Alice

After leaving the shop early to let Jordan close up, Alice headed home. She was sure Drew was wrong about the kid being a vampire. Why would he not have tried anything sinister by now? She was tired and sad and needed to wallow.

She had just broken up with Drew and even though they had literally one date semi-against her will, and one bout of intense fucking, she felt like she’d just ended things with a longtime true love.

Staring into her freezer, Alice was about to grab a spoon and eat an entire pint of Cherry Garcia right in front of the open door when she looked outside. It was what she called the “Blue Hour.” Even in the freezing cold, she could not resist.

It was her favorite time of day, but being so busy with the shop, she rarely got the chance to see it.

She cast a small warming spell over her winter coat and headed outside. Trudging through the snow in her boots, she was beckoned to Colony Hill. Here was the place where her Colonial-time ancestors had been executed by being burnt at the stake. Sure, it was depressing, but it had the best view anywhere in the county. It was dark, but she could just make out the lines of the twisting country roads, the nearest neighbor’s fence lines. She could hear a dog barking. She looked up in the sky, and she saw the shape of Orion, which would be bright and easily spotted in less than an hour.

Alice turned her face to the moon. She took a deep breath, drinking in the cold night air and letting the moonlight glow on her face, filling her energies. Next, she disrobed completely. Yes, it was freezing, but she needed this. To reconnect with the moon was essential to the life of any witch worth her weight in sage. But like normal people, witches were busy. And all the sex, fighting and frustration had sapped her.

After she had her fill of the moon’s energy, the woods beckoned. Alice felt warmed, exhilarated and refreshed. Who needs to wallow and eat ice cream when you have the woods at your beck and call? Who even needs clothes at the Blue Hour? The sky was her blanket as she literally floated over the snow. Her only clothing was the sheath attached to her thigh that held her wand. The bare tree branches of her beloved maple stand reached skyward like old crones’ hands, as if summing the starlight and moonlight that lit her snowy path. She felt she was about a tenth of a mile deep into the woods when she heard footfalls nearby. It sounded to her like it could be her friend. She turned and indeed, a familiar stag ambled out of a thick stand of young evergreens, having filled his belly with any hardy shoots that might still be found this late in winter.

The stag bowed his head and approached Alice for a pet. She laughed and scratched behind his ears, amused at the mighty, skittish beast behaving like a puppy in her presence. This was the best thing about being a witch, in Alice’s mind. All creatures sensed a witch’s connection to the earth and the elements as if they were one of them. A witch has the gift of true understanding; she is not just human, but also a mushroom, a rabbit, a tree, a cloud, all particles of the same infinite universe. Each was tiny, but together they were all one majestic ball of unstoppable love.

She was suddenly having a thought. It wasn’t yet formed but there was something giving her a kernel of hope in this train of thought.

But before this idea was fully formed, the stag was startled by something and suddenly took off for the deeper woods. It might have been a bear, or something as silly as a little nosy wren. Alice watched the stag go until she could not see it but only hear its hooves on the forest floor. It was getting dark, it was probably time to go fetch her clothes and go home.

Just as she thought she might be hearing another deer approach, something very powerful had her around the waist and was pulling her through the air, away from the maple stand so fast it was a blur. She tried to scream, but no sound came out. She saw branches whizzing by her head, and she realized she was being carried by a creature as fast as a speeding car, deeper and deeper into the woods. She pulled and pushed and struggled against this creature that had captured her. She hit it with her fists, but the creature was stronger.

She reached down for her wand, but the creature caught her and bound her hands. By the time she had gathered her thoughts, she found herself backed up against a mighty oak tree miles deeper in the woods, with a beast pressed against her, breathing hard into her face, growling like an animal. Without warning, the creature had his teeth at her neck. The fangs were at her neck and just beginning to pierce her skin.

She cried out, “Drew, stop!”

“Tell me you don’t want this.” Drew’s voice was rough and ragged. Alice could feel the sharp teeth at her neck, but not quite ready to drain her dry. Drew was carrying out her sex fantasy, even after she had told him she had changed her mind.

“It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t want you to die,” she said.

He gripped her shoulders and pressed her harder against the tree. He withdrew his teeth and instead inhaled her scent.

“What do you care if I die when I’m already dead? You can feel me in your blood, I know you can. You liked feeding me. Admit it.”

Tears streamed down her face. “Is that what you want? You want me to take away your immortality so you can just leave, and leave me stranded. Alone in this world without you?”

He gripped her hair. He traced his fangs up and along the line of her jaw. “You wanted me to come to you like this. To shock you and grab you by surprise.”

“I changed my mind.”

