Chapter Text
London, 1899
Kylo hadn’t meant to kill the whore.
It was supposed to be quick; a feed and maybe a fuck to chase the iron-tang of the bloodlust.
He’d found her standing in the shadow of the gas lamp outside The Ten Bells. Her skirt hiked up high enough to show off the hem of a spoiled petticoat and the top of a lace-up boot. The only thing he really noticed about her was that she was young, her heartbeat steady and strong, a flush on her cheeks as though she’d had a couple of drinks inside for courage for the night ahead.
London was full of girls and most of them were for sale. You just had to be the right buyer and Kylo, with his black tailcoat, top hat and ivory-tipped hand-carved cane was just that: a dream for a street orphan looking for somewhere warm to ply her trade and open her legs. She was probably used to drunken bricklayers and off-duty police officers. But Kylo looked the part he was playing: a perfect gentleman with long hair clean and a starched collar. She wouldn’t be able to tell what kind of creature he truly was. At least not until it was too late.
The girl said her name was Rachel, and Kylo knew it was a lie from the spike in her heartbeat, and an oft-repeated one from how easily it slid off her quick tongue. Closer up she was freckled and pretty but the most important thing was that she was alive and standing in front of him, there on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier, ready to follow him anywhere for the promise of a few shillings.
God, it was easy. If being a monster was a sin, why was it so fucking easy? To take the girl’s hand and lead her trippingly along the streets of Spitalfields to one of many boarding houses with rooms for rent by the hour. Inside, past the madam, with her spotless apron and jingling keys, was the bedroom, candle-lit with wood-panel over the dry rot. Rachel lifted her tattered shawl from her shoulders and folded it neatly on a chair.
“How do you want me, Sir?” A line well-rehearsed, delivered in a voice that was practical and a little bored, rather than seductive. But now he could scent her.
I want you neck-first, he thought, and splayed open. Kylo could smell her delicate thready pulse now, thrumming and dangerous. She smelled of warm caramel and sunrise. Of things he would never taste or see again.
It made his mouth water. It made him hard. It made him want to turn her inside out where she stood.
“Naked,” he said.
She stifled a sigh, and began unbuttoning the intricate shirt over her corset. But Kylo was wrong. He couldn’t wait that long.
Crossing the room, he batted her hands away from her clothes, wrenched her chin to the side and buried his face in skin above her pulse point. His iron fingers tangled in her hair until she yelped.
“Sir, you’re hurting me!” The fear made her smell even more exquisite. Perfect, quivering, blood-rich girl.
Oh I’ll hurt you, little one. I’ll rip you open.
He’d planned to take his time with his food, cat and mouse. To see that golden skin tremble and quake, and find out what sounds she’d make in pleasure and pain. But Kylo was overcome, plunged deep into frenzied need, and it rushed him forward, headlong, Bezerker-style. His teeth unleashed themselves with painful speed and she screamed as he bit her, latching into the artery and sucking out the throbbing life. It happened so fast, Kylo felt pulled under by the tide of her, drawn out into the sea of her, drowning as though he were not already dead.
A more reasonable, educated part of him yelled inside his head. He wasn’t supposed to kill, to leave traces of his presence across the city. And he was usually disciplined about it too. He wasn’t a blood-drunk childe anymore, but a practiced thing of darkness, obliged to obey the codes of his own demonic society. Feed and move on; leave no bodies.
What had Snoke said after he sired Kylo? “They may be humans but they aren’t stupid.” Even in this modern age of gaslight and telegrams there were still those among the living who suspected the undead walked the same fog-fingered streets. Kylo might be strong, he might even be hard to kill. But nothing was impossible and immortal life was a bargain not a promise.
Still, he had already broken the first rule. By the time his bloodlust was sated and his mouth burning from the arterial heat of her, Kylo knew the girl was dying. He’d taken too much, bitten so hard her throat was half-torn out, vocal chords bloody and gurgling. Her face was frozen in a mask of shock and terror.
