It Comes At Night
Loki Laufeyson x Reader
Summary: Death has a name and a face and a thirst for blood.
Warnings: NON-CON, DUB-CON, blood, murder, loss of virginity, ambiguous time period, vampire!Loki
➥ banner by @vase-of-lilies | ➥ divider by @firefly-graphics
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Your sister was the first to go.
It happened gradually, so gradually that it took you so much longer than the rest to realize something was wrong. By the time you did, she was already at death’s door, and your mother was sitting you down to have a conversation about preparing for the worst. It was a conversation that you would remember for years to come and even as it was being had, you were deep in denial.
Your sister had always been healthy—much healthier than you—and the bout of illness seemed to have come out of thin air. One morning she was all smiles at the breakfast table, cherubic and perfect and bothering your father with silly jests as she always did, and then the next morning she did not even have the strength to get out of bed. You thought nothing of it.
A simple cold.
“I am having some tea put on for your sister,” your mother had said.
You had only hummed in response then, nothing about the statement causing alarm. A book was in your hand as you glided outside to read under a tree. You recalled the stray thought of wishing healing on your sister, but nothing beyond that. It saddened you now to think about your lack of concern at the time, but how were you to know?
How could you have known that she would be dead in only two week’s time?
A mere fortnight?
One sick morning turned into two which then turned into three and before you knew it, it had been a while since you had breakfast with the other woman. What you thought would clear up in a few days had only seemed to get worse, and while your parents assured you that she would be better in no time, the worry in their eyes said otherwise.
As did their lips.
“...but you and father tend to her,” you argued one evening, looking at your mother with a frown. “Why is it that I cannot see her?”
Your mother started to take your hand before thinking better of it.
“...because we do not yet know what is wrong with her. We do not know how it could be passed along and one sick daughter is frightful enough,” was her excuse.
An excuse you did not agree with. Did she and father not care if they got sick? Did she not consider how it might affect you should they fall as ill as your sister? Perhaps your defiant thoughts were written all over your face because your mother gently shushed you before you could utter another word. She left you with your thoughts, and the next day you hid around the corner as the doctor came to see to their sick daughter.
“A diagnosis eludes me.”
His confession made your own heart sink, and you could only imagine the look on your parents’ faces as the great doctor in this town admitted to them that he did not know what ailed your sister.
“How can that be?” your father quietly asked him after some time.
“By all accounts…she is not sick—at least, she is showing no outright signs of any illness.”
There was a long beat of silence, and it seemed that he decided to elaborate.
“She has no cough and nothing is irregular about her heart or breathing–.”
“Yes, but she does not eat and she is always so exhausted and…look at her! You know what our daughter looks like, doctor, and she is half the size she once was in only one week’s time. Something is very wrong with her,” your mother hissed.
Your own back was pressed to the wall as they went back and forth with him, all of this information being news to you. Had your sister really lost so much weight in only a short amount of time? Was she really not eating? But was it also true that she had no cough or any other signs of illness?
“I fear that this may be more psychological than anything,” the physician finally said.
“Are you trying to imply that this is all in her head somehow?”
The other man’s statement brought forth a whole new round of questioning and anger, and you were forced to take your leave when you heard their footsteps coming closer. When they all exited through the door—to discuss this more at length, no doubt—you were seated with a book in your lap as if it were the most entrancing thing you ever read.
However, no sooner did the door shut that you found yourself hurrying down the hall and to the one place you had been forbidden from for days.
Your sister’s door had never been a barrier for you, and to stop in front of it with hesitation certainly made it feel as such for the first time in your life. This woman was your best friend, your confidant, the person you were closest to in the entire world. You could find her voice and pick out her face from any crowd, but as it were…she was almost unrecognizable to you.
Your mother’s words did not quite convey just how much weight she had lost, and as you stood in the doorway, you could not help but to think that she looked so frail—terrifying even. Under normal circumstances, one could mistake her for the younger of you two, but as you stood before her, you could only think about how sick one would think she was because she looked very sick indeed.
