Fading

She stopped being careful with me.

It happened the way everything with her happened, slow and then all at once. The parties became more frequent. Twice a week, then three times, then she stopped counting and so did I. The car came at dusk and I went down to it without packing a bag and I did not come back until dawn and sometimes not even then.

And at every party she offered me.

Not to one or two now. Not the careful rationing of the first night, the tilt of the head, the murmur of permission. She offered me to anyone who looked. She walked me into rooms full of cold beautiful faces and she put me in the center and she stepped back and she said feed and they did, one after another, mouth after mouth on my throat and my wrist and the soft inside of my arm, and I stood or swayed or sank and the only thing holding me up was the knowledge that she was watching, that she was always watching, her eyes bright and her hands clasped behind her back and her jaw set in a line that dared anyone in the room to say what they were seeing.

She was proving something. I understood that much. I understood it the way you understand weather, not with thought but with the body, with the slow chill that sets in when you have been out too long. She was proving to herself that I meant nothing. That I was a vessel, a convenience, a warm thing she could pass around a room without flinching. And if the proving required her to watch five women drink from me in a single night, and then six, and then seven, then that was what it required, and she would stand there with her bright eyes and her set jaw and she would not flinch.

I did not flinch either. I could not. I did not have the strength.

The weakness came on slow. I noticed it first in my hands, a tremor I could not stop when I reached for a glass. Then in my legs, the way the stairs to my apartment became a thing I had to plan for, a hand on the rail, a pause at the turn. Then in the dark circles under my eyes that no amount of sleep could touch, because sleep did not come anymore, not real sleep, just the thin shallow half-consciousness of a body too drained to dream.

I was losing weight. I could see it in the mirror, the hollows under my cheekbones, the way my collarbones stood out sharp as blades. The marks on my neck never closed now. They stayed open, raw, tender, a constellation of small wounds that ached when I turned my head and throbbed in the quiet hours before dawn.

I did not tell her.

I did not tell her because I did not believe she would care, and I was afraid that if she did not care the confirmation would kill me faster than the blood loss. I did not tell her because I had not been asked to speak. I did not tell her because telling her would have been an admission that I was something more than food, something whose failing could matter, and she had been very clear, night after night, party after party, that I was not.

So I let it happen. I stood where she put me and I let them feed and I watched her watching and I grew thinner and paler and lighter, as though the thing holding me to the earth was being drawn out of me one mouthful at a time.

The last party of the month was at the townhouse. The one with the stairs and the candles and the music that came from under the floor. Elena dressed me herself, buttoning my shirt with cold efficient fingers, and her hands did not shake anymore. She had won, or she believed she had won, and the winning had steadied her. She looked at me the way you look at a finished task.

"You'll do," she said, and turned away.

The room was full. More women than I had ever seen in one place, tall and pale and gleaming, and they turned when we entered and their eyes found me and I felt the weight of them like a hand pressing down on my chest. Elena walked me to the center. She stopped. She looked at me, and for one second, one half second, something flickered across her face. I could not name it. It was there and gone.

Then she let go of my neck and stepped back.

"He's yours tonight," she said to the room.

I do not remember all of it.

I remember the first mouth. The second. I remember the gold light blooming and fading and blooming again. I remember my knees going, and the floor coming up, and someone catching me and holding me upright and another mouth finding my wrist while I hung between them. I remember the room going sideways. I remember trying to find Elena's face in the blur of candlelight and cold skin and not finding it.

I remember the stairs.

Someone led me out, or I wandered, or my legs carried me somewhere without my telling them to. The stairs were narrow and unlit and I was at the top before I understood where I was, and the floor was uneven, and my vision was a white narrowing tunnel, and my foot found air where it expected stone.

I went down.

I did not feel the stairs. I felt the floor at the bottom, the cold hard shock of it, and then I felt nothing, and the nothing was so vast and so final that for a long moment I thought it was simply the rest of my life, that I had finally been poured out completely, that there was nothing left.

I do not know how long I lay there.

I know that at some point the nothing became a sound, and the sound was a voice, and the voice was hers, and it was saying my name. Not food. Not pet. My name. The one I had given her in a bar a lifetime ago, the one she had never used.

I felt her hands on my face. Cold. Shaking. I heard her voice above me, low and urgent and nothing like the voice I knew, stripped of every careful thing she had ever built it out of, saying no, no, no, you don't get to, not you, stay with me, stay with me, and I felt something press against my mouth, her wrist, and I smelled it, ancient and bright, her blood, and I understood she was going to give it to me.

Then another voice.

One I did not know. Low. Calm. The kind of calm that has weight behind it, the kind that comes from being older than calm itself. It said her name once, and then it said something in that other language, the musical one, and the wrist pulled away from my mouth, and I heard Elena make a sound, raw and animal, and I heard the other voice again, firmer now, and I caught words. Sacred. And not his to carry. And you know what it means.

I heard Elena say something back, sharp, vicious, a sound I had never heard her make, and the other voice did not rise to meet it. It stayed low. Patient. Immovable. And Elena went quiet in a way that felt like something breaking inside her, and the wrist did not come back.

The nothing closed over me again.