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I should have noticed far sooner.

Ignorant as I was of the details of her nature, the recent and worsening declension of her health coupled with the violent onset of winter should have been enough to alert me to her predicament. Yet, despite the clues, I was oblivious and thus unable to aid her until the situation became dire.

The seasons changed smoothly, on the whole. Gentle transitions from summer breezes to autumnal chills to winter winds. This year, the brisk October air froze into harsh gusts and gales overnight. There were still leaves clinging to wick branches when torrential snow began to fall. They never had a chance to decorate the forest floor in a warm carpet of oranges and yellows. One evening the drying grass and well-worn dirt paths were dusted with a smattering of leaves, and the next morning every one that had fallen was buried beneath still-growing heaps of snow.

The veritable blizzard didn’t relent for the better part of a week. Though the schloss was well-fortified and spacious, the draftier areas neatly avoided and the fireplaces regularly stoked, this posed a problem to my Carmilla. One I only realized when I went in search of her after a prolonged absence at dinner.

I struggle to describe the symptoms of her ailment, even now knowing their cause. I shall say, then, that she had been…out-of-sorts, and hope that will suffice for the nonce. Malady does not manifest in Carmilla the way it does in the rest of us. It is not so plain-faced upon an indomitable creature such as she. Not at first.

She had left the table rather hurriedly – particularly considering that we had guests. An old friend of my father’s and his family were in attendance, though the weather was far from ideal. The reunion had already been twice-postponed – once in summer, and once earlier in the week – which left my father’s determined friend most vexed. The moment he was reliably informed that a carriage would be able to deliver him and his family to us, he had made it so, stubbornly braving the elements before they could spite him further.

With more company than we’d entertained in quite some time, an excellent meal, and with as charming a disposition as Carmilla’s, I was awash with apprehension as I watched her leave the table with a murmured apology; nearly tripping over her skirts in her haste…

Trip? My Carmilla?

It was then, without warning, dread closed its cold fingers around my throat.

Recall: Her grace is not mere practiced poise, it is truly preternatural in its source. The most artful being alive could never hope to be as flawless in their every step as she. For her to falter? To stumble as any mortal might? A terrible wrongness had befallen us like the snow that smothered the schloss.  

Providence was yet kind in one instance; however. My father was entirely engaged with his guests and did not question the impending dual absence as I also excused myself.

I left the table trying desperately to quash all signs of the urgency I felt until well out of eyeshot. Only then did I quicken my step, hastening along the halls of the main floor, my alarm growing with every moment.

I tried to tell myself it was absurd how I fretted. She was susceptible to far fewer threats than I. Her unassuming stature and general demeanour hid incredible physical abilities. Her reflexes were unmatched, her speed incomprehensible! A delicate hummingbird with a lion’s strength. I could not conceive of a thing that might best her…Why, then, did I continue to rush through my home with increasing speed even after my legs and lungs began to protest?

It didn’t help that I was weighed down by all manner of fancy accoutrements that had so excited me when I first dawned them. There hadn’t been cause to dress up in so long, everyone had leapt at the chance to do so, gleefully indulging in pursuits of vanity we’d nearly forgotten.

Pendants, earrings, and bracelets left to gather dust were pulled from their cobwebs and adorned both Carmilla and I so the rustling of our skirts was complimented by the dainty jingle of finely engraved jewellery. As the guests arrived, I had felt more confident and imperious than I’d thought possible – though it may have been due more to Carmilla’s little hand in mine than to the gaudy trappings I wore.

Now that opulence plagued me. My pace impeded by endless layers of silk and crinoline, tight strands of pearls clattering about my throat with incessance, if not rhythm. Wisps of hair tickled my scalp where they had been jostled free of their overly complicated stylings. Stylings whose structure promised to collapse entirely if I continued my frantic search, but I couldn’t let it distract me. The suspicions or disapproval its disarray might incur could be considered after Carmilla was found.

I pressed on, searching the main floor with flagging speed, significantly slowed by the time I reached the staircase which led to the second level. I’d made a circuit so voices drifting from the dining room were audible again and I did my best to steady my breathing. They could not hear me or my hammering heart, but still I feared discovery, a stern hand guiding me back to the table without having located my companion.

I clutched the balustrade, steeling myself and climbing the stairs as quickly as I was able without either tripping over my gown, or gasping for breath. I was in the wrong apparel for such exertion – exertion to which I was woefully unaccustomed in the first place.

When I reached the landing, I paused, shivering. Not from nerves, but from the distinctly biting chill of midwinter. Cold air from an open casement was piercing the warm ambience of the schloss. I turned to peer down the corridor to the right though I knew I would find nothing amiss. Only my chambers and amenities were in that direction, and any windows therein had been firmly shut since the blizzard began.

But to the left…A cold whisper of wind blew past my cheek before I had finished turning my head. Guests’ quarters were on a separate floor, but Carmilla was so much more than that, and had been from the start. Hers was the only inhabited room down the corridor to the left. And the door to it was slightly ajar.

