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The bite was low on Je
I didn't stay to watch. My arm hurt, and I could hear a girl laughing, somewhere deep within my head.
Life is the Teacher by Carrie Vaughn
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, which started with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. The seventh Kitty novel, Kitty's House of Horrors, is due out in January 2010. Her short work has appeared many times in Realms of Fantasy and in a number of anthologies, such as The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance and Fast Ships, Black Sails, and is forthcoming in Warriors, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
Vaughn says that the modern seductive vampire is very different from the old-school folklore vampire. "It's an interesting evolution seeing how the one became the other in film and fiction," she said. "I think audiences are intrigued by the power-supernatural power, seductive power, political power-that vampires are made to wield. They become these avatars for the dangerous and alluring."
This story, which first appeared in the anthology Hotter Than Hell, is about a new vampire learning to hunt, using her newfound powers of supernatural seduction.
Emma slid under the surface of the water and stayed there. She lay in the tub, on her back, and stared up at a world made soft, blurred with faint ripples. An unreal world viewed through a distorted filter. For minutes-four, six, ten-she stayed under water, and didn't drown, because she didn't breathe. Would never breathe again.
The world looked different through these undead eyes. Thicker, somehow. And also, strangely, clearer.
Survival seemed like such a curious thing once you'd already been killed.
This was her life now. She didn't have to stay here. She could end it any time she wanted just by opening the curtains at dawn. But she didn't.
Sitting up, she pushed back her soaking hair and rained water all around her with the noise of a rushing stream. Outside the blood-warm bath, her skin chilled in the air. She felt every little thing, every little current-from the vent, from a draft from the window, coolness eddying along the floor, striking the walls. She shivered. Put the fingers of one hand on the wrist of the other and felt no pulse.
After spreading a towel on the floor, she stepped from the bath.
She looked at herself: she didn't look any different. Same slim body, smooth skin, young breasts the right size to cup in her hands, nipples the color of a bruised peach. Her skin was paler than she remembered. So pale it was almost translucent. Bloodless.
Not for long.
She dried her brown hair so it hung straight to her shoulders and dressed with more care than she ever had before. Not that the clothes she put on were by any means fancy, or new, or anything other than what she'd already had in her closet: a tailored silk shirt over a black lace camisole, jeans, black leather pumps, and a few choice pieces of jewelry, a couple of thin silver chains and dangling silver earrings. Every piece, every seam, every fold of fabric, produced an effect, and she wanted to be sure she produced the right effect: young, confident, alluring. Without, of course, looking like she was
trying to produce such an effect. It must seem casual, thrown together, effortless. She switched the earrings from one ear to the other because they didn't seem to lay right the other way.
This must be what a prostitute felt like.
Dissatisfied, she went upstairs to see Alette.
The older woman was in the parlor, waiting in a wingback chair. The room was decorated in tasteful antiques, Persian rugs, and velvet-upholstered furniture, with thick rich curtains hanging over the windows. Books crammed into shelves and a silver tea service ornamented the mantel. For all its opulent decoration, the room had a comfortable, natural feel to it. Its owner had come by the décor honestly. The Victorian atmosphere was genuine.
Alette spoke with a refined British accent. "You don't have to do this."
Alette was the most regal, elegant woman Emma knew. An apparent thirty years old, she was poised, dressed in a silk skirt and jacket, her brunette hair tied in a bun, her face like porcelain. She was over four hundred years old.
Emma was part of her clan, her Family, by many ties, from many directions. By blood, Alette was Emma's ancestor, a many-greats grandmother. Closer, Alette had made the one who in turn had made Emma.
That had been unpla
"You can't bottle feed me forever," Emma replied. In this existence, that meant needles, IV tubes, and a willing donor. It was so clinical.
"I can try," Alette said, her smile wry.
If Emma let her, Alette would take care of her forever. Literally forever. But that felt wrong, somehow. If Emma was going to live like this, then she ought to live. Not cower like a child.
"Thank you for looking after me. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, but-"
"But you want to be able to look after yourself."
Emma nodded, and again the wry smile touched Alette's lips. "Our family has always had the most awful streak of independence."
Emma's laugh startled her. She didn't know she still could.
"Remember what I've taught you," Alette said, rising from her chair and moving to stand with Emma. "How to choose. How to lure him. How to leave him. Remember how I've taught you to see, and to feel. And remember to only take a little. If you take it all, you'll kill him. Or risk condemning him to this life."
"I remember." The lessons had been difficult. She'd had to learn to see the world with new eyes.
Alette smoothed Emma's hair back from her face and arranged it over her shoulders-an uncharacteristic bit of fidgeting. "I know you do. And I know you'll be fine. But if you need anything, please-"
"I'll call," Emma finished. "You won't send anyone to follow me, will you?"
"No," she said. "I won't."
"Thank you."
Alette kissed her cheek and sent her to hunt alone for the first time.
Alette had given her advice: go somewhere new, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, where she wasn't likely to meet someone from her old life, therefore making her less likely to encounter complications of emotion or circumstance.
Emma didn't take this advice.
She'd been a student at George Washington University. Officially, she'd taken a leave of absence, but she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to continue her studies and finish her degree. There were always night classes, sure…but it was almost a joke, and like most anything worth doing, easier said than done.
There was a place, a bar where she and her friends used to go sometimes when classes got out. They'd arrive just in time for happy hour, when they could buy two-dollar hamburgers and cheap pitchers of beer. They'd eat supper, play a few rounds of pool, bitch about classes and papers they hadn't written yet. On weekends they'd come late and play pool until last call. A completely normal life.
That was what Emma found herself missing, a few months into this new life. Laughing with her friends. Maybe she should have gone someplace else for this, found new territory. But she wanted to see the familiar.
She came in through the front and paused, blinked a couple of times, took a deep breath through her nose to taste the air. And the world slowed down. Noise fell to a low hum, the lights seemed to brighten, and just by turning her head a little she could see it all. Thirty-four people packed into the first floor of this converted townhouse. Twelve sat at the bar, two worked behind the bar, splashing their way through the fumes of a dozen different kinds of alcohol. Their sweat mixed with those fumes, two kinds of heat blending with the third ashy odor of cigarette smoke. This place was hot with bodies. Five beating hearts played pool around two tables in the back, three more watched-these were female. Girlfriends. The smell of competing testosterone was ripe. All the rest crammed around tables or stood in empty spaces, putting alcohol into their bodies, their blood-Emma could smell it through their pores. She caught all this in a glance, in a second.