It was a mess. The girl’s dress was blood-soaked and she was heavy in his arms. His hands and shirt were smeared, and the spray had even reached the ceiling. Kylo hated the new pall spreading across the girl's skin as he laid her out on the carpet, pale and green-tinged. The sunlight was gone, her golden hue fading into memory. He wanted it back. He wanted…
Even as he did it, Kylo understood the curse he was bringing down on his own head. He couldn’t say why he did it, only that it felt in the moment that there was no choice, or that the choice had already been made. Still, he knew the only thing worse than breaking the first rule was breaking the second: Sire no new children without permission.
“We cannot live in a world overrun with beings as powerful as we are,” Snoke had said, long ago in a different land and a different time. “There are ways things must be done. It is what has protected us for time immemorial.”
But even the weight of Snoke’s words could not reach Kylo now, in the small bedroom on the third floor of Mrs Hampton’s House for Harlots, as it was known in the neighborhood. There he was alone, save for the dying girl that he had not meant to kill and did not want to lose.
It took hardly anything to take his long left hand thumbnail and draw it across his right wrist, hard and deep, until the black, dead blood began to trickle out like drops of oil. Even less to bring his wrist to her lips and let it fall between her parted lips.
The change was unpleasant but it did not take long. An hour in, the madam knocked on the door and Kylo bellowed at her until she left with the promise of a Guinea for her lack of curiosity. He rocked on his haunches, watching her like she was an accident he could not look away from.
The girl thrashed and moaned on the floor, coughing up bile and vomiting blood, her body rejecting every trace of what was once human. The room stank of rancid human sweat and drying blood. Death was there with them, in all its strange glory.
The room was a threshold and Kylo a witness. The girl crossed from one world to another with only him to watch, and when she quieted, to brush the hair from her blood-smeared brow. Even like this, she was beautiful. If he understood the mystery of how one became a vampire, if anyone truly understood what kind of raw, mystical transformation was being wrought on her slight frame perhaps they would have been able to say exactly when the girl became something new.
Kylo only saw the looseness return to her limbs, the light coming back into her eyes. Not golden now but bright and wet as river stones, her skin like moonlight. Not the burnt sugar beauty he’d found on the street but something new: something powerful. And hungry.
When she slowly pushed herself up to sit, Kylo knew she had survived the change and been reborn. Here was his new, ill-begotten child and he would never live in peace because of it, but just look at her: the most beautiful monster ever made.
The girl looked down at her hands, turning them over slowly. She reached up and touched her face, feeling its contours with her fingertips. Worrying the already healed wound at her neck, now just a silvery scar.
Finally she looked at where he sat, back against the wall. She frowned, as though seeing him for the first time. Oh, the way her eyebrows knitted together and her nose scrunched up like a rabbit's. The things he would show her and teach her and the things he would do to her now he couldn’t break her and…
“What am I?” Her voice, strong and deeper now, startled him out of his dreaming.
“Something special,” he said slowly. “Something truly special.
Less frown now and more horror. A hideous kind of understanding settling over her face. “What have you done?”
“It can be hard at first, little one, but I will show you…”
“You…” she spluttered, rolling onto hands and knees. “You’re a fucking monster.”
He was on his feet then, looming over her. “I saved you.”
“You killed me.” Each word a poison dart, as she pushed one shaky arm into the floor to stand.
“I gave you a great gift.” A gift he shouldn't have given. A gift he was already starting to regret.
At that she pursed her lips and spat on the floor at his feet, a bloody globule landing on the dirty carpet.
“You took everything. I don’t want this.”
Too late, little one. Too late for both of us.
Kylo raised an arm, hoping to rest it reassuringly on her slender shoulder, but the girl wrestled herself away, turning for the door.
“No,” Kylo said, as she retreated from him in the dark hallway. “Don’t leave, it’s not safe for you.”
But the girl ignored him and slipped in the away and down the stairs without looking back. He wanted to call after her but realized he still didn’t know her real name.
And besides, she could run as far as she wanted from him. He was her sire and already he could feel the tendrils of her consciousness in the back of his; her confusion, her rage. And her fear.
Whether his childe went, he would follow. Especially since her very existence was a crime against their kind. She was the kind of mistake the others would move swiftly to rectify, and he could not allow that.
Even if she ran for miles. Even across a lifetime.
She was his.
And she would realize it, soon enough.