The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Death Angel

As I thought about how to reach the patient, I wished that some of the nonsense written about us had been true. It would have been very convenient to turn myself into a mist and drift along the ceiling into the oncology unit, noticed by no one. We can’t do that, although the legends that we can may be based on something real. Some of the more observant among us recognized a long time ago that the human susceptibility to suggestion could be exploited. In fact, some of humanity’s oldest myths are very likely tributes to our skills. Circe did not need to turn sailors who happened by her island into pigs; she only needed to make them believe that they were pigs, and they were happy to be led into the sty, fed liberally, and taken out one at a time to have their veins tapped. This hypnotized happiness helps us manage the prey and avoid wasting energy in setting up the feeding.

The “vampires” that throng your popular literature these days distort our natures almost as much as our numbers: we can turn into bats, we are the spawn of Satan, we are lonely and misunderstood so we’re always looking to turn our prey into other vampires, etc., etc.—By the way, that last one? As the predators at the top of the worldwide food chain, you really should have seen the stupidity of that notion. If you had the power to turn the steer from which your steak came into a carnivore with enhanced strength and speed, not to mention a lifespan counted in centuries, would you? How many tigers, grizzly bears, and wolves have you left alive and uncaged, let alone enhanced, in this world?

No, fortunately for us, conversion does not happen as a byproduct of feeding; it takes a lot of work, and we aren’t stupid enough to go around promiscuously bestowing our nature on our food source. —Our only food source. No one knows why, but although we can eat and drink like you, we can’t live more than a few weeks on anything but whole blood from your species. We’re stuck with you, so you’re stuck with us.

That fact has consequences for both sides. We have evolved, both biologically and socially, into creatures that can sustain this symbiosis between us, and it is a symbiosis, a dependency from which both species benefit. Yes, we do cause the deaths of individual members of your species, but we are not parasites on the human species. We are more like the hunter-gatherer groups that used to be your only form of social organization. We recognize our dependency on you; we have come to know your ways well. Some of us have developed the ability to see into your thoughts and memories, just as some of you have always been better at tracking and anticipating the behavior of prey than the rest of you. Like those stone-age trackers, the wisest of us are thankful for the gift that our prey gives us. In fact, we feel for you something not so distant from what you call ‘love.’ The only joy we take in the death of one of you at our hands is the joy of our own survival through the sustenance that the death gives us. Most of us kill only when we must, and we try to minimize the fear and pain for our prey. In fact, some of us make our feeding intensely pleasurable for you, even when we have to feed to the end.

Even the worst of us have nothing to approximate your horrifying custom of war, massive numbers of you straining every nerve, exploiting every bit of ingenuity, to kill hundreds of thousands of your kind who never wronged you personally. At times we have had to intervene to stop your “wargasm” from wiping you out, and us with you. Even short of annihilation of the species, the waste is horrifying. I have walked the battlefields in the dark, my senses leading me to the deathly wounded, boys lying in their wasted blood, with only a last agony for companionship. I say ‘boys,’ not ‘men,’ though they have been deceived into believing that only this obscenity that is killing them could make them men. Dying, they see the truth. Then they cry for their mothers, or for the sake of pride, they lock that cry behind clenched jaws, but I can hear it screaming from their minds: Mama, find me, make it stop hurting, save my life. I visit them then; of their wishes, I can grant all but the last. The ones I take are the lucky few.

I have held these boys in my arms, murmuring comfort to them, soothing that final and lonely pain, being their mothers, or their wives, or the girl back home. Sometimes the girl back home has stopped writing, and they look up at me from a delirium of pain and ask me what happened to my letters. Sometimes the girl back home is the hopeless crush that they all remember from first youth; the difference is that these boys won’t live to be loved back, to receive someone other woman’s love like a poultice over that boyhood rejection. So I lend them a little of my blood and give them the strength to love that girl, in me. If I gave them enough to save them, I would die. I can only spare a little, and in the short-lived euphoria of that borrowed strength, their bodies celebrate life for the first and last time. While the waves of this supreme human pleasure break over them and hold back the fear and pain, I numb their wound with my saliva. I whisper them into the warm sleep of afterglow. Then I probe with my tongue until I find a big enough vein and take back what I have lent, with interest. They die, but not in pain, not afraid, and not alone.