I summoned my nerve, and strode towards it, my unease increasing tenfold. The handle was icy against my palm as I grasped it and swung it fully open, nearly tumbling through from my gathered momentum.

There, at the window, picturesque as ever, stood Carmilla.

She wore a gown of deep, rich greens, defiant of the sudden winter outside. Her skirts and their garniture were accented with royal purple and fell just scant of the floor, so with her grace she appeared to drift wheresoever she went, leaving only the faint, ethereal rustle of fabric in her wake.

Embroidery on her bodice made a subtle pattern of leaves in a lighter green that contrasted the darker hue of her gloves. They stretched snugly up her forearms to just below her elbow as though she’d dipped the appendages in liquid evergreen. One hand absently toyed with her necklace, making the pale skin above her neckline seem all the more wan beneath the dangling amethyst pendant and the verdant fingers that worried it.

So too, did the dark lustre of her hair contrast her pallor where it was pulled away from her angelic, though ashen face. Where was the warm blush on the apple of her flawless cheek, the ubiquitous surety to the whole of her person which now appeared to wilt like a flower kept from the sun? Even the black fathoms of her eyes seemed murky, the glimmering mysteries therein obscured.

She turned slowly, her brow wrinkling in apprehension as she pressed her back to the wall.

“Carmilla?” I ventured, voice quavering.

“Laura dear,” she replied with a weak smile. Though her response was awash with affection, no part of her relaxed. She continued to meld to the wall as best she could. As though she were trying to keep her distance. This was a vision of a cornered animal, not the regal hunter at its heels.

I commanded myself to move no closer for fear she might pass through it if her hand were forced. “What’s wrong?”

A frosty gust blew into the room, sending the curtains and wisps of her hair fluttering. I shivered as it brushed over the thin layer of sweat across my skin that had formed in my mad dash for her. Carmilla shuddered too, her frame quivering like a tuning fork for a long moment before wilting further.

“Carmilla, please,” I begged, unable to stand seeing her so. “What ails you?”

She gazed on me so piteously I forgot myself and stepped further in to go to her, help her somehow…but I halted mid-step as she startled, bracing herself on the snow-dusted stone at her back.

The door swung shut behind me with a low, protracted creak as we stared at each other, at a loss. Eventually, she lowered her eyes, biting her lip as she did when in consternation, though on this occasion it was eerily difficult to tell the white of her teeth from the colourless lip into which they dug.

The tumult of nameless worries colliding in my mind and beating in my breast quieted as terrible revelation dawned on me.

Nearly a week of heavy, uninterrupted snow trapping man and beast alike in their dens. At least two of our guests had commented on the foolish stubbornness of my father’s friend and how he had endangered them by travelling, even having taken precautions. Apart from the howling wind and complaining branches laden with ever-growing mounds of snow the forest was quiet, devoid of life and sound.

And during this, my Carmilla became nearly as pale as the frigid blanket choking the forest and keeping us locked away. Weakening and wilting at an alarming rate. Oh, she had taken pains to hide it, but this was undoubtably a Carmilla whose vivacity had been depleted. I recalled her leaving the table with something near a stumble. Not even her most acute episodes of torpor had left her so white and cold; had never disrupted her fluid gait. Certainly not once the sun had set and it was “her time”, as she had once put it.

I took a cautious step towards her. “You are starving,” I said softly, unable to keep the horror of the prospect from my tone.

Carmilla’s eyes darting upward once again to meet mine, their hazy depths roiling with fear and shame. “I’ll be alright,” she muttered.

I stepped forward again, thoroughly unconvinced.

“Don’t!” She gasped, shrinking against the casement.

“Why?”

“I don’t…I might…” her faltering explanations petered out with a limp sigh before they’d even begun. “I’ll feed tonight. Later.” She persevered. “It is…it becomes difficult to check when I have been without for…I-I shouldn’t have come to dinner. Too many…” she trailed off, leaning heavily against the wall, her eyes falling closed. I wanted so badly to go to her. It was torment to see her so distraught.

“How can you be sure you will find…sustenance?”

“Your father’s guests braved the weather, they cannot be the only ones. If necessary I’ll…one of them will do.” She turned towards the window and breathed deeply, swallowing the fresh air like a parched wanderer might imagine the taste of water on his tongue. “It may be complicated but they’ll do. With luck they’ll dismiss it as a dream.”

I frowned, perplexed. “It won’t kill them?”

She shook her head weakly. “It doesn’t need to. It can. I only require enough to…hold me over. Until I can properly…” she swallowed again. “It’s when I go too long without that it becomes increasingly difficult to…stop.”

“And that threshold is approaching?”

“The hour grows late, they’ll retire soon.”

“It’s been many years since last they saw each other, they may socialize a while yet,” I warned. She grit her teeth.

“Then I will wait.”

“Can you?”