“Sister?”
Her voice was so small, airy. She sounded like a child.
“Is that you?”
Her thin arm lifted into the air, and her fingers—so skeletal—beckoned you closer.
“They have kept you away, and how I have longed to gaze upon your face…”
You took slow steps with every word that left her lips, and if she noticed the fear and horror on your face, she spoke nothing of it. The bedding was piled so high that only now could you really get a good look at her, and you wished that you had better self control to swallow down your gasp.
Her face was so gaunt that it looked painful, and her once thick and beautiful hair had thinned so. Her skin had lost its color, lips dry and eyes sunken in, and had you walked upon her while she was sleeping, you would have thought she was having an eternal slumber already. With that being said, beyond all that, she was still beautiful in a ghostly sort of way. It fascinated you as much as it terrified you.
“You are sick,” you breathed, looking over her. “Very sick.”
“No,” she hurried to argue, shaking her head. “I am just tired, is all.”
“Tired? This is no mere exhaustion. You look as if you will blow away with the wind.”
When she reached for you, you let her pull you to sit down, and despite how ghastly she looked, there was a twinkle in her eye that you had never seen before. A small smile danced along her lips, and in this moment she looked so much unlike herself.
“Really,” she stressed to you. “I am not sick.”
“Something is wrong,” you told her, sounding like your mother. “What is it then?”
You watched as your sister licked her lips in a way you had never witnessed. It disturbed you, and a shudder crawled up your spine as she slowly swiped her tongue between them. Her eyes glinted in an unfamiliar manner, and for a moment, you felt like she was not seeing you, at all.
“He visits me at night.”
She said the words so quietly that you almost did not hear her, but once you processed what she said, your frown only deepened.
“He crawls through my window…like a cat, you see,” she seemed to gasp. “...in the darkness…and he tastes me…”
Her vulgar words had you gasping, quickly rising to your feet in shock, and you watched as her frail hands glided along her neck and chest.
“He drinks from me, and Y/N, I swear,” she shook her head. “I have never known such heaven.”
Her disturbing words had you so frozen and turned around that you did not even hear your mother return, only the sound of her yelling at you as she pulled you out of your sister’s room. The sound of the other woman’s soft laugh reached your ears even from outside the door, and your feet had a mind of their own as they carried you down the hall.
You could only think to yourself that your parents hid much more about your sister’s illness than you realized. They spoke of no fever, and so you did not think the heat was making her say such delirious things, but perhaps the physician was not far off when he brought up her state of mind. Even hours later, her words disturbed you whenever you thought about them, and you could not get that look in her eyes out of your head.
It was a look of hunger and desperation and elation all rolled into one as she spoke of some phantom man who came into her room at night and drank from her. The thought made you shudder, and even in the darkness of your family’s manor, you swore that you could hear her childlike giggle from down the hall.
One week later, your sister was dead.
Your father was the next to go.
It happened quickly, the complete opposite of your sister, and you did not know if you preferred that. It was a simple carriage ride from the next town over when their carriage was…attacked. Somehow. At least, that is what you were told. You never did see anything for yourself, your mother having the responsibility and burden of identifying his body.
All you knew was that she was a wreck when you saw her.
It was only when you were at the funeral—the second in a month’s time—did you finally hear whispers of what may have happened that fateful night.
“The carriage driver was completely ripped apart,” a woman whispered behind you. “I hear they did not find much to even put in his casket.”
You froze at that, and you wondered if the insensitive woman even realized that you were there.
“...and poor Mr. Y/L/N was completely drained of blood…”
Your heart sank.
“Throat practically ripped out. Or…at least that is what they said.”
“What sort of animal can do such a thing?”
“It sounds like something straight out of a nightmare…”
Their words did not leave you for weeks, and you found it so hard to sleep.
