Naomi could barely bring herself to answer the door, a nameless fear welling up in her stomach. The fear certainly didn’t come from a dislike of who was waiting outside — she’d been yearning to see her for close to a century — but rather from a concern that Naomi herself wouldn’t be nearly all that she intended to present herself as, and that her visitor would see through her artifice. She was, after all, probably the only person alive or undead on this earth who could.

The year was 1920, and Naomi was much happier than she’d ever been in life or undeath. She had an entire retinue of no less than nine thralls at her disposal, a few of whom lived alongside her in a lovely big house in Somerville, Massachusetts, a burgeoning industrial hub in those nights.

She’d stayed with Olivia for four years subsequent to that first painting, and during that time she’d finally ceased to be a pathetic and weak-willed fledgling, maturing into the strong and seductive woman she was tonight, with substantial painting skills to call her own as well. But that was nearly a century ago now — four years into it, she’d longed for the more familiar shores of the Boston Harbor and she had left Olivia behind, not before each promised the other that they’d meet again one night.

After years of drinking feminine blood, her pale tits were larger and softer, her wavy red hair was longer and thicker, her girlcock was smaller and softer, and her thighs were wider and more irresistible. Olivia knew well of it, not just because she’d personally observed the first few years of it, a time during which the two vampires shared a bed as well as each other’s thralls, coming to love each other as much as any two women might learn to. Since Naomi had left, she’d kept in regular correspondence with the love of her undeath, and the two knew of all the many things that’d happened in each other’s undeath… love and lust and loss, each feeling that their own path paralleled the other’s, though the letters took a long time to arrive.

And like she’d told Olivia, Naomi had been too much of a coward to make Violet like herself, and the two had parted one night after her beloved thrall reached the age of seventy-five, decades ago now. Still twenty-six herself forevermore, Naomi had come to feel that she didn’t connect with the old lady nearly as well as she once had, and though they were both overflowing with tears for countless nights thereafter, Mistress and thrall both rested easy in the end thinking of the other as Naomi left Violet with more than enough resources to live out the rest of her life in peace and comfort. Many of her other girls had soon followed, and though she missed all of them deeply, still thought of them nightly, loves of her undeath all, there were other girls to drink from in their place, new blood to cherish and love all the same.

But Naomi knew from letters that Olivia had not been free from suffering either. Besides the thralls she’d let go and the one she’d turned since they last met, Olivia had lost her beloved fledgling Behnaz to the machinations of a hunter who claimed loyalty to the Eastern Orthodoxy. Naomi had feared for Olivia as she’d gone on a tear across the Caucasus mountain range searching for the killer of one of the other loves of her undeath, relieved when she returned victorious but saddened to know that the elder vampire retained a hollow place inside herself where Behnaz had once dwelled, much the same sort of place that Violet occupied.

The night-to-night of undeath had kept getting in the way, blood to drink, thralls to command, territory to maintain, but after ninety years apart, Naomi and Olivia had decided that they couldn’t possibly keep putting off another visit for any longer. And as agreed long ago, it was Olivia who would visit Naomi the second time, gaining a small sample of New World culture for herself and a slice of Naomi’s undeath for at least a few years.

That night was tonight. She was knocking, and Naomi longed to see her more than anything else in the world.

She opened the door just a crack at first, her nerves nearly sending her into a frenzy, but it was enough to see that Olivia was there, that she’d truly come all these thousands of miles just to pay her a visit.

The elder vampire looked much as she had the last time Naomi had seen her, her pallid grayish skin adorned with innumerable lovely tattoos, her messy dark brown hair grown out a bit more than it had been a century ago, her crimson eyes and her narrow frame that was still wider than Naomi’s own all just the same, wearing a green and white embroidered dress. She looked so smooth, so feminine, so touchable. The redhead couldn’t bear it any longer, so she opened the door wide and threw herself at the love of her undeath, reunited at last.

Olivia laughed and took the younger vampire in her arms, kissing her forehead wordlessly. They’d both waited for this for so incredibly long that there was little to say out loud. Letters could only convey so much, but there’d be time for conversation, and that time was not now.

Naomi took stock of the two women accompanying Olivia, a couple of delicious thralls looking to be in their early twenties and late thirties respectively whom she’d never seen before. Each was carrying a couple of travel bags on their Lady’s behalf, and Naomi realized that they must have heard a lot about her without ever seeing her in person, much as Naomi’s own thralls would see Olivia and surely would find that she was beautiful as Lilith herself, beyond any description that their Mistress could provide.

Of course, Olivia hadn’t seen Naomi as she was now either, and she seemed nearly as enchanted as a human might be, and she was the first to speak.

“My word, your tits have grown, nazdar.”

“W-what?” Naomi said, pressing her apparently impressive tits against Olivia’s own chest. “They’re still not really all that big, not like yours.”

“They’re just the perfect size for a woman of your build. And by Lilith, your voice!” Olivia exclaimed, planting a kiss on the younger vampire’s lips. “You must have maidens kneeling at your feet after a single word, nazdar.”

Naomi peered back inside her home to see her thrall Rebecca, indeed a maiden of twenty at the time her Mistress took her. Naomi had found her in the Boston Common late one night while she was in town to experience the marvel of the Tremont Street subway, first underground railway in the country. Rebecca was a poor girl who’d just been deprived of house and home by her wealthy parents for refusing to marry a man, and she’d indeed submitted herself to the lesbian vampire after only a couple of spoken words — not truly a single word, but quite close to it. Only a night or two later the thrall admitted that she’d always longed for the forbidden touch of a woman, and she’d served her Mistress loyally for almost fifteen years since then.

