"Wow, Daria, have you been working out?" Jane asked the question honestly, after Daria had carried her heavier suitcase up the dormitory stairs to avoid waiting for the elevator.
"Just finally eating right, I suppose."
"Does that mean pizza is off the menu?" Huge news if true.
"Would I let you down like that?"
Jane had been a little worried about Daria's eating, when she had come back to Lawndale for Christmas. Daria had pecked at her meals, it seemed, though nobody else appeared to notice. And in between, she had taken bites of dark chocolate from bars that looked and smelled quite indulgent. Almost too dark for Jane's taste, when Daria had offered a sample, but she figured it wouldn't take long to get hooked.
Daria helped her unpack. She didn't seem excited that Jane was here at last, but she was quietly pleased.
When all of Jane's identical shirts were finally hanging in the closet, Daria said, "I haven't evaluated the pizza places in this part of town."
"More than happy to visit one you do know. Or all of them."
Outside, the temperature hung around freezing, and the wind kicked up at random intervals, enough to sting her face. "Please tell me that the subway goes to Raft," said Jane.
"Not quite," Daria replied. "But we can skip the river crossing, which on a day like today will be the windiest part."
They had to take two trains, actually, leaving the Green Line trolley and descending the steps to the lower level of Park Street to catch the Red Line northbound. Daria navigated the station unerringly and, when the train arrived, gestured Jane to a seat that turned out to offer a view of the city as they trundled over the Charles. Evening approached. Streetlights and car headlamps and skyscrapers were all flickering into activity as windows caught the first suggestions of sunset. "I made the right choice," Jane said, quietly.
Daria heard her regardless. "It's been a long semester without you."
They emerged at dusk into a city square, cozy with shops and restaurants and what looked to be a real, honest-to-goodness arthouse movie theater. "Best if we walk from here," Daria said.
"Gonna work up an appetite?"
"Not that I particularly need to."
They headed away from the plaza, up a gentle hill into a neighborhood of houses. "I saw a play in the basement of that church," Daria gestured as they passed. "Well, a live-action gender-swapped Star Trek episode."
"Damn, you're getting cultured, amiga."
"Like a fine cheese."
"Oh, now that you've mentioned it," Jane began.
"Not far now. I do want to show you something."
The hill got a little steeper, and the atmosphere began to read as college campus.
"Where are we going?"
Daria deadpanned back at her: "Where the rainbow ends."
Jane wasn't sure what to say to that. She was still spinning on it a minute later, when Daria led her around the corner of a library building and towards a stairway, behind a hedge wall, leading down to a basement. Daria extracted a key from her jacket. She hopped down the stairs almost nimbly, Jane thought. In so many small ways, where her friend had been quiescent before, she was active now.
The basement hallway was deserted. "Just around the corner, here." The next door was closed with two padlocks, one of them taking a key and the other a combination.
"You have a hobbit-hole?"
The space inside was concrete-floored, brick-walled. It might once have been a coal cellar or some other functional chamber whose purpose had been lost during renovations, forgotten by the world. Closing the door dropped them into complete darkness for the split moment before Daria switched on a flashlight. In its glow, Jane saw stacks of well-used books, a few items of camping gear.
"This is where I crash a lot of the time," Daria said. "We're below the Special Collections department of the Raft main library."
"I should have expected you'd make yourself at home here. In a place like this." Jane looked around herself. "Very cool. And," waving at the books, "very you."
"I'm glad you say so."
"Now... dinner?"
"It is after sunset, isn't it?"
And Daria's eyes were suddenly level with Jane's. She held Jane by her biceps, pushed her back against the brick wall, and Jane looked down, and Daria's feet were no longer on the floor, her legs were kicking back, both of them into the air, and now Daria opened her mouth to exhale cold as winter, and—
Fangs.
"Daria!" she screamed.
"I have had to figure out so many things these past few months," Daria said. "I tire of the complexity. I want something straightforward now. I intend to take it. I will ensure that you have pleasure in giving it."
Jane thought, "Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul." And then there was only room to think of Daria.