Carmilla made no answer. She could almost have been mistaken for a statue in repose for how still and pale she lay against the wall. I advanced another step. Her brow furrowed but she hadn’t the energy to beg my retreat.

Without another thought I reached behind my head and fumbled to undo the clasp of my necklace. It came free after some fumbling attempts, leaving me with a peculiar sensation of naked vulnerability. I pushed the bashful folly from my mind as best I could, letting the pearls slip from my grasp and onto a nearby desk.

The sound, though faint, caused Carmilla to cast about for its source with half-lidded eyes.

“Drink of me, then,” said I.

At that, she balked, regaining a burst of vigour if only to make another feeble bid for putting a mote more of distance between us.

“N-no,” she protested.

“Why? If I am cognizant of your nature, and it won’t endanger me, why?”

Horror and hunger warred within her. She wrenched her head to the side, breathing deeply of the cold winter air, unseasoned with the scent of racing blood.

“My self-discipline is honed, but not infallible.”

“Then why wait until that discipline is even harder to maintain?” I asked braving another step nearer, almost close enough to reach out and touch her. She turned back to me, feverish with desperation but pale as death.

“Laura, my darling, you are so much more than food,” she pleaded. “I can’t…I won’t reduce you to such…not again.”

Even as hoar frost blossomed on my tongue from the stinging winter air whereof I breathed to ask her meaning, my memory had already begun to give answer. That formative recollection of a girl at the foot of my bed. The warmth of her embrace, the comfort of her companionship…and the startling prick of twin needles wrenching me back from the cusp of sleep to fearful wakefulness.

“I was more reckless back then,” Carmilla murmured. “I should not have come so close with an empty stomach. Not once I knew I didn’t wish to feed upon you.

“Brashly disregarding the very precautions I had taken to prevent thirst from running rampant. I thought myself mistress of my hunger and so failed to keep it from ruling me.” She bit her lip again, her small hand bracing against the stone as a tremor passed through her from more than the cold. Even speaking of it drives her to distraction.

“The first – the only time I wished to abstain without understanding why,” she continued fondly. “An inexplicable desire that dared contest the unchallenged rule of my appetite. It was more human than I had felt in what seemed like millennia.” Her expression darkened and her eyes fluttered shut once more. “And I was too careless to be trusted with it.

“I hardly realized I had…” she paused, tensing again at the memory. “Until you screamed.”

We had never spoken of our first meeting in great detail. Even now, though I had never doubted its veracity, it felt more like a dream than a memory, the exact events beyond her embrace as hazy as any somnolent vision.

Not so for my Carmilla. She could call to mind the instance with awful clarity, her sharp-edged remembrances cursed and blessed to never dull beneath so inconsequential a master as time; evidenced by the teardrops gathering beneath her lashes and the unutterable shame suffusing her words. “I cannot ask you to feed the worst of me.”

“You ask nothing, I offer of my own accord,” I protested, spurred to further conviction by her distress. “And I do it that you may be spared another lapse of discipline which so torments you. If that is the worst of you, then even the best of men is damned.”

She feebly raised her head to meet my eyes. “Dearest…” she began, a modicum of hope twinkling in the conflicted fathoms of her gaze.

Emboldened, I seized her gloved hand. She gasped, stiffening and swaying precariously on unsteady legs.

“To see you suffer so is a thousand times worse than the memory of whatever unintended pain you caused me in the past.” Vainly, I endeavoured to coax her away from the casement but only succeeding in compromising what remained of her balance. A short whimper was all the warning she could muster as she swooned.

Deeply as I wished to aid, I was under no illusions that such wishes could imbue me with her strength, or grace. I knew there was no earthly way I could provide her with a fraction of the preternatural steadiness with which she had once caught me. I knew it as as time slowed and her doleful eyes rolled back to take refuge under their flickering lids, and she keeled towards me with terrifying inevitability. I knew I did not know how to catch her.

But more than that, I knew I could not let her fall.

With a desperate paroxysm, I threw my arms around her, channeling all my fortitude into holding us both upright. I clutched her as a sailor might a mast in the throes of a tempest even as I felt my own balance fail, and winced as my shoulder slammed into the cold stone behind us bearing the brunt of both our weights.

The pain was dull and blunt. My grip was far from enduring. My heart raced. But we were still upright, after a fashion. For the time being. The wind howled. She was as eerily absent of heat as the stone at my back. I held her.

Clasped in an awkward vice, Carmilla stirred against me, her lapse into something like unconsciousness thankfully short.

“Warm…” she murmured, longing thick in her voice. She’d fallen into me on her side, and now I felt her head turn, questing for exposed skin. Every tremulous movement was in service of drawing herself nearer to the sustenance she craved, guided as though by magnetic compulsion.

Slowly she advanced, creeping towards my jugular in the manner of shadows lengthening come twilight. She moved with instinctive care, no precious energy superfluously expended. Desperation breeds rashness and panic in most. In Carmilla, perhaps all vampires by necessity, it bred a hunter’s patience.

