Long ago, when the streets were still cobblestone and littered with the rats infested with fleas and disease roamed freer than the people, there would be the bodies of the dying and starving paving a way from boulevard to boulevard. The brothels lining the roads through the city housed sexual desires that would stop men in the middle of the streets of Paris, the city of l’amour.
Love: you could gain it on any street corner and wench your carriage passed by, at least for one night. Penniless families had no qualms to send their daughters to the brothel to collect enough money to buy a meager loaf of bread a night. Some of the decaying corpses were those who had been too slow or too quiet for their lovers, who would pull out a knife and slit their pretty little throats should their pleasure seeking be compromised.
There had been one place near a theater where absinthe and wine intermingled, creating the deepest of reds and greens. They had beautiful French girls with thin-laced corsets and pale throats, skirts that fell down off their hips and legs smoother than the most expensive of silks. Legs would spread for any wishing to find a good night among the passionate embrace of another.
A lingering scent masked the building; the sturdy lamp-lit rooms smelled of flowers. Even in the harsh winter, snow piling up outside the door too high for the customers to get in, having to climb through the windows on the second story, the smell would be there. The owner said it was from the spirit of a young woman who had been murdered in the upstairs after the rich man she lay with became distraught from the drink. He had soaked the bed with her blood; the owner stating that he had guzzled it down his throat in waves of scarlet.
It was where the smell came from, more overpowering that the perfumes of the courtesans who poured the scents in rivets down their suckled necks. The taste of their skin was always masked; alcohol and fragrance too strong, but when people allowed their lustful urges to overcome their minds, sending them spiraling into the oblivion of sweet nothings and heavy pants, they always reported that the girl’s would taste like flowers. The room became famous; girls in and out every hour of the day, their drunken lovers following behind with their fingers already pulling at the pants that covered their legs.
The rich loved it there for they were shrouded in darkness of the night and throws of passion. Their voices were unrecognizable, their money the only thing of importance. They could slip in, only the tips of their guiltless fingers covering their faces, and no one on the street would notice or care. They would come, their laces tucked behind cloaks and hands already trailing over the soft curve of another woman’s breast.
Sable always entered through the back door. Seldom knew of it and even fewer used it; the harlots and the younger boys tending to the food and drink knew that he came and went as he pleased. He was well paying, even when he did not lay a single finger on their heated flesh or the smooth folds between their legs or drink from the cups or eat from their plates.
Sex never took place in the back, where the girls would lay on small cots of hay and tend to their wounds or clean the slick seed from their innards. One boy always came with fresh cotton, sometimes soaked in the wine to clean the fresh gouges in their sides from nails that grabbed more than stroked. The plain cotton was for when the women would bleed—the customers complained heavily about the blood if they were not the ones at fault. It was never loud in the back, but when the door would open when a woman left or came back every person would clutch their ears, unused to the piercing cries of both pleasure and pain, sound of breaking glass and swears.
The place was a sanctuary of peace, a place where the woman could rest and eat. The owner was a kind man in a perverse sense; he did not ask for silver or gold as payment for them to sleep in the back and drink the beer or eat the stew. He expected services of sex, which were as most of the girls stated was far more disgusting than laying with a stranger. The proprietor was missing his first two teeth, the others rancid and falling from his mouth, and one of the younger girls explained, with a hint of repugnance as she took a swallow from the steaming bowl of soup in her lacquered fingers, how he had the tendency to bite into their breasts with his yellowed teeth, leaving abnormal bruising and bite marks.
Tonight, when he came in from the bitter cold of a dreary September night, not long after the sun had set, was much different than the others. Sable would normally sit with the women, hold the hot tea they would offer him until it went cold and he could safely pour in into the bucket near his feet while no one was looking. The simple act of being with the women and boys fed his desire, curbing his lust for blood, at least for a short while. It made him feel human again, something that, as the time passed by in swirls of hot blood and moonlight, was becoming infrequent and more difficult to achieve. He expected the scent of warm bodies and alcohol, soup and flowers but his nostrils were overcome with blood, thick and moist overcoming all sensations.
The first step took an eternity; all he could feel was the thirst perpetually growing in his stomach, raw and powerful, an urge he seldom could control when it got to such an uncontrollable level. Just walking into the room, the lights playing trick on him as he looked around.
