Fever

She came to me in the dark.

Elena. The real one. The only one. She came and she sat on the edge of the bed and she put her hand on my face and her palm was cold, the right cold, the cold I knew, and the marks sang under her touch, a low sweet note that went through my whole body, and I turned my face into her hand and I cried.

"I waited," I said. "I waited, I waited, I waited."

"I know." Her voice was low and close and her thumb traced the line of my cheekbone and she leaned down and she kissed my forehead and her lips were soft. Soft. The word I had never associated with her. Soft the way no part of her had ever been soft with me, and the softness was so unfamiliar and so exactly what I needed that something in my chest cracked open and the sound that came out of me was not a word.

She kissed my mouth. Gently. Her lips on mine, careful, tender, and her hand stayed on my face and she did not take. She gave. She kissed me the way people kiss in stories, the way I had read about and never experienced and never expected from her, and I opened for her and her tongue found mine and she tasted like dark wine and ozone and the taste was right, the taste was Elena, and I kissed her back and my hands found her waist and her skin was cool through the thin fabric of her dress and I held her and she let me hold her.

"You're here," I said.

"I'm here."

"Don't leave."

"I won't."

She undressed me. Slowly. Her hands on the buttons, careful, and she peeled the clothes off me and her palms found my chest and she laid me back on the bed and she followed me down and her body covered mine and her cold was everywhere, the right cold, and she kissed my throat, my collarbones, my chest, and her mouth found the marks and she breathed against them and they sang, they sang, they sang, and I arched up into her and she pressed me down with her hips and she said, against my skin, "Let me."

She took her time. Her mouth on my stomach, my ribs, the hollows between, and her hands on my hips, gentle, and she moved lower and her breath was cold against me and she put her mouth on me and the cold and the wet and the slow deliberate movement of her tongue undid me. She brought me up slow, a long patient climb, and she did not stop. She did not pull away. She did not deny me. She kept her mouth on me and she brought me to the edge and she took me over and I broke apart under her mouth and the release went through me like a wave and the marks sang. Her mouth moved from me to the marks and she bit and the white hurt and the gold blazed and I was whole.

She lay beside me after. Her head on my chest. Her cold hand over my heart. I held her and she let me hold her and the silence between us was warm and full and the hunger was quiet, finally quiet, fed, answered, and I pressed my face into her hair and she smelled of ozone and copper and rain and I breathed her in and I slept.

I woke alone.

Hard. Shaking. The marks weeping. The sheets twisted around my legs. The room was dark and cold and empty and the hunger was worse, far worse, and my body was rigid with a release that had not happened, that had not been real, that my dying mind had manufactured whole from nothing.

I pressed my hands to my face. I was hard and aching and the marks throbbed and the dream was already fading, the details dissolving, the way dreams do, and I clung to the fragments I could keep. Her hand on my face. Her mouth. The gold. The quiet.

Gone. All of it gone. I lay in the bed in the wrong room and the hunger screamed and I was alone and none of it had been real.

But.

There was a mark on my wrist. On the inside, the soft skin. A bite mark. Small, neat, paired. The kind of mark a mouth leaves when it feeds. I had not had that mark when I went to sleep. I was certain. I stared at it and I felt the ghost of sensation, a mouth on my wrist, warm, and in the dream Elena had held my wrist, she had held it while she touched me, and I told myself the mark was from before, from one of the feedings at the parties, and I had not noticed it, and the noticing now was coincidence.

I told myself this. I almost believed it.

The fevers did not break. That was the next thing I understood. The fever that had started at the edges did not recede. It stayed. It became the climate of my mind, the baseline state, the water I swam in, and the boundary between waking and dreaming softened and dissolved and reformed and dissolved again and I lost the ability to tell where one ended and the other began.

Elena came every night.

She came and she was tender and she was open and she gave me everything the real Elena denied me. Her mouth. Her body. Her words. She said things the real Elena had never said. My name, spoken softly, spoken like it meant something. Words I had wanted to hear. Words I had pressed down and buried and refused to let myself want. She said them in the dark against my skin and I believed them because I was dying and the believing was the only thing keeping me alive.

But the details were wrong.

I did not notice at first. The dream was so real, so overwhelmingly real, that the wrongness was invisible. But as the days passed, or what I thought were days, the wrongness accumulated. Small things. Her hair was different, longer, the color slightly off. Her voice was lower than I remembered, the register shifted half a tone. Her hands on my skin were different, the fingers slightly shorter, the pressure slightly different, and I told myself the fever was distorting my memory, that I could not be expected to remember the exact shape of her hands when my mind was dissolving.

Her scent.

Her scent was the thing that stayed with me, the thing I clung to in the dark hours, the ozone and copper and rain that meant Elena. And the dream Elena smelled different. Close. Close enough that my starving mind accepted it. But underneath the familiar notes there was something else. Something older. Deeper. A scent like old stone and deep water and time, and I did not recognize it and I told myself the fever was changing my perceptions and I let it go because the alternative was unthinkable.

The attendants came during the fevers.

I did not always know they were there. Sometimes I surfaced enough to see them, shapes in the dark, cold hands on my body, a mouth on my arm, my wrist, my throat. The gold would flicker, the salt water, the sharpening hunger. I would cry out and the cry would become part of the dream and in the dream Elena was crying out, Elena's mouth was on my wrist, Elena was feeding, and the dream would absorb the feeding and make it hers and I would sink back under.

I woke with marks I could not account for. Bite marks on my inner arm, my wrist, the curve of my shoulder. Small neat paired wounds, healing human-slow. I stared at them in the dim candlelight and I tried to remember if they had been there before and I could not remember and the not remembering was itself a symptom of something I refused to name.

There was a night, or what I thought was a night, when the dream Elena had me on my back and she was above me, straddling me, and she lowered herself onto me and the cold of her was wrong, the angle was wrong, the weight was wrong, and I looked up at her face and for one second the face was not Elena. The bone structure was different. The eyes were darker. The hair was silver at the temples.

I blinked. The face was Elena. I told myself the flicker was the fever.

She rode me and she fed from the marks and she came apart above me and her face when she came was open and raw and unguarded and it was beautiful and it was Elena and I gave myself to it and I did not think about the silver at the temples.

I woke with a bite mark on my inner thigh. High. The kind of mark left by someone between my legs.

I pressed my hand over it and I stared at the ceiling and I told myself I could not remember how it got there and the not remembering was the fever and the fever was not my fault and the marks on my body were from the attendants and the dreams were dreams and none of it was connected.

None of it.

I lay in the bed and the hunger howled and the marks on my neck burned and I could feel my body failing, the slow shutdown, the systems going dark one by one, and the dream Elena was the only thing keeping the lights on and I reached for her in the dark and I found nothing and I called her name and the name echoed in the empty room and came back to me unchanged.