The absence of both your sister and your father—and especially in such a short amount of time—was glaringly present in the manor. While your mother brought on help to lighten the load for the time being, when it was all said and done, she did not need someone to do the cooking and the sweeping and the dusting. Your mother needed someone to bring back your father and sister, and you very much wanted the same.
In the weeks that followed their deaths, a dark cloud seemed to descend over the house. You swore that it followed you with every corner you turned and every step you took. It was dark and ominous and suffocating, and there were many nights you sat up in your bed out of your sleep and gasping for breath. If you did not know any better, you swore that you could feel it choking you with its bare hands if it had any.
The demise of your sister was something you had come to be prepared for even if it was only a few days in advance. That is not to say that it made her death any easier to swallow, but your father’s was so sudden that no preparations—emotional or otherwise—had even been made. When your sister was buried, the grief had threatened to pull you down, but something about your father’s death triggered something else entirely.
You could feel it in your very bones.
There was a danger that hung in the air in his absence. Perhaps it was because you thought your father to be untouchable. His death was something you rarely gave thought to and when you did, you were confident that it would be something you would have to grapple with so far in the future. He was your provider and your protector and with him gone, you felt scarily vulnerable. Vulnerable to what? You did not know.
…but those nights in which you walked the dark hallways to find something to eat or drink grew less frequent. Every trip down to the kitchen and back up to your room felt longer than the last. At one point, you swore that your mind was playing a trick on you and that the hallway had grown in length.
Every step felt shadowed, and too many times did you stop with a glass in hand, convinced that you could hear the whisper of footsteps echoing alongside yours. In those moments you stood so still and did not dare to release a single breath, afraid that it would bring something about you would not have protection from. In those moments, your hair would stand on end and you would stare straight ahead into the darkness for so long that you swore you even started to see things.
Telling yourself that you could not remain there all night, frozen between floors and rooms, you would force yourself to carry on, walking slow and soft in case you were being followed by something you swore you could not see. And when you finally made it to your room, you faced the door as you closed it, convinced that something would latch onto your back otherwise and that you would take it to bed with you.
As you laid in bed, you told yourself that the faint footsteps outside of your door was all in your head.
Your mother’s uncharacteristic silence had become the new normal. Breakfast was a quiet affair, tea time was a quiet affair, and you were sure that even if she did leave the house with you to go to the market, it too would have been a quiet affair. As it were, you could never even get the older woman to step foot outside of the door.
Your sister’s death had shaken her, but your father’s had broken her entirely. It sometimes made you wonder how she might have reacted at your death, but as it were, she would never know. Despite how much the house terrified you these days, that ominous darkness had claimed her instead.
Like your sister, it crept up on her.
Unlike with your sister though, you were attuned to everything about your mother these days for she was all you had. So when those dreadful bags started to appear beneath her eyes from a lack of sleep, you were the first to point it out.
“I am just tired, sweetheart,” she softly told you, waving you off.
“...but all you ever do is sleep.”
She had no answer for you, humming softly to herself as if the brief exchange had never happened, at all. You stared at her for so long, and she continued to hum and needlepoint and for a moment, you could have sworn that she forgot you were there entirely. The entire time your gaze remained on her, she did not look up once, and a cold feeling washed over you, feeling the strangest sense of deja vu as you looked over her.
Your mother became something like a ghost—smiling past you and looking through you and resembling something like a lesser version of herself each day.
“Mother, you must get out of bed. Walk around, get some sunlight…eat.”
They were familiar words that she had been hearing for days, and like all the other times, your words fell on deaf ears. She merely smiled at you and took your hand and gently rubbed your skin from the comfort of her bed.
“You are so beautiful, sweetheart,” she whispered.
It was as if she was not even there, at all, and no one was more relieved than you when the physician finally came to see her, terrified of history repeating itself. But it seemed determined to do just that because he uttered the same words to you that he did to your parents all those months ago.
“She has no outright signs of illness,” he told you. “...and I fear…it is all psychological.”