So Naomi didn’t believe that she was being dishonest when she responded, “I’ve been known to do so.” 

But Naomi couldn’t tolerate small talk now. This was the most important reunion of her entire undeath, and as much as Olivia was complementing her, Naomi had so many kind things to say back…

“Lilith, I’ve missed your thighs so much,” she said, bending her knees slightly to grip around the shorter woman’s ass. “Your lips, your breasts… Oh, I never want to be apart from you again, my darling Olivia. How can it have been an entire century since we met? Where has all the time gone?” Her eyes began welling up with tears — just like Violet had said that entire century ago, she had always cried easily, and vampires were not known for changing over a day.

The full moon seemed to frame Olivia’s face as she wiped away tears from Naomi giving her love a sympathetic smile. To Naomi, the dark-haired, darker-skinned vampire looked like an angel with the moon as her halo. The redhead had come to distrust the influence of angels, beings that were no doubt diametrically opposed to her kind if they existed at all, but Olivia could never be anything other than a restorative presence to one such as herself.

Yet she looked a bit sad as she spoke.

“Naomi, Naomi, nazdar, I’m here for you… I’m here for you now,” she said, and Naomi’s whole body tensed up before relaxing into her love’s strong grip. “But we must establish expectations. I cannot stay here for the rest of my undeath.”

“B-but… now that you’re here, I don’t know how I could ever go on without you,” Naomi blubbered. “You must stay.”

It was like everything clicked for Naomi as she realized how much she needed the other woman. She’d matured so much over the last century, become as independent as she could ever hope to be, and she was far from the fledgling she’d been on the night she’d shared that nameless girl with Olivia in Diyarbakir. But at the same time, she needed this woman by her side, same as she needed any of her thralls, given that she was the only woman in all the world who truly understood every aspect of her. How could she possibly give up someone like that? How could Olivia refuse to stay by her side?

“I love you very dearly,” Olivia said, lifting up Naomi’s chin by a single long black-painted fingernail. “And I’m not going anywhere tomorrow, nor the next night, or the night after that. We will spend long nights and days together, nazdar.

“But turn the request around on yourself,” she continued, brushing Naomi’s hair out of her face before giving her another long, deep kiss on the lips, tongues briefly interlocking between twin sets of fangs. “There came a time when you had to return home. To your home shores, to your thralls, the familiar sounds and scents and architecture. Neither of us could ask the other to give that up for good.”

Naomi thought of how much she had longed for the sight of Boston Harbor when she’d left Diyarbakir, as lovely a city as it was, and she knew that the elder vampire was right. But it still hurt like a stake through the heart, to know that though Olivia would remain for months if not years, that she would not remain forever.

“I’ve simply missed you so dearly,” Naomi said, squeezing her love tighter than ever before, ribs beginning to strain. A vampire’s bones were actually surprisingly brittle, though they could heal quickly, and thankfully, the redhead knew well enough when to pull herself back.

“I’ve missed you too, every night you’ve been gone,” Olivia promised with a wide, slightly tearful smile. “I dreamt every day of lying against your back, feeling your every inch. Finding out how your shape has changed with that feminine essence now suffusing your body.

“And I think, too, of my Kadriye back at home. I’ve told you of her, haven’t I?” she asked.

“You have,” Naomi replied with a sly smile. “How has she been doing?”

“Quite well,” Olivia said. “She’s adjusting well to independence, yet she wants to remain in Diyarbakir with me. And she’s most certainly been a successful experiment, one I may repeat if the right person comes along. You’ve been quite the inspiration for me, nazdar.”

Naomi had almost hoped that Olivia would bring Kadriye along with her, though two vampires visiting would no doubt be difficult. When her Lady had taken her, Kadriye had been a lamplighter — a man — whom a few of Olivia’s thralls had regarded as especially awkward and reserved. Olivia had chanced upon the man one night and, unusually, regarded him as merely pathetic rather than detestable.

Upon speaking in person and putting him under her spell, the man’s life story had turned out to have surprising echoes of Naomi’s own history, and Olivia decided that while a man could never be fixed, she was clearly speaking to no man, but only a woman who hadn’t yet embraced her true self. So she’d turned her after only a few weeks as a thrall and commanded her newly-turned third fledgling to begin absorbing the feminine essence from her victims’ blood the same way Naomi did.

All that had been a quarter-century ago now — and Kadriye was no longer her Lady’s fledgling, but the experience had left her a much happier, more complete person, a woman, just like her Lady and her Lady’s love.

Naomi had almost balked when she’d read in a letter what Olivia was doing, unsure if it was truly different from what Alexander had done to her, but she could only smile when she heard of Kadriye’s happiness over her own breast development, the joy and catharsis she felt at putting on a woman’s dress for the first time. It reminded her that humans often couldn’t find happiness alone — they needed a strong, cold hand to guide them toward it. She did wish, though, that it was possible for a human to attain that essence in some way without being born into it. It was a true tragedy that it was a privilege left only to her kind, though perhaps that came from the fact that changing one’s gender was so clearly against God’s plan in the best way possible.

And the fact that Kadriye enjoyed her femininity and wished to remain by her Lady’s side even after receiving freedom made Naomi want to meet her more than ever. But that night would not come for another five years or so.

“I’m delighted to hear she’s happy,” Naomi said. “And I believe I understand your point. You must return to her one night, mustn’t you?”

“To her, to my Aelin, to my Ronya… so many others,” Olivia replied.