Her breaths were ragged and shallow at my throat, spellbinding in their wolfish primality. Under such intensity, no matter how feeble, I felt like her quarry. The realization sent gooseflesh rippling down my arms.

“No!”

She stubbornly wrenched her head to the side, trembling for the effort it took to keep herself from gravitating towards the source of her temptation. “Can’t…”

“Carmilla…”

Her lovely face was contorted from concentration. So determined to fight a losing battle, unwilling to surrender until she was anywhere other than in my presence…but what form would that surrender take, and how much control she would have of it?

“To what end?” I beseeched her. “You are more of a danger if you hold yourself to this needless penance.”

She made no reply beyond a thin whine. My arms were beginning to tire but I persevered, holding her chilled frame to me and whispering hoarsely to her temple. “Hunger is addling your mind. Whatever forgiveness you seek, search for it after you are yourself again.”

“L-laura…” With tremendous effort she looked up at me, her pleading gaze dark and glassy. Such despair was untenable. I pressed my forehead to hers, as though it would transmit my perspective, my adoration with more clarity.

Her breath caught, another mewl of protest escaping her at the added closeness. Her joints locked as she willed herself to stillness instead of lunging as she so clearly wanted to. Even so, little spasms propelled her involuntarily, her head jerking forward, lips parted and teeth nearly bared, atomies from my skin…only for her to recoil with a similar twitch to clench her jaw so tightly I felt it through our joined brows.

“Don’t do this to yourself, I beg you. Drink of me and know you break no promise, nor cause offense. I do not fear you. I see no shadow-cat in your place.” There was nothing beyond us, no earth but the planes of her pale countenance, no sky but the cloudy night of her eyes. “My Carmilla, you have lent me your strength so many times, let me be that font of courage now.”

She offered no resistance as I slid my fingers up through her hair, carefully guiding her to the crook of my neck until her mouth was all but upon my fervent pulse. “My blood means nothing – you already have my heart.”

The tip of her tongue flicked serpentine against my throat, and I tilted my head back in encouragement. Her lips skimming my flesh here carried a different urgency than her kisses, though the effect it produced within me was much the same. Fast, precise, a hummingbird assessing how best to sip my nectar. I felt the flick of her tongue again, now at my burning chest. Somehow, I knew she had aligned herself with my heart, hovering above it while she gripped my arm for support.

There was a breathless moment of hesitation.

“Dearest…please.”

My final entreaty did not go unanswered, twin needles piercing my bosom with carnivorous ease. Never have I been so relieved to feel a shock of pain, the initial sting causing my spine to stiffen even as a sigh escaped my parted lips.

I marvelled with morbid and ephemeral fascination at the dual nature of her bite. The clinical accuracy with which she breached the skin in opposition to how primal an action it was. The elegance with which she struck contrasted with how hungrily she formed a seal around the puncture to lap up my warm, welling blood.

Carmilla groaned, the luxuriant hum reverberating through my chest. I felt whatever vessel she drank from balk, unable to comprehend the willing theft before yielding to the suction. Heat ebbed from my cheeks, painting hers with a too-long absent blush. I smiled as she shifted to support more of her own weight; her strength returning and her quivering grip on my arm calming into something less frantic.

The fleeting sting of her teeth had hardly lasted a moment, and was replaced by a growing sense of pleasant, heavy languor.

She had spoken of this once, a potent secretion administered via the bite, aimed to slow and sedate and make the feeding easier. I had vaguely expected a sort of numbness to grace my extremities, or weigh down my limbs, but what I had not anticipated was the accompanying increase in my sensitivity to touch and stimulation.

My head lolled back, the texture of the stone wall sending tingles over my scalp. The velvet of her gloves on my bare skin made me shiver where moments earlier I hadn’t given it a second thought. When strands of her hair so much as brushed me, my nerves alit with vellication, but the more I craved, needed, to be touched, the further into sweet, intoxicating heaviness I sank. In moderation, either sensation would have been bliss, but the two together were so overwhelmingly powerful and so stubbornly at odds I felt as though I might combust. The air was molasses and I had not the strength to ford it even in service of scant relief.

Only Carmilla’s body pressed flush with mine, and the thousand tiny pleasures elicited at my breast whereof she drank kept me from madness. I swear I felt her temperature rise by miniscule degrees, able to chart each increment of heat as it revitalized her. The slightest shift of her teeth buried within me, the swipes of her tongue at tickling trickles of blood, her every whispering exhale across flesh made raw by her hunger…it was sublime, but still not enough.

Like she had heard my thoughts, she slid her gloved hand around my waist, stroking my bodice with gentle, rhythmic pressure. It was a simple gesture, but in my current state it was nothing short of exquisite. My heavy eyelids widened, a small, unintelligible noise caught in the back of my throat.

I noted dimly that at some point she had become the one keeping me upright, compensating for my drunken legs. She continued to grow warmer against me, the familiar heat of her a welcome salve to both my worried mind, and my needful body.