The inhuman strength in her hands. The grace with which she defied gravity.
Jane's voice was harsh to a rasp, for more than one reason. Dry-lipped, she managed to ask, "Will I... live through the night?"
Daria released her right hand from Jane's arm and gestured, briefly, in a circle. Candles lit around the room.
"I don't want to be undead without you."
And she gripped Jane's arm again.
Jane closed her eyes, opened them again, felt the tremors in her body.
Then she nodded.
Suddenly Daria's hold was loose enough that she could lift her hand to the zipper of her coat. Her fingers fumbled with the metal. Daria covered them with hers. And pulled.
"I could..." Jane gasped for words. "Could never tell you..."
"Nor I you," Daria said. "Before." She pulled herself in closer still, brought her lips to Jane's ear. "Times... have... changed."
And she sank to Jane's neck.
The first contact was a kiss and a runner's high, the shock of pain that nothing in her body was able to fight, that nothing in her body could pull away from. Then she grew weak, knew in a distant way that her legs would have collapsed, that Daria was holding her upright. She gasped in pleasure, gasped in pain, shuddered as the distinction between the two frayed and snapped and vanished. She moaned without words. Daria's hands moved to caress between her shoulderblades and through her hair, and they were growing warm now, warm with the blood that was leaving her, warm like her body was the first rain shower of summer, the blood that she surrendered to Daria like she was making up for lost time, the blood that pounded in her ears with her heartbeat, and then with another beat far more powerful than her own, Daria's heart mastering and entraining hers, and Jane made a strangled cry of pure joy as her vision clouded, and her world narrowed to Daria's hands, and then to Daria's heart, and then there was only trust and love and rest.
* * *
Jane awoke in a sleeping bag. There was a can of ginger ale beside her head. Daria popped the tab, inserted a bendy straw and held it to Jane's lips.
On instinct, she drank. Fizzy and sweet and just a little sharp. "Thanks," she said.
Jane heard a familiar snap. Daria reached out again, this time with a piece of chocolate between her fingers. The nails on her pinky and index were longer than those on the middle and ring.
Jane ate the chocolate, and then another. She reached her left hand up to her neck. Something had definitely happened there, but the wounds had closed.
"I'm good at it, aren't I?" Daria asked. Her voice was level, as usual. No false pride.
"I should've known." Jane kept her voice to a whisper. "Take away your anxieties, and you're as confident with your body as you are with words. And you... control mine... just as well."
Daria slid her arm around Jane's back and lifted her to a sitting position. She offered the ginger ale again, and Jane sipped again.
"I lived," Jane said.
"I told you."
"OK... OK, questions. First. Sunlight?"
"The day-star doesn't burn all of us. I get away with just being inhibited."
"And do you plan to... turn me?"
"Jane, I don't think you could get more queer than you already are."
"Whoof," said Jane. "Well, after how that felt... but I meant the, ah, well."
"One of these days. When it's less of a shock to you. Because I know that one day you will need it, and I intend to give you everything you need. But I can't take this away from you just yet."
Daria leaned away and came back holding a pizza box. Jane could feel the heat from it. "Large, three-cheese," Daria stated.
Jane finished the first slice down to the crust before she even considered stopping. She knew there was tomato sauce on her cheeks. She could tell that Daria thought this was funny.
"So, wait," Jane started, her mouth partly filled with crust. "Is all you can eat, well," she indicated her neck with the tip of the next pizza slice, "that and chocolate?"
"Dead meat is viscerally unpleasant," Daria explained. "And with vampire senses, most human foods are... eh, you've tasted better paste. I got mode-locked into having the alcohol tolerance of a hummingbird, so wine isn't really my thing. I have become something of a tea snob."
On her third pizza slice now. "Damn. That sucks."
Daria inclined the corner of her lips, just noticeably.
"So to speak," Jane added.
"I am curious about one thing," Daria said.
"Hey, I'm curious about many things right now."
"Hush. Explanation time later." Daria was moving quite close again. "Now is when we test..."
