By Blood We Live

And then you learned about others of your kind. They came to you just as the clock struck midnight: all women, with hair flowing like forest vines around their faces and leathery, batlike wings. All of them were also able to separate their upper halves from their lower halves, the edges of their stomachs distended and glittering from a night's frenzied feeding. You wanted to weep when you saw them, floating outside your window, looking at you with dead eyes, calling you forward. You knew what they were, you knew the stories, half-whispered to children in order to fear the dark, the beat of shadow wings. You thought that being in the city would make you safe.

But you had to accept it. A part of you knew that this was all your fault, and you had to learn how to accept consequences. And if this was punishment for that one night of bliss, then so be it.

Kian's apartment was no bigger than a large walk-in closet. Two steps forward and you were in the kitchen, two steps back and you were almost stumbling into the bed. There was no couch. You look at him expectantly. "Bathroom's over there," he says, waving carelessly at a wooden door that was held shut by a length of chain. He rummages inside a synthetic textile closet, the one with a zipper for a door, and hands you a rumpled t-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts. You thank him quietly and close the bathroom door behind you. In the dim light of a single orange electric bulb, you pour the freezing cold water over your head from a pail. There are warning bells going off inside your head, but you force them to be quiet, to still. Kian won't touch you, and you certainly will (try) not to have any physical contact with him.

(

He has a girlfriend!)

You stumble out of the bathroom and into utter darkness. "Sorry," came his disembodied voice from somewhere to your left. "I'm too tired. I'll take a shower in the morning."

"Did you even change?" you tease, keeping your voice light.

"Of course," he says. "Come to bed, Chel."

You carefully maneuver around the plastic furniture and the plastic bags of clothes and groceries scattered on the floor. Your fingers encounter a soft material, which means you've probably reached the bed already. You slip into the space Kian has provided, painfully aware of the dip in the center of the mattress, which means that he's already on the other side. Positioning yourself on the edge, you cross your hands over your chest and turn your back towards him. You're not sure whether your eyes are open or closed; it doesn't make much of a difference.

Behind you, Kian moves forward and wraps his around your waist, pulling you to him. You whisper worriedly, wondering what's wrong, but he simply buries his face at the back of your neck. You feel something warm and wet trickle down your nape, and you turn around to face him. "Are you crying?" you ask quietly, wrapping your arms around his shuddering shoulders. His face is in your shirt, burrowed between the valley of your breasts, and you have never held him like this, not even when Anita, the love of his life and his first girlfriend, left him for her classmate Jasmine Toledo. He had also cried then, and refused to eat anything but Meat Lovers' Pizza from Pizza Hut (because that was the last meal that he and Anita had shared) for two weeks.

You hold him to you (

it's not so bad after all), until you feel him shift slightly and his lips press against your skin, through the fabric. You look down, and he looks up, and then you are reminded of the way the Titanic slammed against the icebergs-the impact was enough to bring the mighty ship shuddering to its knees. Kian's kiss feels that way: breaking all the barriers, refusing to acknowledge their existence, cracking the walls that you have surrounded yourself with. (Twelve years' worth…) You bite down on the flesh of his lower lip; your tongue swipes the drop of blood that wells across the surface. He tastes of metal and ci

You gasp as his hands slip underneath your shirt, stroking the flat of your stomach, tracing the line of your wound. "Is this it?" he whispers, his voice grating the still night air. You nod desperately, squirming underneath his touch, everything be damned.

He lowers his head and you feel the tip of his tongue, like a flower petal dipped in morning dew, slipping/sliding across the cut, tasting your blood. You tangle your fingers into his hair, allow him to uncover your skin beneath the clothes, his hands memorizing the language of your movements. You know you are sinking, that you have abandoned all hope of resurfacing, You, who have known flight, known the names of all the winds that encircle the city-now, you know how it feels to drown. The waters are slowly, slowly closing over your head.

In your mind, there will be no chance for redemption, so you will decide to run away. You will change your city, your name, your face. But to the women, the others of your kind, the foulest of blood that flows hotly through your veins will still sound a clarion call, and everywhere you go, they will gather outside your window, waiting for you like ghosts at a funeral.

You will taste the blood on your mouth, feed because you need to live, but there is no more pleasure in the succulent liquid taste of meat. Even flight has lost its pleasure: every time you take to the air, you remember the fall into his arms, and everything is made bittersweet by the memory.

When you feed for the last time, you will find yourself crouched on the rooftop of a beautiful white house in the outskirts of the village where you are currently hiding in. You will hear the fervent prayers of the woman in your mind. She does not want this child. Carefully, you will unfurl your tongue and search for a gap in the roof. You can smell her already: strong and warm, full of flesh and life. Your tongue enters her belly, laps up the scarlet-and-sunset child that will never know light; only the warm beat of the darkness. You will swirl the liquid inside your mouth, and realize that it tastes of metal and ci

(

I know this taste.)

Ode to Edvard Munch by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including Silk, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and the vampire novel The Five of Cups. Her short fiction has been collected in A is for Alien, and in several other volumes. She has also published two collections of erotica, and a third, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, will be released in 2010. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

This tale was inspired, in part, by Edvard Munch's painting, The Vampire. "But I was much more interested in writing a story about immortality and time, about our smallness in the face of the passage and the gulf of time, than I was in writing a traditional vampire story," Kiernan said.

Kiernan says that she usually accounts for the prevalence of the vampire in modern literature to the marriage of sex and death. "In the vampire tale, and especially in the more romantic sort, we have a sort of socially sanctioned necrophilia," she said. "A vampire is essentially a ca

I find her, always, sitting on the same park bench. She's there, no matter whether I'm coming through the park late on a Thursday evening or early on a Monday evening or in the first grey moments of a Friday morning. I play piano in a martini bar at Columbus and 89th, or I play