“Ah. And I must introduce you to these two lovely ladies!” she continued, motioning to the thralls by her side. “Nur, Sosin, I’m sure it’s already quite clear to you, but this is Mistress Naomi.”

“Good evening, Mistress Naomi,” Nur said. She was a short, well-built, dark-haired, dark-skinned woman wearing a gray and blue dress similar to her Lady’s.

“Greetings on behalf of my Lady Olivia,” Sosin said. She was a thin, fair-haired, olive-skinned woman between Olivia and Naomi’s heights, wearing a black blouse and matching skirt.

“It’s lovely to be introduced to the both of you lovely girls,” Naomi said. “Please, you’re all invited inside. I think a storm may be coming on tonight. I’ve had lodging prepared for you all.”

It was misty outside that night, condensing on the two vampires’ skin in the cold winter weather, Naomi’s favorite season. She would have stayed outside with Olivia as long as she liked. But the elder vampire’s thralls were shivering a bit, and Naomi knew that her love had traveled long and far to be here. If it was her, she’d want to come inside and relax, and she knew that Olivia would be waiting for an invitation.

The entryway of the two-story house Naomi called home wasn’t anything special — though she’d had her own carpet and rugs and wallpapers installed shortly after moving in, and a painting of the Boston Harbor from the perspective of the Long Wharf downtown was hung on the wall, the waves modeled by the redheaded vampire in intricate detail. It’d taken her decades to gain any sense of style or interior design, for her home as well as herself, but although finding that for herself was frustrating even with the help of her thralls, the time spent had paid off.

Naomi herself was wearing an ankle-length loose-fitting red dress with narrow shoulder straps, showing off an amount of skin that was regarded as scandalous by human standards. Of course, she never minded showing off around her girls, nor around Olivia’s. It wasn’t as though they wouldn’t see her naked body soon enough — with their Lady’s permission, of course, but Naomi suspected that she would receive it.

“That’s a lovely painting,” Olivia said. “And a lovely outfit. My, you have so much art in this house, don’t you?”

She looked around the living room down a couple of steps from the entryway at the many paintings upon the walls.

“I’ll greatly enjoy showing you every one of them,” Naomi said. “I presume you recognize Boston Harbor?”

“Indeed. I arrived at the Long Wharf earlier tonight,” the elder vampire said.

“I painted that one, oh, sixty years ago. Sixty-three, to be precise,” Naomi said, calculating in her mind. “It was during my final week with Violet. Making final visits to the places we loved most.”

She teared up thinking of it, and remembering how she had had to let go of Violet made her want to let go of Olivia even less, the fact that she intended to return home one night tearing her apart inside once again.

Before Naomi could speak out, though, her love had already wrapped her arms around her, crimson eyes staring into her own.

“I’m so sorry you lost her, nazdar,” Olivia whispered. “And… I fear that I’ve brought all this up for you with the reminder that I must eventually leave. But Naomi, humans have finally learned to fly. It seems probable that in only a decade or two, they’ll be ferrying themselves across the sea in mere hours. That could include you and I as well, you know. Our meetings need not be such an ordeal.”

“I was responsible for sending you that letter about the provenance of flying machines in this country, my darling,” Naomi said, lost in the elder vampire’s beautiful eyes, her own mascara running a bit as tears continued to escape her. “But I don’t know how soon it will be practical… and even if you must leave for only a decade, say, that is far too long to be without you.

“I stayed with you for nearly half a decade, you know. Won’t you stay for longer? A full half, perhaps? I have so much to show you, to speak about. A century ago, we were only just becoming acquainted. I was barely my own woman. And now I have a century’s worth of things to show you, activities I’ve been longing to share with you.”

Olivia looked at her Nur and Sosin, a bit forlorn, and she took Naomi’s hand. A smile spread across her pallid face, one that Naomi echoed before Olivia even began to speak, predicting what she might hear.

“Those would have to be five quite wonderful years, wouldn’t they?” the elder vampire said with a little giggle. “I’ll have to write back to Kadriye and my thralls at home then. Might Nur and Sosin be told where my things are to be left? Theirs as well?”

“Of course,” Naomi said, smiling at the two thralls before turning back toward the parlor behind her where a couple of her thralls were waiting. “Rebecca, Samantha, my darlings! Take these lovely ladies’ burdens off of their hands, won’t you? And guide them to their bedchamber.”

“Yes, Mistress,” they said, one after the other, and the two rushed into the entryway. Rebecca, the woman whom Naomi had rescued from an unwanted marriage fifteen years ago, had light skin and long wavy blonde hair that nearly reached her waist, and she was almost as tall as her Mistress, though more muscular. Samantha’s skin was dark and her hair brown and curly. She was a foot or so shorter than both Rebecca and her Mistress and had a narrow figure, and she wore glasses upon her face.

Sosin and Nur handed their various bags off to the two of them, and shortly thereafter Olivia spoke approval for her girls to leave with Naomi’s, and the four of them set off for the house’s second floor, leaving the two vampires alone with each other.

“They’re such good girls, aren’t they?” Naomi asked, rhetorically of course.

“I would love to get to know them,” Olivia said, a bit of saliva escaping her pallid lips. “And, with your permission, to taste them.”

“There’s little that would make me happier,” Naomi said. “But for me… for now, I think your company is more than enough.” She stepped as close to her love as close would allow, undead bodies pressed up against one another, steeped in desire.

“Well, I have stepped into your territory now, haven’t I?” Olivia asked teasingly. “I should like to heed the wishes of the Mistress of the house.”

