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There’s a light stepping just outside Laura’s bedroom door. Featherlight, graceful, like a dancer is practicing a quiet, delicate routine just in the other room. It’s familiar.
Too familiar.
Laura sighs, closing her eyes again firmly. A year after that night in the crypt, and she still can’t stop imagining her. Carmilla’s memory follows her like a shadow—lurking, ever-present, unnoticeable from certain angles but always there. Trailing after Laura and Laura alone, making her hackles raise and a scream catch in her throat before she turns around to see—nothing.
Venice hadn’t cured her. Long nights spent crying in her father’s arms hadn’t cured her. Even writing down her story hadn’t cured her. Perhaps nothing will.
“Perhaps.” Why does Laura use that word? The good doctor made it very clear, sighing remorsefully as he closed his bag, the metallic snap of the latch like a death sentence. Consumption—an almost beautiful disease in its first stages, only to ravage and pillage, leaving its victims as ruined corpses. Nothing much one can do, once they’ve contracted it, except lay in bed and wait to die.
It would be ironic if it weren’t so terrifying. To escape the clutches of the lady Carmilla—because she will always, to Laura, be Carmilla—only to die a year later, in much the same way. Not the same way—Laura remembers frantically checking her body the moment she started feeling ill, terrified that a pair of mysterious pinpricks would somehow have appeared somewhere on her body.
There were none. Carmilla is dead, long dead, staked and beheaded in the Karnatien family crypt. At the very least, Laura should be glad that she will die a holy, mortal death.
Again, the footsteps. Louder this time. Laura almost opens her eyes—for a moment she is well again, and the sun is slanting through the windows, and Carmilla is slinking through her bedroom door, hair loose and smile bright.
But she does not indulge herself. She is already dying, after all. Better to die with her wits about her than as a raving madwoman, swearing she hears the voices of the dead she goes to join.
It should frighten her. Dying. It had a year ago, when she had fallen ill for seemingly no reason, and her lovely, wonderful, mysterious friend Carmilla had plagued her in nightmares as a cat and a shadow and a bloody, leering wraith.
But this death, it almost feels…mundane. Bland. To go like this, slow and transitory, leaving her father behind with no wife, no daughter, no boys to carry on the family name. At her lowest points, Laura remembers staring at her ceiling and contemplating the matter of her own passing with an idle resignation.
It’s at those points that she almost, almost humors the notion her delusions provide. She imagines Carmilla curled up next to her, the way she used to, hair dark and skirts lush against the white of her bedding. Laura imagines Carmilla’s lips curling into that ever-familiar smile, sweet and sly, as she cooes and murmurs and whispers sweet words in Laura’s ear. She imagines the prick of pins on her breast, the prick of long nails as they slip under her nightgown—
The door creaks.
Laura’s eyes snap open with a gasp, hands already tightening around the sheets—but the door is closed. Thinking of all these horrible, unnatural things is putting her on edge. She sighs in frustration, closing her eyes and settling back into the pillows. It would do her well to get some sleep—the clock in the hall has just struck midnight, and the doctor did recommend she try to get plenty of rest. Not that it would cure her, but at the very least to stretch her already dwindling life just a little bit longer.
Oh, she is tired. So very tired. So tired that she almost, almost falls asleep.
It is only a long, thick, heavy lock of hair falling against her cheek that keeps her from it.
“Hello, darling,” a familiar voice purrs, sweet and soft.
Laura jolts back to the waking world, blood freezing in her veins. It can’t be. It can’t be. Father and the Baron said they killed her, watched her crumble to dust and blow away. The image looming over her, pale as snow and smiling with the wicked, cutting teeth of a cat, is another conjuring. An overactive imagination, produced by a tired, dying mind. Yes, that’s it. Laura will close her eyes and Carmilla will be gone. She’ll be gone…
A delicate hand places itself on her forehead, cool as a corpse’s and very real.
