It's cold out there

“Hello, little sister.”  Her voice comes from behind you, impossibly close. You turn, drawing your dagger and slashing at where her throat should be in one fluid motion, but there’s no-one there. 

She speaks again, this time from somewhere high above you, on the library’s half-collapsed second floor. “I’m hurt. We’ve been apart for a year, and you greet me with the edge of a knife?”

You hear her weight shifting on the floor above you and raise your weapon towards where you know she is, focusing your magic through the intricate sigilwork along the blade as you speak an incantation of pure destructive intent. It’s your father’s technique, rough and incomplete — he never taught you, but you’ve tried to reconstruct it from what you remember of how he fought. In the right hands, it could have leveled what remained of the manor. Yours have never been the right hands, though. Your spell will be smaller, less refined, but no less deadly for it.

The dagger gets hot in your hand as the inscriptions it bears ignite, compressing the air above you down to a single point of impossible density. Then, for a fraction of a second, a star blooms in the library. A wall of heat and force explodes outward as it collapses in a brilliant flash, reducing the second floor to splinters and dust, a cloud of debris swallowing the room whole.

There’s a breathless moment as the dust settles where you think your hunt might finally be over. You don’t let your guard down, though, buying you just enough time to react as she comes flying out of the rubble, hitting you like a freight train.

The melee is frantic, a flurry of claws as strong and sharp as steel clashing against your blade, the blade she was meant to bear. It would be only fitting to kill her with it, wouldn’t it? 

She’s fast, faster than you’ve ever seen her. But her wild swipes and slashes are unpracticed — for all her talent with magic, you’re better than her in close combat. You’ve always been better than her. You break through her defense and tear a gash down her forearm, the dagger’s enchantment burning flesh as it carves. She hisses, and you steel your nerves. You can do this.

But then, you see her. You really see her, for the first time since all of this started, and it’s… it’s her. 

It’s your sister. She’s thinner than you remember, all pale skin and bone that would make her seem almost frail if she hadn’t just nearly killed you. But she still holds herself the same way when she’s hurt, and it’s still her face, even if it’s being worn by the monster that killed her.

You hesitate, and it costs you. Her grimoire is in her hands before you even register that she moved, that ancient leather cover recognizable even in the near pitch-black library. You’ve seen her cast from it a thousand times; you know better than to let her finish.

You lunge, and she doesn’t even look up from the page. Her lips are moving, the intricate sigils inscribed in the book forming in the air around her. It’s like reading a language you almost speak — you can see the spell’s structure and pick out fragments of its horrifying logic, but the bigger picture eludes you. You’d cast a ward if there were time, but there’s no time.

The spell finishes and she sidesteps your lunge with a laugh, the last thing you hear before the world goes silent.

Not quiet, not muffled, silent. The total absence of sound, like one of your senses had been simply plucked from your skull. Sound was your lifeline here, fighting the dark, and now it’s gone. You do your best to follow her movement, desperately trying to keep track of her. It doesn’t work. 

She comes at you from a direction you weren’t expecting, and you narrowly deflect claws aimed straight for your throat, the force sending you stumbling backwards. You slash recklessly at where she was and meet nothing, only to be placed on the defensive again, losing ground as she takes you apart with one brutal strike after another.

You try to keep up, frantically retreating as each sparking clash of claws on steel wears you down. Your heel catches on something behind you and you glance down for an instant — it’s the windows, or what used to be the windows, the massive panes of glass now melted down into glistening slag on the floor. Her claws rake across your shoulder and you bite down on a scream you wouldn’t have heard yourself make anyway.

You’re running out of room. She pushes you until your back is against the wall, then shatters your guard and sends your blade clattering to the floor. You can feel warm blood coursing down your arm, dripping down onto the glass beneath your feet.

This is it. 

She grins, then rushes towards you, and in an instant her hand closes around your throat.

It’s cold. That’s what you notice amid all the panic, how cold her hand is. You’ve held this hand so many times before but it’s cold and dead now and it does not let go no matter how hard you claw at her wrist, her fingers, anything you can reach. Your vision is going dark at the edges, your struggles are getting weaker and weaker.

And then the silence breaks, sound crashing in like a wave. Your ragged breath, your pulse pounding in your ears. It’s deafening, but her voice cuts through it all.

“I missed you, little sister.”

The library goes dark.

