Blood Bonds

Blood Bonds

After the meeting we scattered to our homes, our mundane lives, but we could feel them and their otherness running like the hum of some softly running machine in the background, like the pounding of your blood when you press hard against a pulse point. And it is all about the blood, their blood and ours. Whether we were bonded or not, we could feel it, like a pulse, making our blood race.

So over the days and weeks before our adventures, they would appear to each of us. They would come as friends and lovers and they would offer us many things: Protection, friendship, loyalty, sex and love and their blood. Some of us would drink from the wounds they would make in their bodies and some of us would imitate our friends and bite hard on their flesh and we would be, for a moment, Vampire. They would be ecstatic with the sensation. If you really want to know what turns a Vampire on, bite a willing and friendly Vampire and you will find out.

When Bill came to Renee, he came to her as her friend and lover. He was as excited as she when they undressed for practical reasons as much as the pleasure they would get from the contact of their bodies. In the quiet stillness of her house, human spouse at work and child with friends, they sat in her big bed and he pulled her astride him and showed her where to bite, the place where Renee would get the most of his blood and where he personally enjoyed the sensation, on the neck, just under his jaw. He assured her he would be fine, that it would be pleasurable for him even, and she would have a great deal of pleasure as well.

Eric was doing the same with Linzy, holding her against his cool naked body as she fed from him just under his nipple, like a strange and beautiful mother and child, the roles reversed as Eric nursed her from his own body, to make him a part of her. He moaned in his pleasure as she took him in and she could feel his ancient wildness, this savage passions, running through her veins as they were swept out with release.

Pam pushed Scarlett’s red hair back and stroked her face and leaned down and kissed her gently then drew her against her. The Vampire bit into her wrist and offered the dripping wound to Scarlett who took it like communion and Pam, who otherwise had not maternal feelings, sang a lullaby, her eyes half lidded, as she stroked Scarlett’s shoulders and arm. Again, a different sort of mother and child.

When the Barrister was met by Jessica, he was surprised to see her. She had a sweet and innocent way about her that belied the fact that she could be, might be, a predator. Jessica took his hand and explained everything to him and then, as she had done with God Speed, she opened her wrist and offered it to him, as lady in olden times may have done for a gentleman to kiss her hand and so he bent his head and put his lips on her flesh.

The bonding would happen over the days and weeks before the summer and the scenes would be played out, and then we would be bonded to them, and they to us. Because the bond works both ways. We would feel them coming close to us, and we would sense their emotions on some levels. Not as sharply as they would feel ours, but they would be more than a hum in the distance. Our hearts and senses would be in unison and no longer would we be playing at blood bonds and family ties, we really would be bonded.

Blood is a link. When you were children, long before the spectre of AIDS and other blood borne diseases, there were archaic rituals of blood. Becoming blood brothers, scratching the skin just enough to bring a bead of blood where you would comingle the blood and be “related”, swore to fight tooth and nail with and for one another (for surely you can say and do what you like to a brother or sister without recrimination and even break each other’s hearts, but the outside would incur the wrath of the other for any slight).

If you came from a religious home, you may take part in a ritual with symbolic or transformed flesh and blood. When girls came of an age, the signal of blood told them it was time to put away dolls and pick up the beginning burdens of womanhood. And if a man was lucky, he took his lover in his arms and with a few careful thrusts, he would break her virginal seal and all would be left is the blood and the knowledge that he was first to know her in that way.

Birth is bathed in blood and as Bono said, “Freedom smells like a newborn baby’s head” and for all that seemed like a throw away lyric but the goofy, bombastic Irishman was right. The baby pushes itself out bathed in the shared blood of mother and child. Forever bonded, whether they liked it or not.

You have the blood of your race. And that can be source of pride or prejudice, depending on which race you belonged to. You can have the blood of your people, a cultural notion, an identity. You can have blood on your hands, and like Pontius Pilate, sometimes the blood can never be washed away.

Contracts can be signed in blood, but I suggest you don’t. The devil is in the details. Battlefields are baptized in the blood of the soldiers that fight on them. You can even be rich in blood money, but the one thing it cannot buy is peace of mind.

But what does it mean to be blood bonded? Bonded to these people; this special race with their own magikal spark of life? And what would it do to us, our little family? Would we see the difference when we gathered? I know I could feel Eric strongly, moving in Fairy’s veins when she appeared in the parlor after he bonded with her and made her first wife in his plural marriage. Jen too when Eric healed her and God Speed seemed to have the wild youthful look of Jessica moving around behind his eyes. Raki certainly looked smug, the little blood thief, having nipped the ancient Viking and had a taste of his blood. But, as Bill said, it takes only a drop or two.

I suspect that we would recognize the Vampire living inside each of us. We would smell them. What does each Vampire smell like? Bill, my lover and spirit spouse smelled like wild flowers and grasses and paper. Eric smelled like fire and electricity and spices. Pam smelled like bergamot and roses and steel. Of all the Vampires, her scent was one that suggested dangerous energy. Something about a woman who would fuck you and eat you at the same time was far more lethal than the two men. Jessica smelled like spring with a touch of frost, that strange clean smell of the first cold night that signaled you to turn on the heat and throw on an extra blanket.

Perhaps they smelled differently to each of us. But I could always smell the general dry smell of Vampire that lingered in the parlor, even over the smells of Minnie’s home baked cookies, and Scarlett’s lasagna, and God Speed’s bacon cheese burgers.

And as I begin to finish this tale, I can feel the coming of a Vampire. I am not bonded yet, but perhaps I just feel it through my blood in the Vampires I have fed and I turned to the door to see who it might be.