Martinique, the girl of fourteen with voluptuous breasts and a rounded face with deep blue eyes like the sea, lay on the hay bed; her legs spread open wide, a gush of blood coming forth like wine, deep and sweet. There was a small bump as her abdomen, the muscles constricting as she let out a scream. One of the boy’s spilled water across her face, but it was red with pain and contorted with shame.
“I thought it was gone,” Martinique screamed as a particularly harsh wave of pain touched her. Sable could smell even fresher blood come from her womb. “I thought it was gone, I thought I killed it, oh my lord I thought in was gone!”
Taking a few hesitant steps forward, for a moment the fledgling resisted the urge to turn and run. Childbirth, he had been alive for twenty-three years in human form and never once saw the act. Now, alive in a body that would not die, every new feeling brought forth was like an infant opening its eyes. Which was what a child would do, perhaps, if the girl could deliver. She was too young, too small, her body not capable to carry a child.
One of the women turned to him, her face streaked with a sharp line of blood that stood out against her pale nose. Her French was not excellent but she managed to get out the words. “Help, please sir! She cannot deliver the monster on her own!”
Sable’s fingers felt sticky. The words lingered in the air, accentuated by Martinique’s shrill scream of unadulterated pain. “I… I know no medicine.”
“Matters not!” One of the boys stated fiercely, reaching into his satchel to pull out some thin cotton. “Staunch the bleeding or she and the baby will die! None here can do it, our nails and hands are too tough; we will rip her open.”
The blood… the smell invaded every one of his senses, but, when he opened his pale eyes to look the young girl held on her face, one of absolute fear and hopelessness was one that stayed in Sable’s mind. He had, not a year before, seen the same look on his brother’s face as he was turned. How could he ignore the similarities, even for that brief moment? He had not let Light suffer so terribly, and he would not stomach the thought of doing it to another.
Too long had it been since he saw his sweet brother’s face or his soft and mesmerizing breathing and just seeing Martinique’s sweaty face lacking all color, he mutely nodded, pulling his cape off, sending it tumbling to the ground.
“Boiling water and cloth to wrap the child in.” And so he began, sending boys running around the kitchen, passing by women who offered their underskirts as the needed cloth. Martinique’s soft hand against his own and her moans blocked out, for the briefest of moments his blood lust was quenched.
Its small feet wriggling, the boys poured water over the opening to help the breached child squirm out of the woman’s opening, another placing cool rags across the mother’s forehead.
Sable plunged his hands in, grabbing the child’s bottom with one hand, helping to guide the body out. Its head popped out last, deep red hair covered in blood and gore.
So tiny, that small baby was in his arms and so tiny was the breath Martinique let out when the pain of the contractions finally ended. Her eyes were bleary and before she could look at the small child who she had carried in her body she was asleep, in a fit slumber only a woman who gave birth could have.
He had helped bring a child into the world, where its mother was a whore and the father just another name and fee. It was a beautiful tiny thing, too small because of its premature birth.
Tiny wisps of red hair and feeble fingers that grasped so lightly at his bloodstained shirt, the marvelous little boy in his undead hands was one of the most beautiful sights he knew he would ever see. The little boy didn’t cry very much, only once when Sable had pinched his rear to make the liquid in his mouth cough up.
It slept in his arms, none of the girls, who had after an hour been rushed back into the brothel so they could begin their night’s work, attempting to do more than coo at him. Suckling on its thumb, the red-haired baby’s deep brown eyes penetrating into every nerve the vampire had. The mother, in a brief spout of lucidity, told Sable with her soft, childish voice to name it before falling back into the oblivion sleep brought her.
Sitting by the hearth, the boys offering him broth and wine that he rejected, the fair-haired man stared down. There was no yearning for blood, even though the place reeked of it, more than the aroma of flowers. There was just contentedness. As the warmth licked his cold skin that he kept away from the child to keep it from getting the chills, the baby’s name came to his tongue.
“His name will be Gabriel,” Sable stated, fingering a lock of red. “Gabriel, one of God’s most beloved angels.”
Later that night, a few hours before the sun rose high up into the Parisian sky, Sable drank the blood of three men. They all could have been brothers, with their long crimson hair and deep, cavernous chocolate eyes. He left their bodies in the piles of dead and dying, knowing the path he had already chosen and where it would lead.
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