One of them saw something of the truth of me through the soft haze that I had wrapped around his mind just before the feeding.

“You’re not my mother. You’re the Death Angel, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes, my dear,” I whispered. He was close enough to the truth.

“Why do you call me ‘my dear’?”

I smiled at him. “Because you are dear. And you are mine.”

“You’ve come for me?” He began to tremble.

“Yes, darling. There’s nothing to fear. Hush, now. The pain is going away. You’re going to feel sleepy, warm and sleepy, you feel it already, you feel the glow of warmth spreading out from your core, you feel the relief of letting go . . . letting go. Your wound will stop hurting, I’m going to kiss it and make it better.”

I bent down toward the wound in his belly and slid my tongue into it, lapping his blood as I went. The venom in my saliva is quick; in just a few seconds he sighed, as his torn abdominal muscles relaxed. I lulled him into a deep sleep, I drank, and he died.

These days, most of the wars still going on are in places that are hard to get to, and the battlefields are smaller and more scattered. So when the lunar month changes and I must feed to the end, I favor two kinds of hunting grounds. One is the streets of big cities when the bars are emptying out and the human predators prowl the alleys and dark streets. The only thing merciful about these kills is that they are quick; I rip their throats open and drink enough to kill them in ten seconds. Few of your species would mourn for them.

A different hunting ground is the hospitals, especially the hospice units. In this time, those humans who can afford to try to hide from the sight of the dying. They send their aged and hopelessly sick away, to places where all the patients wait for death. There I can feed. The illnesses in their blood cannot hurt me, although long illnesses drain some of the nourishment from it. Still, especially with the old ones, my feeding often creates an intimacy. To the ones in the last stages of dementia I can give only a quiet sleep, an end to the confusion, an easy passing. For patients who still have some of their imaginations and memories left, sometimes I can make their passing better than easy. No human hunter can say as much.

The difficulty with these institutions is finding the necessary privacy. So, some years ago I bought the training and, in the West, the more important documentation, of a nurse practitioner in “pain management.” This specialty is in growing demand in the hospices. The best time to hunt is the last few hours of the graveyard shift. Usually I can walk right in, wearing a nurse’s uniform. Detached, private hospices are the easiest of all; they are the most lightly staffed, at night. Even nurses who have been working the graveyard shift for months are not truly inured to the hour; on top of their fatigue is their boredom, and sometimes loneliness. The loneliness makes them want to listen to me instead of thinking hard about why I’m there at three in the morning. The boredom is easy to exploit; they’re ready to hear anything new, so by the time I’m halfway through a story, they’re already in a light trance. The fatigue, of course, is my greatest ally, easy to intensify through indirect suggestion, either through the story, or through my commiserations about late-night shifts, how tired we all feel, our bodies knowing that we’re really supposed to be asleep, Mother Nature smoothing our eyelids closed, she knows what’s good for us, we should listen to her, we should listen and relax and close our heavy, heavy eyes . . .

During this particular graveyard shift, the duty nurse had told me, from the depths of her trance, that no one would be coming in for two hours, when the morning shift would start at 6. Plenty of time to feed and to give Mr. Lane Spencer, white male, sixty-seven years old and dying of pancreatic cancer, a good send-off. I also had his chart from her, a good prop for looking as if I belonged in his room, just in case someone appeared unexpectedly.

As is the usual practice in hospices, he was in a room of his own. The sound of his breathing told me he was asleep, as I slipped in. His face had the sharp cheek bones and nose, the fragile-looking skin, of a wasting illness. The simplest and kindest thing would be to take him in his sleep. But just as I resolved to do that, he twitched hard, his eyes opened, staring at the ceiling, and he cried out, “Ah God!” A nightmare, perhaps, or the pain waking him, burning through an insufficient mist of painkillers. He turned his head on the pillow, squinting as he tried to bring my face into focus. His voice rasped,

“Who the hell are you?”