Cold is the first thing to greet you as you wake — cold stone beneath your back, cold air stinging in your lungs. Then comes the pain, the wound you took to the shoulder searing itself back into your slowly growing awareness. You try to move your good arm but firm restraints stop you, and a jolt of fear shoots through you as you as you realize you’ve been stripped down to your smallclothes. You wince and open your eyes, trying to take stock of your situation as calmly as you can; panic won’t help you right now. 

There’s a vaulted stone ceiling high above you, one you swear you’ve seen before. You glance towards your injury, but are surprised to see bloody bandages wrapped tightly around it. Had you been saved somehow? No, that wouldn’t make sense. Why would you be restrained if you had been rescued?

Looking past your bandaged arm, though, you see more of the room around you. Torchlight dances on a stone statue that stands against the far wall, silently guarding rows of ornately carved tombs. Your heart drops, the panic you tried so hard to stave off beginning to set in as you realize exactly where you are.

You haven’t been saved, and nobody is coming to save you now. This is the crypt beneath the manor, and you’re tied to the ritual altar.

For a moment, you hear nothing but the sound of your own unsteady breathing.

Then, from behind you, footsteps as your sister moves into your view. “Good morning,” she says, smiling down at you. It doesn’t reach her eyes.

“You bandaged my shoulder,” you blurt. It’s the first thing your mind lands on, a detail you can’t quite make sense of.

She sounds almost offended as she replies. “Of course I did. I’m not going to let you bleed to death, sweet sister.”

“Then let me go,” you command, in the closest thing to a confident tone you can manage right now. You know you’re in no position to make demands, but you have to say something.

“I will,” she says, pleasantly. “Eventually.” She pulls a chair from somewhere beyond your vision and sits beside the altar, staring at you like she’s waiting for something. 

You meet her gaze defiantly. Keeping you alive would be her fatal mistake, if you could just find a way out of these damned restraints. As if anything had changed, you test them again. They don’t move. 

She laughs at you, that same laugh you grew up adoring now a knife that twists in your gut. “I would have been disappointed if you didn’t try, but you’re not going anywhere. I need you to stay still for this.”

Anger compels you to speak again, to ask the question that has been burning in your mind since she left you.  “Y-you killed them. Why did you—”

She cuts you off. “It was for you, angel. You’ll understand that eventually.”

“Don’t.” You spit back at her, pouring venom into your tone. “Don’t tell me I’ll understand, or that it was for me. You murdered our parents and turned everything I knew into ash, and then you ran from me. You’re a coward.” 

“I freed us.” Her tone is gentle, like one used to correct a misunderstanding. “I freed myself, and I freed you, too. I know you can’t see it that way yet, but that’s alright.”

“How does—” you start, but she interrupts again.

“They were going to get us killed,” she says, as if it’s a fact. “Maybe not this year, maybe not the next, but eventually — in some dark place, for a family name already half-forgotten and for a world that would have used us up and left us in an unmarked grave.”

A flicker of sadness crosses her face. “We were never people to them, little sister. We were weapons. You know I’m right.”

A small, treacherous part of you doesn’t disagree. But you’ve seen the trail of bodies left in her wake, she’s a monster. There’s no justification for what she’s done. “That doesn’t give you the right to kill them.” 

“No,” she agrees. “It doesn’t.” The admission stuns you into silence.

She rises, placing her grimoire on the stone beside you. “But I don’t care. I’m not going to try to justify my actions to you.” 

“I kill who I want, because I like it.”  She reaches into her cloak and produces a small wooden box, setting it beside the spellbook. 

“I take what I want, because I like it.” She lifts the lid. Inside, a fine silver needle rests on a bed of dark silk, a small reservoir of violet ink sitting beside it.

“And what I want, more than anything, is you, sweet thing. I won’t let anything keep us apart any longer, least of all this idiotic crusade of yours.” A thin filament of light forms at her fingertips as she focuses, coiling around the needle and lifting it into the air. She touches it to the surface of the ink and the intricate carvings along its length drink deep, violet crawling up through the grooves. The ink beads at the tip, trembles, then drips once into the reservoir. “Your hunt ends tonight, little sister, though maybe not how you imagined.” 

You’ve hunted vampires before, seen the dark magic etched into the skin of the poor souls bound to their will. You had made peace with your own death long ago, but she’s not going to let you die; she's going to make you hers. “N-no, wait!” you plead. You can hear the change in your voice, your anger giving way to fear. “Please, just stop and we can talk about this.” 

“We are talking,” she says, gently, sitting down beside you as the needle hums. Panic drags you under completely as it draws closer to your arm, your heart pounding in your chest. You writhe against your restraints; not because you think you can escape, but out of instinct, like an animal caught in a trap. When they don't budge, something inside you breaks. You start to cry, ugly sobs wracking your body as tears fall down your cheeks.

