Charles loved his sister. From the moment he met her, hungry and filthy and ready to flee from the kitchen if he gave her the slightest reason, there had been no other option other than to love her. She was under his protection from that day forward, the only other like himself in the world...or at least the only one like himself he'd ever found.
His feelings toward her never changed in life, or he told himself they didn't. Her feelings, though, did, so that eventually part of protecting her became ignoring the hints about the way she felt toward him, feigning ignorance about the real reasons she wanted him to stay out of her mind.
One night—drunk and off his footing, or even the weak, soft creature he was then would have seen it coming—Charles met with a mishap in a dark alley. When he rose from an unmarked grave three days later, he found he could think only about two things: his hunger, the way his entire being trembled and shuddered with it, and Raven.
He secured an invitation to a friend's home. Fed, bathed himself, borrowed a change of clothes from that friend, who would not ever need to change his clothes again. By the time he felt like himself again, a person instead of a raw set of instincts, the sun had risen, so he stayed where he was and tried to rest. But he couldn't sleep, thinking now only of Raven. Had he ever really believed he'd never noticed her breasts when she started them? Had he never so much as glanced at them, full and ripe as they had grown over the years? Had he truly tried to convince himself that he didn't want to taste her tight, hot cunt, or to bury himself in it while she screamed? Had so many of his dying thoughts really been that he had to fight long enough to make certain Raven never encountered such a creature herself? All of that seemed so foolish now.
When the sun set again, he slunk through the streets until he reached the mansion. He found Raven's window easily, pleased to glimpse lamplight through the curtain rather than having to wait for her to come to bed.
He rapped the windowpane until the curtain was shoved aside and Raven's faced appeared before him. She gasped, then threw the window open. "Where have you been? I've been worried sick!"
"I've been thinking," Charles said mournfully—the way he always had whenever he'd come to any inconvenient conclusion. "May I come in?"
"I suppose." Raven whirled away from the door, anger overtaking her previous fear, the way it always did once any danger was over.
Charles climbed in the window, contrived to look mournful some more. "I'm sorry to have frightened you. I only...I needed some time away. To think. Do you see?"
"No. You're doing it again. I can't read your mind, you know."
"...Right, you're right. Well. I've been thinking about us. The way we are together. The way we could be."
Raven's heartbeat had begun to slow a bit, but now sped up again, going even faster now than it had when he'd appeared at the window. It was a delicious pulse, throbbing in the back of Charles' mind, begging for everything he wanted to give her. "What are you talking about?"
"I think you know." Charles stepped toward her, reached out to stroke her cheek. "I know you think about me. I think about you, as well. That's why I had to go away. Just for a few days. I couldn't think straight when I was around you. I couldn't come to any kind of decision with you right here."
It was so easy to find the words to bring her hope, to make her believe. She'd been pining after him for years, after all. She'd have believe anything. All the things she wanted him to say were right at the forefront of her mind, ripe for the twisting.
"Really?" she said.
"Really."
"So, what have you decided?" She was trembling, trying not to, ready to shout at him should he give the wrong answer, ready to leave him forever if he rejected her cruelly enough (or worse, if he did it kindly).
"I'm here, aren't I? I'm with you," and then Charles tasted her, just a little, the innocent, benign way she thought she wanted.
It took little coaxing for that chaste little kiss to become more. It took barely more than that for them to lie down in her bed together, her thigh clutched around his middle, his hand stroking her breast. Charles looked, and saw that Raven wasn't quite virginal; she'd done this much and a little more with the stable-boy a few months ago, then come back to this bed and done it again by herself, pretending Charles was the one who was with her. And now he was, and she ached and grew wet, and when Charles grew hard against her thigh, she wanted him inside her. She'd have let him do anything he wanted.
If he'd been honest enough with himself a week ago to admit he wanted it in the first place, her wanting it would have been enough. But he'd changed while he'd been gone, and now he wanted something else from her entirely.
"Please, Charles," Raven said, when the tip of his finger began to tease around the opening to her slick cunt, never quite penetrating, never quite giving her what she needed.
"We have all night," Charles countered. He pulled his hand up her damp curls, draw wet trails along her belly, imagining the pink curls of her intestines, tucked not so far beneath her soft skin.
Raven, impatient Raven—no matter how long she'd pined for him, she'd never have accepted that response. She should have whined made demands, even flipped him on his back to have her way with him now that she had him here. And yet, all she said was, "All right."
