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It was like rust over all his memories. Like a mold, a fever. It was not easy to be ill but he had gone so long without drinking — had held back until the ever-present hunger made a maw of his stomach, lancing teeth, endless empty hole. Hunger like a dry, cracked tongue, sitting still and stiff only to make him aware of how very hollow, how very parched he was.
Like rust on his memories. Eating them away, drifting off in red-brown flakes, taking along whatever life and color had been beneath it. Krolock remembered every dear person he had killed, and he remembered how their blood had tasted, and how he had sucked every last drop of it away until they were light and empty and pale. Remembered, and sucked the life out of the memories too — watched the blushes in his lovers’ cheeks fade again and again, watched anything he felt at remembering pool on the surface of the image until it dried out and flaked away.
In 1617, he thought, the sky had been clearer. Some of the ones he was familiar with had faded into the background by now — more light in the cities, more smoke in the air. Back then the Sorceress had taught him her names for them, which were none of the names he had studied and a thousand times more interesting because they fell from her lips, always stained dark and curved in a half-sardonic smile.
Oh, it had not been long then. A month, a year. Everything blurred together but her and the clear stars and the way the grass had whispered at the edge of the cornfield. Krolock still remembered life before, at that point, in more than sweet haunted snatches, the third echo of a memory if the wind was just right. He had lived not fifty years — despite the hunger and fear and darkness he was only a man, really. The Sorceress’ hand was warm, soft, tracing aimlessly over his chest and stomach, and he did not remember two and a half centuries of nights, folding over and over on one another. He leaned into her touch.
The Sorceress pressed her hand to his waist, rolled gracefully onto him, her lips at his collarbone, wandering down his chest. And Krolock, who was so conscious then of the stillness under his ribs, slid a hand into her hair and guided her up again, pressed his lips to hers and ran a hand, slowly, down the lacing at her back.
Conscious of his stillness — he remembered that — and conscious of her lack of it. That, he thought, had grown worse over the years; but it had been so much, even then, the deep, ragged way she breathed and the quick, rhythmic stutter of her heart. The warm pulse and flooding of blood under her skin. But he remembered what the sun looked like, and how it had been to feel his heart racing as he kissed; he remembered it so well he nearly felt it, heat prickling along his skin and the frantic burst of life in his veins.
He imagined it. Krolock, under the stars, had loosened the Sorceress’ corset, had slipped a hand against the live, arching plane of her back and felt it burn his palm, gasped low and rough into the kiss and clutched her to him, cradling the back of her neck with his other hand — that too was so hot, so fragile.
He remembered how all his lovers tasted. How their skin broke beneath his fangs and how they cried out at the pain of it — and then he remembered only how their blood coated his tongue, rushed down his throat. He remembered nothing of feeling them die, not the way they surely twitched and struggled, not whether they had cried out more, not even the marks a few of them scratched into his shoulders as he drank, clawed into his back. The Sorceress had done that. He had found the scratches in the castle just before dawn, noticed the ache of his upper body as he washed away the blood he had gotten under his nails, holding her too tight. He could still taste it on his tongue, like iron.
After that he tried to be cold. To forget all warmth but the warmth of full veins — no sunlight, no tender touches, no comforting gaze. It did not work. Each time he promised himself not to love and each time he learned the feeling of their elegant hands, the softness of their lips, the sweetness of their voices before he tore into their throats. He couldn’t help it. There were more like the Sorceress — an Enchantress with fire-red hair and a wide, fierce smile, who bit him first; a Siren whose voice was low and rough like thunder, whose blood pooled in the water on the dark rocks the night he turned her. There was Nyx, who he saw so often because she was nocturnal too, had always preferred the company of nighttime to people.
And there were the highborn nobles he met at parties — queens and kings, their faces cold and regal in the candlelight. One of them, Katarina, had been offered to him for marriage, sent by her parents like an offering to the strange reclusive lord in his castle neighboring their dukedom. She was the only one he had explained himself to in the beginning, and how strange it had felt when she did not run, only blinked and smiled and said oh, perfect .
He had stared at her. “What do you mean? I —” and she grinned wider, raised an eyebrow.
“I do not want to marry you. I do not want to marry anyone,” she said. “I think I cannot love as I should. But if the only thing that interests you about me is my blood, well. You seem like a man of restraint.”
Krolock was silent, watching her face, the wry pull at the corner of her mouth, the sorrow and frustration in her eyes. He remembered her eyes so well, clear grey and weary. “If I can stay here,” she said, determined, “and feign marriage to you, I will not have to go home. And you and I could be friends, I think. You don’t frighten me.”
He remembered exactly how she said you don’t frighten me . Defiant, almost a threat. Having her in the castle had felt like coming home for the first time since his heart lay silent between the stones. They read together. Krolock took up a love affair with a queen whose wintry voice and soft white curls made him shiver, and for a while they were all three blissfully happy, curled together by the fire at night with Katja’s voice and the Snow Queen’s idle kisses. Katja called him “my wonderful husband,” voice dripping with irony, throat dripping with blood months later when the hunger grew too great. She had known what he was, but she had trusted him. He had turned her anyway.
