Stories: All-New Tales

My senses were in such a heightened state from the corona and saving a life that it took me a while to identify the potency of her scent. There was a bouquet to her blood that I had never experienced before. It drew me on a primal level. I found myself having to hold back from biting her right there in the coffee shop.

“Is that why you tried to kill yourself?” I asked.

“Tarver is always depressed,” she said. “He mopes around the house when he’s not working and he’s jealous of my painting. Whenever I’m working he finds some way to interfere. Either he needs my attention or finds something wrong with the house. He comes in with plumbing problems and unpaid bills—anything to distract me, anything so he doesn’t have to feel bad about me living my life.”

“That’s not really an answer,” I said.

“I don’t owe you an answer, Juvenal. What kind of name is that anyway?”

“I was very sick once,” I said. “A woman saved my life and after that she suggested that I go by the name Juvenal Nyx.”

“Why?”

“It means ‘child of the night.’”

“It’s like you were named after a poem.”

“The disease left me with certain allergies to natural light. If I go out in the sun, I get weak. If I stay out long enough, I lose consciousness.”

“And do you get a rash?” she asked. She was smiling, less than an hour out from her attempted suicide.

“No, but I get a kind of allergy to bright moonlight too.”

“Wow. And you call this better?”

“It is best. I know the parameters of my existence and experience ecstasy every night.”

This was true though I had never spoken it. I wasn’t cursed or debilitated. I didn’t miss my family or friends. The life I had known decades before seemed to me like a rat trapped in a researcher’s maze. My sex, my race, my repetitious existence—these were the chains of mortality, the bonds that I had shrugged.

“Ecstasy?” she uttered.

The look in her eyes told me that I loved her. The scent on her breath was the odor of procreation.

“Why did you try to jump?” I asked.

“It just all came together,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I didn’t want to go home to Tarver and I was sure that I’d never paint again.”

“Why not just leave him?”

“Because that would kill him and then I’d have his death on my head.”

“And so you’ll do it again?”

“I don’t think so,” she mused.

Iridia had dark bronze skin and large almond-shaped eyes. Her gold-brown hair was long and thick, tied back into a braid that was reminiscent of a broad rope.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I believe in fate and you saved me at the last possible moment, when I had given up.”

“Because I saved you, you won’t try to kill yourself again?”

“Not just because you saved me,” she said. She reached across the table and took my cold hand in hers. “I had already jumped. I could feel the gravity give way beneath me. I had given myself up to death and then you caught me and held me.”

We gazed into each other’s eyes and I was lost.

“Would you ever give up the sun?” I asked.

“Never,” she said. “I’m a watercolorist and I need it to feed my heart.”

“But you were willing to die,” I argued.

“Not anymore.”

It was at that moment I came into control of my life. All that had gone before was immediately obvious and clear. I had existed as human being for twenty-two years following the pathways that were prescribed. I had a race and gender, nationality and language. I was what the world made me. And then, when Julia came, I was what she made me. So tenuous was my existence that the transformation she wrought tore apart the paper-thin fabric of my identity. I hadn’t even been able to maintain my name. I had, for fifty—five years, never made a choice on my own. I was always led, always formed by others’ hands. Even my school politics came from a knee-jerk desire to belong.

Iridia had found her identity with a simple gesture, had changed her direction when she saw a new light.

“Will you come home with me tonight?” I asked.

“But I have to go back to Tarver in the morning.”

“All right.”

I WANTED MORE THAN anything to bite Iridia, to change her from human being to predator child. The fang in my lower jaw throbbed as we kissed, as we made love, but I would not bring it out.

I knew, instinctively, that if I turned her, we would have to separate. That is why Julia left me before I awakened to my powers. The scent of love for us is fatal. Once we make our children, we are compelled to devour them.

This hunger yawned in me like the chasm under Iridia when she leaped from the Brooklyn Bridge; it is why I had never come across a being like myself. We are very rare. Our love is truly a hunger, and we, like our human forebears, are our own best prey.

“WHAT’S YOUR REAL NAME, Juvenal Nyx?” she asked in the early hours of the morning after we’d made love for hours.

I had to think for a few moments before saying, haltingly, “James Tremont of Baltimore.”

“You don’t sound sure,” she said before kissing my naval.

“It’s been so long.”

“You’re not that old.”

“I’m older than I look.”

Her nostrils flared and the gland under my jaw swelled with venom. I pressed against it and kissed her left nipple.

“Bite it,” she whispered.

“A little later,” I said.

“I want it now.”

“How will I ever get you to come back if I don’t make you wait?”

She sat up in the bed, in the empty underground room.

“I’ve never met a man like you,” she said.

“Then we’re even,” I replied, thinking that I hadn’t talked so much in decades.

“You really don’t need music or books or even paintings on the wall?”

“For a long time I thought that the only things I needed were food and sleep.”

“And now?”

“So much more that I can’t even begin to articulate it.”

“I’ll have to tell Tarver about tonight,” she said softly.

“Yeah.”

“I won’t leave him.”

I wanted to tell her that the love wrenching my chest could never live with her—my hunger for her soul was too great.