Her free hand moves to stroke your face and you freeze up, still sobbing as the claws that tore your shoulder to shreds now wipe away your tears. “Shhh…” she soothes. “It’s okay, just hold still for me. This won’t hurt, I promise.”

Her words aren’t particularly comforting, but fear keeps you locked in place, a still canvas for her magic. As the needle first touches the inside of your wrist, you learn that her words weren’t particularly true, either. It stings as it pierces your skin again and again, tracing out delicate sigils. You bite down hard on the inside of your cheek, holding back whimpers. You won’t give her the pleasure of knowing she’s hurting you. 

The pain is bad, but you’ve trained your whole life to ignore it; the feeling that comes as the ink seeps into your body is far worse. Everywhere the needle has left its trail of violet begins to grow warm, getting more sensitive. At first, it only amplifies the torment, your skin tender and raw as your sister continues to inscribe delicate magic. But slowly, creeping in at the edges of your suffering, comes a new feeling — one that fills you with disgust.

It starts to feel good. 

The pain begins to fade as pleasure takes its place, the bite of the needle and your sister’s cold touch stirring a warmth inside you that dredges up feelings you’ve long-since buried. As shameful as it might be, there was a time when you would have done anything for your sister to make you feel this way. But those feelings were wrong, and that thing isn’t the sister you grew up loving. Whatever she’s doing to you is altering your perception, just like the spell she cast in the library. You need to fight this.

It takes all your energy, but you can still find the faint feeling of pain in what she’s doing to you. You focus in on the hurt, centering it in your mind as you try to exclude everything else she’s making you feel. You don’t think it’s working.

She stops for a moment to coat the needle in ink again and you breathe a sigh of relief, but as much as you hate yourself for it, you can’t shake a feeling of emptiness as her touch leaves you. When her work resumes and the sensations return, a moan nearly escapes your throat, barely held back by clenched teeth. You’re not sure how much longer you can keep this up, the pain you had been using to anchor yourself is all but gone now.

Time blurs as your body screams out for you to simply give in, to accept the gift of pleasure she’s giving you but you can’t, you can’t give in.

You can’t give in. You can’t give in. You can’t—

“It’s finished, sweetheart,” she says, gently. Your eyes, clamped shut, slowly drift open. Your sister is smiling at you, her fangs showing just past her lips as she dries the needle on a small cloth before setting it gently back in its box. 

She’s… done? That doesn’t make any sense. Your injured shoulder no longer hurts, the sting faded into the same pleasant warmth that suffuses the skin around your new tattoo. You hate the way the sensation makes your tummy flutter, but you’re still you, despite whatever she did to you. You’re not sure if that’s better or worse.

“W-what did you do?” you stammer. “I thought I would be—”

“A mindless thrall? If all I wanted was a hollowed out pet, I could have taken any girl I desired. I want you.” She reaches up to cup your cheek in her hand, a terrifying glint in her eyes. “I would enjoy making you into an empty plaything, but that would waste something beautiful. No, your mind — and your love — will be given to me willingly before this night ends.”

No matter what she does to you, there’s no way you’ll surrender to her. “And you think that making pain feel—” You nearly say good before you catch yourself. “... making pain feel weird, is gonna make me love you again? After everything you’ve done? You’re insane.” 

“No, sweet sister.” She traces the intricate violet linework of your new tattoo with her claws, the sensation dragging a shiver out of your traitorous body. “But this is only the first gift I have for you. What I’m going to do next will hurt much worse, and I wanted you to enjoy it. I certainly will.”

Her hand dips beneath her cloak again as she draws forth an ornate band of black leather — a collar inlaid with silver sigils, delicate as lace. “I had this made just for you. Don’t fight it too hard, okay?”

You give her a defiant glare, steeling yourself against whatever effect the collar will have. The moment the clasp closes around your neck, you feel it begin its dark work. It starts at the edges of your thoughts, a low fog and faint pressure in your head. A memory crystallizes, though not of your own accord.

You recognize where you are: a dark alleyway in Prague, standing over a girl’s body as her still-warm blood pours out onto the cobblestones. You’re sure you’ve never seen her before, but there’s a familiarity that nags at you. When you turn her over to examine her wounds, your stomach drops. She looks just like you — your red hair, your green eyes, your cheekbones. The resemblance is uncanny. 

