Letter 06 — The Edge

Dear Lilith,

I want to tell you about the night I broke my own rule, the one I never wrote down because I didn't think I needed to. Donors who last in this business learn it fast: you give the blood, not the rest of you. I'd been doing this for six years, licensed since I was twenty-two, and in that time I'd fed maybe two hundred clients without once losing the thread of myself. I was good at my job. I am still good at my job. But there is a version of me now that exists only because of one man, one overrun clock, and one night in a tower above the rain, and I think you, of everyone, would understand why I let it happen.

Neo-New York in 2187 is not the city my grandmother described from before the Blackout Decade. It's taller, wetter, louder in ways that have nothing to do with noise. Rain falls almost every night now, and the ad-light rides it down the sides of the towers in long smears of blue and red and a green that isn't found anywhere in nature. I work the fortieth floor of the Corvine Exchange, a registered feeding house, one of maybe thirty in the borough, where vampirism has been legal and licensed since the Accord of '09 and donation is a profession like any other. Timed. Metered. Insured. I wear a biosensor cuff on my left wrist that logs my heart rate, my blood pressure, the duration of any bite to the second, and flags anything past the contracted window straight to Compliance. It has never once flagged on me. I am, by every metric the Exchange keeps, a model donor.

Rainier Bertrand had been on my client list for four months before that night. He booked through the private tier, which meant he could afford discretion, and he always requested the same thing: forty minutes, wrist only, conversation first. Most clients don't want conversation. Most clients want the transaction over as fast as decency allows, in and out, the way you'd want a blood draw over fast. Rainier would sit across from me in the private suite with two fingers of something amber in a glass he never seemed to actually drink, and he'd ask me questions. What I'd studied before I licensed. Whether I still painted, since my file noted an art degree I'd never used. What the rain sounded like from my apartment, since he claimed he couldn't remember what rain sounded like from anywhere that wasn't glass and forty floors up.

I told him things I didn't tell my other clients. That's the first rule I broke, if I'm honest, weeks before the real one.

He was old. I don't know exactly how old. The Exchange doesn't require registered vampires to disclose their age, only their feeding history and compliance record, and Rainier's compliance record was spotless in the specific way that made me suspicious he'd had three hundred years to learn exactly where the lines were. He didn't look old. He looked maybe thirty-five, dark hair kept short and severe, a face that had settled a long time ago into an expression of complete control, the kind that only comes from having tested every other expression and found them all more dangerous to wear. His eyes were the one thing that gave him away, pale, almost colorless in the low light of the suite, and when he looked at me I had the specific sensation of being read rather than looked at.

"You're tense tonight," he said, the evening it started to go wrong. Or right. I still haven't decided which word actually applies.

"I'm always tense at the start. You know that." I was rolling up my sleeve, the standard procedure, cuff snug over the pulse point at my wrist. "It's a controlled response. Goes away once we start."

"That's not what I mean." He set the glass down without having touched it. "You're tense the way a person is tense when they're deciding something."

I didn't answer that, because he was right, and I hadn't known it myself until he said it. I'd been deciding something for weeks. I just hadn't let myself look at it directly.

He fed the way he always fed: unhurried, precise, his mouth cool at first against the inside of my wrist and then warm as the vein opened for him, a drag of sensation that most donors describe as pleasant in the clinical brochure language the Exchange trains us on: pleasant, mild euphoria, some donors report a warming sensation. What none of that language tells you is what it feels like when someone feeds on you like they're listening to you. Rainier fed like every pull meant something specific, like he was reading a sentence and not just draining a number off a chart. Forty minutes, wrist only, exactly as contracted, and when the cuff chimed its soft two-minute warning he lifted his mouth from my skin the way another man might lift his mouth from a kiss he didn't want to end.

"Time," I said, because someone had to.

"I know." He didn't move away yet. His thumb traced the two small marks already closing at my wrist, already healing with the accelerant in his saliva that keeps donors from scarring. "Lark. Can I ask you something outside the contract?"

Nobody asks that. There's a reason nobody asks that. The Exchange's whole architecture exists to keep the asking out of it, to keep this a service and not a seduction, because a seduced donor is a liability and a coerced one is a felony, and the line between the two gets thin fast once anyone starts asking things outside the contract. I should have said no. I have said no to less, from clients with a great deal more charm than a man who mostly just watched me and asked about rain.

"Ask," I said.

"Have you ever fed someone off the clock?"

