to fill in the emptiness in your chest

At seven forty-five the next evening, Priscilla lit a lamp and left her dormitory, the lamp in one hand and a roll of parchment in the other.

She crept along the corridors, slowly and quietly, clad in her thin white nightgown. The professors' wing was not any great distance away, and most likely she would reach her destination by seven fifty, but Professor Viccari had warned her not to be late, and she felt quite sure he was the sort of man who would not look kindly on even a single minute's tardiness. So it was best to err on the side of caution.

Fortunately, the hallways were, so far as Priscilla could see, deserted. There was no one to catch her. Soon enough she stood before the door to the professors' wing. It was large and heavy, of dark hardwood, and securely locked. Feeling just a little short of breath, she took the silver skeleton key from her nightgown's single pocket, using the same hand that held her poems, and inserted it into the lock.

With a soft click, the lock yielded.

She pushed the heavy door open, stepped through, and shut it carefully and quietly behind her. After that it was the work of one or two minutes to find Professor Viccari's door. It was made of the same hardwood as the door she'd passed through just now, but thinner, she thought, and just as he'd promised there was a silver plaque affixed to it on which the words *Octavian Viccari* were engraved.

She transferred her poems to her left hand (which held her lamp), lifted her right hand, and knocked gently: once, then twice.

Immediately the door swung open. He was there, clad in his fine black suit. He looked her up and down.

"I'm here, sir," she said, more breathlessly than she'd intended, and Professor Viccari smiled his eighth smile.

\* \* \*

Twenty minutes later they were making love. She was underneath him, his hand on her cheek: holding her head at a very precise angle, the better to kiss her mouth whenever he liked. She found that she enjoyed that. His eyes were locked on hers as he took her.

It would be easy to imagine that someone in Professor Viccari's position might be gentle with Priscilla, given her youth and her inexperience, but Viccari had no such mercy. He was not being rough with her, exactly; his movements were precise and deliberate -- but it was obvious that he was taking everything he wanted, whenever he wanted it, and not holding back for Priscilla's sake.

It hurt a little, and she liked that.

(If it had been *possible* for him to hold back, she would have been disappointed, she thought. He desired her, and she wanted him to desire her: wanted him to need her so intensely that he had no choice but to take her exactly as his desires demanded. So it was, and Priscilla could not have been more delighted.)

He buried his face in her shoulder, and Priscilla recalled her dream and her breath caught. But of course he did not bite her, only kissed her skin, because he was not a vampire and vampires were not real.

She shuddered and leaned into his kiss and wrapped her legs around him, and he drove himself deep inside her and came to his culmination.

She lay on her back with Professor Viccari embracing her (still clad in his black trousers and white silk shirt, now terribly rumpled, with only his manhood exposed to take her), and looked at his face and contemplated him.

A great portion of her could not help but be disappointed that he was not a vampire, that he did not desire her blood. But why? Was it not better this way? He desired her; was that not enough? Why on Earth should she want to bleed and die to satisfy him?

Perhaps it was the wrong sort of desire.

After all, a professor's lust for his beautiful young student would allow Priscilla to surrender her body to him, but did it grant her adequate cause to give up everything she had and everything she was? Did Octavian Viccari desire such things?

A vampire would...

Then she dismissed those silly childish thoughts and lay there contentedly beneath the man who had taken her virginity. The muscles along the length of his body were still taut. He gazed into her eyes, and slowly caressed her naked body.

Now one hand was on her cheek, and the way he looked at her was very intent.

"Sir?" she asked.

His eyes grew harder and sharper and hungrier.

"Love me," he said. His voice was low.

Priscilla shuddered deeply, and very nearly arrived at her climax.

She gasped for breath, and nodded. "Yes. Yes, sir."

Viccari gripped her cheek tighter, to the point of pain. "Tell me."

She gazed up into his eyes, lips parted. Her chest rose and fell. "I love you, sir," she murmured.

(It was true. Of course it was true. How could she hope to do anything but love him, when he was so terribly strong and clever and demanding? When he had taken such things from her?)

Viccari seized her by the wrists, held her down, and kissed her hard upon the mouth.

\* \* \*

After he had finished with her a second time, he sat at his desk in the corner of the room, his face lit by candles, and read while she watched him adoringly from his bed. He still was fully clothed, having tucked himself back away into his trousers, and he sat there and read her poetry as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened.