The memory keeps shifting; new cities, new bodies, but never a new face. Always yours, staring back at you, empty-eyed. A message, you had decided, early in the hunt. A taunt, maybe. I could do this to you. Stay away, or don’t. See what happens.

In the waking world, your sister moves in the periphery of your awareness. A candle catches flame on the altar, and your temper ignites with it as you realize what she’s doing. She’s gloating. She’s out there, doing whatever she wants to your body while she makes you look at this, a year’s worth of her cruelty laid out in front of you. 

Then something speaks from the corners of your mind, and it speaks in her voice. The intrusion startles you, and adds more fuel to your anger. You think she killed them because she hates you. You couldn’t be further from the truth.

What else could it be? you snarl back.

Maybe she missed you, it says. She looks for your face everywhere she goes, finding only echoes of you. It’s not her fault none of them filled that void. This is just what love looks like when it has nowhere else to go.

Love. She wants to call it love when she abandons you, when she kills the innocent for pleasure, for the crime of reminding her of you. Your hands curl into fists; the cruelty of it, the sheer audacity of it, it’s enough to make you want to scream. You feel the force of your magic coiling behind your rage before you can stop it, and you scream into the fog clouding your mind. If she loved me so much, then WHY DID SHE RUN? A whole year and she never ONCE—

The fog slams down as your magic surges; a thick, suffocating weight bearing down on your thoughts. When it settles over you and all becomes numb, her voice speaks again, gently. You hunted her. You picked up the blade and carried on the legacy she tried so hard to free you from. What else could she do?

You open your mouth to answer and find the words harder to reach than they should be. You pull harder, and feel the fog thicken in response.

That’s not— you start. She’s the one who—

But in the real world, you hear her begin to chant, a dozen candles flickering around you as the air starts to move. The sound of her voice, knowing she’s casting something, sends a spike of panic that cuts through the fog. You don’t have time. Whatever she’s doing out there, you don’t have time.

You reach for the well of anger that drove you as you chased her across Europe, the only thing that kept your feet moving through every cold city and dead end. You reach for it and it comes up thin, diminished, the dying embers of the fire inside you.

In a panic, you grasp at the one memory that has never failed you, your unassailable answer to your every doubt. The library in flames. Your parents crumpled on the floor. The way your sister grinned with their blood still coating her lips. You wait for the anger that always comes. 

It doesn’t.

You can see every detail just as sharply as the day it happened, but the memory sits behind glass now, and the place where anger used to live is quiet.

And then the collar shows you something else.

Your father’s voice raised. Your sister stepping in front of you, blocking his way into the training room. She’s thirteen, she’s saying. She’s thirteen and you will not send her out there, not on her own, not tonight. She’s not ready. The way your father raised his hand to hit her, and the way she never flinched.

Another memory, years later. Slipping through the manor’s back door, bleeding after your first solo hunt goes wrong. You have to get to your room quietly; you can’t let father see the gash torn in the fine leather cuirass he commissioned for your birthday. You don’t make it, collapsing on the floor of the storeroom. You wake to your sister leaning over you, bandaging your wound and mending your armor with a spell.

She loves you. She has always loved you. She did what she had to in order to protect you, and she would do it again. You’re not sure if that was her voice, or your own.

There’s a void in your heart. A great, gaping wound torn open by the absence of the rage that drove you for so long. Without that, what do you have left?

You have her, comes the answer. The only person who ever loved you, who ever saw you as more than a blade.

You want to argue, to snap back, to scream that it’s not enough, but it’s right. She’s all you have.

Outside your memories, you see her standing at the foot of the altar, palms raised to the vaulted ceiling as she speaks the final words of the spell she’s been building since the collar pulled you under. The candles around you flicker, then snuff out as something dark gathers in her hands — a dense, writhing knot of black-violet curse that pulses in time with your heartbeat. 

Fear drags you up from the depths of memory as she moves towards you, the curse crackling in her hand.  “H-hey, no, what are you—” you start, your voice small and terrified.

“Don’t worry,” she says, climbing onto the altar and straddling your legs. “I know you’re scared and confused, but I’m gonna fix you, okay?”

Your heart pounds in your chest as she brings the curse towards the bare skin of your tummy and it begins to reach out, like it’s alive. The last thing out of your mouth before it touches you is a barely coherent “no, please no nonono—”

And then, between two beats of your panicked heart, time stops as the curse takes root.

At first, it feels like warmth pooling just beneath your skin, a heat that gathers low in your belly. Then, the corruption spreads, veins of violet and midnight threading throughout your body. The threads ignite and you scream into the cold air, but it doesn’t hurt, not after your sister's first “gift”. 