He remembered every word the Poet had written. Sweet-voiced Poet, who told him of the blue of the sky in daytime long after he had forgotten its precise color. Endlessly, achingly passionate, a tempest of joy and longing, who shivered so deliciously when Krolock ran his hands through his long hair. He who wept in Krolock’s arms and laughed as he kissed him, murmured loving verses against his skin. He who begged to be turned even as Krolock despaired of losing him forever.
And his rival, the Frog, the one Krolock had turned by accident trying to shut him up. Tall, proud, sharp-tongued. His mouth cruel and his hair a tangle of emerald curls. Krolock always wondered how the Frog would sound if he buried his hands in that gorgeous hair and pulled; but he had never tried to find the Frog after he walked off into the woods and Krolock left the Poet, dead and bloodless, by the pond. The Frog’s wandering eyes, the Poet’s fervent promise of an eternity together — those would go as cold as they had in due time, and they would hate him for what he had done to them.
So instead he had gone to France, charmed a Musketeer into fierce loyalty, and torn into his wrist when he offered his hand in fealty.
He had tried drinking from animals. Drained a Shepherdess’ sheep of a little of their blood each night, always allowing them time to replenish whatever he had taken. He had frightened her, and at the same time been undone by her courage, the bold untrembling way she spoke to him. She had found him one night at the barn door, in May, pursed her lips and led him inside. “You needn’t beg shelter from the sheep,” she had said, as though what he wanted was a roof over his head. Her father was a pastor, and her house was full of dedications to a dead god, and his skin prickled from the crosses on the walls but it was worth it for her, fierce and lovely woman, pale and cold and never gentle. She died with his hands on her delicate throat, his fingers drenched in her heartsblood, and he in a trance laid her in bed, wrote a sanguine poem on her skin before kissing her head and leaving her.
Those were strange days. He had forgotten what it felt like to have a heartbeat. He hated himself, hated trying to be good and kind, though he could not help loving. That particular anguish had faded in the end, for the most part, but he remembered the sick coiling in his stomach, the desperate need to feel something other than empty, aching hunger and loss.
There was a Duchess — he remembered just where on her cheek and brow there had been moles to kiss, the precise pattern of freckles on her wide, soft shoulders — whose eyes flashed as they sat together in the dim-lit salon, who had read more philosophy than he had and always bested him in games of wit and wonder. He had bitten her from behind as she read one night; had not even said hello; had run his hands down her arms and kept his eyes on the pages of her book as he drank, imagining that in her blood there was knowledge and he would keep that with him, at least, now that she was gone. She sighed so pitifully when his fangs broke her skin — twitched but went limp so quickly.
Maybe he had wanted someone who might fight and win after that, but the Knight was too enraptured by the grey in Krolock’s hair to be very fearsome. He wore burnished golden armor and his hair was coarse and dark, his arms strong, though he loved to be overcome. Sometimes, long after Krolock left him bleeding outside the walls he guarded, he still recalled his touch so vividly he could feel it, the phantom tracery of his lovely hands over Krolock’s silvering hair.
He had a hundred paintings, maybe, of the Blue Boy. Vain creature, he had so loved to sit for Krolock, though it was always by night and he wondered again and again aloud how Krolock could see so well in the dark. He took many of the paintings with him, and Krolock was glad of it — fewer things to ache over — but he left three. The one in the gallery, the first Krolock had painted, a necessary reminder that he would place alongside the others when he inevitably gave in to his greed. The one he had painted under the stars, just before some of his favorites faded into the black, where Blue sat looking over his shoulder in a field of sleepy blue flowers, smiling vaguely back at Krolock. And the one in front of a mirror, Blue pleased at his reflection in the glass. Krolock had been so careful not to move in sight of the mirror, and the Blue Boy had said he would be well-suited to a touch more vanity.
In 1813 he had killed an emperor’s pageboy, come in tears to the castle door. He was past heartbreak by then, numbed by his own grief and self-loathing. Years later he had killed the emperor, too.
And no matter how much the Pirate begged him to come to sea, Krolock refused; but in the dark corners of waterfront bars he pressed the man into the wall, kissed his seasalt lips, caressed his seasalt hair. He reminded Krolock of the Siren. He was unabashedly hungry, nearly as greedy as Krolock, untamed and delicious. He wore bright colors and stole more than a few gold rings from Krolock, and once an entire chest of coins went missing from the castle. Krolock would have given him anything he asked, gladly, but he saw how much he liked the game.
And Ludwig — barely a memory, Ludwig, who had gone limp in Krolock’s arms so many times before the last. Who had begged to be taken away from his home, from his isolate room and the sounds of distant parties he wasn’t allowed to attend. He would have been better there, safer — not because of his illness but because of Krolock, who could not resist anyone, much less Ludwig’s eager liveliness beneath him. His death had been so horrible Krolock had fasted until it was unbearable, remembering every death on his hands, every loving sigh and perishing scream, how their blood had tasted, how thick and warm it had been in his mouth, how even the struggle as he drained them had been in some dreadful way exhilarating.
He could not bear it any longer. The hungrier he grew the louder were his memories, and the less sympathetic. Smiles and caresses fading into the background until only their death throes remained, only their blood. He needed to feed, and there was singing, sweet singing, in the village.