spirit drifting, her days.
All she knows is Orlok, is hunger, is lust. A macabre hedonism.
Sex is a violent thing. Messier than mere sweat and slick. They drink the cold, congealed blood from each other, claw their bodies open, feel through their insides. All the soft, dark places.
It is not a procreative act, nor something pure and holy like the union of chaste newlyweds. But sex never was that for her, was it? She had been fortunate that way.
Thomas hadn't wanted children. "Not yet," he'd said, and she knew he believed that to be true — but she had known it was a lie. He would never — truly — want children. That had been a comfort to her, so afraid of the responsibility, the loss of freedom; of the chance she might pass on this strange affliction to any young she might birth.
Neither had they been so chaste. Their letters were full of secret desires. Their wedding night had been eager and curious, a bit of pain that only heightened the bliss.
She remembered riding his cock to his climax, and then his mouth to her own. Could still recall the revelation of his lips and teeth and tongue there between her legs. After, she had cleaned the mess of them off his semi-erect flesh and brought him to another orgasm. His fingers ensured she came again, too, that they were equal in that regard.
Nothing had seemed unsacred that night or the nights and days that followed.
And even still she had yearned. Craved. Hungered. It was never enough.
"I am an appetite, nothing more," Orlok had told her the first time they met in flesh.
Those words haunted her then and haunt her still. She had already been the same when a mortal girl. Now this undead beast is ever starving. And even Orlok cannot sate it.
"Let me send for him."
Ellen is tired of these awful dreams that plague her days. It feels as though she is trapped in a mirror of her mortal life — her days spent in a torturous confusion and longing that bleeds into her nights more and more as time passes.
"All my sleeping thoughts are of him," she had said once of Orlok. Now it is Thomas' turn to haunt her.
Orlok pulls her from his chest, staring down with cold, hard eyes. "He will reject you." Speaking as though he knows Thomas, her Thomas, better than she does. As though that isn't merely what he hopes will happen.
Selfish. Greedy.
Ellen understands him all too well.
"Lies," she hisses. She knows Thomas. She knows her husband, knows him so thoroughly now. She knows he wouldn't reject.
"Keep away from me, I am unclean."
"Never," he promised her then, and Ellen knows he spoke true.
"He loves me." That word is a weapon, one she will use mercilessly until she gets her way if she must. She can feel the shudder that courses through her monstrous lover's body — not of disgust, something much more vulnerable.
Orlok huffs like an agitated animal. Tries a different tactic. "You will only destroy him."
Ellen grabs his face by the chin. If he wants to fix that unflinching gaze on her, let him. She will not cower beneath it. Neither will she let him avert from her own to match. "Then help me destroy him the way you destroyed me."
It is not until the letter is sent that any doubt begins to trickle in.
Thomas still believes her dead. Dead and lost and gone. What if he's moved on? Or simply moved? What if he and Greta have found peace, happiness, a new beginning?
Someone else?
Visceral fury sparks to life in the pit of her stomach. Her fangs grind together as something mean and vicious rises inside her at the thought, at the imaginary woman who may have taken her place.
Orlok studies her with a knowing look. Is this what it felt like when he learned of Thomas? Is this what it feels like now?
Ellen almost feels guilty for it.
Almost.
Instead she clings to the wrath that fills her veins, nearly burning her with an inhuman heat; a warmth that is not natural, not her own. Funnels it into her lust, her hunger. Without conscious thought she sinks into shadow and rises up in front of Orlok, shoves him to the ground.
He is not so fragile as he appears, and Ellen has no desire to be gentle.
Clothes become shadow become skin. Already he is inside her, cock swollen from the peasant they shared to start the night. She is slick and ready. The wet sound of him sliding in and out echoes off the stone walls.
"Hurt me," she hisses. Needs the pain, needs to bleed this fury out of her before it burns her up inside and consumes her.
Before she becomes a bitter thing like him.
"Beg of me," he snarls.
Ellen grips his throat and bares her fangs. "No."
Claws slice through her back, slip between the bloody seams. Scrape along her spine, make her twitch, make her writhe, make her dance and contort atop him. He stares at her with such need it almost feels like hate.
"More," she whispers. It is soft enough to be confused for a plea.
Orlok sits up, arches her backwards so her chest is exposed, easily accessible. Fangs press against the scars of her bite.
