The lord’s castle is cold.

Your breath comes out in little puffs, soft little clouds of silver starlight drifting by your lips on every exhale. You have a coat drawn close, buttoned over your chest, and your boots thud gently on the thin hallrunners guiding your path. You are exhausted. You have been up all night, entertaining the whims of the lord’s staff – though you had come with the expectation of a counsel with their master, you’d instead found yourself being coaxed into a shared meal of rare meat and salted veggies, and then you had been drawn into judging a sparring session between Killer and Dust. 

If you are being honest, by the time their knight, Cross, suggests the cardgame Uno, you are beginning to suspect that they were trying to distract you from the thought of their missing ruler.

With the threat of the imposing dawn, you had excused yourself from the overly friendly hosts, politely insisting that you had best speak to the castle’s owner before dawn broke and he slunk off to rest. When you had pressed for his location, they had all shaken their heads, a harmonized answer of “who knows?” following you as you faded back into the hall. 

Your hands are cold, but the wine Bear had paired with dinner sits warm in your belly, and you are not giving up just because of a little chill. 

You swear this place changes each time you come back. Despite knowing that the door under the tapestry on the wall – a depiction of a treestump, looking as though it has been blown to pieces by a lightning strike, with a background of the gloomiest skies you had ever seen – should lead into an impressive gathering room, it opens instead into another unassuming hallway. One side of the hall is covered in doors, and you don’t bother testing their knobs, striding onward. On your other side, windows reach high toward the ceiling, their dark drapes blocking out the moon, which you are certain has begun to fall. 

The hall ends abruptly. You had though it would turn, either left or right, but it does not. Instead, there is a mahogany credenza waiting for you, an ornate mirror perched atop. 

As you approach, the world behind you goes quiet. Your footsteps no longer echo, your boots as silent as the beat of an owl’s wings. The light from the candles posted up and down the hallway mute, as though eclipsed by a terrible shadow, and soon, the only light comes from the candelabra atop the table, the only sound from your little puffing breaths.

You see your own reflection in the mirror. In that alternate world on the other side of the silver, the hallway is bright, unobscured. 

You smile. 

“did the boys tend to you?” 

Despite knowing that he was there, you still jump in surprise when his voice drawls from somewhere behind you. Despite the frightened pulse of your heartbeat, you will yourself turn, slowly, slowly, your smile unchanged as he comes into view.

He is a terrible thing. He stands, his head slightly cocked, several feet down the hall, despite the previous nearness of his voice. Those odd tentacles, dark as a storming night, reach your end of the hall, and then further still, until the frame of the mirror, and then the glass, is entirely obscured. you can no longer imagine the comfort of an empty hall. There is an edge about him that is eldritch, powerful, something that makes you feel poised to run, makes your fingernails dig crescents into your palms, makes you feel like a prey animal. His cloak, drawn tight, shields the source of his tendrils – they seem to be both a part of him and a mere illusion of his shadow, though you are certain that if you ambled back to touch one, it would be alive under your fingers. 

You do not reach out for one. Instead, you stride towards him, your heartbeat thundering in your ears. There is a feral part of you, one that screams that this is a bad idea, every learned instinct and taught terror telling you that you should not be approaching a vampiric lord of darkness, you’re like a lamb walking into a wolf’s den – 

But the scars hidden under the collar of your jacket, against the column of your throat, suggest that you are no stranger to defying these instincts. 

He greets you with a hand held out, expecting your willingness, and you meet him, his bones so impossibly cold that it feels like cradling ice. He leads, and you, ever the lamb, follow, trusting the facade of a shepherd that you know he is. (This is a bad idea. You know it is, but you can’t help that you really, really like this guy, and that causes you to make thoughtless decisions, like letting him get you lost in his castle.) 

You talk, as you always do, and he listens. You tell him of your dinner, shared with his ‘boys,’ and remind him that you really prefer when he’s there on your visits. (He must see that you’re griping is coming from a place of longing for his company, but you’re intentionally ignoring the grin he casts your way, all fangs and impossible hunger.) 

He retrains himself. You know what you are here to offer him, and you are certain that he cannot wait to devour you; still, you play the part of coy, and he, the part of patient. 

He does not take you to his chambers. It is not because he worries for his safety – he is certain you could never find it on your own, – but because it would be… uncomfortable for you. You would be too cold, surrounded in stone, and there was nowhere pleasant for you to recover after what he intends to do with you. No, no, it won’t do, you give more when you’re comfortable, and so he sweeps you away to his study, to his crackling fireplace and reading nook.

(You can’t explain the nausea that swells in your stomach, when the world seems to sway. You hear a horrible sound, almost smothered by the ringing in your ears, and Nightmare steadies you with a hand at your elbow before you recognize where you are.) 

The lord releases you in front of the reading nook. It is a rectangle taken out of the wall, surrounded entirely in bookshelves, padded in dark cushions with perfectly color-matched pillows. You had left a blanket here once, just a little knitted throw someone had made for you once upon a time, and now it lived here, folded neatly on one side of the bed, giving the illusion that someone soft and cold might snuggle here regularly to read. 

(A bolt of pining punches through you so fiercely it nearly hurts in your ribs. You want to be the someone, soft and cold, who sits here to study all of the lord’s literature. You are blind to the unreadable expression he fixes you with – and you shake your head to clear those lousy thoughts away before they can catch. You and Nightmare were moving at your own pace, and there would be time to think about bookclub with my vampire boyfriend later.) 

