Dulcie wasn’t sure why exactly she’d taken the pale woman’s hand and let her lead them both away from the dance floor. She’d come here to meet a guy. Someone tall and handsome, ideally, and this girl did tick some of those boxes on an academic level: she was tall, certainly, and maybe even handsome by some definitions. She wore her fishnet well; in the dim light it’d been hard to tell if she had sunken eyes or just a penchant for wearing too much eyeliner, but her hair was certainly raven, and her outfit screamed goth.

All wasted on Dulcie, though. So often, she heard people drone on about sexuality being a spectrum, or everyone having an exception. Well, not her. She hadn’t felt anything at all when her friend Jessica tried to convince her that guys found bisexual girls hot and kissed her in the parking lot outside of the bowling alley.

Which only made it more mystifying why she didn’t feel any panic as she was gently ushered through a door into an old, disused room, followed in by the nameless girl who closed the door with a click. The music from the dance floor was muffled, and Dulcie suddenly felt as though she was a million miles away from the next human being.

It was in the dark of that room that everything made sense.

Her eyes.

So red and so deep. She’d never seen anything so beautiful in her entire life. It was on the back of gentle crimson waves that she’d been carried here so weightlessly and without worry.

Fingers like branches of frost found Dulcie’s chin, and oh-so-gently did they tilt her head up, captivating her to gaze into them, searching them for something she couldn’t put a name to. The sound of the woman gathering breath made Dulcie’s skin race with shivers, anticipation tickling the back of her neck.

“Tell me,” she said, and Dulcie’s heart stopped, awaiting permission to beat, “are you going to be a good thrall for me?”

Ecstasy coursed through her veins. “Yes!”

The woman’s lips curled into a smile that beguiled Dulcie all over again, charming her stomach to flutter with butterflies she’d never felt before. “I know you will.”

Those fingers traced a slow line down the column of Dulcie’s throat, and Dulcie tilted her back head without being asked, exposing the soft of her neck to the woman she understood, with the help of some long-dormant instinct, was her natural predator. The existence of the door, and of everyone on the other side of it, were blurred at the extremities of her consciousness.

And then, all at once, Dulcie understood that she’d never stood a chance—the woman she believed she was for her entire life up until that moment died as Her fangs sunk into her neck, a white-hot point of pressure followed by a sensation nothing at all like pain; no, it was purpose, the argument of the culmination of her life and personhood refuted in a single crimson instant. She’d never been able to conceive of that concept, of instant death, of being there one moment and gone the next, but there she was, now, on the other side of it, a new woman who moved around a new orbit with a new divinity to worship.

Dulcie was thankful, at least, to the old her for carrying her to her destiny. She had been foolish, though. She’d pined for the affections of pathetic mortal men, seeing value in copper, ignorant to the existence of gold. She hadn’t known that true beauty—actual, objective beauty—was to be found only in her Goddess; how unlucky that all the philosophers of yore who deliberated fruitlessly about art and aesthetics were born too soon to share the world with Her, not knowing they were doomed from the moment of their birth to never behold Her!

Dulcie had never thought so poetically in her entire life, but maybe her Goddess just had the effect of bringing it out in her. Thinking of Her and basking in the wet heat between her thighs that She had benevolently provided was all Dulcie could do, as she hung limp in Her arms—her Goddess drank, and drank, and drank, and not once did it cross Dulcie’s mind that she might be in danger. She may run out of blood, but her only worry was for Her, that if she were not enough to satiate Her thirst, then She would have to go through the inconvenience of finding another girl.

Eventually, her Goddess finally had her fill and pulled away, running her tongue across her blood-smeared lips. Dulcie found herself light-headed but alive. There was still a thick trickle of blood running from the corner of Her mouth down to Her chin, and in a moment of daring, Dulcie leaned in and lapped it up in one long stripe, gathering it on her tongue. It was pure impulse. The old Dulcie would have recoiled, would have flung herself against the wall and trembled in fear of a monster, but for the Dulcie so graciously reborn at the hands of the greatest being in all of creation, it was an act of service, a bitter, copper-warm offering of herself to the cold, radiant being who resided at the centre of all the stars and the heavens.

Her Goddess grinned viciously, and Dulcie selfishly hoped there was some pride in it before She crashed her lips into Dulcie’s, a kiss that claimed Dulcie all over again, flooding her with a rapturous chemical bliss that no drug could ever hope to replicate. Everything was for Her. Even the joy she felt was seasoning for Her enjoyment.

“Come on, cute thing,” the vampire said, taking Dulcie by the hand. “Let’s go meet your sisters.”

Dulcie gazed back adoringly at the predator who had slain her. “Yes, Goddess!”