“Go away,” Laura pleads, screwing her eyes tighter and sinking into the pillows like they might swallow her whole and protect her. “Go away. You’re supposed to be dead.”
A lush, throaty chuckle, and the feeling of another weight settling on the mattress. “A creature like me never truly dies, my sweet. You, on the other hand…”
If Laura didn’t know any better, she would have thought Carmilla sounded sad towards the end.
The sound of rustling silk, the feel of shifting weight and a cold cheek pressed against hers in tender familiarity. If Laura had the strength, she would have pushed her away. This vile, unholy, bloodsucking demon who tricked her under the guise of friendship, only ever intending to make a meal out of her.
“Leave me alone,” she begs softly, a sob catching in her throat. “Please, just leave me alone.”
”I cannot,” Carmilla says, the words husky and tender as a lover’s confession. It makes Laura’s chest ache like her lungs are exploding. “You know I cannot.”
“Haven’t you done enough?”
The tender press of lips to Laura’s cheekbone, as the hand on her forehead travels down, to toy with the ribbon on Laura’s nightgown. Laura squeezes her eyes tighter as her skin grows hot. Fever. It’s just fever.
“If I had done enough,” Carmilla says. “You wouldn’t be suffering like this. You would be mine, immortal and forever. If those meddling, insolent, arrogant, nothing mortals hadn’t—”
”They did the right thing,” Laura protests weakly—it is what she should say, and she tells herself she believes it with a violent ferocity. “They—they were saving everyone from you. You bring death and damnation wherever you go, you—you seduce innocent girls and eat them alive, you—“
”Oh, Laura,” Carmilla cuts in smoothly. Her other hand finds its way to Laura’s forehead, brushing her hair out of her face the way she used to before. “My poor, poor darling.”
She leans in close, dropping her voice to a lush, husky whisper.
“We both know you don’t mean that.”
Laura only has time to let out an agonized sob before her lips are taken in a rushing kiss. Carmella’s mouth is cold, her tongue like ice, and she kisses with all the savoring, drawn-out content of a creature that has forgotten the need to breathe. Her teeth occasionally scrape against Laura’s lips, which elicits a tiny cry that Carmilla drinks down with a throaty chuckle as she drags her tongue over the cut.
This is a nightmare, Laura thinks. A nightmare. She remembers seeing a picture of a painting, a sleeping woman pinned to her bed by an ugly, impish-looking creature as a ghastly horse looked on in perverse glee. That must be what is happening. A terrible monster plaguing her dreams, disturbing her sleep. Any minute now Laura will wake up, and Carmilla will be gone.
Carmilla will be gone. The thought feels like a lance to the heart.
She squeaks as Carmilla pulls her blankets away, rucking her nightgown up around her hips with a simultaneous reverence and carelessness. A deep noise rumbles through Carmilla’s chest, more animal growl than human moan, as she breaks the kiss to creep down Laura’s body, all trailing hands and strategically placed kisses, until she’s laying between Laura’s—oh, Lord.
“Hush, my sweet,” Carmilla soothes as her nails grow sharp, scoring long, delicate lines down Laura’s legs. “I will make it gentle for you, I promise.”
This is all the warning Laura gets before there’s—oh, God. Oh God. A mou—a mouth, that is a woman’s mouth on her, that is Carmilla’s mouth on Laura, all too-sharp teeth and too-long tongue and soft, supple lips making Laura writhe.
This is a nightmare. A nightmare, and Laura prays it never ends. Even if she doesn’t dare open her eyes, even if this will almost certainly be the thing that damns her to hell forever. For a moment, she can pretend that God and the Devil and sin and virtue don’t exist—that all there is is Laura, and this dear, beautiful, horrible girl she still isn’t sure whether to be repulsed by, or to make the subject of a deep, singular obsession.
You flatter me, my sweet, Carmilla croons, even as her mouth is occupied with—what it’s doing. She holds Laura’s legs with a strength Laura didn’t know she had, far stronger than any man but infinitely more gentle. My dear, darling, lovely Laura. Oh, how I have missed you. Have you missed me?
