Nothing

I did not understand. I looked at her. She was looking at my neck. At the marks.

Before I could speak she moved. There was no warning. One moment she was standing at the foot of the bed and the next she was on me, in my lap, her hand fisted in my hair wrenching my head to the side, and her mouth found the marks and her teeth went in and the white hurt ripped through me like a current.

It was not like the others. It was not like Elena. The mouths at the parties had been cool and efficient and the gold had come soft and slow. This was different. This was violent and deep and the woman drank from me with the focus of something very old and very hungry taking the measure of something new, and I felt my body respond, felt the old welling of heat and light and the desperate animal relief of being emptied, and I opened for it the way I always opened, the way she had trained me to open, and I gave.

And nothing happened.

The gold came. The light came. The drowning sensation, the slow soft sinking. And beneath it all, nothing. The hunger did not ease. The ache in my blood did not quiet. The marks did not sing. It was like drinking salt water, the body taking it in, the throat swallowing, the need sharpening with every swallow instead of dulling. I arched into her mouth and I waited for the peace and the peace did not come and I did not understand why and I made a sound into the quiet room that was close to a sob and the woman pulled back.

She sat in my lap. Her lips were red. Her young face was flushed and her eyes were bright and she was looking at me with an expression I could not read, wonder maybe, or confusion, or the particular stillness of something that has just confirmed a suspicion it was not sure it wanted confirmed.

"You felt it," she said.

I did not know what she meant. My body was trembling. The marks ached. The hunger was worse, far worse, and I could not understand it, I had been fed on, I had given, the gold had come, it should have helped, it always helped, why had it not helped.

"What did you do to me," I said.

"I drank from you," she said. "The way any of us might. The way they did, at the parties. The way you have given a hundred times." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "And it gave you nothing. Did it."

I stared at her. I did not understand. I could feel the hunger clawing at me, worse than before, sharpened, and I could not make sense of it, could not fit it into anything I knew about what I was and what I needed.

"It should have helped," I said.

"Yes," she said. "It should have." She climbed off me. She straightened her clothes. She looked at me from a distance now, her arms folded, her old old eyes in their young face studying me. "And it did not. And you do not know why. And I am not going to tell you."

She moved toward the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame, the same frame Elena had gripped.

"She will not say it," she said, her back to me. "She will say it to no one. But you should know that what she feels, whether she names it or not, has not happened in her in the time I have known her. And I am very old."

She left. The door closed.

I sat in the chair and I shook. The marks throbbed. The hunger screamed. I pressed my hand to my neck where the woman's teeth had been and I felt the wounds, fresh, open, and they gave me nothing, not the low sweet pull, not the promise of peace, nothing, and I did not understand.

I did not understand and I told myself it was because she was not Elena. She was not the one who had marked me. Of course it felt different. It had to feel different. It was a stranger's mouth on a wound that belonged to someone else. That was all. That was simple. That was survivable.

I stayed in the room. I ate when the food came. I rested when my body demanded it. I healed, slowly, the human way. And every night I stood at the door with my hand on the handle and I did not turn it, and the hunger grew, and the marks ached, and I did not know what I needed, only that I needed it, and the need was getting worse, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I did not leave, because she had told me to stay and I had not been told otherwise and that was the only thing I had left that made sense.