I closed the door behind me. “I’m the night nurse.”

“Like hell you are; I know all the night nurses on this wing.”

“I’m filling in,” I said, projecting a calm confidence. “My name is Lila.” It isn’t, but that’s what was written on the official-looking nameplate I had pinned to my uniform.

“Well, Lila, he replied, with a hard mouth, “It’s not the custom around here to wake dying people in the middle of the night.” He reached for the call button with his right arm, on which I could see the shrunken remains of muscles that once would have been called “wiry.” Now they looked like twisted clothesline. I caught his reaching arm in one hand; his eyes widened in surprise. My grip on his forearm allowed my thumb and index finger to meet. I modulated my strength carefully; I wanted neither to hurt him nor to leave suspicious marks on his body.

“Actually, I didn’t wake you,” I said softly. You cried out; it must have been the abdominal pain. I came in to see what I could do for you.”

“You could give me some more goddam morphine.”

“I’m sorry, Lane; we’ve already given you as much as the doctor authorized for the night.” This was true. I had seen the notation on the chart. Even hospices for the dying had some administrators worried about fanatics or ambulance chasers suing the institution for “endangering” the patient with life-shortening doses of opiates—or for unofficially assisting in suicide.

“Lane?”

He groaned a little and turned his face away.

“Lane, I can help you with the pain, but I need you to wake up for a few minutes first.

“Wha—What?”

“I need to do a short neurological exam first; it won’t take long, and it won’t hurt.”

“Now?”

“Yes, Lane. Now is the time.”

“This doesn’t make—“

He gasped and his back arched suddenly, then he fell back. I could see him fighting to get control of the pain, forcing a deep breath and a slow exhale.” Then he turned toward me slowly, his eyes, crusted in the corners, the whites stained with the old-mustard color that told of failing kidneys.

“All right, get on with it and go. I’d rather not cry and piss myself in front of company, even uninvited company.”

“Thank you, Lane; this will be easy,” I whispered in my “reassuring” voice, a sort of low, breathy tone. It’s actually not that different from my hunting voice. “I want you to look into my left eye, and then into my right eye, when I tell you to, yes? Right eye first, right here, good, now left eye, that’s it, and now the right eye, yes, and left eye. I see that you’re beginning to blink more often, right eye again. Take a deep breath . . . and release it . . . good. Blinking even more. That’s probably because your eyes are tiring, and when they get too tired to stay open, you can just close them, left eye now, that’s right, as they begin to water and the lids get heavy, we can see how long you can keep concentrating on the left eye . . . and now the right eye. Do you see the green around the blue in my right eye? Compare the colors with the left eye, that’s it, and now we’re going to add a coordination piece, as you switch back to the right eye, I want you to inhale, and when you switch to the left eye exhale, that’s it, whoops, now inhale as you look at the right eye, I know this can be a little tiring, to keep concentrating when it’s so late and you’re wanting to sleep, but don’t worry, I won’t keep you from sleep much longer, left eye, and exhale, and as you do let everything go and let your tired eyes close, they need rest and so do you, just close your eyes and listen, it’s easy to listen as you close your eyes and relax even more deeply, breathing easily, a floating feeling and very comfortable, a sleepy, dreamy feeling, and—”

He snapped awake, to my surprise. “Young lady, are you trying to hypnotize me? This was no neurological exam. So why are you in my room at three in the morning?”

I played for time and adopted a teasing tone: “Why were you hollering like a banshee at three in the morning?”

The challenge set him back, but his reply was not playful.

“Because my gut is on fire. I’d gladly let you borrow my terminal pancreatic cancer with a side order of metastasis to the kidneys, if you’re too damned thick to get the picture.”

There was a silence, during which I scolded myself silently for so misreading him. He winced around the eyes, sighed, sketched out a vague gesture in the air that turned out to be an apology.