(His rooms were very clean. Not clean in the manner of his lecture hall, even, in the manner of a place kept well by its occupants, but *pristine*. There was no dirt and no clutter. Nothing lay askew. Priscilla could hardly imagine how the maids kept these chambers in this state. It was as if no one lived in them at all. Perhaps he had only newly moved here, from some other set of rooms.

There were not even any cobwebs on the ceiling.)

He commented in passing as he read, his attention never straying from the page, and Priscilla's heart fluttered with every word. She had always found great joy in hearing what thoughts her professor had on the things she wrote, but it was a different feeling entirely to hear his thoughtful critique in the warm and intimate light of his private chambers, while his seed could still be felt inside her.

She had chosen to be daring this time. He had seen her nakedness and felt her warmth and heard her shy, quiet pleasure. He would hardly scold her for a risque poem. So her work was less abstract now. The third she had written explicitly to him: poured out her feelings, true and pure, in black ink upon the page. How she had felt when he was inside her. How much she adored the way he needed her.

She wondered how it felt for him, to learn that she had loved him before he had even ordered it.

He finished reading it: the third poem, the one addressed to him. He turned in his chair and fixed his eyes on her, and his gaze was fire and ice.

When he took her, it was not gentle or slow.

\* \* \*

They spent the whole night that way, making love in the soft candlelight with their words and their bodies. It was not until four o'clock in the morning that Priscilla fell asleep, naked and content in Professor Viccari's arms.

She awoke to soft morning light streaming down through the narrow windows, and Viccari planting a line of kisses down the valley between her breasts. She murmured, still half asleep, and opened her legs eagerly to him. He leaned down to kiss each of her nipples, just as he had in the garden, that first time, and then as he was pushing her thighs apart and making himself ready to enter her, Priscilla's gaze fell upon the ornate clock beside the bed and her eyes widened. Her first class would be starting in scarcely two minutes. She would be late.

She turned to look up at Professor Viccari, her mouth opening, but he only growled and pinned her shoulders to the bed.

"I'll send a note to Professor Abati excusing your absence," he said.

"Oh," she answered breathlessly.

"You have more important tasks to attend to, Priscilla." He lowered himself, and the tip of him, at her entrance, thrust inside her. She gasped, and he held her gaze with his, his manhood hilted inside her, while she shuddered and stilled.

"I see, sir," she said, demurely, once she had breath enough in her lungs to be demure.

He kissed her again, and saw to those important tasks as if nothing else in the world mattered. Afterward, he petted her hair and caressed her cheek and looked at her eyes, and his face was almost fond.

"I will be off to give the day's first lecture in a moment," he said. "You will sleep, Priscilla, until the time arrives for your second class. I want you well-rested, because tonight you will write more poetry for me, and it is important that it be your best."

"Yes sir," she told him.

She would, of course, obey his every word. To do otherwise seemed utterly unthinkable.

He lay both hands along her cheeks and looked down into her eyes, intently, his face very close to hers. "Write about how you feel," he said, "just as you did before. About how much you love me."

She nodded. That, she thought, would not be difficult. Her heart was full so near to the brim. She needed only sit down and take up quill and parchment, and her love would overflow and spill out through her pen, covering the page.

His face was so *very* beautiful.

His hand found her hair, and he kissed her forehead.

"Good girl."

\* \* \*

Priscilla sat leaning forward in the high rows of the lecture hall, gazing down intently at Professor Viccari as he lectured. She did not write any notes: did not even have quill and parchment prepared. She did not need to. She felt certain she would remember his every word.

"Immortality," he said. "What, dear students, is the conceptual significance of immortality in myth?"

A handful of students raised their hands. Priscilla did not. If she found the correct answer, and he praised her, then certainly that would be wonderful, but she knew better than to think she was as clever as Professor Viccari. She only wanted to hear his answer as quickly as possible.

Viccari leveled his pointer (slender, polished, of dark hardwood) at a student in the third row. "Giovanna. You have an answer for me?"

"Immortality is a sign of power and divinity," said Giovanna: in a formal tone, as if quoting a textbook, which perhaps she was.

"Ah," said Professor Viccari. "Yes, that is the most obvious answer. And in a great many cases it is even true! After all, immortality means that a creature is free of its mortal limitations. But of course this was a trick question."

Priscilla smiled.

"The only *true* answer," he continued, "is, of course, 'it depends upon the myth'. Or at least upon the *genre* of the myth. And today our topic is myth regarding that remarkable creature of legend, the vampire."

