lina is prey 01
A stag do, leaking slurred Geordie accents at the volume of a football match, staggers along the dockside road. This little seaside town has its charms but such spectacles are not one of them.
Most of them amble or shuffle past your steady tread, but one of them seems surprised to find you breaking through the middle of their meandering group. Maybe he doesn’t like the purpose in your tread. Who knows?
“‘Ey, who’s this fella think he’s ten men like?” A shaved head the shape and definition of a thumb opens its bleary eyes wide and fixes you with an affronted leer.
A couple of them pause on either side of you. The group stretches thin since the stag hasn’t noticed a problem. You keep your gaze soft and let it dance from face to hand to hand to face. Not staring, not looking away. Neutral, not a threat but not cowed. You could certainly handle any number of unarmed drunk fools, but you’ve got a date to keep.
“What ya lookin’ at, boyo?”
“People having fun,” you say, glancing either side. “Off anywhere nice?”
The drunkards not set on being dickheads get it through their heads—also shaven, strangely—that you’re not actually starting anything. One of them laughs at his companion.
“Geoff man, you’d start on a barstool. Get gannin’, we’re fallin’ be’ind.”
“You’re not you when you’re hungry, Geoff,” volunteers the other, clapping Geoff on the back.
Geoff isn’t so easily put off. He steps closer, his breath reeking of cigarette smoke. “No lads, he’s givin’ me the eye, like. You got a problem?”
You don’t have time for this. You do not take him out with extreme violence. You half-step forward, triggering his hands to rise to push or grab you; and having made him commit to some sort of move, you need only side-step past the raised arm and push his shoulder the direction he’s already going. Nice and gentle, it means you’re already past him by the time he’s turning to face you again, and his friends don’t think you’ve done anything aggressive.
“Have a good night, lads,” you say as you continue on your unhurried walk.
He’s still coming in hot, but he has sensible friends. They grab his shoulders and cajole him to drop it and go back to following the stag.
Men are so tedious.
When you arrive your date is overlooking the sea from the little graveyard on the east cliff. She has selected a flowing black dress which the wind wraps and catches mercilessly. You smile faintly to yourself when you see her. The braids in her black-dyed hair are even more ornate than they were when you met her during the day. She must like you.
Fate delivered her to you, though she is no one special. With your pale face, your handsome features, your poised body, your cool eyes that can flash white hot… In this place and time, it would be obdurate not to acknowledge and rely upon your mystique. Still, as you explored the town and marked its myriad changes since your last visit, you were slightly miffed not to be serendipitously engaged by an entranced ingenue near the whalebone arches, or when windswept by the sea, or ascending the 199 steps, or haunting the winding streets…
You were considering visiting the goddamned Dracula museum or, heaven forfend, actually going to the effort of hunting, when you tossed a quid in the cap of a busker with Down’s.
A few moments later, you heard a woman’s voice, speaking to you. “Hey, that was nice of you.” She only needed the excuse to start.
The woman who accosted you shivers in the salt wind—then turns to look directly at you. You allow the smile to remain and warm your features till the shock has a chance to work its way through her system.
It’s so fascinating to watch her unconscious mind fight her conscious. Everyone is edible, but some are prey in their bones, whether they know it or not. Lina is prey
Watch: Even before she sees you—a dark figure leaning against the church wall—the corners of her lips are pulled down by a spasm of terror. She is unusually perceptive: she felt you there and somehow, on some level, she understands that you are dangerous.
But then her conscious mind intervenes. She recognises you. You are smiling a smile tuned half way between tender and charmed—a smile obviously not meant to be discovered. The terror meets recognition and safety.
And then from her subconscious, another impulse, no less deep than the terror: Attraction mixes with the intimation of mortal danger and combines into something that makes her knees literally weak.
That’s what makes her prey.
Having watched the procession reach its conclusion you push yourself from the church wall and approach her at a leisurely pace. “Good evening, Lina.”
She laughs nervously. “Good evening, Crow. You scared me.”