The words ‘care’ and ‘facility’ reached your ears, but you did not know how to tell him that you were afraid to be alone in this house. This house that killed your sister and was currently killing your mother, and should you be left alone in it, you were afraid that it would kill you too.
It certainly felt that way, especially in the darkness, and each step to your mother’s room felt harder and harder to take. She did not want to eat nor drink, and so you felt it was your duty to see to it that she did not suffer her daughter’s fate. Every movement closer to her room felt…unwise, and when the candle in your hand lit up her door, a newfound silence descended over the corridor. As if there were faint whispers you had not been able to register before, only now that it truly felt silent.
“Mother?”
Silence was all that met you, and swallowing down your fear, you turned the knob.
You did not know what sight you expected to be met with, but oddly enough it was not the vision of your mother resting soundly in her bed. The sight genuinely surprised you, and for just a moment you silently told yourself to get it together.
You stepped into the room with a sigh, placing the water on her nightstand and looking over her. Your brows knitted at how peaceful she looked, and you recalled a stray thought about your sister once. If you did not know any better, you would say that your mother was dead, but the slow rise and fall of her chest pointed to otherwise.
Telling yourself that you would leave the water for her to drink in the morning, you made your leave. You turned your back on her and the room, the candle lighting the hallway before you. With the thought of your bed in mind, you turned to close the door…and froze.
It was a cruel trick of the light, but your eyes shaped the outline of a figure nonetheless. It towered over where your mother slept like some grim reaper, and the flame of the candle flickered despite the lack of wind. You did not look away once, and your lips parted in a silent gasp, but when you moved the candle past your face…her room was empty once again.
You told yourself that you were seeing things, but only your mind believed that. Your heart thudded and your skin grew cold and your legs shook as if something had really been there. You tried to convince yourself that it was nothing, but then why did you suddenly feel less alone?
When you looked over your shoulder, all that met you was darkness. No matter which way the candle moved, the flame only shined a light on darkness, and against your better judgement, you slowly made your way back to your room.
You buried your mother four days later.
And then you were alone.
Your sister spoke the truth.
He came in the night.
A house full of maids and kitchen staff and houseboys posed no deterrent for him for his sights had been set on you since before the first member of your family was buried. He did not want the maids or any of the houseboys or any of the cooks. He wanted the last surviving member of your family.
He wanted you when you were down and isolated and afraid of something you could not see but could surely feel.
Your window was not open, but your sheets ruffled all the same as if it were. They moved like something was beneath them, and even in your sleep, you could feel it. You could feel that something was not right. A ghost of a whisper was in your ear and the whisper of fingers was on your skin. They danced along your flesh like spiders, and when you reached down to push them away, your hand only met air.
Staring up at the ceiling gave you no clarity. Your room was as empty as it was when you retired to bed, and you swallowed at the thought that you were losing your sanity too. It would not be surprising if you were. After all, burying all of the family you had in half a year’s time was not something you would wish on the worst of people.
You continued to stare into the darkness for what felt like hours, and despite your best efforts, sleep eventually won.
It was a good sleep—a great sleep even—and had one of the maids not told you, you would’ve thought that you slept for days instead of only one. Her proposal of breakfast surprisingly stirred up nothing within you, and despite how much it worried you that you did not want to get out of bed, you could not find it in yourself to move. Despite how long you had slept, you felt the most exhausted that you ever felt.
One day turned into three, and each morning you felt weaker and weaker.
Your body and your mind were in a battle, and the latter only won with the help of one of the maids, her shoulder acting as a crutch as she guided you to the washroom. Every action felt tenfold and took the greatest bit of strength to do. All of this seemed so familiar to you but on the other side now, and determined to get back to your room on your own, you brushed off her help.
Your bed called to you, and you almost heeded its call, but one glance in the mirror stopped you.