He gestured with his pointer to the chalkboard behind him, on which he'd written a sort of narrative diagram of a written legend. He had not made a note of the title, but Priscilla was fairly certain, based on the events described, that the legend was Lennartsson's *Vuldar*. She had never read it in full, for lack of access, but the library back in Glevumshire had held two different abridged versions, and both of these she had read more than once.

"Vampires are immortal -- the myths are certainly consistent on that point -- but we can hardly say that they are divine. They have more in common with the infernal than the heavenly, and one might say that devils are divine, in a sense, but even then the connection is thin. What a vampire most resembles is a beast: a beast that walks and thinks like a man, a beast that dresses and feasts like an elegant noble, but a beast nonetheless. A starving beast. The farthest thing from a god which depends on no one and nothing, don't you think? A creature with needs so desperate that it kills and devours to sate them."

Well, yes. That was precisely what so fascinated Priscilla about them.

Viccari raised his pointer and tapped it against the fingers of his left hand. "But the vampire is not *mortal*. It lives forever. Why?"

He spread his arms wide, and looked to the class. No one offered an answer. There was a girl in the fifth row, a girl with striking red hair whom Priscilla would have expected to raise her hand, because she seemed to be very intent upon the lecture, but she did not move.

Viccari smiled. "Well. As usual, we may find our answer in the classics. Albrecht Lennartsson's *Vuldar* is one of the oldest tales of vampires. Not the very first, but close to it.

"Now. I imagine many of you, when asked to imagine vampirism, think of a sort of supernatural disease: an infection, which is spread by the vampire's bite. This, I'm afraid, is a rather late innovation, and it makes very little mythical sense. Why should it be so incredibly simple to grant a thing as profound as immortality, even if it does come with terrible curses? It's obvious that this is merely an invention by later writers, probably motivated by a desire to make vampires appear more threatening."

He turned from the chalkboard to the class and grinned, uncharacteristically, showing teeth. "As if they weren't frightening enough already."

Now he tapped the chalkboard with his pointer. "But the precedent for this, the seed of the idea, is in *Vuldar*. Misunderstood, of course. Here, at the legend's conclusion, the hero Aostarbrandt is fed upon by the vampire Vuldar, and becomes one in turn.

"But if you pay attention, which I know is a difficult thing for most, it will become obvious that the matter is not that simple. Vuldar has victims aplenty, and many we are told about in detail. With the sole exception of Aostarbrandt, their blood is drained from them, and they simply die. And this is also what Aostarbrandt expects! His conversion comes as a great surprise to him." It was hardly visible, but Priscilla was looking so intently at Viccari that she could see his grip tighten on his pointer. "A very unpleasant one, I might add."

He began to pace, from one side of the lecture stage to the other. "Now. This is not obvious to most, because they read excerpted passages, or abridgements, but *Vuldar* is a deeply religious tale. A religious tragedy, really. It is, by its own lights, about sin, and the consequences of that sin. Why does Aostarbrandt become a vampire when bitten?"

Viccari stopped, and turned to the class, his eyes hard. "Because of his *motivation*."

He rapped his pointer against his fingers again, and continued pacing. "The bite is incidental: a plot device. Vuldar only exists in the narrative at all to serve as foreshadowing of our hero's fate. Now, *think*." He turned to the students again, and his face was almost pleading. "Why is Aostarbrandt bitten? Under what conditions does this event take place?"

The class was silent. Viccari sighed.

He turned and pointed to the events of the legend, laid out upon the chalkboard. "At the story's halfway mark, Aostarbrandt and his family are taken captive by Vuldar. He digs a tunnel so that they may escape, but not quickly enough. His children are fed upon, and they die. His wife is fed upon, and she dies. What does he do then?

"He despairs. His tunnel is complete and he could escape, but what would be the use? Already he has lost everything he cares for." Viccari paced. His eyes were searching the class, as if desperate to find understanding there; the muscles of his face were tight. "So he gives himself to Vuldar. To be fed upon. To be killed."

He stopped, in the center of the stage, and held one end of his pointer in each hand, tightly. "It is *then* that he turns. Do you see? He sinned. He despaired, and in his despair he wished to destroy himself. In the oldest stories, the vampire is not the product of some mundane infection. It is nothing more or less than a man who is cursed by God for the mortal sin of suicide."

