Chapter Text
i.
“Shit. This isn’t what it looks like.”
Eva sat up smoothly, pulling her knife from under her pillow, drawing it to hold in front of her. She still felt groggy from the potion she had let Astarion give her before she slept, but he wasn’t to know that. He wouldn’t be drugging her again.
“Really? Because it looks like you were about to bite me.”
The knife wouldn’t do much good if things were as they seemed. Fortunately, Astarion had told her a vampire was near a few days ago. The camp had been prepared. She just hadn’t known it was Astarion they were preparing for. Eva eyed the small pile of holly stakes they had whittled and planted in the dirt beside the firewood proper. Could she get to them before Astarion? Sluggish as she felt, she didn’t think so, and the potions and concoctions that would allow her to raise a cloud of fog, the spell incantations that would allow her to cast a temporary blindness or confusion upon him were across the camp along with most of her daily gear.
“I wasn’t going to hurt you!” Astarion protested. It was amazing how he could add that pleading note to his voice and yet speak in a whisper. Maybe that was the solution. She could scream. Something in her recoiled at the prospect. It was beneath her. The vampire raised his hands beseechingly. “I just needed . . . well, blood.”
Eva snorted. “And if you did hurt me, what of it? Right?”
Astarion looked hurt. He could look any way he pleased. “I didn’t choose you because of what happened with that tiefling,” he argued. “I just . . . I thought you might be a little less likely to wake. The plan was to just . . . take what I needed and leave. I live on animals—like the boar. Whatever I can get. And usually, it’s enough. But there’s just been so much going on. I’m weak! Slow. I thought, just a minute, just a taste, and I could catch something more filling so much better. You’d hardly know.” As he spoke, he took a seemingly unconscious step nearer.
Eva spun her knife in her hand without thinking of it, and somehow, she knew that even with the drug still flowing through her veins, she could throw it accurately at this distance. Into his heart. Into his throat. Even into his eye. Astarion was undead, and the steel wouldn’t slay him. But she had seen that he could be hurt. She could buy the time she needed to make it to the holly stakes.
Astarion froze.
A pounding filled her head. Eva could feel the path her knife might take when it left her hand. She could picture the lying snake doubled over, screaming with agony. Would it even be wrong, to kill him now? Surely the others would understand that Astarion had attacked her. “And you thought that you’d just bite me,” she hissed. “You wouldn’t even ask.”
“Oh, because that would have turned out well,” Astarion snapped. “Asking you, especially. I thought I’d have a stake in my heart before I could blink.”
A red haze clawed at the sides of her vision. “I told all of you I felt dangerous,” Eva retorted. “Mad. I told Alfira it’d be dangerous with us. But every moment I’ve been awake, I have kept it under control. And when I realized I can lose control in my sleep, we made plans to deal with that. How’s your control, Astarion?”
Astarion shoved his hands out at her in a furious, helpless gesture, and Eva almost let fly with her knife. She caught the end of the hilt just in time. He had his teeth. But he was otherwise unarmed.
Please. Like that has stopped you before, something purred in her brain. The voice had the same sweet, rotten air of that foul little creature who had visited her last night when she’d gone for wood. The more helpless the victim, the more beautiful the demise!
And anyway, Astarion is far from helpless, a more pragmatic voice reasoned. Even before she’d known he was a vampire, she had seen him move quicker than the wind.
“My control was perfect until tonight!” Astarion spoke as heatedly as ever one could in a whisper. “You have no idea what it’s been like, traveling around with you bloodsacks all day, eating vermin!” He turned to face her once again. “But I’m no monster. You can trust me, Eva. Please.” His expression turned soulful, imploring. He looked like some tragic poet.
A tragic poet with red eyes, fangs, and no blood to his complexion at all, Eva thought. How had she missed it? The first time she had clapped eyes on him, she had taken him for a corpse.
She knew how she had missed it. She saw corpses everywhere she looked, even if they walked, talked, and breathed. She had taken her instincts about Astarion for just another aspect of her madness.
“I did trust you,” she reminded him, furious. “I trusted you to help make me safe. Look at how that’s turned out. If your potion had worked tonight, you might have killed me, and I’d have never known. But it didn’t work. Forget trusting you not to hurt me, it seems I can’t even trust you to put me to sleep properly!”
“That may not be my fault,” Astarion argued swiftly. “You don’t remember who you were or what you did before the nautiloid, but you obviously have experience in the underworld. If you’ve experimented with sedatives and poisons before, you may have resistance to the basic potion I tried to use.”
The moment he mentioned it, Eva felt certain he was right. She had milked snakes like Kagha’s. She had remembered that much. Now that she thought of it, she could almost see bottles and distillation equipment before her. Frustrated, she looked away. She hadn’t wanted to burn Gale out, asking him to do a spell on her every night, or to use valuable supplies writing down detailed instructions for one of the others. Astarion and Shadowheart possessed the necessary skills to do chemically what Gale could do magically, and so long as she didn’t overuse their potions so that they became ineffective or she developed a dependency, she had thought that all three of them could share the burden of making her safe o’nights and feel some security for themselves besides. But if she had resistances to poisons unknown already, they would need to think of another solution.
Astarion had been watching her, and now he treaded closer once again. “You know, though, if you want to sleep soundly through the night, a little nibble might be just what you need,” he suggested in a honeyed voice. “Come on. It’ll do us both good. I need you alive; you need me strong. I’ll be fed; you’ll be fine by midmorning tomorrow—but maybe a little less inclined to sleepwalk for the rest of tonight, hmm?”