“Then let’s make haste to my bedroom, my beloved Olivia. We’ve half a decade to make the best of.”

Naomi led her love into her home with a wide smile, knowing at least that they’d spend more time together than they ever had before. There was so much to show her, so much to do, so many places to go, more than enough of her own paintings to fill a gallery, each with a story all its own. Olivia had provided the same for Naomi a century ago, of course, and the younger vampire, no longer anyone’s fledgling, couldn’t wait to return the favor.

The trouble with invitations was that they couldn’t be rescinded once given. That usually worked out quite well for vampires, except when they were the ones handing out the invitations.

A week had passed since Amelia’s unfortunate visit, and Naomi was doing her best to keep that miserable woman out of her mind. But that was quite difficult when neither could seem to let the other go.

Naomi herself wanted Amelia to stop being such a hardheaded piece of shit and just kiss a girl already, or better yet, drink one’s blood. She wouldn’t let her come near her thralls and hurt them any more than she already had, but the way things had ended had just been awful beyond compare. She couldn’t let her oldest surviving acquaintance go back home and keep believing that Naomi’s thralls weren’t women, especially not when she was surely just parroting Alexander’s beliefs. Naomi liked to think of herself as saving her girls from living in the world of men, and how could Amelia’s undeath be described as anything other than that?

But really, she just wished that it had been Olivia coming along to visit rather than Amelia. Unfortunately, that was no longer a possibility.

And Amelia hadn’t let up one bit. Though she’d professed her intention to leave before Naomi convinced her to stay the night, the eternal fledgling had kept trying to pester Naomi ever since, trying to stay in her undeath. One night she was sending e-mails to the Seagate Hotel’s support address, and the next, one of her thralls, a dull-looking man with the physique of a bodybuilder, was speaking to Gail at the front desk. Naomi realized that these behaviors potentially ran afoul of her own promise to rip Amelia’s head off should she come near the redhead’s thralls, but to be frank, she had a certain kind of pity for the stubborn creature.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to go through it all alone — and with Amelia continually reaching out, Naomi thought it best to have strength in numbers. While she could overpower Amelia on her own, it was always best to have backup in the form of her first fledgling Valerie.

“I’m mostly surprised she’s still in town, Mistress,” Valerie said. “I would’ve gone back home if I was her. If I knew what was good for me, at least. Not like she doesn’t have a ton of thralls waiting for her there.”

“It’s a bold presumption that she knows a shred of what’s good for her,” Naomi said spitefully, looking down at the frayed gray carpet of her fledgling’s suburban apartment. Staying in her own hotel was making her a little uneasy with how often Amelia was reaching out.

Valerie was a tall, chubby girl in her late twenties with long blonde hair that she kept tied back into a ponytail. She wore a blue t-shirt under a gray hoodie and jeans; she’d never been all that concerned with fashion or femininity. Her skin was deathly pale and her eyes blood-red, marking her as one of the undead like her Mistress. Just three years ago, she had taken up the mantle of a vampire hunter to feel like she was contributing something to the world amid severe post-college burnout, but when she decided Naomi would be her biggest catch yet, she found herself preyed upon instead.

Naomi was happy to have Valerie as her thrall, and they’d shared six wonderful months together thereafter. She’d never meant to turn her into a vampire more than any of her thralls — doing so always caused her to fear killing them, or perhaps even worse, acting like Alexander. But eventually another pair of hunters had come after Naomi with devious tactics up their sleeve, and Valerie had sacrificed her life saving her Mistress. Letting her die would have been the one thing worse than turning her, so Naomi made the only decision she could.

It hadn’t always been easy, but Naomi thought she’d done reasonably well for herself as a first-time begetter thus far. Valerie still had a lot to learn, and she often acted in ways that were utterly perplexing from Naomi’s perspective, but she’d adjusted to undeath about as well as any person could, and she could usually even stay in control of herself when she smelled blood — enough so that Valerie was once again living at home with Lauren, her girlfriend and part-time thrall. The two vampires were there at Valerie’s house in the suburbs of Manchester, New Hampshire, Lauren asleep in the bedroom as her Goddesses remained awake at the ungodly hour of four in the morning.

“Besides, when you survive as long as her or I,” Naomi said, finding a classic teachable moment for her fledgling, “a few weeks doesn’t feel so long to stay in one place. I stayed with my Olivia for more than four years when I was only, what, forty? And she with I a century later.”

“Sure, Mistress,” Valerie said, stretching her legs out on the old faux-leather couch in her living room, sat opposite of Naomi, who took up residence in a beaten-up armchair that Lauren had gotten out of a dumpster years ago. “But the difference is that you two actually loved each other. This girl’s sticking around just to harass you.”

“I don’t know how much effort she’s expending on it, really,” Naomi said. “She can just send her thralls off to do something for her, of course. I’m presuming she’s here for other reasons. She has history in this area too, keep in mind. No coincidence she ran into Brenda to begin with, I’m sure.”

The two vampires smelled something wonderful then, the scent of their shared thrall’s AB positive blood moving toward them from the bedroom. As she walked into the darkened living room, lit only by the cloudy sky outside, she was rubbing her eyes, dressed only in an oversized T-shirt that she generally liked to sleep with. But as she saw the two pale women sitting, she fell to her knees, then pressed her head all the way to the floor.

“My Goddesses!” she proclaimed, an unmistakable exhaustion at the back of her tone.

“What are you doing awake at this time of night, my darling?” Naomi asked, dashing over to her beautiful thrall and squatting down to pat her on the head. “You need your beauty sleep, you know. The sun won’t arise for another couple of hours.”