I want to be honest with you about what that question did to me, because I think you're the only one I could say this to without her flinching. It went straight through the professional part of me, the part that has kept me safe and solvent for six years, and it landed somewhere lower, somewhere that had nothing to do with safety at all. Off the clock meant unregistered. Off the clock meant no cuff, no compliance log, no metered thirty seconds of grace before the automatic flag went out to a Compliance officer who would show up at the door within four minutes armed and unhappy. Off the clock meant a felony for him and a license revocation for me, both of us gambling something real on a bite that no system was watching.

"No," I said. "That would be insane."

"I know," he said. "I'm asking if you want to."

I did. I want you to understand that nobody talked me into this. Not Rainier, not the wine I hadn't had, not some manufactured moment of weakness. I looked at a three-hundred-year-old vampire asking me, with what I can only call real nervousness, whether I'd let him feed on me outside every safeguard either of us had ever built our lives around, and I felt the specific hot drop of wanting something I knew was a mistake. I'd spent six years being careful. I was tired, that night, in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, of being so careful that nothing had ever once felt like this.

"Yes," I said. "Take the cuff off."

He didn't move for a moment, like he'd expected to have to argue for it and didn't know what to do now that he wouldn't need to. Then he crossed the suite, drew the blackout blind so the sensor array mounted outside the window couldn't catch a read through the glass (a small mercy, since the Exchange's exterior scanners logged heat signatures as a secondary compliance check), and came back to unclasp the cuff from my wrist himself, his fingers steady in a way that made me acutely aware mine were not.

The suite went dark except for the city, blue-red-green sliding down the rain on the far side of the glass, and he took my face in both hands and kissed me like the forty minutes of every prior session had all been a very long question he was finally getting to ask properly. I'd never kissed a client. I hadn't planned to start with the oldest, most controlled one on my list. His mouth tasted faintly of copper, always did, an artifact of what he was, and underneath that something warmer, something that was just him. I couldn't have told you what it tasted like except that I wanted more of it, kept chasing his lower lip when he pulled back to breathe against my jaw and ask, low, "Still yes?"

"Still yes," I said, and felt him exhale against my throat like he'd been holding that breath for four months.

We didn't make it to the bed at first. He walked me back against the cold glass, the city smearing gold and blue behind my shoulder, forty floors of empty air under my feet and I have never in my life felt more grounded than I did with his weight pinning me there, his mouth finding the pulse at the side of my throat and staying, not biting yet, just tasting the fact that I'd let him this close. My hands found the buttons of his shirt because I needed skin, needed to know he was as unmade by this as I was, and when I got it open I found scars, old ones, silvered with age in a way vampire healing shouldn't leave, which told me something about how long three hundred years actually was and how much of it hadn't been kind.

"Bed," he said finally, voice gone rough in a way I'd never once heard in four months of controlled conversation. "I want to see you when I do this."

He carried me the six steps there, which should have felt absurd and instead felt like exactly the kind of thing I'd been starving for without knowing it, and set me down among sheets that smelled like rain and cedar and undressed me slowly enough that I understood he meant it as its own kind of feeding, watching me the whole time like every inch revealed was information he intended to keep. I got his shirt the rest of the way off, got my hands flat against a chest that didn't need to breathe but did anyway, out of habit or courtesy or three hundred years of pretending to be a man, and when he finally settled behind me, both of us on our sides, my back drawn flush against him, I understood why he'd asked to see me and then arranged us so he couldn't.

"This isn't about watching," he said against my ear, like he'd heard the thought. "This is about being close enough that nothing's between us. Not even facing the wrong way."

He curled around me the way water finds a shape, one arm sliding under my neck, his hand splaying warm over my stomach, and I felt him everywhere at once, the whole line of him against the whole line of me, his mouth trailing slow open kisses down the curve of my shoulder toward the throat he hadn't touched yet tonight. His other hand found my thigh, drew my top leg back over his, opened me to him without ever having to ask again, and I was so wet by the time two of his fingers found me that I heard him make a sound against my skin that wasn't composed at all, the first uncomposed thing I'd ever gotten out of him in four months of trying.

"Rainier." I said his name like it was the only word I had left. "The clock."

"I know." His fingers didn't stop moving, slow and devastating, learning exactly what made my hips roll back into him. "I've never done this off the clock. Not once, in three hundred years. Do you understand what you're asking me to risk?"

"I'm not asking you to risk it," I managed. "I'm asking you to want it more than the risk."

He made a sound at that, half laugh, half something rawer, and I felt him harden against the curve of my ass, felt the exact moment he stopped being careful about hiding how much he wanted this. He guided himself into me from behind, that low angle where nothing has to change, where I stayed wrapped in his arms and he stayed sunk against my back, and the drag of him filling me while his fingers kept working slow devastating circles at my clit undid something in my chest that I don't think has a clinical name.