Eva cast her eyes over to the ugly stained earth and kicked up dirt where she had brutally murdered Alfira and left her body inside that strange, ritual circle, all without the slightest bit of awareness of what she did. They had buried the bard and done their best to dig up the ground and hide the signs of the crime, but traces still remained. She had mixed feelings about that. Her madness reveled in the remaining signs of her deed, even wished Alfira’s corpse still lay in their camp, perfuming the air with its deathly scent. Memento mori.
And the sooner the better.
Yet, the side of her that knew that she would surely die the ugliest of deaths without her companions, a death without distinction, dignity, or art, felt two ways about the reminder of her crime as well. Felt her deed was best forgotten as soon as possible and that they could not move on to their next camp fast enough, and felt also that she, Eva, as well as everyone else could probably use the daily reminder of what she was truly capable of, what they needed to beware.
She looked back into Astarion’s hot, hungry eyes. “Fine.” The words came as a surprise to both the vampire and to Eva herself. Angry but determined, she threw herself back on her bedroll and held up her wrist. “Not a drop more than you need. Are we understood?”
Astarion stepped back a moment from her, staring. “What? Really?”
Eva felt a little sick, imagining the vampire’s fangs sinking into her, the helplessness of it. “Just . . . get it over with before I change my mind,” she snapped, waving her wrist at him. “I do want you strong. And I don’t think it’s a bad idea if my body is a little weaker.”
“I . . . of course,” Astarion said, the mask of his composure snapping once more into place. “Then let’s get comfortable, shall we?” He padded to her side, as graceful and as silent as a cat, and knelt. He took her outstretched hand. His own hand was curiously warm, especially given what Eva now knew of him. She had a brief desire to squeeze her fingers, to crush Astarion’s to a mealy pulp, and she wasn’t even sure it was the Urge, or merely her defensive instincts. Regardless, she gritted her teeth and swept the impulse aside. She waited.
But instead of lowering his lips to her wrist then, Astarion began to massage her hand slowly. He squeezed each of her fingers in turn, then worked her wrist, rotating it 360 degrees. “Relax,” he murmured. “You’re taut as a bowstring. It will only hurt a moment, but it will be worse if you’re so tense. Trust me.”
Then he bent over her body, and instead of biting her wrist at all, he put his lips over her neck. They felt warm and soft on the sensitive skin beneath her jaw.
Eva felt Astarion’s whole body hovering over hers, though he supported his weight on his knees and a hand beside her head. She drew in a breath. Astarion kissed her throat, laved his tongue over the pulse point once, and then bit down.
Eva gasped again. There was just a moment of ice-cold pain, then it was gone. She still felt the pressure: Astarion’s lips over her throat. She felt the hot blood leaving her, felt growing cold in her extremities. But at the incisions themselves, only a lovely, tingling numbness. Almost pleasurable.
Astarion’s right hand had tangled in her hair, holding her head in place. He moved over her, licking, swallowing. Moaning. Eva’s eyes fluttered shut. She felt a hollowness in between her legs, a swooping in her stomach.
She also felt a growing dizziness. Her arms and legs grew ever colder. Blood ran down her neck and toward her ear. Astarion licked it, lapped at it. He sucked. The pressure at her throat was increasing. Eva’s body began to buzz, and she knew in a moment, she would faint, be unable to tell Astarion no. And he showed no sign of stopping.
Eva pushed at his chest. “That’s enough,” she mumbled, words slurring. “You’re fine.”
“Hmm?” Astarion hummed, still sucking at her neck. Then he seemed to collect himself. “Right. Of course.”
He licked her throat again, more thoroughly. “To stop the bleeding,” he explained. “Sealing agent in the . . . you’ll be all right.” He patted her shoulder and sat up. “Just lie there a moment.”
Eva’s eyes felt heavy as great axes, and yet she managed to lift them. Astarion was sitting back on his heels now, staring at her. His eyes were bright, almost glowing. A dribble of her blood still ran from his lips down his chin. “That . . . was amazing,” he breathed. “I feel strong. I feel . . . happy.”
He looked poleaxed to Eva, as though she had brained him with a club—or he would have done, if he didn’t also seem so alert. Bright and aware. He had said he fed on animals. Had he never had a thinking creature before? She suspected she may have done better than him, if he hadn’t. Those dwarves in the goblin camp . . .
She thrust the thought away. It hurt to twitch her lips up in a smile, which made her feel like smiling all the more. She doubted she would be able to move for half an hour or more now, and even after she could, it would be some time before she would be physically capable of killing anyone. “I feel like I could sleep till morning,” she sighed, struggling to stay awake even now. “If I do, you won’t be back?”
She knew she couldn’t stop him now if he decided he wasn’t finished. But somehow, now Eva found she didn’t care. To die to a vampire, she saw now, would be not unlike falling asleep. And a death she had chosen, to strengthen a companion—would it really be so bad?
But Astarion shook his head. “No,” he promised. “You are . . . invigorating, but I need something more filling. I’ll hunt and be back by morning.”
Eva mustered all her strength to nod her head. Her neck sent a sudden throb of pain to her head, and then her head lolled to the side. Astarion took it in both hands to lay it straight again. “No, no,” he chided. “Don’t do that. Rest.” He patted her cheek and stood, wiping his lips as he turned to go.
As Eva descended into darkness, she thought she heard him say, “This is a gift, you know. I won’t forget it.”