She was uneasy for a quarter of an hour or so, growing a little more so each time she did or said something that wasn't what she would have, something that would have been right for some other girl, but not for her. Then, between one moment and the next, she understood what was happening, that this thing she had never realized she feared from him had become a reality.
Stop it, she said sharply, and in the meantime her mouth said, "God, yes, Charles."
Get off me, even while her back arched at his touch as he trailed kisses from her breasts down to the hair between her legs.
Oh God, no, please don't, don't— she cried when he made her ripple back to blue. He parted her legs, and there she was, open and humiliated before him, every nightmare she'd ever had about losing control come to life, in front of the one person whose opinion she really did care about the most. Please, I'll do anything, even while her voice purred, "I don't mind if you see me like this—but only you."
He licked and sucked her for the better part of an hour. She came five times, clenching around his fingers. Each time, he rode along with her embarrassment, her shame, the moments she wanted to die and the others when she wanted to tear him into pieces. She told her fingers to gouge his eyes out, but all they did was tighten in his hair as her mouth moaned encouragement. The more she tried to struggle, the more Charles wanted the rest, and the more he had to pace himself.
At the end, when she was aching and over-sensitive, her mind begging for nothing more now than for it to end, Charles mounted her. This took a while, too—by then, she wanted nothing more than to go away, to be somewhere else, and that was what her mind tried to do. Charles wasn't going to let her get away with it, not now, not so close to what he'd been waiting for, nearly the very best part; he chased her down and brought her back, so that she'd have to pay attention while he fucked her. She hadn't been virginal, but in this way, at least, she had been a virgin before him. He glided in and out of her, one of her voices inviting him in while another sobbed in the background. He had such a hold of her by now that Raven no longer seemed entirely certain which voice was her own real one.
It was fascinating, to have her hot, tight cunt around him, to be feeling exactly what she felt about the intrusion when she had so little to compare it to. It was even better to have made her say and do what he wanted, to have made her mind recoil from something she'd wanted so badly mere hours ago. Charles didn't know why he'd never done this before, what had stopped him from trying this with any of the other girls he'd taken to bed. Every one of them had had their insecurities; he could have unraveled each and every one of them, and it wasn't that something had stopped him, it was that it had never occurred to him until he'd risen and thought of Raven.
As much as Charles had hoped to prolong this, eventually it ended. When he stiffened on top of her, then sagged down onto her breast, he felt something new, something different, because Raven did—relief, that it was ended now, that it was over.
"You don't really believe that, do you?" Charles asked.
He let her worry about what that might mean for a moment. But he was too ravenous now to delay any longer. Even as he softened inside her, he took her by the chin to turn her head, sank his teeth into her pretty blue throat, and began to feed.
Feeding on Raven was like feeding on anything else: The guttural thing, the animal thing; unsatisfying if all she did was lie there, meaningless without the physical struggle. For that reason, Charles grabbed her wrists and let her mind go.
Days ago, she'd been stronger than him. Now, she was weakened from what he'd already taken from her, and he was strong, so much stronger than he'd been. The more he fed, the more she tired, the more futile her struggles became. Halfway through, Charles had grown hard once more, a combination of their struggle and the new blood that coursed through him, a vitality unlike any he'd ever known before. This time, there was nothing calculated about the way he fucked her, though by the time he came again, she was very still and pale beneath him.
He'd come very close to going too far, he would realize later, when he had knowledge to go along with instinct. He'd realize, too, that if he hadn't been able to make her drink, he'd have lost her either way. Thankfully, though, her heart still beat, if sluggishly, and when he slit his wrist and held it up to her lips, she had enough of a mind remaining for him to tell her to drink from him, to purse her lips and suck and suck, until she'd had so much more of him than his seed.
Not long afterward, she died in his arms. Charles stayed there, holding and watching her for a while. She was a beautiful sight, wan and naked, covered in the beginnings of new bruises, that red stain around her mouth. Charles could have held her for days—but, remembering the confusion of his own awakening, he decided it might be better to leave her alone until it happened. He laid her back down in the bed, placed her hands across her chest, closed her eyes. He draped a blanket over her, covering her from head to toe. He closed the window and drew the curtains closed, making very certain the sunlight would not peak in through any opening come the morning.