“That was a shitty thing to say,” he said. “I didn’t use to say shitty things, even to people who pissed me off. Lucy didn’t like it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Chronic pain doesn’t make saints out of people, and my snappy comeback wasn’t very funny, or very appropriate. Can we swap apologies?”

He shrugged a little, and one corner of his mouth rose slightly. “Okay. But you still haven’t answered my question. Were you trying to hypnotize me just now?

I smiled innocently back at him.

“Hypnotize you? Why?” I asked, shaking my head in faux surprise. “Of course, it is one of the listed options for pain relief, and I am certified in it, but I wonder why you thought . . . Did you start feeling sleepy? You did, didn’t you, and you thought I was doing it.” I slipped back into the velvet voice. “Maybe I was, just a little. Do you still feel a little sleepy? It is awfully late, and you must be—”

He pointed his right forefinger at me, pistol-like. “No you don’t,” he said. “Lucy was a therapist for thirty years, and she used it once in a while herself, to treat phobias. She even . . . Well, let’s just say I know what an induction sounds like, so don’t try to . . . Aren’t you supposed to ask my permission?”

“Well,” I said, “That’s an interesting question, because everybody knows that hypnosis only works if you want it to work, so asking permission is just a legalistic formality, if you really want me to relax you with my voice, and capture your focus with my eyes, and lull you into a deep, soft place where pain can’t reach you, I can do that for you, Lane; maybe your Lucy used to do that when you’d come home after a hard day, and she’d lull you into a trance so that you could unwind enough to make love, and then sleep, that beautiful easy sleep after sex—“

I stopped, mostly because he had begun to cry, which wouldn’t usually break an established trance, but would shut down the induction. I seemed to be consistently off my game this night.

“I’m sorry, Lane. I didn’t mean to . . . What is it?”

He scowled and cleared his throat. “I always prayed we’d go at the same time, because I knew it would be bad for either of us to be the one left behind.” He took a shaky breath. “But I didn’t know how bad it would . . . I miss her. My Christ, I . . .”

Then he sobbed like one of those boys out on the battlefield, and I leaned over his bed and took him in my arms. “Sshh, Lane, it’s okay, you don’t have to wait any more. I’ll take you to her. Away from here, away from the pain, away from this poor, worn-out, hurting body . . .”

He blinked at me, with a little fear, but more of something else. He pushed at my shoulders and I laid him back down against the elevated head of the bed. He looked up at me wide-eyed. My voice had calmed him enough so that he saw the implications of what I had just said.

“Who . . . what are you?”

I reached out slowly and stroked the side of his face, smiled gently at him. “Some call me the Death Angel.”

“My God. Are you some psychotic killer?”

“I’m not psychotic.”

“But you came to kill me.”

I shook my head. “You’re already dying, Lane. Both of us know that. I came to lead you past the hard part. To the good part—“

“What is going on here?”

A bald, pear-shaped man in a suit was standing in the doorway.

“Nurse,” he demanded. “Why are you sitting on a patient’s bed? And you will release that wholly inappropriate embrace now.”

I stood up and faced him, but spent a few moments in silence, thinking. Kill this man, then kill Lane, drink fast and leave? Not how I had wanted it, but self-preservation demanded—

“Who the hell are you?” Lane demanded, with an even broader outraged-customer tone than he had used when he asked me the question.

“I am the Internal Health-Care Procedures Auditor, working for the Risk Manager, and this is an authorized unannounced inspection,” he said stiffly. “And this floor is unacceptable! The head nurse on duty is passed out, apparently so drunk or doped that I couldn’t even wake her. And either you have an unsanctioned visitor in your room long after visiting hours, or a nurse is wearing an obsolete style of nameplate and behaving in a—“ Lane overrode him.

“This woman is a private nurse my daughter hired. She is helping me with pain management, which is a major aspect of my terminal care that your doctors are neglecting, because they’re more worried about the appearance of euthanasia than they are about my pain, so why don’t you make a note of that and get the hell out. My lawyer will be contacting you tomorrow to learn what corrective measures you have put into place.”