Jane's mouth was still heavy with the residues of three-cheese pizza when Daria's lips met hers.
Daria pulled back, eventually.
"I don't mind that taste at all," she whispered.
Jane felt like a call girl. She'd put extra effort into her makeup and had her hair done shorter. She wore her nicest jacket over her sluttiest top, right into the hotel, and as for Daria's gifts... Putting a runner into high heels and a pencil skirt had to be a power trip in itself. She glided through the lobby, thanks to three hours of practice gliding around her room, found the elevators where Daria had said they would be, and pushed the UP button like she belonged.
On the seventh floor, she nearly tilted over when her heel hit the hall carpet, but she recovered like a pro.
She knocked at the door whose number had been given her.
A few heartbeats later, Daria opened it. She stepped back as Jane stepped in, but not quite as far. She pushed the door shut and gathered Jane into her arms.
"Good evening," Daria said. "No trouble, I hope?"
"All cool with me," Jane responded.
Daria disengaged from the hug a moment later and turned to walk back into the bedroom. Jane swiveled to flip the deadbolt shut and let her bag fall from her shoulder to her hand. She followed.
In the bedroom, Daria was leaning against the escritoire, her arms crossed. One booted foot was flat on the floor, the other tipped back on its heel.
Jane dropped to her knees, pulled a dark chocolate bar from her bag, pushed the bag aside and offered the chocolate on her upturned open palms, her eyes downcast. "Voici, maîtresse," she said.
The thing about Daria's power trips was that submitting to them was so much damn fun.
Daria took the offering and lightly brushed her fingers across Jane's in the process.
"Glad to be off those heels?"
"You wanted me to learn. I'm learning."
"You're nervous." Daria now let her fingers seek through Jane's hair and rest there. Easy and steady.
"Just felt out of place on the walk here. Kept wondering how many people thought I was an... escort."
"And was that all bad?"
Soothed under Daria's touch, she smiled, more shyly than she smiled at most sources of joy. "Not all bad. Maîtresse."
"I'd like you to end every sentence you address to me that way. Can you do that for me?"
Now her smile was bolder. "Oui, Maîtresse."
"The faster you let go of everything that holds you back from submitting, the happier you will be. You know that, don't you?"
"I do, Maîtresse."
"You're curious to see what depth you're capable of, aren't you? The question burns inside you. It quickens your pulse, brings that lovely flush to your cheeks. You crave the discovery. You want each trip inward to be deeper than the last. You feel proud when you break faster than before. Don't you, my dearest?"
"Oui," her breath was already ragged, "Maîtresse."
Will she let me have it so soon, will she, will she—
"Good girl," Daria told her.
The tension dropped from her spine.
"Now," contined Daria, "I want you to look straight ahead for me." As she stepped around Jane, she flicked her wrist, and a candle across the room lit up. The room lights dimmed until only the candle was left.
From behind Jane now: "Just keep looking straight ahead for me. Eyes open. I know that's hard for you right now. Keep them open until I tell you to close them. I know that's difficult. I promise the command to close your eyes will come when you are ready for it. Just keep looking forward. Do you understand?"
Daria traced a fingernail across her forehead. She barely managed to speak. "Maîtresse, oui, Maîtresse..."
"Good girl."
* * *
Jane relaxed in what was possibly the most plush bathrobe she had ever worn. Her back was propped up against silk-encased pillows, and a bowl of sliced fruit rested in her lap. She pulled another morsel out of it, some kind of melon that exploded with sweet juice on her tongue.
Daria was stretched out at the foot of the bed, perpendicular to Jane, resting one hand on Jane's calf just below the knee, brushing it idly up and down.
"It was easy to manage," said Daria. "You don't really want to know about using vampire powers to break into computers, of all things, do you? Hell, I got the idea from a guy who had done it to stalk Quinn."
"Tell me sometime when it'll come in handy," Jane said.
"Fair. I promised you the story of how I turned, didn't I?"
"That sounds better."