Then, Charles went out into the hall, closed and locking her door behind him, and went to play another game, this time with his mother and stepfather. This round didn't last nearly so long; whatever care he'd had for his mother in life was gone now, and he found he didn't want to taste either of them, didn't even want to smell them. There was amusement enough in speaking to them for a few minutes, in letting them see his new face before he snapped their necks.
After that remained the servants, tastier and by far the more fun—especially the cook when it came her turn, for she had liked him more than anyone in this house but Raven. Once a few of them had discovered the game, Charles prevented them from leaving, and snacked upon one every six to eight hours before leaving that one's corpse where their most beloved family member might stumble upon it.
It was a good game, but not as satisfying as it might have been, had he not had to play it alone.
On the eve of the second day, while hunting the butler's son, Charles rounded a corner and came upon another person feeding on the child. He'd last checked on Raven an hour before, and so that perhaps was why it took him a moment to realize Raven had risen, even more quickly than he had himself.
He approached her and she snarled, a warning: she did not intend to share her meal.
"Let me help you," Charles said, remembering how his first feeding had gone, when he'd been newly woken and so weak. It had been a miracle, really, that he'd made it to Raven's window at all.
He grabbed the boy, still struggling, and held him still so Raven could correct her grip. It occurred to him only later that he could have achieved the same effect by taking hold of the boy's mind—but doing it in this way seemed more immediate, seemed right. It seemed like Raven was more likely to notice his effort this way, in the state her own mind was in.
When she had finished, the boy gone limp, they left his body where it had fallen. Charles led her back to the washroom, where he tenderly wiped the stains off her mouth—"You're clean, I promise," he said, when she tried to check herself in the mirror and found nothing to see there but the wall—then led her back to her room. The whole time, he waited, watched her carefully, knowing she was digesting her first meal, that it was helping to change her from a newly born animal into whoever it was she would be now. Knowing little about what was true and what was myth about their kind Charles was still aware on some level that she might not be the person he'd wanted when he started this; she might not be the companion he'd intended, might not desire him in the way she had when she was a sixteen year old girl who fancied her older brother. He'd made her, certainly, but had no guarantee as to what he'd made.
"Does his mother still live?" Raven asked eventually, in as innocent a voice as she'd ever asked him anything.
"...Whose?" Charles asked, startled. He'd begun to wonder about the low-lidded way Raven was regarding him, the cold regard of her yellow eyes, more lizard-like than he remembered them ever being before. Perhaps she wouldn't be pleased with him, after all. Perhaps she'd remained the squealing, soft thing she'd been, of no more use to him than any other prey, looking out at him like a stranger because she'd decided he was one. Or perhaps she'd be so cold now she wouldn't wish to be with him at all. He might have to give up on her and look for another companion like himself, an effort that could take a lifetime if it bore fruit at all...
"James's."
James had been the boy's name. "Oh. Oh, yes." Charles felt nearly shy admitting the next part, hearing the same softness in his voice she'd so often teased him about when he made the mistake of discussing various scientific discoveries he'd read about; knowing that Raven, whatever she was thinking, heard it too: "I'd planned to leave him in his mother's bed. Tuck him in, nice and cozy."
"I have a better idea," Raven said, and this time she said it in the clear, high voice of a child—for she'd just become one, indistinguishable from the boy she'd fed on. The coldness was still there, but there was amusement in it, too. "Shall we play?"
"Let's," Charles said in a low murmur, amused at himself, at his own concerns from moments ago. He needn't have worried, after all. For the first time since she'd risen, he reached out and touched her mind, and was not surprised that what he found there was a perfect twin to all of his own plans and desires.
A day later, after a long and satisfying game, they fed from the boy's mother, and fucked beside her corpse. Raven's fingernails dug red gulfs down Charles' back, and her teeth cut his shoulder to the bone when she wasn't busy teasing, breathy in his ear, "Please don't, Charles, you have to stop, Charles, please, I'll do anything..."
The remaining servants made for another fortnight's fun. After that, there were no living persons left in that house. More importantly, there were beginning to be questions from outside it. After the final slaughter, the final meal and the final fuck, the two waited until dark, then slipped out of Raven's window, hand in hand.
Charles loved his sister, and now they would be together like this, not for the few years they'd shared already, but for all the years that remained. There was a whole world to explore, theirs to amuse themselves with, to play in and feed on as long as they pleased. They were two alike, and like no one else, and oh, it was good.