“Mr. . . uh, certainly your pain management is a crucial concern to us in the Windhover Healthcare System; however, it is not within my warrant to—“

“Then let the nurse that my family hired at great expense do the job you should have done and—“

He broke off to groan loudly and then cough violently, thrashing in the bed. The Auditor glanced nervously at me and thereby did not see the wink that Lane tipped me.

“Please give me room to work,” I ordered briskly. “I’m familiar with this reaction when Mister Spencer is placed under stress. So write his name down—Lane Spencer—if you need to, and then it would be better if you left.”

The Auditor turned toward the door but said, “I’m going to find the physician on call to—” He didn’t finish because I slipped up behind him and put an augmented bare-arm choke on him, tipping his balance backward so that only I was supporting most of his weight. Known popularly and not inaccurately as the “sleeper hold,” this technique doesn’t hurt at all, really, but it’s efficient; the Inspector clawed ineffectually at my arm for no more than five seconds before his efforts became disjointed, almost uninterested. He made a gargling noise in his throat. “Hush,” I whispered in his ear. “I won’t kill you; you’re just going to sleep, and you’ll wake up with barely even a headache. Easy . . . going to sleep now, light-headed, drifty, just go with it, listen to my voice, that’s good, reelaaax.” I eased up on the arm pressure to start his transition from hypoxia to hypnosis. “Even more deeply relaxed now, hearing only my voice, you feel comfortable, breathing easily, comfortable and sleepy, still hearing my voice as if it were your own, inside your head.” I felt his muscles go limp, but with none of the mini-convulsions of extreme hypoxia. Perfect.

“Can you hear me, Auditor?”

“Yes,” he mumbled.

“Very good,” I purred. Now, tonight has been very confusing for you, I know, but the good news is that you can forget all that. Everyone is all right. Everything is as it should be, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ve done your job, and now you will go home to a good night’s sleep, remembering only that everything is all right, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Very good. Now stand up, and by the time you leave this wing, you will forget that you saw me here, forget that I spoke to you, forget that you found the Duty Nurse asleep, remember only that you checked the wing thoroughly and everything was all right. You will be wide awake and alert going home, but remember only what I told you about tonight’s events on this wing. You understand?

“Understand,” he said drowsily.

“Good. Open your eyes and go now.”

He got up and walked out of the room without a word or a glance at me. I watched him go down the hall, looking normal enough, just rather abstracted, a man with a lot on his mind. I heard the elevator arrive and return him to his uneventful evening. Lane and I exchanged grins of mischievous conspiracy, before we remembered what was to come. I felt a surprising sadness, I who have taken the lives of boys and girls still in their teens. This man had lived a full enough life.—Fuller than most: he had loved someone so much, for so long, that life without her was unendurable. And yet.

“What now, Lane?” I asked.

“Seems to me that’s your call. You’ve put just about everybody in the wing to sleep, and I’m bed-ridden. The way you moved on that guy, though, I don’t think I could have taken you on the best day I ever lived.”

“You’re right, but I hope you’re not silly enough to feel bad about that. Would you expect to have a fair chance against a tiger, or a polar bear?”

“Point taken,” he shrugged. “But I have to tell you, if you’re some kind of hired super-assassin, I think you’re in the wrong room. I’m a retired high school English teacher. I’ve never witnessed a criminal act, or borrowed money from the mob, and I’ll be dead in a month anyway.”

“A week,” I said softly. I meant to say it gently, but how can a reply like that be gentle?

“How—“ he began.

“I read your chart.”

“They told me a month.”

“They gave you the best-case figure, or the worst-case—“

“—Depending on how you look at it,” he said wryly, and looked away from me.

“How do you look at it, Lane? Are you ready?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, you tried to cover for me with the auditor, instead of screaming for help,” I said. So . . .”

“I thought you would kill him if I called for help.”

“I know. And when I put the choke on him, I heard you trying to get out of bed, to pull me off him. I heard you gasp at the pain, but you tried again. I think you’re one of the “brave” ones that your people write and sing about so much. You’re not afraid to face your death. That comforts me.”