The intensity of her feeding gradually receded until her teeth slid from my flesh as easily as they had entered; prompting another thin sigh to slip from my slack mouth.

I had no concept of how much time elapsed while she drank, and I don’t know how long we remained as we were, two panting figures locked in a carnal embrace, doubtlessly in flagrante but unable to care. For my part, I could happily have stayed there for hours: Cold stone at my back, warm Carmilla at my front, her breaths still washing heavy over the bite.

“Darling?” She murmured anxiously. I could make no coherent reply with my tongue so heavy and ungainly in my mouth. Auspiciously, she was more familiar with the effects of her venom than I, and understood my querying mewl as acknowledgement.

She withdrew slowly, keeping me steady with her deceptively prodigious strength, and assessing my loose-limbed state. Concern – fear, even – and guilt played across the delicate angles of her face, but there was relief within as well. I wished for her expression to change to one that matched the exultation I felt on seeing colour and vitality returned to her.

Though bright with worry, her eyes twinkled with perspicacity once more; her cheeks positively glowed in the joyous manner of reignited embers. As though by magic, she had transformed from a doll-like figure as pale and fragile as porcelain, to my Carmilla.

She examined me, biting her lip – its hue a startling red with the remnants of my vitae. Lustful yearnings all the stronger for her venom shivered through me at the image and I mewled again

“You are pale,” said she, without a hint of irony. I released a clumsy bark of laughter. My mirth, however crudely expressed, appeared to hearten her somewhat. “It will pass,” she assured the both of us, though I did not doubt it.

Her velvet hand came to cup my cheek, all but catching the weight of my head as it instinctively lolled towards the sensation. The soft tickle of her glove against my now-wan skin, warmed by the palm of her little hand was so sublime I felt myself in danger of salivating.

“Oh, beloved,” she cooed, an abashed tremor in her voice. “It is…powerful?”

I grunted in assent.

Her brow furrowed. “It was not my intention to inflict such a state upon you. I did not think…” A realization lit in her gaze as she studied me, tapering into mild reproach. “Have you had your victuals?”

I couldn’t muster the coordination to shake my head, settling for a muted grumble and trusting it would convey my meaning.

In truth, I had been too anxious at dinner to think of food. Though nowhere near as dire a situation as my Carmilla’s, it occurred to me belatedly that my empty stomach had done me no favours in warding off her pleasant sedative.

I had not eaten since breakfasting that morning, and yet still did not feel hunger gnawing at me. Perhaps it would return with a vengeance once I had recovered more of my physical faculties. For the moment, my appetitive desires had nought to do with food and drink.

All this, I attempted to express in a needy whine, cursing my leaden form.

“Mm,” she nodded as though I had delivered as eloquent an address as any practiced poet.

She opened her mouth to speak again, but something caught her ebon eye. I felt the cause a moment before she lighted on it the intensity magnifying with every passing second. The sight which was a fleeting distraction to her, swiftly became all-encompassing to my mind. From the bite I could feel – in horrible, exquisite detail – a single droplet of blood meandering down my chest.

It’s journey was hypnotic; so slow and so teasing, slinking closer and closer to the top of my bodice, ready to dye the light silk a lascivious crimson…But my greedy flesh ached for more than what it could provide. My breaths came in shallow gulps, delirious and entirely inarticulate yips and whimpers fell from me unchecked. Perspiration began to bead my brow, threatening to slide down my face, and restart the torturous cycle.

Just as I was certain I could endure it no longer, my Carmilla released me from the rogue droplet’s torment. She ducked with swan-like grace, intercepting it before it could stain my garment. Hungrily, she dragged her hot, questing tongue up through the valley of my breasts in a single, ravenous motion that caused my eyes to roll back in momentary ecstasy.

I jolted as though struck by lightning, a desperate ululation soaring up from the depths of my animal soul.

She cleaved to me again in answer, the warm, wonderous pressure of her body so sweetly comforting the impatient desire itching at my flesh.

“The madness of this opiate sensation in my memory is old, but no less clear. Let me echo your devotion, dearest,” she breathed, pressing closer and laying her head upon my shoulder. “This is the sustenance you crave?”

My answer was a whimper, long and pleading.

“Then, as you did I, let me slake your thirst.”

Her grasp on me tightened in a flash, the room blurring from movement I could not comprehend as she whisked me over to her bed by virtue of her preternatural strength and speed.  The effect would no doubt have been dizzying to the extreme were my senses not already altered to accommodate – nay, desire – that which was beyond my ability to provide or perceive.

I was laid semi-recumbent atop the blankets with Carmilla perched behind me, drawing me to her protectively. I was overcome with the urge to wriggle nearer still – like a petulant cat demanding attention. The best I could manage was a limp twitch of my head, and another inarticulate noise. I do not see how she could have understood me… then again, she had performed greater miracles than that by far.