“I couldn’t sleep, Mistress,” Lauren said, pressing her hands together to pray for forgiveness. “Haven’t been able to get her out of my head. A-Amelia… I mean, I felt brave for a split second, but…”

“It’s horrendous when someone like her insists you’re a man in spite of all evidence to the contrary, isn’t it?” Naomi asked. “But I won’t let it happen again, not to you, my Lauren, nor any of my girls. With Valerie by my side, Amelia wouldn’t dare challenge me.”

“So you’re… done with her, Mistress?” Lauren asked, looking up at her Mistress’ face, just below her eyes at her beautiful sharp fangs. Being in a position like this constantly reminded her of how thoroughly she belonged to her Mistress.

“Not nearly. I simply need to find the right way to approach her,” Naomi said.

“Mistress and I were talking about it right before you came out here,” Valerie explained. “She can’t let Her own… um, vampire sister—”

“That wording might be a bit confusing,” Naomi interjected.

“Good point, Mistress. But She can’t let Amelia turn out the same way as Her begetter.”

Naomi nodded soberly. “It would be doing both of us a disservice. But I fear I can’t convince her of anything till she understands who I really am. It’s just… I fear things will turn violent once the truth comes out, regrettably. She’s rather crazed, and I’d like to avoid endangering you all.”

She sighed. “Sometimes I regret taking my sister’s name. If I’d named myself Maryanne from the beginning, she might’ve recognized me for who I was from the beginning, with no preconceived notions.”

“Would she have found You at all that way, Mistress?” Lauren asked. “Brenda wouldn’t have told Her the name Naomi Rennt.”

“Her last name would have been the same, though,” Valerie said. “Might’ve still been recognizable.”

“That bothers me more than anything. What connection do I have left to my parents?” Naomi asked. “I haven’t seriously thought about them in decades. My family name is nothing more than a vestige.”

“I fuckin’ feel that, Mistress,” Valerie said with a groan. “It’s weird still having my dad’s name. I haven’t seen him since I was 15.”

“Have you ever thought of changing it, my darling?” Naomi asked. “There’s a long undeath ahead of you. You need not remain my Valerie Hawthorne.”

“I brought it up once with Goddess,” Lauren said, too tired to realize that she was speaking out of line even in her current submissive position, “back when we were in college, when I was changing my own name. I kept my parents’ name in the end too. Didn’t want to piss my mom off and make it turn into a whole thing. But it was, uh… under consideration.”

Valerie had offered Lauren a great deal of assistance in obtaining gender-affirming treatment when the two women had been college roommates, back when both of them had been good human friends and neither had even conceived of the idea that one night they’d serve a bloodthirsty Mistress side-by-side. The two had kept living together after college as well, sharing the same apartment for another half a decade before they learned the true purpose of their existence.

“Lauren, sweetie,” Valerie said, rushing over to be beside her Mistress and her thrall, and putting a firm hand onto Lauren’s long brown hair over the back of her head. “Mistress was asking me. But… yeah. Lauren suggested it to me then, but changing my own name just felt like a hassle. Maybe that’s just my stubborn cis girl perspective, though. I’ve never had to really consider it. Figured my dad’s name would always be with me.”

Naomi sighed. “It can’t only be a cis girl thing, my darling. Or maybe it’s just my old-fashioned perspective. But I feel it too, that sense that I’ll never let go of my connection to my family, even as they’re so terribly long gone. I truly almost never think of them, but they remain with me despite that. Perhaps there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to let them go.”

“I’m sorry for speaking out of line before, my Goddess,” Lauren said, taking Valerie’s hand to kiss it softly while the pale blonde vampire smiled coldly. “But Mistress… I’ve never heard anything about your parents before. If it’s alright to ask… what were they like?”

Naomi shook her head, covered her face with her long delicate fingers. “Oh, Lilith… Amelia’s got me stuck in the past these recent nights. Why the hell would I bring them up? They’ve had no bearing on my undeath since it was my life.

“But I don’t intend to keep secrets from my girls. My mother… she was a housewife. A weaver of clothes, mostly. Dressed exactly as modestly as the town pastor instructed. Lived a godly life. I think I heard her express an opinion of her own maybe twice, that wasn’t just regurgitated from the pastor or from my father. He was a baker and a miserably gruff man in his own way. Liked to smack me when I behaved insolently, but Naomi was always his baby girl, utterly exempt from that kind of treatment.

“When we were turned, I learned that they’d sort of… shut down. Hadn’t baked a single loaf of bread since our corpses had been found. My Violet told me my mother and father had seemed hollow at the funeral, the one for both my sister and I. Like they might never smile again. Violet thought maybe I could cheer my mother up with a visit, but… I suppose I wasn’t interested in doing so. I always thought my sister had been given a better life, but in the end, I only wished to be like her for this reason and that. The grass was greener… but she hadn’t had it much better than I. Such is the nature of living as a young woman, perhaps.”

“You lived with Your parents till you died, Mistress?” Lauren asked. “Couldn’t imagine it, all the way till You were twenty-six.”

“Gladly not. My sister and I had long before moved in with the master carpenter I apprenticed under,” Naomi said. “Not a typical mode of living, but he was an old widower, and he had space, and she did not wish to remain with our parents until marriage. He was, perhaps, a man I was willing to tolerate for that alone. But he was on a work trip in the city of New York when my begetter came along. So… he was spared. And I barely caught a single other glimpse of him in undeath. Naomi and I were whisked off to Boston with haste once we were turned.”