“What are you?”

“I think you know.”

“Are you seriously telling me you’re a vampire?”

“Yes. Does that scare you?”

He looked at the wall and shook his head, as if surprised. “No. I just don’t give a shit any more. For a while I thought I had to hang on for our girls. Lucy asked me—no, she said she knew I’d take care of them, be both me and . . . . I said I would, but it was a lie.”

He was trying to speak through a throat clogged with grief:

“Nobody could be Lucy.”

A few seconds passed in silence. I didn’t know what to say except, “I wish I had met her,” which was somewhat true.

“She was the best person I ever knew. And somehow, this woman loved me. She got her second-best prayer answered; she went first. She didn’t have to wait . . .” He swallowed. “I’m glad she didn’t have to go through this, but now I can’t stand it. It’s too hard. Go ahead and . . . ”

He looked away, his eyes wet, angry at himself for it, like so many men from his place and time. I shook my head. The pains of life are enough, without being ashamed to show that you feel them.

“I don’t want to be a vampire, though. . . Nothing personal,” he added quickly,

“You won’t,” I said with a half-smile. “I promise.”

He nodded a little—in embarrassment that he might have hurt my feelings, I thought. It was sweet.

“If we had time,” I reminded him gently, “I’d spend the rest of the night hearing whatever you were willing to tell me about her. But the morning shift will be coming on soon, and so will the morning sun. I have to be gone before they get here.”

“You could just go. And not kill me.”

“I could,” I said. I’d have to find someone else very soon, but I could just leave. Do you want me to?”

“Do I have a choice?”

I’m still not sure why I said, “Yes, you do.”

He hadn’t expected that answer. He seemed at a loss; then he said, “Could you come back the day after tomorrow, after my girls visit?” He sounded almost childlike.

“It’s too dangerous, Lane. Posthypnotic suggestions wear off if they’re not reinforced. I can’t walk into a group of people who all have a vague sense of having seen me in the same very odd dream. After tonight, I can’t come back to this place for a couple of years.”

He was silent for about ten seconds. It seemed longer.

“Then go ahead” he whispered. “Do it now. Every time I see the girls, I say goodbye, because I’m afraid that the next time they see me the cancer will have gone into my brain and I won’t have a mind. I don’t want them to—“

“I know.” I reached a hand slowly toward his head. I only meant to comfort him, but I think he believed that I was going to kill him at that moment. He blurted out,

“How old are you?” These random questions are not unusual when people are conscious of their imminent death, even if they want it.

“Three hundred and fifty-two,” I told him.

There was a silence, and then he said,

“You don’t look a day over three hundred.”

I smiled, although I had heard several variations on that joke. Then he turned serious.

“Were you ever in love? Does your kind . . . do you love?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes we even love people who can die. It’s not wise, but it happens.”

“Why is it—Oh. Of course. The pain. Of watching.”

“Yes,” I said. Very few of us will endure it more than once. Then there are those who think that we’re ‘lowering ourselves’ by loving candles.”

“By loving what? Oh . . . Macbeth. ‘Out, out, brief candle.’ You read our books? Of course you do. What do you write yourselves?”

“We don’t make much art,” I said. “What we make never is as good as the best of yours.”

He nodded. Now he looked very much like an English professor. “Yes. I see that. It doesn’t have to be as powerful. No death, “the mother of beauty mystical.” He took a deep breath. “Lucy and I: our friends will remember us, and then only our children will, and then they’ll die too, and then we’ll just exist as a few scraps of stories, as old snapshots in a dusty cardboard box.”

I leaned over—slowly, so as not to frighten him—and kissed his forehead. “I’ll remember you. And I’m probably good for another three hundred and fifty-two years—if I eat right.”

We shared a brief smile at my joke, which was also old. Then his face closed again.

“You barely know me. And Lucy is just a name to you.”

“She could be more,” I whispered. “And I could know you better.”

“What?”