You drop yourself down on the edge, chilled fingers struggling with the buttons of your coat, and he secures the curtains obscuring the window above his plush chair. Dawn must be climbing into the sky, but the room is still plunged in the illusion of late evening, the fireplace crackling with a flame that you’ve never seen him feed, oil lamps flickering like caught fireflies to create the ambient glow. It must be the warmest room in the castle, you think, shrugging your coat off your shoulders. You fold it, unhurried, and then lay it on the floor, bent far enough forward that you can undo the laces of your boots to leave those off the cushions, too. 

You straighten, and a dark hand fleets along your jaw. His phalanges, long, slender, move up, stroke along the curve of your cheekbones, under your darkened eyes, with a gentleness that feels almost like the ghost of heavy snowflakes. His fangs are sharp when he smiles down at you, eye slanted in something crossed between fond and starving, and you sink backwards until you catch yourself on your elbows, letting him crowd the space between you knees, where your legs dangle over the side of your seat. 

He does not pounce, like you so horribly wish he would. You know that he could – you know that he could close those impressive canines around your throat and drink until you were cold and useless. You know he could rend you apart, could pull you in so many directions you’d be irreparable with those wicked tendrils crawling up the walls of the room, wrapped around your ankles and winding up your shins. (You know it shouldn’t be sending those sinful little flashes of heat to your belly, to think of all these things and still bare your throat, but it does.) 

Even when your chin raised, your head tipped back against a velvet cushion, Nightmare’s silhouette over you and devouring all the light that tries to reach you, he does not strike. Your pulse pounds in your throat, anticipation combining with the fear of pain, and still, he waits. 

You swallow your fear, and you tell him that you’re ready, if he would like to eat. 

His teeth are at your throat. You didn’t even see him move; in less than moment, he is simply covering you completely, your knees hooked over his ilium and your body hidden by his cloak. You almost scream, that horrible prey instinct making you recoil, only for a moment, but the drag of a fang over your pulsepoint has you completely still. 

(He can feel your pulse, fluttering like a little trapped bird under your skin. He could bury his fangs there, rip open your carotid artery, lap the ambrosia spilling from your veins and then find some new plaything after you’re gone – but he does not. He does not know why.) 

He moves downward, away from the tempting river of your throat and down to the safer expanse of your shoulder. His teeth – his flatter incisors – scrape gently against you as he moves, and his tendrils, blunted and soft, offer a comforting distraction from the irritation to your skin. You’ve never seen his tongue, but you are certain he has one – especially when you feel something painfully cold lapping at the crook of your neck. 

The cold almost manages to numb the pain when he scrapes his canines over your shoulder, and you try to settle, the arm closest to him rising so that you can wrap it around his shoulders, the other grasping at the thick fabric of his cloak and balled into a fist against the side of his ribs. You have to manually breathe through the fear trying to dissuade you, in, out, in, out, forcing your head to stay up as he nuzzles almost fondly against you. 

The fear settles, drawn from you like the blood he’s begun to lap from the surface of your skin. You wonder, as you always do, if its some spell he’s cast upon you to keep you coming back, but it really doesn’t matter – even if you were still afraid, you would still be drawn back to him. (in fact, the fear is a big part of why you’re here to begin with – but you’re well aware that he knows this already.) A few tendrils glide under your tunic, fanning out over your ribs, and you understand why when he bites. You writhe, a sound you aren’t entirely proud of breaking from your throat, and the ichor binding you keeps you from hurting yourself on his teeth even as you instinctually try to thrash. 

After a moment, when the sharp suddenness has faded, when his teeth have pulled free, you stop trying to buck him off. That was, as always, the worst part – the initial pain, white-hot despite the surface level effort of numbing, – and now he greedily laps at the wounds he’s left behind, the cold now a blessing when pressed to your throbbing shoulder. He devours you, your blood, your fear, and leaves nothing but space for the good feelings, giving your struggling mind time to process things like the tendrils coiling over your stomach, and the head-fuzzy feeling of losing blood too fast. 

It’s a rush. Your tunic will be stained, likely unwearable, and you will have a new set of scars to cover in public, but none of that matters, not now. His incisors pinch your skin, keeping your wounds from clotting, and the pain makes your knees strain, trying and failing to press him away from you even as your arms clutch tighter to him. It’s horrible and divine, a painfully overwhelming combination, and you are just barely kept from breaking by whatever odd power the negativity guardian has over you. your hips jerk upward, and his pelvis presses you down harder. Whether its to keep you in place, or to offer you easier friction, you can’t tell, but you rut up again in response, murmuring out a breathless, rasping little sound of appreciation for the friction being pressed so thoroughly against him provides. 

You like this. You like this a lot more than you should. 

As all good things do, it must come to an end. Nightmare realizes, not at all sheepish, that he has taken too much from you; your head is spinning, your vision fuzzy at the edges, and when he pulls back from your throat, your face is pale and dotted with sweat. He tries to talk to you, a near whisper of your name, but you murmur, exhaustion and bloodloss mixing into a cocktail of drowsy wooziness. Healing magic isn’t his forte, but he murmurs something in a language you’ll never hope to understand, and your bleeding begins to finally slow.