Her arms encircled me, the deep green of her gloves making them appear as winding vines in a faerie cradle. The stark shift from hard, winter-cold stone; to the soft warmth of my companion and her bed was enough to make me feel as though I were dissolving, my being loosening and coming apart into little motes so small and light they did not fall through air, but sank languid into its adoring embrace.

Eventually, devastatingly, she unwound her arms with no small degree of her own reluctance. I heard the rustle of crinoline and felt the bed shift as she pulled her legs up so her feet were flat on the blankets and her knees pointed towards the ceiling.

My limp frame wedged safely between the bookends of her thighs, she set to the task of unbinding me with nimble fingers. She made quick work of the lacing on my bodice, oh so gently rocking us from side to side so I did not go mad from unbearable stillness.

As the last of the lacing came undone, an agonizingly soft kiss was pressed to the edge of my shoulder and I gasped. Another followed, and another, my gasps turned to panting by Carmilla’s lips, warm and reverent along the line of my shoulder, sometimes accompanied by a humming sigh, or amorous contemplation of her own.

When she reached the sloped ascent that would take her to the column of my throat, she changed her course, pressing kisses to the nape of my neck, and trailing them partway down my liquid spine. In concurrence, she busied her hands elsewhere, trailing her fingers up and down my arms as lightly as glancing flower petals.

Though my desire could not be considered quelled, such delicate stimuli directly upon my bared flesh was so soothing that were I not still aflame, it might have lulled me to sleep. I groaned in the hopes of expressing the satisfaction it brought me, however meagre.

“I know, sweetness, I know,” Carmilla whispered against my back. She began to peel my bodice from me, sliding her hand between the silk panels and my enkindled skin. Brushing her velvet fingertips against the newly uncovered flesh that it might acclimate to the touch for which it hungered, I keened.

“It must be gradual,” she continued regretfully, resting her forehead between my shoulder blades. “I have weakened you. The release you crave may strain your precious heart.”

I wanted with all my being to correct her, insist that she was not at fault the way her rueful tone implied. Moreover, I wanted to deny her claim, as though there was any chance of me swaying her with my irrational lust. Reason argued that she spoke the truth, but it was drowned out with the lunatic clamour of passion. None of which mattered, as I could articulate neither.

“The wait will not be long, I promise you this,” Carmilla assured me. When she blinked, her lashes dusted my back and sent shivers along my nerves. “Meantime…” She raised my rubber arms above my head pulling my bodice up around them and releasing me from its confines.

Once, not long ago, to be so swiftly laid so bare before another would have made me blench. But set aside the base yearnings her venom awoke within me, this was my Carmilla. She who crushed shame beneath her dainty heel long before I was born; who tirelessly helped me learn to do the same. She who dared to ask what I wanted and taught me the words to answer. She whose touch had become home.

Above my hips I was fully nude, but modesty was leagues away from my mind as she cradled me, the immediacy of her presence strong and steady and real.

Newly settled, it took little time for her to begin soothing my complaining skin again with delicate ministrations. Her fingers skimmed my midriff, back and forth across my stomach. It quivered reflexively, though no ticklish sensation accompanied the dutiful response of my tense musculature.

Her other hand returned to my arm, sliding along until the backs of her verdant fingers grazed my neck, and moved upward further still to remove my earrings. It was easily done. The weight of the offending accessory was astonishing, and unnoticed until it was removed and I felt as though I had been freed of a ball and chain.

The pull of it had been so harsh, so heavy, how had I withstood it? My muddled body marvelled at this imagined tenacity until new feeling swept those thoughts away as quickly as they had arrived. Carmilla gently massaged my earlobe between thumb and forefinger, dispelling the burden that had so recently afflicted it.

This unshackling was repeated, a sigh of relief bubbling up within me. Instead that respiration left as a thin, almost hiccoughing inhale as her sweet, ceaseless touch slid forward down the line of my jaw, and returned so her fingertips skirted behind my ears and began the tantalizing loop again. All the while, feathery open-mouthed kisses were breathed like wordless secrets onto my back.

Another moan broke from me, my hips shifting weakly, extremities twitching with a drunkard’s finesse. But my Carmilla hummed approval and relief.

In my eagerness, I ventured speech…and managed only an inarticulate gurgle. I felt a tender smile upon my spine.

“Your colour is improving,” murmured Carmilla.

I whimpered in agreement, praying it meant release was not far off. A second twitch of my fingers accompanied the sound.

“Soon, soon, precious Laura,” she crooned between a cascade of kisses. The heat of her cherubic lips so soft and pliant, urgent and measured all at once was a supplement to my yearning as much as a remedy.

Her little hands took up their posts at my temples, now stripped of their velvet trappings – though I know not when. I relished how she arched into me ever so slightly to better free my hair from what remained of its stylings.

Pins and clips and jewelled accoutrements of further ostentatious natures were plucked neatly from my tresses. Like with the earrings, each one was an unspeakable weight I became aware of only as I was relieved of its tyrannical grip on my aching scalp.