“When I . . . feed, I often share memories of my—donor. It just lasts for a few seconds; I think my feeding opens their minds to me; we share the ecstasy, and sometimes a train of memories comes along with it.”

“Ecstasy? “

“Yes, ecstasy. It feels really good for both of us. Maybe it has something to do with certain properties of my saliva, evolved to avoid struggles when . . . it happens. But there are fringe benefits for the pr—Anyway, it normally only lasts for a few seconds. But if you let me in first, if you let me relax your barriers, I could share many more memories before I actually begin to—you know. I could feel what Lucy was . . . is, to you. I’d like to do that, if you’ll let me.”

“You’re not the average vampire.”

I laughed. “You’re an expert? You’re not the average married guy.”

“You’re an expert?”

“Well, kind of.” We both laughed a little, but the silence afterward felt awkward.

Then he looked right into my eyes, not with the glazed look of mesmerized prey, but as one person recognizing another.

“All right,” he said.

I kissed him again, on the eyelids this time.

“I’ll make it good for you, Lane, the best I can. I promise. Now just keep looking into my eyes. Take a deep breath, and as you let it out, let go of all the hard things. The fear goes . . . because you know that I will bring you no pain . . . only pleasure, and sleep, and liberation.”

He sighed and blinked his eyes, slowly.

“All the muscles of your scalp, your forehead, your jaws relaxing, and the little muscles around your eyes, those tiny muscles so weary now with the weight of the eyelids, releasing that burden just as your mind is releasing the pain. Your mind has no need to recognize it now. Pain is just a danger signal, but here, with me, you are past all danger. I’m bringing you your own sweetest memories, and pleasure, and sleep, a soft ending. Here comes a memory: lying in the dunes on the Oregon coast, behind a deserted stretch of beach. You are just learning each other’s bodies; even the touch of your tongues is deliciously new as they swirl in their dance. And then Lucy disengages and softly stabs her warm, wet tongue into your ear.”

I did so, too, and I also nipped him lightly on the earlobe, just taking a sip of his blood, old and sweet despite his illness, as if it carried something of his life. I let a little venom enter his bloodstream, lulling him toward dream.

“You gasp at the surprising pleasure. Now she lets her tongue glide down the side of your neck, and you shiver, and your strong hands clutch and squeeze her muscled hips, pulling her sex into yours as it swells . . .”

I rubbed the heel of my hand over the crotch of his gown, lightly scratching with my nails. His penis barely rose, but I could read the pleasure from his mind.

“. . . And she pulls up your T-shirt and laves her tongue down your belly, over the ripples of muscle, and she purrs and looks up at your face. What does she say, Lane?”

In a dreamy monotone, he answered, “She says, ‘Let me show you with my mouth how much I love you.’”

“Yes, and no one has ever done that for you before. Lucy is a more experienced lover; she doesn’t try to hide that from you. She trusts you to trust her, and she uses pleasure for its true purpose, to make love, and now her tongue slides along the crease of your groin, then draws a warm, wet line from your balls to the head of your penis, sliding down once more to tickle your balls and suck one gently into her mouth, massaging it with her lips . .”

I did, too, and then I moved up his shaft, sucking the blood into it to build his erection, tickling with my tongue just beneath the folded ridge of his circumcision, and softly stroking his sack with my nails.

Lane moaned, and I could have made him come then, but I wanted to draw out his last pleasure a little longer, and taste more of those memories of Lucy. Then one came to him, and to me—of an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving weekend in Northern California, seventy degrees and sunny. Lane was renting a house in North Oakland, a house with an eight-foot fence around the backyard. The two of them were naked under the sun, and Lucy was smoothing suntan lotion over the pale, muscled buttocks, down below the border of his well-tanned back. The two of them could not get enough of touching each other, tasting each other, exploring every orifice as if mining their bodies’ depths for pleasure, for the joy of love, even for the taste of their fears, so that they could make defying those fears a tribute to each other, so that they could make lulling those fears one more kind of caress exchanged between them.

Lucy and I whispered, “Will you let me try something? Will you trust me?