Laura opens her mouth to protest, but Carmilla does—something—with her tongue that makes her gasp, clapping a hand over her mouth. Carmilla laughs, the kind of laugh Laura remembers used to crinkle her eyes in the prettiest of ways—like the whole world’s set itself into order just for her.
You have. How sweet. I’m so sorry I never got to tell you the truth myself, dear one—I meant to, after I was finished. I have loved you since before I met you, and to lose you—it would have been agony, my sweet. An agony I had not known in all my many, many years.
Something flashes behind Laura’s eyelids at this admission, shapes and colors and emotions that aren’t her own, a longing and a hunger so deep it feels it might drown her.
I am a simple creature, darling. I eat, and I love, and I survive. Most people hate me for this—I pray you do not. I need you, Laura. You are mine, mine, mine until the end of days. No one can take you from me. Your God cannot take you from me. Your shame cannot take you from me. Death cannot take you from me. You and I will be one forever.
I love you, Laura. My darling, darling, darling girl.
Be mine forever. In life, in death, in eternity.
Be mine.
Laura makes a noise she didn’t know she could make, somewhere between a sob, a cry, and something so vulgar it makes her cringe. Her hands scrabble at the sheets, in Carmilla’s hair, in the trailing, ruched silk of her skirt. Her eyes flutter open, but she keeps them trained upward, flitting from one of her bedposts to the ceiling.
Laura, Carmilla lilts, her voice musical and compelling. Dearest. Darling. Look at me.
And Laura—Good God, was a single request all it took?—she does. And what she finds is something unnatural, something perverse and profane—Carmilla lays between Laura’s thighs, eyes dark but for a smoldering light at the center, like a slow-burning ember in the fireplace. Her hair is in disarray, most of her features indistinct as parts of her body blend between formless shadow and some vast, furred, bestial thing. The only thing besides her eyes that stands out is her smile—too wide, too thin, too many too-sharp teeth stained red from the occasional careless slip.
A nightmare.
It’s beautiful. It makes Laura want to scream. Either way, she can’t bring herself to look away.
The form is gone in an instant—Laura blinks, and the figure between her thighs is not a shadowy monster but a beautiful girl, with pale, perfect features and dark, tumbling hair, smiling up at Laura like she can’t imagine looking at anything else. No one’s ever looked at her like that. No one ever will.
“Be mine,” Carmilla breathes, husky and heavy like a woman starved, the words ringing in the air and in the cavern of Laura’s skull.
It is this moment that Laura remembers the screeching pain in her chest, the fierceness with which she’s begun to cough. The lightness of her head, the taste of iron on the back of her tongue. She thinks of the cold, stretching hallways of the castle, only populated with the rarely-changing faces of the staff and her father. She thinks of dying like this, cold and alone, miserable but for those few sweet months with the beautiful, mysterious, terrible Carmilla Karnstein.
Oh, she cannot choose anything else. She cannot.
She barely has time to nod before Carmilla’s surging up her body, kissing her tenderly once again as she does away with the remainder of her nightgown. Once again Laura thinks of the painting—the woman, the imp, the horse. What would a painter see, if they chose to depict this? Her, swooning and sickly. Carmilla, dark and ravenous. Not an ugly, hunched creature, but beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
And hers. As Laura is Carmilla’s, Carmilla shall be hers. Forever.
Forever.
Carmilla breaks away for a moment, smile radiant as she scoops Laura off the mattress. It is the last thing Laura sees before there’s a sharp pain in her chest and oh—oh—
The world slides into order. It erupts into screeching, agonizing pain. There is blood on the sheets and blood on Carmilla’s dress and blood flowing in rapid bursts from Laura’s veins to Carmilla’s reverent tongue.
This is love, Laura thinks, dizzy and delirious, as she slips through the fingers of death and disease and is made new as something greater. Surely, this is what love feels like.