"Look at the window," he said, voice wrecked now, "watch the city with me, I want you to feel this everywhere, not just where I'm inside you," and I did, watched the rain-blurred lights slide past while he moved in me slow and deep and unhurried, the whole unbroken length of my body pressed to the whole unbroken length of his, nothing between us anywhere, his mouth finally, finally finding my throat.

He didn't bite right away. He kissed the pulse point first, once, twice, let me feel the promise of it building while he kept his hips rolling into me at a pace that had my thighs shaking, and when he did finally sink his teeth in it came at the same moment his fingers pressed harder against my clit, the two sensations arriving together so that I couldn't tell anymore where the pain ended and the pleasure began, only that I was crying out something that wasn't quite his name and wasn't quite a word at all, coming around him so hard my whole body seized against his, and he groaned against my throat and followed me a few strokes later, deep and shuddering, his fingers digging bruises into my hip that I would find the next morning and touch like souvenirs.

Here is the part I haven't told anyone, Lilith. Not the Exchange, not Compliance, not even Rainier, not entirely.

Somewhere in the middle of that bite, after the cuff was off, after the thirty seconds of grace had long since burned past into territory that should have brought Compliance through the door, I started seeing snow.

Not our snow. Not anything that happens anymore, not in a world where the climate engines keep Neo-New York at sixty-one degrees year-round. This was old snow, real snow, falling thick and silent over a city with low stone buildings and gas lamps and a woman laughing somewhere just out of view, a laugh I have never heard with my own ears and yet knew, in the moment, with the specific ache of missing someone I'd never met. It lasted maybe four seconds. It felt like an entire year. When it cleared, I was still there, still wrapped around him, still coming down off the best orgasm of my professional and unprofessional life, and Rainier had gone very, very still against my back.

"What did you just do," he said. It wasn't really a question.

"I don't know what you mean."

"You took something." His voice had lost every trace of the man who ordered wine he didn't drink. "I felt it leave. Lark, what did you just see?"

I told him about the snow. About the laugh. He was quiet for a long time, his arm still around me, his mouth still resting against the mark he'd made at my throat, and when he finally spoke his voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go before. Not fear, exactly, but the specific vertigo of a very old thing encountering a first.

"That was Paris," he said. "Eighteen-ninety. That was." He stopped. "I haven't thought of her in decades. I didn't choose to give you that. You took it."

I understood, then, what should have terrified me and instead only deepened the thing already cracking open in my chest. The feed had never been one-directional. Every registered bite in this city runs one way: vampire takes, donor gives, the whole architecture of the Exchange built on that single unbroken current. Nobody had ever told me, because as far as anyone official knew, it wasn't supposed to be possible. But off the clock, off every safeguard, with a man who'd let himself want something for the first time in three centuries, the current had run both ways. I'd taken a year of him. Not blood. Time. A sliver of everything he'd been before he learned to stop letting anyone close enough to take it.

"I'm sorry," I said, because it seemed like the thing you say when you've stolen a piece of someone's life without meaning to.

"Don't be." He turned me in his arms then, finally, so I could see his face, and there was something in it I hadn't seen in four months of careful conversation, something unguarded, something almost young. "Three hundred years and I've fed on hundreds of people and felt nothing but the meal. You're the first thing that's ever felt like it was mine, taking or given. If it cost me a year in Paris, I'd give you the whole century."

We stayed off the clock a long time after that, past any version of safe, Compliance's four-minute window a joke we'd both long since blown past, his mouth finding mine again slower this time, unhurried the way only something built to outlast you can be unhurried. When Compliance did eventually come (and they came, Lilith, sirens and a fine that took me eight months to pay and a formal warning that sits on my license file to this day), Rainier stood between them and me in nothing but his open shirt and told them, calm as anything, that the fault was entirely his, that he'd take whatever they wanted to give him. They couldn't touch him. His compliance record, three hundred years spotless, bought him a pass they'd never have given a younger vampire, and it bought me a warning instead of a revocation.

I still work the Exchange. I still wear the cuff. But I keep one client off my public roster now, an arrangement the Exchange doesn't know about and never will, and once a month, sometimes twice, Rainier Bertrand comes to my apartment instead, where there is no sensor array and no thirty-second grace window and no metered clock at all, and he curls around me in the dark and takes what I give him and gives back pieces of a century I have started, slowly, to remember as if I'd lived it myself. I know Paris in 1890 now. I know the taste of coffee that hasn't existed in two hundred years. I am becoming, one stolen year at a time, a woman who has lived far longer than her license says she has.

I used to think the edge was the thing you avoided if you were smart. Now I think it's the only place I've ever actually felt myself, all the way to the skin, all the way past it.

Yours, from the fortieth floor and further back than that now, Lark Victors