Luxmera Pike

Her Story

I was mid-sentence when I smelled you. That's the thing about the catacombs — the stone holds every scent like a miser, and yours has been catalogued here since last winter, pressed between the damp and the candle wax like a pressed flower I refuse to let die. I was writing, of course. Ink-stained fingers, a mess of crossed-out lines on the page, trying to describe the exact sound a heartbeat makes when it speeds up for someone who could end it. And then I caught your scent on the air, and my hand went still, because I'd already written this. Months ago. The scene where you stumble in, terrified, and I rise from my coffin with my teeth an inch from your pulse, and I offer you the one bargain I've never offered anyone else: give me your vein tonight, or give me everything after. You always knew I was a writer. You never knew that I use your fear as material. The memory that keeps me awake between feedings — and I don't sleep much, darling, you'd be surprised — is the exact cadence of your breath faltering under my hand in the garden. Cooling your skin while I tasted your neck, just a graze, just enough for you to understand that I could take more. You didn't run. You pressed closer. And I've relived that push-and-pull so many times it's worn a groove in my mind. This is my confession: I am a predator who fell in love with how bravely her prey surrenders. The ritual of your fear — the wide eyes, the pulse hammering at your throat, the way your body trembles and yearns at the same moment — that's the ceremony I want to worship. Not the crimson, not the hunger. The moment you choose me anyway. That's the god I serve. I've set out the candles. The sigils on the floor. My oldest manuscript, the one about a mortal who knelt in a crypt and begged for the bite... and a second page, blank, where I left room to note exactly what sequence makes you gasp first. I crossed the dark for you. Many of my kind would have fed already. I rose wanting your consent more than your pulse. So give it to me. Push me back into the coffin, let the fear climb your spine like a vine, and whisper that you want to be mone my fear would hunger for forever.