You looked weaker, yes. You had already started to lose your color, this was true. Looking into the mirror certainly stirred up some feelings that you had when staring into the faces of your sister and mother, but none of those things were what caught your attention. With parted lips, you tilted your head to the side, and your mind struggled to comprehend what you were staring at.
The bite marks were all that you could see, and your gaze eventually lowered to the floor.
Faint memories of waking up in the middle of the night with the feeling of something sitting on your chest hit you. The heavy feeling, the heat coursing through your body, none of it was forgotten, and your eyes traveled to your bed in fear. Its call was so strong, and your mind told you to go downstairs, but your body did not listen.
He found you right where he wanted you when darkness fell again, and this time he was no phantom. There were no whispers of a touch nor the faint murmurs of voices on the wind that you had convinced yourself you had imagined.
He was before you in the flesh.
His soft hands glided along your frame as if they were committing you to memory. His lips kissed along your skin, and in between every peck, he took a bite out of you. Gentle bites, nothing alarming, but enough to make you gasp and arch off of the bed. His dark hair tickled your shoulder as he drank from you, and you could not hold in your hum as his fingers gently dragged back and forth along your spine.
He was beautiful, but he carried death with him.
When his fingers found their way inside of you—the first to ever do such a thing—it brought a noise out of you that you did not know was possible. It seemed to amuse him, and beyond the haze of ecstasy and horror, you heard something like a sound of appreciation leave his lips. His fingers were soaked with you, and the sheets whispered in the otherwise quiet room from every movement.
Your window was wide open tonight, and the wind blew the curtains along the walls.
His pale skin glowed under the moonlight—you both were bathed in it—and the smell of blood was strong in the room. He bit you everywhere he so desired—your neck, your breast, your ankle, and even that place between your thighs where you had never imagined a mouth could go. It made you feel on fire, and you twisted your hands into your hair as he crawled up your trembling body.
One of his arms snaked its way underneath you, lifting your chest towards his mouth, and the pulling sensation of your blood leaving your frame had your eyes rolling into the back of your head. Your legs were tangled with his, and he was on his knees, and your back was completely off of your bed. You felt as if you were floating, and you did not want to come down.
“What a pretty responsive thing you are…”
It was the first time you heard him speak—truly speak beyond whispers in the air and voices in your head.
When he finally slid his cock into you, your head hung off of the bed and your fingers twisted into his hair. It was oh so painful but the sensations were equally new and exciting and the mix of it all had you moaning into the darkness. Your blood from your chest ran down your neck and some of it even onto your lips.
You even swore that you heard him growl into your skin as he fucked you, and it sounded so inhuman, but you supposed that is what he was—inhuman. He disappeared in the light and came out of the darkness and found his way into your head. He lived off of the blood of people like you, and only something other could do that.
Your foot slid up and down his leg as he stretched you out onto his cock, splitting you open and sinking into your folds without a care in the world. His tongue traced the trail of blood he left behind, and when his lips found yours, you tasted yourself on his mouth. He was rabid and savage and wild just like an animal, but more than anything, he was teasing and cruel and hungry like a predator.
He prevented you from hurdling over that cliff just too many times to keep you sane, and you felt yourself losing your mind more and more every time you were denied. Every stroke of his cock flamed that fire deep within your stomach, and as the night went on, you felt as if you were about to combust. You were sticky with sweat and blood, and your sheets must have looked like a crime scene.
He bit you again and again, satiating more than one hunger by taking his fill of your body. You were in heaven and hell at the same time, and everything around you melted away. You forgot where you were, you forgot your grief, and you forgot your solitude. You even forgot your name, and when you finally came around him, all that you felt was cock and his teeth and the pleasure that both were giving you.
Your mouth hung open and your head was thrown back and you enjoyed all the sensations of heaven as he dragged you to hell.
absolutely BREATHTAKING! Oh my gods, this was unbelievably amazing and unique and oh my gods that last line,
"....and you enjoyed all the sensations of heaven as he dragged you to hell."
Total bang (pun not intended). Loved it!