“Do You know what happened to Your parents in the end, Mistress?” Valerie said.

Naomi sighed, and shook her head once more. “He had no interest in me returning to New Hampshire, and after his death it was the last place I wanted to visit. So much must have changed in that time… I don’t think Violet had much desire to return, either. I suppose, in the end, they died, like all humans. But I don’t know when or how.”

Valerie wrapped her own strong pale arms around her Mistress, and the three women remained silent for several moments. Naomi had long accepted the loss of all she had once lived alongside, Violet regrettably included, but there was still a certain hollowness within her when she spoke of her parents. She wondered if it was the same hollowness that Violet had seen upon Naomi’s mother’s face those two centuries ago.

But in the end, it was all ancient history — nearly literally — and she didn’t much care to have the answers she had never sought.

Yet as fledglings tended to be, Valerie was always full of surprises.

“Well, Mistress,” the blonde vampire said, “it might not be very difficult to find out, if You’d like.”

“How do you think?” Naomi asked. “It would be awfully tedious to try to uncover the few public records that exist from that time.”

“Don’t You remember, Mistress?” Valerie said, a fanged smile creeping across her face. “I found Your grave in the old Derryfield cemetery, back when I was a hunter. Your sister’s grave, anyways, the one I assumed was Yours. Don’t You think Your parents would’ve been buried there too?”

“Oh, I could get you there in fifteen minutes, Mistress,” Lauren said, still prostrate. “I went there with Goddess when She was looking for You.”

“Oh, Lilith, must I go?” Naomi said, not at all having realized what she’d walked into.

“Not unless You command it, Mistress,” Valerie said, raising her hands in the air defensively.

“Never. We belong to You, Mistress,” Lauren said. “I’m Your loyal thrall. My body and mind are Yours to do with as You please. But if You do want to see it…”

“It may be productive,” Naomi said quietly, looking at a clock on the girlfriends’ shelves. “Just to get these matters with Amelia off my mind. Let’s be quick, then. Only two hours till sunrise.”

After two centuries of undeath, Naomi had a strong sense of sunrise and sunset times in New England, nearly to the minute, and Hooksett was not far at all from her own home. Knowing that she could get into town and back safely, the three women gathered their things and prepared for a late-night excursion.

It was a cold, misty night in late autumn, verging on early winter as Naomi and her girls arrived at the old Derryfield cemetery. It was nearly Naomi’s favorite season, but she had a rare sense memory of the kind of discomfort humans felt when exposed to the cold as she walked among the old crumbling graves.

“Seems this place has barely changed at all since I was a child,” she said, staring off into the darkness. No one but her and those she’d brought with her was in the graveyard as far as she could see or smell, the darkness of night still pervasive. There had been some work vehicles on the road here and there, but even after so much change had taken place in the world, humans still tended to rise and set with the sun — more or less. Lauren was an exception, of course, as were many of her thralls, all the better to have more time alongside them.

Yet it wasn’t true that everything was just the same as it had always been. There were many more graves than there had once been, and a parking lot as annex. The nearby Congregational church had evidently been bulldozed and rebuilt at least once in the past two hundred years, grass and trees replanted many times. But the graves themselves remained just the same, only weathered by the passage of time, a force Naomi thought herself inured against. But tonight, she was beginning to doubt that.

Valerie was following not far behind her, holding her girlfriend and thrall’s hand. The sky was cloudy and the air somewhat misty, so Lauren would not have much luck navigating on her own without the potential to trip on an errant headstone or a rock. Tripping over objects like that was something that Naomi tended to be quite wary of on the two’s behalf.

“Graveyards always fill me with this kinda melancholy feeling,” Valerie said. “But I guess these days I’m more like the bodies in the ground than I am a human. Maybe it’s not something to be so sad over.”

“You’re a lot more interesting than a corpse, Goddess,” Lauren said. “And sooooo much prettier.”

“You too, hon,” Valerie replied with a slight shudder. “But maybe… I’m not really all that comparable.

“Um, Mistress, I can take you to Your grave if it’d be a good starting point. I still remember where it is.” From Valerie’s perspective, her Mistress seemed to be wandering in almost random directions, reading random headstones and missing others.

“I remember exactly where we were buried, my fledgling,” the redheaded vampire replied. “I’m just sparing a few moments to get my bearings.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Valerie replied.

Several minutes passed as the girls walked about the cemetery, under large trees that seemed to blot the whole world out more than the clouds in the sky already were. By the time Lauren spoke again, Naomi didn’t even know what was going on in her own head any more.

“Did you come here often, Mistress?” she asked.

Naomi shook her head, then hesitated. “Only for burials. But they were rather common in those days. The town was small enough that everyone knew each other. When someone died, everyone would gather in the churchyard for a sermon. Scores of people attended my sister’s and my funeral, Violet told me.

“It’s much larger tonight than I ever saw it. Some of these are from as late as the 1840s.”

“Goddess…” Valerie said, looking around at the tall trees. “I’m a fuckin’ vampire, aren’t I? Wandering around an old cemetery at 4:30 in the morning. I came here during the day when I was looking for Your grave, Mistress. During the night… well, I was worried I might run into You.

“Now I’m the girl who humans stay away from the cemetery to avoid, heh.” The fledgling vampire looked down at the moist grass beneath her, full of life in a way that she herself wasn’t, and to Lauren beside her, much the same.

“You are, darling,” Valerie’s begetter said, taking her fledgling by the hand. “I understand it can be a bit disconcerting to walk among shadows the way our kind must. But it’s not so bad if we do it together, is it?”