“But your mind forgot to tell your sex. It is open and wet for me already. It’s a fact. I can smell you readying for me from miles away. I wouldn’t have come, I would have obeyed your wishes if your body didn’t command me.”

And then he was pressing himself against her, their pelvises locked in a tortuous ache. He felt her body tighten and yet her hips rock into him.

“Just give in to it,” he urged.”

* * *

Alice

Alice wanted to reach up and push him away, to put distance between them so she could clearly express and clarify and reason and give her dissertation on witchcraft to him. A fiery sermon in the style of that old Colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards—only, you know, more occult-friendly and less fire-and-brimstone. A PowerPoint presentation here in the evening woods. But with Drew’s lips and fangs teasing her naked flesh, turning her nipples to hard beads in their desire to be tasted, and her judgment was becoming increasingly clouded. Damn him.

All she could manage to say was a simple clarification. “Our first calling is not to do harm to other creatures or to the earth. That supersedes everything else.”

She reached down to her thigh holster, but to her shock she found her wand was gone.

“What…?”

He stopped teasing her neck and reached into the waistband of his pants and held up a gleaming wand of silver. “Looking for this?”

“You don’t know what you’re doing with that. Give it back.” She tried to keep her calm. But her desire was quickly turning to rage watching a low creature of the night, a bloodsucker, a taker of life, with his hands on her holy relic. “You have no idea what you’re holding right now. “

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “You say you don’t want to do any harm, then why do you all carry these weapons with you?”

“Give it back, vampire.”

He laughed. “What hypocrisy. You alter the world around you all the time with these things! You can kill people with a flick of the wrist, faster than I can by sucking your blood. Who are you to talk to me about live and let live?”

She was not going to be baited into an argument with a soulless creature who was proving himself to be just that. “I thought you were different,” she said. “Just give it back and go away. You are holding eons of magic in your hand, more power and responsibility than you know what to do with. You might be 700 years old, but that thing has about two thousand years on you. If you use it against me, it will obliterate you in the blink of an eye. Don’t fuck with me, and don’t fuck with magic.”

Drew got into her face again and reached the wand downward and did something only a base vampire would think to do. He smiled and splayed open her wet labia and found her clit. The wand was ice cold and his breath on her face and neck was equally cold. As she was overheated with lust and rage simultaneously, the sensation was a magnificent torture. Was she really going to let him do this?

“How did you even get up here? I changed the gate code. Oh god…” The stimulation with her own wand at the hands of her lover-slash-enemy was sending dangerous, dark sparks through her body, from her toes to her core, up her spine. She closed her eyes and tried to summon the will to fight back.

“Baby,” he said, “Once you invite a vampire in, there’s no lock or charm that can keep me out. “

Then, unexpectedly, even to herself, she laughed. “Does it make you feel strong, knowing you can pass through any of my barriers? Does it boost your ego, holding my ancient relic between my legs, using it to coerce me to fuck you? Is this the beast or is this the noble human man supposedly being restored by my super-amazing magical cunt?”

And then Drew lifted his head to the sky and roared. It was the sound of a mountain lion. His whole face changed, his eyes grew dark. The creature was laid bare before her. He growled, “You don't get it. I want to die. I want you to take this life away from me so I can rest.”

And with that, he roared again and tossed the silver wand into the snow, where it sparked, hissed and sank all the way down through the snow, to the frozen ground.

So he was after her because he was on a suicide mission. This man who sometimes acted like an overgrown frat boy, who loved to screw, who seemed to love life to the fullest, wanted to finally die after centuries of living his half-life. She finally understood.

He stepped away from her and she studied his frame. He removed his coat, and his layers of clothing underneath. “Fucking kill me. If you won’t be with me, then just kill me. If you won’t fuck me to death, then let’s just get your wand and get this over with.”

This whole thing called for a meeting with the high priestess. There were ethics to be discussed. There might even be a meeting of the holy order of witches. There would be a debate about whether it was more harmful to stay away from each other, screw him to oblivion as he wished, or simply assist him in suicide. Combined with all of the added messiness of her being Alice the First in a past life and him being a creature that craved blood to the detriment of humans and animals.

But there Drew stood, naked in the snow, his washboard abs, his beautiful body shaped from perhaps centuries of hauling beer kegs around with his own two hands. Did they have beer kegs in the 1300s? Well, over this many centuries he did something right. His trim waist taunted her to come and take a nibble, despite a lifetime of guzzling beer. Those mighty arms that had carried her effortlessly through miles of wood at top speed. His full lips, strong jawline, and oh god, the dimples.

Fuck ethics.