Chapter 7: The First Feeding

The evening after Nora woke in the sealed palace's guest room, brushed her teeth with the precise efficiency of someone for whom routine was armor, and dressed in clothes that had been laid out for her (eighteenth-century, she catalogued, with modern understructure, suggesting Casimir had acquired them at some point and updated them), Casimir asked to feed.

"There is a formal protocol for this," he said, and he was standing in the palace's library again, having led her back to it as the sun was setting, painting everything in tones of amber and rust. "It is considered discourteous not to ask clearly, and to proceed without explicit agreement. So I am asking: will you allow me to feed from you?"

Nora processed this the way she'd learned to process everything in his presence: as information requiring cataloging and response.

"Yes," she said.

She said it with the same tone in which she would have agreed to a blood draw at a physician's office. Clinical. Professional. Removed. She believed, in that moment, that she could treat this as procedure, as transaction, as the mechanics of an arrangement that was entirely sensible despite its surface impossibility.

She was, she would later reflect, spectacularly wrong about this.

Casimir had selected a small sitting room attached to the library proper, one that contained a velvet settee and a single candelabra. He'd arranged the lighting carefully, she noted. Not too bright, not so dim that she couldn't see. Deliberately calibrated. She sat on the settee, and he positioned himself beside her, at an angle that suggested he was approaching this with the same formality he brought to everything else.

"Your wrist or your neck," he said. "The wrist is less intimate, but the neck is more efficient. Your choice."

Nora, still operating on the principle that efficiency was a virtue and that clinical distance could be maintained through careful attention, offered her wrist. He took it very gently, cradling it as if it were something delicate, something that required the same care he brought to handling the oldest books in his collection.

He didn't break the skin with fangs that descended or transformed. Instead, she felt his teeth against her skin, and then a small, precise opening, and then the sensation of her blood beginning to move, to flow, to be drawn.

It was the easiest thing in the world to feel clinical about for approximately five seconds.

Then the sensation changed.

Nora had expected it to hurt, or to feel invasive, or to trigger the biological disgust response that came when something began to feed on one's body. Instead, it felt like something much more complicated. There was pleasure in it, yes, but not the kind of pleasure that was comfortable to think about. It was the pleasure of release, like breathing after having held one's breath too long. It was relief. It was the sensation of something that had been incomplete suddenly becoming more complete, and she was the instrument of that completion.

She kept her eyes on the portrait of Casimir from 1712, the one that hung above the fireplace in the main library, visible through the open doorway. The early eighteenth-century version stared out from his frame with aristocratic disinterest, and Nora tried very hard to maintain disinterest as well. Tried to remain academic about the sensation of this man drawing her blood and the way each draw seemed to correspond to something happening at a very deep level of her physiology. Tried to remember that this was a transaction and not a surrender.

She failed.

The failure was subtle and then absolute. At some point, her hand went from being held to being gripped gently, and at some point, her breathing became something she had to consciously manage, and at some point, the library seemed to tilt slightly and reorganize itself around this single point of contact.

When he finished, he withdrew immediately. More immediately than might have been necessary. He stepped back, his hand releasing her wrist, and she saw a faint line of blood at the corner of his mouth that he was careful not to touch. He was breathing too, she noticed. And his eyes had darkened slightly, the pupils dilated.

But his expression, when he looked at her, was perfectly controlled.

"Thank you," he said. "That was... restorative."

"Don't mention it," Nora said, because she couldn't think of what else to say and because the alternative was to acknowledge that something had shifted in her physiology that couldn't be easily filed into her regular catalog of understanding.

She looked at her wrist. There were two small punctures, barely visible, already beginning to close. She was fascinated by the speed of healing, by the biological efficiency of something designed to seal itself quickly, and she focused on this fascination because it was easier than focusing on anything else.

"I will need to feed again in three days," Casimir said, settling into one of the library chairs with what appeared to be perfect calm. "Unless you are willing to accept feeding twice weekly, which would be more efficient. But I will not take more than you are willing to give."

"Twice weekly is fine," Nora heard herself say.

She found a chair of her own and sat down, her wrist still tingling slightly, her brain still trying to reassert control over the parts of her that were not willing to remain clinical.

Casimir watched her for a moment, and then he said, very quietly: "You asked, yesterday evening, what it was like to sleep for one hundred and seven years. I will answer that now, if you wish."

Nora did wish. She wished very much to return to conversational territory where she could again pretend to understand what was happening.