“I’m not afraid of You, Goddess,” Lauren said, her eyes wide as she looked upon her girlfriend with reverence. “I… love being close to You. Here or anywhere else.”

“H-hold on a sec,” Valerie said, taking her partners in close to her. “But… we’re not actually alone here, are we?” She looked off into the distance, suddenly vigilant.

“What?” Naomi looked off in the same direction as Valerie, toward the far side of the cemetery from where the three women had entered, then took in a long sniff. “I don’t smell anyone. Not even a groundskeeper quite yet, though we should get moving before one might arrive.”

Lauren squinted her eyes and tried to follow her Goddesses’ gaze, but she couldn’t see anything in the darkness of the night.

“I don’t smell anyone either,” Valerie answered. “But don’t you hear that crying? It’s kind of faint, but it’s so quiet here… I’m sure they must be right that way.”

“...Another of our kind?” Naomi wondered, suddenly on edge. “You two follow behind me.”

“Yes, Mistress,” they both said, Lauren especially filled with dread. She didn’t want to deal with another vampire she didn’t know so soon after Amelia. It was like she’d used up all the fight inside her in that one shining moment as she’d stabbed the brunette right where it hurt. She imagined that that was the kind of satisfaction that her Goddess Valerie had once felt when she’d stabbed a vampire through its soulless heart in her days as a hunter… not that either of her Goddesses could ever be reasonably described as soulless. Not only did she belong to them fundamentally and completely, but they were a lifeline that she could more than rely on in the face of another of their kind.

Naomi and Valerie quickly began to triangulate the source of the crying, and soon Lauren could hear it — not just crying, but sobbing, the kind of intense and unbearable explosion of emotion that was typically reserved for the death of a loved one or a reckoning with a traumatic event. And Lauren could scarcely believe her eyes or her ears as she drew closer and the crier came into view — Amelia Marques herself, knelt in front of an old weathered grave just a few yards from the edge of the graveyard, quite close to the associated church.

And even with the arrival of the three women, not least Lauren, whose AB positive blood smelled as lovely as any human’s could, Amelia continued to cry, seemingly barely moved by the presence of the three.

“What in Lilith’s name are you doing here, Amelia?” Naomi asked coldly.

At that, the brunette vampire collapsed onto the grassy floor beneath her. Her crying was hoarse, and the redhead began to wonder just how long she’d been here. And as the faded text on the grave became visible as Amelia bowed her head lower, Naomi began to realize that she might have been here for an entirely unrelated reason.

The name was Rosetta Marques, born 1745, deceased 1826. A relative of Amelia’s, clearly, though Naomi had never heard of her. Then again, she and Amelia had never been all that close, even as fledglings.

In any case, it seemed that it was now the two-hundred year anniversary of this mysterious relative’s death, and it occurred to Naomi for the first time, so often shut inside her own little world, that Amelia might have come back to New England for reasons other than to see Naomi herself.

“Who’s this Rosetta girl?” Naomi asked, squatting down beside Amelia, feeling a modicum of pity for the miserable woman despite herself. “Seems she lived a long and healthy life for a woman of the era.”

Indeed, eighty-one was more than even Violet had managed, as well as her Mistress had treated her. Naomi had always gotten the impression that Amelia had come from wealth and privilege unlike herself. But she was nonetheless surprised at Amelia’s apparent attachment to this dead woman. Although Rosetta was a relative of Amelia’s, Naomi doubted that she was a peer, since if her memory served, Amelia had been turned in the 1740s, and born nineteen years prior…

“I thought you hated Derryfield, Naomi,” Amelia said. “That is, Manchester. You and your brother always told Master that you never wanted to come back here.”

“I don’t come here often,” Naomi said. “But a couple of my girls reside nearby. These girls in particular. So I’ve been here more than usual the last couple of years.”

“Yes, your Lauren,” Amelia said, finally turning her pallid tear-stained face around to face the redheaded vampire. “Not a—”

“Stop yourself before I’m forced to hurt you,” Naomi said. Lauren flinched away as her Mistress spoke, not wanting Amelia to focus on her. She’d had more than enough of that, and running into her in a graveyard late at night was pretty much the last thing she wanted.

Amelia looked up at Valerie with an additional fear in her eyes, ignoring Naomi’s statement altogether.

“...Oh. Is this… your fledgling?” Amelia asked. “Another hermaphrodite?”

Naomi growled and grabbed at Amelia’s throat, seizing the collar of the long loose burgundy dress she was wearing.

“Jesus fuckin’ Lilith, I’m cis!” Valerie shouted, only a few inches away from her Mistress. “But back the fuck off of my girlfriend or I’ll tear you in half before my Mistress can.”

The look on Amelia’s face afterward was indescribably amused, even as she appeared to be staring death in the face.

“Cis—your sister?” she scoffed. “She looks very little like you, Naomi. And I know you only ever had a brother besides. Are you truly that fixated on familial relations?”

“She means she’s the same sort of woman as you, Amelia,” Naomi said. “Born to that role and so forth. But it sounds like someone’s living in a glass house, given you’ve been crying over a long-dead relative yourself. Who was she, Rosetta?”

“So it’s not only hermaphrodites you pursue?” Amelia asked. “Or do you only make an exception for your fledglings?”

Naomi groaned. Her own secrecy ate away at her more and more every time Amelia spoke such foul words. She wanted to go ahead and say it, explain her own history without reservation, but then… then she’d never get any answers!

“You’re dodging the question, Amelia,” she said. “Who’s Rosetta?”