She worked methodically, falling into a rhythm of picking a section free, and then combing through it for hidden knots and errant baubles. The whole of my head tingled with each pass of those nimble fingers. I would have sworn lumps of steel and iron had been hanging from my hair by the time she had emancipated it all leaving me weightless, anchored only to the earth by my Carmilla.

My fingers curled at my volition, my joints now bearing me some semblance of obedience. So too did my tongue as I basked in my newfound lightness. “mmeb…mbe…mbeder. Mbetter. Cah…muh….Cah-mm…la…”

I wriggled a little, humming as I successfully maneuvered my upper body so I was pressed closer to her.

“Good, oh good, good…” she babbled softly, relief still coating every word.

“Mm…mo-er,” I begged. “Puh…plee…leez mo-oh!”  

My capacity for thought, let alone speech, winked out for a spectacular instant, as pleasure of a newer, bolder variety unexpectedly flooded me. Gossamer-light, she drew her fingernails along the underside of my breasts, coming to cup them softly, stroking their swell with her thumbs.

Stars dotted my vision even as my moan petered out. She chuckled; that low, liquid laugh of hers only strengthening the heat that throbbed through me.

I writhed, managing to grip her skirts in tremulous hands for some ounce of leverage to alleviate my desire – already volcanic – which had increased tenfold. The feeble fruit of that labour was a pitiful buck of my hips that was not of direct aid, but which further assured Carmilla of my recovery.

“I know, dearest,” she murmured, her mouth just scant of my ear. “The want…I know.” Notes of her own desire were beginning to hoarsely texture her mellifluous voice. I bucked my hips again, understanding all too acutely. “You’re doing so well, sweet one. Not much longer.”

I felt her breaths deepen as her heavenly touch grew less tentative upon my tender flesh. Our joint need was only intensifying as she became more certain of my fortitude and increased her affections accordingly.

Her clever hands began to take more liberties. They wandered, sometimes high to brush my arms again, sometimes low enough to reach the top of my skirts; sometimes passing her palms over the achingly sensitive tips of my breasts or fondling them sweetly with the pads of her fingers.

“My selfless, my patient, my darling Laura,” she cooed. “Mmm, at long last, I think…yes, now.”

Even through the haze of venom and sensation and inarticulate desire, I heard her speak the words I had been desperate for; keening in exultation when her hand finally slid beneath my skirts.

“Ooh,” she groaned, her head bowed into the crook of my neck, and the damp ‘o’ of her mouth aquiver on my skin as she felt the extent of my arousal.

I grasped the blankets to steady myself, faintly realizing I now had the strength to do so before all rational thought abandoned me; usurped by Carmilla dragging her parted lips up the column of my neck to the shell of my ear and whispering in raw, ragged tones: “So wet for me.”

With little more than a brush of her fingers against the root of my desire and a few lustful words, I was shot to the acme of pleasure; able to do little more than moan and shudder needfully in her arms as the stimulation I craved was so abruptly granted.

My spasming lessened, Carmilla nuzzling me as I awaited the pleasant, drifting descent back to a realm of drowsy normalcy…

But such a return did not come to pass.

To my sluggish surprise and confusion, want yet burned, blazed within me. Whether it was an effect of Carmilla’s venom, her sensual skill, or some dastardly combination of the two, I was not yet sated. I bucked weakly in an attempt to communicate my predicament.

A contemplative hum breezed past my ear, Carmilla’s smile audible in her next words. “With pleasure, dearest.” She nibbled my lobe as her fingers began their dance anew between my legs and I was swept up in a maelstrom of mounting desire once more.

No longer fearing for my safety, she had, thankfully, forgone the coy and torturous indirection of her earlier contact, and now doted on me with more confident affections – no less tender for their decisive nature. I felt again – as I often did when thrumming with the pleasure she bestowed upon me – like an instrument in her embrace: Her skillful attendance to my mind and body eliciting the most dazzling and harmonious effects such that I have never known.

Her touch somehow carried even more power in the wake of my first climax so as to quickly bring me to my second. Another ecstatic wave crested and broke within me, another protracted moan surged melodic past my lips, another cascade of waning tremors shook me, and still I yearned for more.

“And here I thought myself insatiable,” teased my Carmilla, her own voice thick with arousal.

Though still not quite fulfilled, my own desire – which had heretofore taken precedence – loosened its feverish grip upon my psyche as I strained to catch a glimmer of how Carmilla tended to her own needs. How cruel that I was presently unable to return the gracious favour!

Her skirt rustled, the back of her hand glancing the base of my spine through the fabric where I lay sprawled against her. I knew the moment she touched herself because I heard a soft, erogenous gasp and felt the reflexive arching of her spine.

Carmilla’s urges spurred my own, and I mewled in answering encouragement.

Both her hands began to move, stimulating the two of us with increasing vigour and abandon.

