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Insabi
It had been too long since she’d been to this place. Voices filled the stillness, tired souls crying out, protesting their burials. They were so loud. She could feel their agony, and he couldn’t even hear them. Not yet at least.
She glanced back at him. The night air was humid and he was dressed accordingly. His chest was pale and damp, illuminated by the moonlight. She wore a sweater. She was always cold.
He met her eyes, and she turned back away from him, pressing forward. The cemetery was not their destination. She took care to maneuver around the plots, and he duplicated her steps exactly. Just like a precious little lamb, she thought. She was a lamb once. That was long ago.
“My master brought me here,” she told him. “It was cold then.”
They were at the church’s front steps now. She laid her palm to the door, as if it was impenetrable. She pressed lightly and it creaked open. “They never lock the doors,” she added, but she sounded like she was reminding herself. He flipped the switch on the wall and the fluorescent lights blazed. She flinched initially, then blinked hard several times, but didn’t scold him. He couldn’t see.
He followed her in and lagged a pace behind. She spoke to him as she walked through the halls—or maybe she really was talking to the room, he wondered. He never walked beside her, and she never looked him in the eye. He didn’t mind.
They came to the main corridor. There was no stage or any indication that a congregation met here. There was no podium. There were no pews. Metal folding chairs were stacked along a wall. That wall had no stained windows or biblical decorations, nor did any of the others. Had he not entered from the main entrance and seen its steeple, he would not have believed it to be a sanctuary. But then, churches were not necessarily sanctuaries, and vice versa.
She seemed to wander aimlessly as the story went on, but then stopped abruptly. He was clumsy and awkward, as she once had been, and was barely able to collect himself as to not bump into her. She shrugged her sweater off and he caught it behind her. She was staring at the floor. It looked no different from any other section of the worn in carpeting. Her face twisted as if she were looking at an imaginary crime scene.
“She was so ill,” she explained. Her voice trembled. “She just…collapsed. She was shaking.” She slumped down into the place she had never missed.
He stepped forward, cautiously, beside her, looked down at the blank spot. It was difficult to imagine the scene: Exterous, the one from the stories, always so proud and strong. It felt strange to picture her meek and helpless.
“She was…dying. And I couldn’t let her.” She paused. “I loved her.”
“So you fed her?”
She ran her fingers lightly over the thick scar across her left wrist. It had never healed fully. She shuddered. “She tried to refuse, but I cut it. It would have been sinful to waste my blood.
“And then…she took my knife away. And she was bleeding. My head was spinning. I didn’t want…” Her eyes closed. “I didn’t want to be like her.
“I tried to throw it up, but she grabbed my throat and the room spun. When she let me go I ran.”
She sprung to her feet as if animated by her own words. She bolted down a side hall. She was fast. He followed, unsure of which room she had turned into. It was the third one. He reached for the switch and she held her hand up to shield herself from him. “Don’t.” She sounded frail.
He loomed in the doorway, exactly as Exterous had that night. She was curled in a corner, sobbing heavily. “And I was here. And she stood right there.” Her voice changed then, steady and filled with spite. “‘A life for a life,’ that’s what she said. And then she just walked away.” She hung her head.
He approached her slowly. He extended his hand, and she took it. It was warm. She wiped her face and was instantly collected. Maybe she was feeling vulnerable. That had to be it. She had never directly faced him before. Even her silhouette was breathtaking.
She looked up at him, and she saw him for the very first time. His eyes were beautiful. His face…was beautiful. He had the smallest patch of freckles, right across the bridge of his nose, just barely a shade from his skin, that she knew she would have to be this close to him to notice. And he was beautiful.
Her breath caught in that instant, and he knew that he was done for. She wanted him. And he hadn’t a prayer. She kissed his neck softly, and her eyes went dark. And she began to circle him.
“You will be mine,” she decided. “Ever cell in your body, every thought in your head, every thread in the fabric of your existence, will be mine. You understand.”
“Yes.” He squinted. He wondered what color her eyes were.
She smiled fondly, “My Insabi.”
“Insabi,” he repeated. It sounded strange from his mouth, and somehow magickal from hers. When it passed from her lips, she seemed to glow with the epiphany of his new name, as if she saw and knew exactly who he truly was in that instant.
“It means ‘innocent one’,” she elaborated, “‘of select birth.’”
And it meant so much more. She was claiming him, destroying who he had been and replacing him with who she would create him to be.
“You know what I am.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” he answered.
“You know what I will be.”
He paused, and she answered for him: “I will be the poison that will fill your veins. I will be the death of all that you are, and the birth of all that you are to become.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“…Do you fear me?”
“No.”
She frowned, pondering. “Do you fear becoming me?”
“No.”
She was in front of him now, where she lingered too close to him. Her lips barely brushed his.
“Do you want me?”
His breath quivered. “Yes.”
She stepped back, drawing a blade between them. His eyes showed no alarm, and hers sparkled maliciously. It was the very same blade that had made that scar.
“Do you trust me?” she prompted him.
“Yes,” he answered automatically.
She pushed the blade to his throat.
“With your life?”
The metal was cold against his skin. He swallowed against it.
“Yes.”
She lowered the tip to his chest.
“With your heart?”
It beat so richly human beneath his bones. It pulsed to push the blood she could so quickly spill without second thought…Or could she?
“Yes,” he answered.
She stepped toward him again, closing the space between them, blade still to his breast.
Her eyes flickered to his. They had relinquished all cruelty and were full now of kindness and honesty.
“…Do you love me?”
He could dimly see her face by the hallway’s light leaking in. He smiled softly back into her eyes. Maybe they were blue. She hated that his were brown. Did he love her? She was testing him. So he fed her the answer she wanted.
“No,” he told her. And he knew that she wanted him to lie.
She smiled victoriously at him.
“Good,” she said shortly, and she kissed the blade. It tore through her lips, turning them fluid red. Then she passed the knife to him.
He squinted at her, trying to take her in, obeyed her without hesitation. He let the metal slice and sting his lips, and he welcomed her onto him.
She bit roughly at the gashes, freeing his blood and taking it into her mouth, pushed her tongue covered in her own life back into his, until it was flowing through him, infecting every vein.
She thought about a song she used to know. He is the lamb, she is the slaughter.
She moved down his neck, smearing red down his collarbone. Her hand was in his and then they were on the floor and she was under him. He watched her, begged her with his eyes. But she smiled mercilessly.
She kept her eyes fixed on his, button by button down her shirt, replaced her fingers with his. They trembled at the task. Her smirk was deviant as she brought his shaking hand to her chest.
She was over him again, pastel smudges down his stomach. She bit at his hips and giggled as she watched his teeth clench. She kissed his lips again, his cheek, his ears.
“Mine,” she whispered.
And she took him.
His innocence rushed over her, intoxicating like a drug, suffocated her. He was fear and love and trust and passion. He was entirely untouched, perfect and pure, beautiful and naive. She fed off of it, drank it in and replaced it with sin.
He was the embodiment of lust and terror.
And he was hers.
Her venom surged through him and he could see, could feel, the entire world. And her. Her body was ice and silk and his arms. And her eyes. In the darkness he could see them clearly now. They were exactly one shade between sea and olive green.
“My Insabi,” she mumbled as they drifted away, “Forever.”