Amelia rolled her eyes, looking away, and Naomi swore that she would have been blushing if she was able.

“You recall that I was a married woman when I was human, surely,” Amelia said.

Naomi nodded, as she did indeed remember Amelia’s history. The brunette had always spoken about her husband dismissively, with a large dose of resentment. Naomi presumed that was because Alexander was so much more important to her, and she needed to prove it. But then again, Alexander had killed her husband on the night he took her — and Amelia liked to thank him for it. And while that might be something a fledgling would be compelled to do, Naomi knew from personal experience that forgiving even one’s begetter for killing one’s loved ones was not so easy. She wondered what exactly had happened between Amelia and her husband to allow her loyalty toward Alexander to survive even to the present night.

“Well, Filipe was not a faithful husband,” Amelia spoke slowly. “And the cadela who he impregnated had a daughter. I only found out about this as Filipe was begging for his pathetic life with Master, you see. It was just another way in which he had been unfaithful, along with the ludicrous price for which he had sold Master the copper roofing for His mansion.

“Master saved me from Filipe’s unfaithfulness, his sexual and physical transgressions upon my body. And thanks to Him, I learned of the daughter I never had. Filipe had impregnated me only a few months before Master took me, you know, but a child won’t survive within an undead body. So when I learned of Rosetta’s birth, I became quite obsessed… from a distance, of course. And she had her own children, and those children had children too. They’re almost like my own descendants. It’s why I came back here to begin with. Most have remained in the region… a branch of her descendants relocated to Australia in the 1870s. Another to Chile in the 1990s. Other individuals here and there. I never lost track of any of them.”

Naomi blinked, taking a moment to reckon with the fact that Amelia wanted things other than to humiliate and mock her and her girls. She had never thought of her as much more than a ghost of her past, not for 200 years, and at the time that they’d both been Alexander’s fledglings, she had seen her as something of an intimidating older sister, mostly relegated to the same bucket as her actual sister, though she cared for her quite a lot less.

And though she’d hurt her thralls, there was clearly more to her than that, and it made Naomi want to make her see sense more than ever. She so deeply wished that she could drink her blood and make her her thrall just like Valerie had been, changing hatred and rejection into love and devotion. But it just didn’t work that way between vampires…

“Bah! I don’t know why I’m being asked this by the likes of you,” Amelia snarled, seemingly having gotten the last of her tears out. “Last time we spoke, you were threatening to rip my head off. You’ve been quite rude to me in emails and to my thralls’ faces. Why don’t we both leave this place? I’ve certainly seen what I needed to see. I’d best return to my hotel before sunrise. My Manuel is waiting in the parking lot. I meant to do this alone, you know.”

“I didn’t mean to run into you here, either,” Naomi clarified. “And you will do well to keep your distance for the time being. But… tonight was not entirely unproductive or unpleasant.”

“I feel similarly,” Amelia said quickly. “I’m glad to have… caught up. We didn’t do so much when I was staying with you.”

Naomi wanted to say that that was because Amelia had insisted on completely rejecting her way of undeath, but before she could, a loud, obnoxious buzzing began to sound, the sort that was all-too-common in the modern world.

“Lilith, what is it? Not the time!” Amelia growled, retrieving her cell phone from her small leather purse and reluctantly answering it. Naomi’s sharp hearing allowed her to hear the caller’s words as well.

“What is it, Francisco?” the brunette vampire hissed in her native Portuguese. Much like Olivia before her, Naomi had had the opportunity to learn a variety of languages over her undeath, and one of them was Portuguese due to picking a few words up from Amelia initially and later learning more from her thrall Vera in the 1950s, a woman of Brazilian origin.

“I’ve been parked in the Seagate lot for the past six hours, Mistress,” Amelia’s thrall Francisco replied in his gravely, masculine voice, utterly repulsive to Naomi’s ears. But what was even more repulsive was the fact that Amelia had apparently had her thralls spying on Naomi’s residence. That clearly embarrassed Amelia as well, as she lifted herself to her feet and began walking away from Naomi and her companions behind a large oak tree. She was soon followed by the frustrated redhead, who was intent on knowing what was being said about her.

“Did you see something of note?” Amelia whispered back, not quiet enough to be unheard in the solitude of the cemetery. “This is really not a good time.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Francisco replied. “A tall, pale figure stepped out of the car and approached the building. Possibly a vampire like Yourself. And possibly some sort of homosexual or transvestite.”

Amelia looked directly at Naomi then, her gaze piercing right through her. “I know you’re listening, Naomi. Who is this? Do you recognize him?”

Naomi wasn’t so sure that the figure being described was a him, but that was partly because she had no idea at all who this might be, especially with such a paucity of actual information. Mostly, she was fixated on the fact that Amelia was teaching her thralls to be just as hateful and small-minded as she was, though given they were men, it was probably an inevitability anyway.

“...I don’t,” she ultimately said, keeping it simple.

“Good boy, Francisco,” Amelia said, hanging up the phone. Then, looking at Naomi — “You may want to look into that, Naomi, darling. I’ll be retiring to bed now. Pleasant chat.”

Naomi didn’t want to let her off that easy, but the sky was already beginning to brighten, and if she wanted to get back to Plum Island in time to deal with yet another potential visitor, she would have to be fast. She left Amelia with a simple good night, and took Lauren and Valerie with her to go.

She never saw her parents’ graves that night, either. In the end, more important matters took precedence. Or, if they weren’t more important, then the matters that remained with her far beyond their rightful time. Those were the kind that never seemed to leave her satisfied.