Already delirious with sensation, I was utterly convinced that I could feel her pleasure as well as mine. That her fading venom was perhaps ebbing with the parting gift of linking me to her passion. Each wordless rasp from her throat may as well have come from my own lungs, each delicious spasm of her lissom body was twin to my lusty twitches…

And through the feverish miasma of fragmented thought, one piercing revelation arose – a last hurrah of intellect over base babbling: She is a virtuoso upon me, and what have I done in return? What have I learned of her beauteous instrument? What scored upon her hallowed flesh that matches the melodies composed upon mine?

Shameful as I was of my selfishness, the thought of Carmilla as desperate for me – my hands, my tongue, my heat – as I was for her fueled my mounting desire. Before clarity sank once more beneath the cresting waves of pleasure, I swore an oath to myself as much as my Carmilla:

I will learn to love you with more than my words.

As though in response, a wanton sigh poured from her. She arched into me again and all thought beyond desire was drowned in that liquid exhalation which, before long, had turned to words. My panting and moaning crescendoed into a descant over her sultry murmurs so low and breathy they were, at times, impossible to understand though her lips were upon the shell of my ear.

“Oh, so good, so good, how good you are my darling Laura…Like that? Yes? Just there? Mmm, I know, like fire – fire in the flesh that hungers for another, I know…oh, the sounds you make…how sweetly, how beautifully you sing for me dearest…mmm, that note again, please; that…yes, yes, beloved, just so-oh…”

Her breath hitched, tension with which I had become intimately familiar momentarily rendering her immobile. And though her rhythm faltered it hardly mattered, as the harbinger of her release was what finally tipped me towards my own.

Euphoria. Pure and bright, rejoicing within every bit of matter in my being and searing the last of the venom from my veins. I howled, relief flooding me. My Carmilla, ever attentive – I will learn, I will – conducting me still, through to the last trembling note…

“Better?” Came Carmilla’s voice, not quite far away, but not quite present. No, I realized with a start, it was I who was less than present, slumped against her and half-dozing. When had I fallen asleep? What was the hour now? How had –

“It’s alright, dearest,” she cooed, my distress evident. Slowly she began to stroke my hair. I could have purred, my eyelids drooping as quickly as they had shot open. “It’s hardly been a minute, you’re alright.”

“And you?” I mumbled. Between my dry mouth and my face half-pressed against her it’s a wonder she found me remotely intelligible.

“Never better,” she replied. I heard the smile…and something beneath it.

I propped myself up on a shaky arm, determined to heft what I could off of her so I could meet her eye. Between the remembered torpor of her venom and the lingering post-coital languor it was no mean feat, but I was nothing if not determined.

I stared into her ebon eyes with as much suspicion as I could muster, praying she would relent before my arm gave out.

She glanced downward, a sad smile on her lips, even as she pulled me closer to her again. I did not resist. She knew what I had been asking, and she knew it had taken significant effort. Little escapes my Carmilla.

“You still hunger?” I ventured. She kissed the top of my head with a sigh.

“You needn’t worry.”

I did not make an immediate reply. She seemed content to card her slender fingers through my hair in silence.

“I do not think any less of you,” I said at last. She paused. It felt like we ought to be holding our breaths.

“You are too good to me, dearest,” said she. Indignation flared within me, desperate and unexpected.

“No, no!” I protested before I could think better of it. “No, Carmilla, you are too good to me.” I shifted to face her again, my movements no less agitated for their ungainliness. “Always, and in everything you put me first. My comfort, my pleasure, my safety – always before your own.

“I do not have your constitution, nor your myriad experiences. I have not your lifetimes of wisdom but I am not made of porcelain, and you are not made of steel!” I cried.

“We are fallible both, there is no shame in that. I have no doubt there are scores of dangers in this world I have not the strength to weather. But I will not stand for you deciding that you are one of them, and I will not stand for you martyring yourself on that belief. I will not have it, Carmilla. Already, I have tacitly encouraged it too long. This:”

I raised my hand to my breast, feeling the dull bruising around the bite-mark, the skin still hot.

“Is not because I felt I owed you for your kindness. It is because I cannot bear to see you punish yourself for that which is beyond your control.

“It often feels there is little I can offer you that you do not already possess. I confess, most days I do not understand your dedication to me…but I trust that you understand it. You know the reason for it, and I am lucky enough to receive it.

“Trust me, then, when I tell you I think no less of you. I do not fear you. I do not blame you for what you are. Trust me when I say these things. Even if you don’t understand it.”

We stared at each other, time lengthening the seconds to accommodate whatever bit of eternity we had stolen.

“I…” she croaked, her eyes wide and shining. She made it no farther, eventually shrugging and shaking her head even as a dazzling smile spread across her face.

I only hesitated a moment before leaning in to kiss her. It couldn’t have been anything remarkable, but she hummed in cat-like contentment, tension melting from her flushed and lovely frame.

I will learn to love you with more than my words

More than words, or blood, or still-bashful kisses. However long it may take, my Carmilla, I will learn.

And what beautiful music we will make.