Ellen comes when they pierce through.
In the gray hours before the dawn, he lets her curl against his body in his own grave, now lined with a thin layer of her native Wisburg dirt.
She does not whisper the thoughts haunting her, the way her wrath has curdled into a melancholy all too familiar.
He does not pry. He does not taunt. Tenderness, the reason she reached out and summoned him to her all those years ago, is in short supply with Orlok. Yet sometimes.
Sometimes he can grant it.
She dreams in the days, weeks, that drag on after the letter is sent.
Of Thomas. Of Greta. Of this nameless woman she has grown convinced exists, has taken her place.
Sometimes she sees Anna. Cold and pale and lifeless, but the perfect wife as always. Her blue eyes are lifeless, cloudy, milky. Her body movies only when pulled and puppeteered on strings. A life sized marionette.
Sometimes it is simply a faceless silhouette. The outline of a woman, but nothing in the space itself, no features, no shapes, no textures.
Sometimes Ellen sees herself — but prim and proper, color in her cheeks, no dark circles under her eyes. Her smile is easy and natural. She is happy, complacent, not some sullen girl who struggles with how to act in civilized society.
Every time Ellen kills her, this nameless woman, this awful replacement so perfect in every way she never could be.
Rips out her throat. Breaks her neck. Tears her heart, still beating, from her chest.
Always Thomas watches her with such horror. Rejection. "Unclean!" he cries. He flees from her to Orlok's waiting arms.
And her lover always devours him.
"He may never come."
The words are not said unkindly. Orlok is…trying. To be patient. To be understanding. He cannot love, he said as much, but he can still respect her pain. The yearning she endures.
"I know," she whispers, gazing out the window of their bedroom. She knows this was the room Thomas was lent when he came, all those months ago, the way she knows anything she shouldn't.
Part of her wants to question that. Ask Orlok if this was his room in life, ask what exactly he did with her husband while he stayed in this room, slept in this bed.
Did he placate himself with her Thomas?
Selfish. Greedy.
Ellen would lash out at him if the very thought didn't make her ache with a strange, new desire.
Orlok stands behind her. Wraps her hair, so long, wild, and unkempt, around his hand and tugs her head back. "I am here."
"I know," she whispers again, gazing up at him.
It must seem cruel of her to remain so focused on her husband when her lover indulges her every whim. But she is too much like him.
Selfish. Greedy.
They do not hate each other. Not entirely. Yet it would be a lie to say neither one resents the other. This tether between them, this consuming need, to the point of madness.
Orlok has taught Ellen that like him, she is a predator, a creature that bucks under others' attempts to control.
That includes his. That includes hers.
Sometimes — on the days when he lets her cling to him in his own sarcophagus so they may slumber together, unable to bear the loneliness of her own — she thinks there might be something else between them.
But she dare not speak the word.
Howling greets her when she wakes from a dreamless slumber. The first she can recall in months. Beside her, Orlok's body shudders back into his control.
"…a traveler awaits beyond the gates."
Hope flickers in her breast where her heart lays dormant. Ellen is only vaguely aware of the following actions — of flinging the lid of the sarcophagus aside as if it is nothing, of traveling through shadow until she is out of the crypt, of running naked to the grand doors of the castle.
The wolves howl and yip beyond them. Clearly circling whoever waits on the other side — she knows who, she knows who — but refraining from bloodshed without the signal from their master or mistress.
Ellen raises her hands to simply use brute strength to open the doors, but before they can even touch the heavy wood they are already pushing forward.
The heavy sound of Orlok's footsteps nears from behind.
And before her, the doors split apart to reveal their guest, trembling from the chill that still accompanies the nights here even in spring, or from exhaustion, or from fear — it doesn't matter. Only that it is Thomas.
Thomas. Her sweet Thomas.
He stares at her, wide-eyed and awestruck. Unfazed by the beasts that circle him, blind to the one that looms just beyond her. Even in the shadow of the entry, the wet shine of his eyes is evident. Thomas falls to his knees before her.
Reverent.
Ellen can only stare back at him. What a sight she must be — unclothed, smudged with earth, her hair a loose, wild shroud hanging down her body. She thought he would see a madwoman, a wicked temptress, succubus.
Yet he looks at her as if she is his salvation. There is only love and relief when he softly utters, "Ellen."