"It should have been. There should have been a tall woman in a man's suit and Milan Fashion Week sunglasses who taught me her methods of torture... but no, I had to go and get the dark gift in the most fucking nerdy way possible.
"It was a display of rare books in the college library. My second weekend on campus. One of them was a codex of maps. Wild speculations, legends now forgotten of how distant lands were said to lie. There be dragons here. I couldn't stop staring. And then the ink moved.
"Thousands of people must have seen that same page, but I had the particular kind of soul that sprung its trap."
"You and your magnetic personality," Jane suggested.
"Har dee har."
"Hey, you spring me, too."
"Hmmm. It was, as best I can figure, a 600-year-old psychic prank. Take a manuscript and curse, or enchant," she shrugged at the choice of words, "the thing so that it may catch someone unawares and bring a little random spice to immortality."
"So, no one else... turned you. In person, I mean."
"It burned cold," Daria said. "Like I had touched my hands to dry ice. Like liquid nitrogen to my face. The words spelled out one message, then another, than another. I could feel them pounding behind my eyes. Forbidden knowledge, transformative truths. I stumbled outside, and five seconds in the sun felt like it was giving me heatstroke. I moved without elegance back to my room, crawled into bed, and... died. The first thing I heard after that was a pigeon on the windowsill."
"Rats of the sky," said Jane. "Wait, you're not telling me that—"
"Yes, I did. And you've never had a Christmas turkey that tasted finer. I spent the next three days on rooftops and alleyways and... Yes, there were rats. Not as big as the ones you'll find down there in the posh brownstones of the Back Bay. It's all built on marshland that they filled in," Daria added.
"What happened to the codex after all that?"
"The exhibit ended, and they locked it up in the archive it came from." Daria craned her neck to look directly at Jane. "How do you feel about a little forgery?"
"Let me guess. We steal the book, I make a replacement that's not enchanted with the dark stuff, and we put the fake back in place of the real one?"
"Maybe not quite in that order, but yeah."
"Why... Oh. You think if I touch it, it'll work on me, too."
Daria sat up and pulled her legs in. She turned to face Jane and took Jane's hand in her own. She nodded.
"Well," Jane said, "that's certainly an interesting character reference. But until then..." She held out her other arm, the veins in her wrist proffered to Daria. "Maîtresse?"
Jane climbed the wooden ladder up into Daria's dormitory bunk. Apparently, Daria's plan for graduating college after receiving the dark gift involved a lot of midday naps, cocooned inside a sleeping bag that was in turn covered by a duvet. It was more portable than a coffin, for sure.
Jane arranged herself in the narrow unoccupied zone of the bed and began undoing the covers, one layer at a time.
Daria was on her side, her arms crossed before her chest.
Jane pulled a pack of sterile lancets from her jacket pocket and fiddled one of them out. She pricked her ring finger and let the droplet of blood fall onto her girlfriend's upper lip. Daria hummed and shifted. The tip of her tongue came forward to retrieve the droplet. Then she hummed more loudly and opened her eyes.
"Good afternoon, sleepyhead," Jane greeted her.
"Hi," she said, smiling slightly but unselfconsciously. "After...? Ugh. I wasn't expecting you here today."
"Errand took me across the river, and I wasn't about to pass up seeing my best girl."
Daria opened her palm, and her watch floated from the little shelf at the head of the bunk into her grasp.
"Improving," Jane said.
"Late," replied Daria. "Dan and Grace asked me to help them review for the gen-bio midterm." She wriggled out of her cocoon, rolled over towards Jane and weightless through the air over her and then down towards her desk chair, touching down first with one sock and then the other. She settled at her desk and began searching under the loose papers that covered its back half.
"Show-off," Jane said.
Direct sunlight would have made her fall on her ass trying that, but it had been surprisingly easy to convince a roommate who hated mornings herself that they should spring for blackout curtains.
"Only because you're so interested in watching. They think I have some special sauce for the class, just because I did well last term..." She muttered. "But these notes ought to be a good start." She isolated the correct three-ring binder and stood. "Pants," she said. "I need pants. Jane, could you check up there for—"
"Seems like it's not in my best interest," Jane mused, tending her finger.
