You Never Forget Your First

Horst Cabal had made a lot of mistakes in his life -- legitimate mistakes, not the sort of mistake that comes after a bit of overindulgence and involves only superficial regrets the next morning. Horst considered himself something of a master of the latter sort, but avoiding the former while pursuing it was, regrettably, next to impossible.

So, when Horst knew that biting his brother was the worst mistake of his life, he was speaking from a position of expertise.

It had seemed a rather charming notion -- a wicked but ultimately cosmically fitting punishment for abandoning him to a vampire's nonexistent mercy all those many years ago, and for refusing to have learned a damned thing since then. In theory, anyway.

Practice, as it happens, was where things had fallen apart.

Regret began to creep into his heart the instant he collided with Johannes like an overgrown cat pouncing upon a mouse he intends to toy with. Johannes fell beneath him, landing with wince-inducing thud upon the mossy stone floor, Horst pinning him to the ground by his shoulders. He struggled for a moment, and Horst was keenly aware of how feeble his efforts were -- Horst had always been the stronger one between them, even allowing for the advantages of age, but this time the gulf was much wider. He turned Johannes onto his back as casually as he might have righted an upset turtle as a child; Johannes twisted impotently in Horst's grip, his legs thrashing almost reflexively before he fell still. Johannes didn't really intend to fight him in earnest -- he was trying to win him over, after all, and kicking his teeth in or putting a bullet in his chest would have put a damper on negotiations considerably -- but even the most rational of creatures lapses into a fight or flight response when faced with a predator, and Johannes was ultimately no different. Flight having been proven useless, he flirted briefly with fight before lapsing into the third, unspoken option: begrudging acceptance.

"Get on with it," Johannes hissed. Horst could not bring himself to look at Johannes's face but he could feel his brother's eyes boring into him. But behind Johannes's flippant words, his predator's senses could hear his brother's heart hammering in his chest like the beat of a bass drum on parade day. His tongue flicked out involutarily like a snake's, tasting something upon the air that was sweet as treacle syrup and that promised intoxication as surely as a bottle of Irish potcheen. With wrenching pang of guilt, Horst realized that this was the scent of naked terror, plain as moonlight.

This is wrong, some small part of him thought, but it was far too late for regrets. Horst drew in a ragged gasp of joy as his fangs clicked forward, and that vicious animal hunger that had loomed inside him during his long starvation surged forward with a vengeance.

Horst had read an unconscionable amount of lurid novels in his time as a living man, and a certain number of them had involved vampires. The authors of these novels had always had a fascination for the inevitable scene in which the dark and brooding lord of the dead finally takes the blood of the innocent and virginal heroine. Johannes was neither innocent nor (as surprising as this had always been to Horst) virginal, and his surrender was not accompanied by shuddering sighs and fluttering eyelids but by a half-hearted kick to the shins. Johannes might have been no heroine, but Horst was undeniably a vampire, and as he leaned forward and pushed Johannes's starched collar away from the throbbing curve of his pale throat, he suddenly understood what all those writers had found so impossibly titillating about the scene.

The part of him that was screaming about the wrongness of it all became more insistent, strapped on a megaphone and started to leap up and down to get his attention, but it was no use. The die, as Johannes was fond of saying in untranslated Latin, had already been cast.

Horst Cabal, in his first act of real vampirism, pressed his lips to the tilted curve of his little brother's throat and felt more than heard him gasp as his fangs pierced into the vein beneath the skin. The taste of Johannes's blood hit Horst's tongue, warm and wet and better than any wine or whiskey. In fact, if Horst had to compare the sensation to anything he'd experienced as a living man, he would be forced to resort to actions he would previously have never, ever associated with Johannes Cabal, who was standoffish and cold and above all his own flesh and blood little brother.

Never ever, that is, until now.

His brother's skin tasted of grave dirt and lingering aftershave; his blood was hauntingly, tantalizingly familiar but still somehow alien, charged with a burst of heart-pounding fear and a harsh note that brought to mind nothing so much as the smell of brimstone. Horst drank it down greedily and swore he could feel it flowing down his throat and spreading throughout his body like the warmth of a fire, down to the tips of his toes. He dug his fingers into Johannes's hair to steady himself as he shuddered in spine-tingling animalistic pleasure, his long nails dragging along his brother's scalp until Johannes hissed in pain from it, then seemed to succumb to some fatalistic instinct and fell still and quiet. The moment wore on -- and on, and on, seemingly endless, as Horst shuddered against Johannes's still body with ravenous excitement. Eventually Horst became conscious of the fact that he ought to stop, but it seemed as though his body belonged to someone else now -- something predatory and dangerous, something that existed only to slake its thirsts and did not care about such petty mortal concerns as kinship or morality or whether or not one ought to be getting what could only be described as an extremely erotic thrill from nearly bleeding one's little brother to death.

But there was, thank God, some shred of human will and decency left in him. In the most heroically difficult act of his unlife, Horst pushed himself away from Johannes, his tongue reflexively darting out to lap at the spurt of blood that followed the exit of his fangs. He sat for a moment perched over his prey -- his brother, he reminded himself, a real human being if a rather nasty example. Johannes was lying very still and very pale, and for a moment Horst was afraid he had killed him, but the steady trickle of blood that pumped rhythmically from the wounds in Johannes's throat and the shallow hiss of his breath thankfully told him otherwise. Horst's suddenly sharpened senses took in the scene before him -- blood seeping into the otherwise immaculate pressed cotton of Johannes's unbuttoned collar, the roar of fear-fueled adrenaline in his veins, the way his spectacles had stayed mostly perched on the bridge of his nose but had been knocked askew by the scuffle. Horst flexed his fingers, feeling his dead muscles tensing like steel cords. With the euphoric rush of fresh blood in him, he felt powerful. Strong. Like he could do anything he wanted.

Horst licked his lips, and tasted Johannes on the inside of his mouth. Beneath him, his brother stirred a little, then raised one hand delicately to the wound in his neck. Perhaps it was only visible to the heightened senses of a vampire, but Johannes's fingers were trembling just slightly. "Had your fill, then?" he asked, his voice as cold and sharp as a straight razor in an icebox. It was the wrong thing to say, but Horst wasn't sure there was anything that could be right, at a time like this. Closing his eyes, Horst pushed himself off of Johannes with an almost contemptuous gesture and stood up, turning away.

"Did I hear you right?" Horst said, his voice trembling. "A circus?" Behind him, he heard a rustle of cloth as Johannes unsteadily got to his feet. He did not feel inclined towards extending a charitable hand up.

"A carnival," Johannes corrected. God, Horst could still hear his heart pounding, even this far away. He clenched his hands into fists, his nails digging into his palms. "There's a train. We can...put your coffin in one of the cars." Horst risked a glance backwards and saw Johannes buttoning up his bloody collar, as though he was trying to pretend that none of this had ever happened.

Think of it as a blood transfusion, Horst had told him wryly. What a damned idiotic thing to say, in retrospect. As if there would be no feeling behind it. No hunger. No lust, blood or otherwise, if there was even a difference for him any longer.

Johannes, as usual, hadn't learned a damned thing. Horst, on the other hand, knew with a fearful certainty that he had suddenly learned a great deal about being a vampire, and it was not a lesson he was likely to soon forget.