And he said, “You know I will,” back then, but he was a little afraid.

Lucy and I whispered, “Then relax, just relax, let me do everything now, and this will feel a little strange at first but if you just relax and go with it, it will start to feel really good. . . . “ He remembered, and I imitated, how Lucy had shifted her position langorously so that her mouth was down near his stiffening penis and she could reach around behind him with one hand. She had squirted a liberal amount of suntan lotion on it, and she was rippling her oily fingertips along the valley of his anus, and then slowly sliding a finger into him.

“Just think about my mouth,” she whispered, “For now, just feel my mouth around your cock, while it sucks an orgasm out of you.”

There was a bottle of skin lotion on Lane’s bed table; the nurses use it for back rubs to keep bedsores away; of course, the best of them use it for backrubs because they know that to be lovingly touched is a need that people never outgrow. The bottle had a pump top, so I was able to squirt some onto my palm one-handed.

He gasped as I slipped a lotion-smooth finger into his anus, probing to the left for his prostate gland. I felt it easily, enlarged as it was, and I petted it only gently with my finger while I sucked his cock, now much nearer the degree of firmness that would have been normal for his level of arousal, most of the way down my throat. In the light of a flaring memory I knew that she had begged him to come for her, and he had said, “What about you?” and she had hushed him, told him that for tonight she only wanted to bathe him in pleasure, and whispered, “Come for me, my love, it’s shooting up your cock like magma, you can’t hold back, I don’t want you to, I want your seed now,” and I pressed his prostate and thought of taking his blood at the moment of orgasm, through his cock, the tiny sting of my fangs obliterated by the flood of pleasure washing over him. Yet I did not. I just made him come, one last joyful spasm wetting my throat with his semen. Yes, of course I swallowed it. We are not succubi; we can’t live on the stuff, any more than you can live on catsup, but sometimes it’s just the right condiment.

“Would you have wanted me to take you during your moment?” I whispered. He smiled at me as if he were now the older one.

“You brought my memories back clearer than ever,” he said. “I have them all with me now, not just this one. I can see her, in a linen gown and a crown of wildflowers at our wedding. We had color shapshots of it, but now I can remember how she moved in it. How she came to me, when we claimed each other in front of our friends. There are hundreds of moments like that, and now I can see them all. Thank you. I don’t need anything else, and you’re welcome to my blood. I’m not sure what you are; I don’t think you’re a demon. If there are such things, I doubt that love is something they can even begin to understand. I’d be pleased to know your name, though, if you’re willing to have it known for these few minutes.

“When I was a woman,” I said, “It was Gwendelyn.”

“Take what you need now, Gwendelyn, and let me go.”

“All right, Lane,” I said, and the tenderness in my voice was not feigned; in fact, the tone was a little ragged at first. “Look into my eyes once more, Lane, relax, and let your mind and spirit slip free of their old comrade, that weary body; let them lay it down for its promised rest from pain. Listen to my voice, and as you go to sleep, know that there are many kinds of love. My kind is for you tonight. Greet Lucy for me, there she is, at the end of the tunnel, just a short passage through the dark. Fare well in your journey, and now sleep, no pain, just sleep.”

He closed his eyes, sighed, his face at peace. I licked the side of his throat and waited a few seconds before my fangs pierced the jugular vein, and I drank.

There was one more thing I could do for him; sometimes they gasp and struggle for a few seconds as their lungs try to pump more air into so little blood.

“Your diaphragm is numb, Lane; no itch to breathe, no need any more, my voice is like a cool lotion soothing away that itch. There is just peace, and a floating release. Release, and sleep.”

He died peacefully.

I would have no need to seek another victim the next day, and I slipped out of the building without difficulty, to continue my three-hundred and fifty-third year of living. We still call it that; none of us use the expression ‘undead.’ But some, not necessarily the oldest among us, have exposed themselves deliberately to true death, sitting out in a deserted meadow to wait for the dawn. Such a choice is inexplicable, the rest of us tell ourselves, or a kind of madness. Surely it cannot be envy.