Daria hopped into a pair of black jeans. "Now if I can find my boots, I'll be ahead of the game."
Jane's arrival had been good for Daria's college "life". It made so many interactions easier to have a social bridge, a girlfriend who could laugh and say "Yeah, she has a whole list of dietary issues" like it was just one more thing to work around, like their class schedules and the dilatoriness of the T. And having a girlfriend who showed up from another school gave Jane a cachet of sorts, a connection to outside the insular world of her own residence hall.
Daria floated back up to Jane and kissed her, briefly but with real pressure. Elbows planted on the bed, she asked, "You want me to come over tonight?"
"Mmm. I'll be wanting that all day."
* * *
At 3:30 in the morning, nothing moved except the vampire and the girlfriend whom she had just handed a mug of hot cocoa.
"Thanks for keeping it warm," Jane said through her smile.
"I also do a bar trick where I light a shot of vodka on fire."
They walked the boulevard from BFAC to Mass Ave and crossed to make the circuit around the reflecting pool. "You figure what went wrong with the vase you fired in the kiln?"
"I think my problem is that I got careless with making a vase."
"Heh. Hear about the spot doing graphic design for the lit annual?"
"The editor hasn't called back. Daria, could we not talk about school for a sec?"
"OK, not-school for $500."
Some nights, on these strolls of theirs, they would pass through a spot with no cameras and Daria would clip into super-speed and suddenly she would be hanging from a drainpipe, a rat gripped by its neck, and Jane would watch and think my girlfriend is a feral creature of darkness and I love it.
Jane said, "You're not getting what I am out of this."
Daria raised an eyebrow.
Jane went on: "You're, well, there's nothing you haven't been willing to do to me, but I can tell that I'm the horny idiot here."
Daria's tone stayed levelly conversational. "I'm happy to minister to you in all the ways that drive you wild, because they drive you wild."
"And you plan scenes that leave my brain a mush, and I love it, and you flex your dark skills and that must be incredibly satisfying and it works on me so damn well..."
"But?"
"Oh, I don't know. How do I say it? When you said that you had wanted to tell me you loved me before all this, I knew I had wanted to confess the same thing. But did we mean the same thing? I keep feeling that you would have been satisfied with, like, cuddles, and I very much would not."
"I would have tried."
"I can't tell if that's good for a girl's self-esteem or bad."
"I would have done everything I could to satisfy your needs, because they're your needs."
"Sounds so... sterile."
Daria made the particular shrug that signaled agreement. "What can I say? We're not mirror images."
"Heh." Jane led them to the edge of the reflecting pool.
("Another myth born of exaggeration," Daria had explained on an earlier date. "Some people register us subconsciously as uncanny, leading to odd effects when they perceive reflections...")
"Jane... this isn't really what's bothering you, is it? I'm getting the sense that there's more on your mind."
"Oh, it's just... This is so incredibly fun, and I can finally just be in love with you, and I..." She swigged the last of her cocoa. "I've made so many bad choices just out of being horny. I ditched you for that track star, remember? And, fuck, the only reason I stayed with Tom for as long as I did and set up that whole mess was that he still gave me a raging clit-on even after the conversations died. And then the summer after graduation, and then the fall you were here... It was making me feel weak, all right? And then this impossible and wonderful thing happened with you, and suddenly I felt... safe."
Daria put an arm around Jane's waist.
Jane drew a deep, shuddering breath. "You melt my brain, and I love it. Every scene, I give you the power to decide what happens to me, and it feels so right, because it means I can't make mistakes any more."
"Because you trust me to make the right choices. Or."
Jane now put an arm around Daria. "Because every time, it feels more and more like the choices are right because you make them. Maîtresse."
And she held a knuckle under Daria's chin, tilted her face upward and gave her a kiss that lingered.
* * *
Neither Daria's college friends nor Jane's noticed that Jane was always the one who fetched their cups of extraordinarily strong tea.