The sound of his voice breaks the spell, and Ellen surges forward, to her knees. Takes his face into her hands and kisses him with a fierce passion. Consume. She must consume him. He is hers, hers, all her own.
Blood bursts from his lips, his tongue, where her fangs nip, like sweet berries in her mouth. Tangy and sweet, she can't help but moan at the taste.
Thomas groans against her but doesn't fight it, doesn't flinch away, doesn't attempt to pry her off. He kisses back and gives, pliant, surrendering to her.
"Enough," a voice calls through the haze of her ravenous desire. A hand lays over her shoulder. The fingers grip and tug her back. Orlok stares at them, furious, jealous — fascinated, captivated. His expression a resentful sneer to try and cover, but Ellen sees it, flickering in his eyes.
The vulnerability beneath the intensity, the way he had looked at her when finally she gave in and embraced him.
His chest shudders with a heavy, rasping breath before he speaks again. "Not yet."
Rebelling against his instruction is instinctive to her, but Ellen staves off the urge. It chafes her to admit, but she knows Orlok is right. She must do this properly; indeed, she wants to do this with more kindness, more of a choice given, as opposed to her own transformation.
A soft, curious cry comes from Thomas' luggage. The sound rips the air from her lungs, whatever words she was about to speak from her tongue. Green eyes stare out from a small cage that hangs tethered to Thomas' satchel.
"…Greta?" her voice comes out small, like a child's, as she stares in surprised wonder, hesitant delight.
Thomas offers a sheepish smile. "I couldn't leave her behind. I knew not what else to do but bring her along." His gaze shifts from her to Orlok with wary suspicion, a quiet and bitter anger that must long to be set loose on the beast that took her. The expression passes, and his eyes return to her. "I hope it is all right."
"Yes," she whispers. Already her fingers are unlatching the carrier, arms ready to embrace Greta when she cautiously leaves its safety. "Oh, Greta, little darling," she cries into soft fur. Her affections are rewarded with a purr.
Whatever Ellen has become, it is not something that Greta fears.
Not something that repulses Thomas.
"Come. This is a discussion for inside." Orlok is already walking away, uninterested in waiting to ensure they follow after.
"Tell me, now, before we go in there, if all said in your letter were truly your words," Thomas asks her in a hushed whisper as they near the spiral staircase. "If they were, I will accept them. If you are…if this…the count…if it's what you want I will embrace this. I will follow you wherever you lead."
Her eyes roam over his face, take in every aspect of his features. The longer, more unruly hair. The shadow of a beard. The dark circles under his eyes that match her own pair from her mortal days.
The sharpness, the gauntness.
"I never meant to make you suffer so," she murmurs, knuckles brushing against the hollow of his cheek.
Thomas' eyes close. He leans into the touch, expression one of stark relief. A starving man finally fed. His hands lift to clutch hers, kissing her fingers, her palm, pressing it to his chest, over the steady, enticing thrum of his heart.
Ellen smiles. "…you would go in there and try to slay him if I commanded you, wouldn't you? Knowing it wouldn't work."
"He is not my monster to slay," Thomas admits, voice wet, thick with emotion. "I know that now. Yet you would not need to command me. Only ask."
The beat beneath her fingers thumps faster, erratic. She curls her hand into a fist so that she does not dig her fingers in. Ellen holds his gaze, sees the fear and resolution, a sweet devotion buried under so much confusion and hurt and longing.
Oh, the longing. It does mirror her own. And Orlok's, too.
"What if I asked you to surrender instead?"
Thomas' throat bobs as he swallows. No surprise crosses his face though, no horror forms in his expression. Only the briefest hesitation wavers his resolve before steeling itself once more before her very eyes. "…then I surrender I must."
She knows there are many ugly things between the three of them, things that are not love or lust; not sweetness, not tenderness, not desire.
They have each left gaping wounds in the other in some form. They will yet leave more.
And yet she wants this. The raw, ugly, oozing bond.
Wants the bitter taste of it in her mouth, wants to suck and drain and devour, until she consumes all they have to offer that is sweet. Hold it in her mouth until it turns sour and only then swallow, and let everything they give her curdle in her stomach.
Blood. All of the blood. Warm and sticky, cold and thick, she will feed upon it all — and still hunger.