“Yes.” You know you can get away with a wolfish grin. She laps it up; thrills with excitement as you lope towards her. You can practically taste her disappointment as your path curves at the last second. You stand beside her against the railing, looking out over the licorice-black sea. “I’m glad you came.”
“I’m not one to refuse a dare,” she says, turning to face out beside you. She keeps stealing peeks at you, though.
“I don’t recall making a dare?”
“‘Meet you by the bench at such and such a time, alone.’ It’s pretty daring.”
“An invitation,” you say, turning your head to find her peeking. She tosses back her head as a signal of defiance but neither of you is fooled. “And you came willingly. I’m glad you came.”
She has nothing to say to that but your eyes detect a reddening in her cheeks. She’s magnificent. Her black hair would be past her shoulders were it not braided so tightly onto and into itself. The black dress enfolds and—with the wind—caresses a body generous in softness and proportion. Low-cut, even your jaded eyes must linger in anticipation on her décolletage and thence, gracefully arcing up to her jaw, a long and pale throat.
Goth candy.
Perhaps your gaze is a little too predatory. She has no ready answer to what you said. You continue. “Did you decide which was Lucy’s bench?”
She turns her head to look over the graveyard. Several heavy, rough benches lie within the grounds. “Was it Lucy’s?” she enquires of the darkness. “Was it not taken, when Dracula leant over her?”
“No, it was Lucy’s.” You follow her gaze, but check for onlookers rather than choose furniture. “Dracula only took her.” All quiet.
Without looking you take Lina’s hand. She turns to you so you walk away from the railing, into the heart of the bone yard.
Indicating the first candidate of several, you ask, “Is this the one?”
Lina is looking at you strangely, though. The moon reflects in church glass, casts a ghostly light twice removed from the sun. The white of your shirt glows within the gloom. But she’s looking at your face. “Um, no, too… exposed, but no real view of the… sea. Crow?”
You ignore the question in her voice, instead guiding her to another seat. “And this one? Many believe it to be so.”
“Too visible from the path. Lucy wouldn’t have wanted to be interrupted so often by walkers. Crow, your teeth. Are you wearing fangs?”
Oh, the disappointment in her voice. Like someone waking from a dream to find it all make-believe. You smile and shake your head. “Wearing? No.”
“God, Crow, this is so—”
You don’t get to know what it is because she stops when you round on her and look into her eyes. Deep into her eyes. It’s not hypnosis, it’s revelation. Anagnorisis. Her subconscious recognises the intruder into the light of the ancestral campfire, and also finds that she cannot deny it. When your half-smile reveals the tip of a fang again she has no comment, save a whispered, “O God.”
With leaden emphasis, you speak as you walk her toward the bench nearest the church itself. “Lina, is this the place favoured by Lucy?”
Lina shakes her head, then nods. “Yes. It’s in the lee of the wind.” She fails to resist you taking her other hand. “The wind won’t make her lose the page she’s reading, and when she looks up, she can look over the town. Please, don’t…”
“Don’t what? You think I’m a monster?” When she doesn’t answer you allow a little of your desire to show in the set of your eyes. Her knees bend the tiniest fraction. “Here.” You bring her hands to your chest, hold them there under one of yours. “Feel my heart beat. I’m alive. I feel. Lina, when you came here, what did you want?”
The touch of your hand on her face makes her flinch away but then lean against it. Her cheek feels hot against your cool hand. She answers you honestly, in the most oblique fashion. “Are they really real? Show me…”
Your fangs are not flashed in brazen display. Instead, without taking your eyes off hers, you take one of her hands and bring the wrist to your lips. Without pause, only with that same deliberate inevitability, you dip the cutting edge beneath the sensitive skin. Sweet, somehow perfumed, like apple blossom, her blood wells smoothly into your mouth. You’re salivating for the taste of her straight away, and an all-too biological grumble in your stomach greets the first swallowed mouthful.
Three little gulps down and faced with an impolite indicator of very animal hunger, it’s time to see just how much Lina is prey.