Your back arches, your whole body shaking as wave after wave of corruptive pleasure crashes over you and you hate it, you hate her, for making you enjoy it. You hold tightly to that hate, refusing to let go or give in as ecstasy burns you from the inside out. The curse devours thought and memory, grief and fear, everything that made you human, until only the hate remains. But the harder you cling to it, the harder the collar presses down on your thoughts.

You don’t have to keep fighting, little hunter, it tells you, and you don’t want to listen but— you’ve been hunting her for so long. You finally found her, and she loves you. Why push her away?

There was a time when you could have answered that without hesitation, but you don’t have an answer now. You’re terrified as you hold the last ember of your humanity in your hands, but you’re not strong enough to resist.

You let go, and the tide of ecstasy carries it away.

Your resistance shatters, a dark hunger growing to fill the hollow space inside you until it consumes you. You cry out, thrashing against the restraints as something pushes up towards the surface of your skin. You watch through tears as a pattern takes shape, growing in delicate curves — a twisted, heart-shaped mandala of petals and thorns that blossoms over your womb. 

It feels like an eternity before you can breathe again, and as you look up at your sister, she’s smiling. Not the predatory grin you’ve come to fear, but one full of warmth and adoration, the smile you fell in love with so long ago. Your chest tightens, and you smile back.

“Oh, there she is…” she breathes, leaning over you to undo your restraints. The thought of fighting her doesn’t even cross your mind. She pulls you up into a tight embrace; her body is corpse-cold but her touch spreads heat inside you everywhere it goes. “I missed you, baby sister.”

You start to say it back but she cuts you off with a kiss; hungry and desperate, a year’s worth of love coming out all at once. Her fangs graze the inside of your lip and you shudder, your head spinning.

The heat in your core is rising and you can feel your body still changing — bones shifting, muscles twisting, a growing pressure at your shoulderblades and tailbone, but you can’t care. All that matters is her, her lips on yours, her claws on your skin.

She breaks away, trailing kisses down your jaw, your throat, her fangs at your neck. She nips gently, like she’s asking permission; you know what she wants, and you’ll give it gladly. You nod, and her teeth sink into your flesh.

You cry out, your vision going white as ecstasy, bright and shattering, hits you full-force. The venom in her bite burns through your arteries as she drinks deep, and the more blood she takes from you, the warmer her body gets until she feels almost alive again. You squirm in her grasp and her claws dig into your skin, but you can’t stay still. The grinding and popping of bones is too much to ignore, the pressure building until—

You scream into her shoulder as your spine cracks and your shoulderblades split with a wet, agonizing stretch. Bat-like wings, delicate and violet-veined, push through your skin, unfurling in spasms. Blood runs down your back, down to where your tailbone is growing, twisting and elongating into a black spade-tipped tail that flicks against your thigh. 

Every part of this should hurt, but it doesn’t, not anymore. It feels right, like this was how you were meant to be — but more than anything, it feels good.

“Gods, look at you…” she purrs as she pulls away. “You’re perfect.”

She’s beautiful, crimson eyes and rosy cheeks, your blood dripping from her fangs. You don’t know what you’re doing as you lean in, but instincts guide your lips to hers again. She kisses back, and you taste salt and warm copper on her tongue. 

Her hand slips between your wings, her sharp claws giving gentle scratches that send shivers down your spine and through your tail. Her other hand glides down your stomach, then lower, and you moan into the kiss as it finally finds the aching need between your thighs. 

Your wings flutter and your tail coils tightly around her wrist as her touch drags needy whines from your throat. It’s overwhelming, you feel raw and sensitive after your transformation, but you can’t stop your hips from bucking against her hand, the hunger inside you taking control. 

Your first orgasm hits you without warning, your hips twitching uncontrollably as it crashes over you. She pulls away from the kiss but her touch barely slows, even as you fall apart in her hands.

“Good girl, that’s it,” she praises, your body still shaking and oversensitive as her fingers pull you closer and closer to the same edge you just fell headlong over. She leans in close to your neck, her breath hot and heavy, but she doesn’t wait for permission this time — her fangs pierce your skin again and when the venom hits, you cum a second time. 

She doesn’t give you a single moment to come down. You try to speak, to think, but the pleasure washes it all away as she brings you over the edge again, and again, and again. When she finally stops, you collapse, nestling up against her — small, and broken, and hers.

“Welcome home,” she whispers, stroking your wings gently as she begins to hum that old hunter’s tune.

“Missed you,” you mumble against her chest.