He smiled a smile, and Priscilla did not add it to her number, because it was grim and mirthless and cruel. "After all, if he sins because he cannot bear life, what better punishment could there be than to make him live forever?"

That's horrible, Priscilla thought.

But then, would it really be so unreasonable to think that God, who mocked the dreams of mankind with hollow mindless spirits, would do such a thing as this?

She looked into Viccari's eyes. She was not quite certain what it was she saw there. Anger? At the students, for their failure to understand? No, she didn't think so. At least, not entirely.

Anger at God?

He was gripping the ends of his pointer so tightly that Priscilla feared it might snap.

Then he released it, swished it sharply through the air to his side, and turned from the class.

"That is all," he said, his voice now cold and formal. "When we meet next week, I shall give you your assignment for the month. Dismissed."

Slowly, the cloud of still silence that always blanketed the class when Professor Viccari spoke broke apart and dissolved, and the students gathered their things and left, a few at a time, talking in low tones. Priscilla found herself sitting still, as she often did, gazing down at the professor as he collected his notes. She liked to watch him.

Soon enough, the hall was empty, and Priscilla would have to leave, if she did not want to be late for her next class.

She collected her things and stood, and realized, with a start, that there was one student left in the hall.

It was that scarlet-haired girl. The one who had been listening so closely to Viccari's lecture. Now she was watching him, just as Priscilla had been.

Priscilla narrowed her eyes, and looked closer.

Now that she thought of it, she was rather certain this girl was not a member of the class. There were only perhaps two dozen of them, and Priscilla knew them all by sight. Moreover, she could not recall ever having seen the red-haired girl anywhere in the academy, which certainly did not make sense. The school's student population was not all that large, and if ever Priscilla had seen this girl even once, she would surely remember her striking appearance...

Very strange.

But strange things were not Priscilla's concern. The girl's expression, however, was: she was beautiful, without question, and she sat perfectly still and gazed down at the Professor Viccari, eyes following him as he moved. As if entranced. The look in her eyes was...full of love.

Priscilla's heart twisted.

She glanced down at Viccari. He'd finished collecting his notes, and now he erased the last of the markings on the chalkboard and left the hall with notes in hand. Her eyes darted back to the girl, who was now gazing wistfully out the door through which he'd left.

Priscilla's grip on her bag tightened. Why was she looking at him like that? How *dare* she?

She hated how pretty she was.

With purpose, she strode along the row of seats, out to the edge, up the stairs to the fifth row, and over to where the girl was sitting.

The girl did not react at all. Not even when Priscilla passed between her and the door at which she was staring. Now Priscilla was scarcely three feet from her, frowning down at her, and still she did not move.

There were cobwebs in her hair.

It was beautiful hair, long and silken and striking red, but it was tangled with silk of a different sort: silver and matted, clinging to her locks from their roots to their ends.

The ceiling of this lecture hall was full of cobwebs, of course, but it was far too high for any of those to find themselves in a student's hair. But perhaps if this girl had spent time in Professor Viccari's office...

Priscilla's heart beat faster.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

Now, at last, the girl blinked.

Without moving a muscle below the neck, she turned, slowly, and regarded Priscilla. (Oh, she was so *horribly* pretty.)

"Hmm?"

"Who are you?" The question was a little more breathless this time.

Another blink. "How should I know?"

"What?"

"I don't understand the question."

Priscilla frowned. Was this girl mocking her?

She leaned closer to the girl, who met her eyes, unperturbed. Their faces were perhaps a hand's breadth apart.

"Stay away from him," she said. "He's *mine*."

The red-haired girl smiled.

It was a fond smile, an amused smile; long-suffering, perhaps, as if Priscilla had said something foolish. All at once her hand came up and landed in Priscilla's own hair, stroking it. Priscilla flinched away like a startled cat.

"Of course he's not yours," the girl said, calmly, and Priscilla's lips curled into a snarl, words of anger building in her chest, but before she could speak the girl continued --

"You're his."

Priscilla froze in place. Her heart pounded like hoofbeats. She stared at the girl, who smiled again, and stood. She did not collect her things. She did not appear to have any.

Without another word, she left.

\* \* \*

Priscilla lay naked in Viccari's arms.

He remained clothed, as always, but he had exposed himself so that they could make love, and he was still inside her. His head was beside hers, and he was occupied in kissing her collarbone.

She stared at the ceiling. His weight on hers was comforting, of course, and to be taken for his pleasure had been the same breathless experience it always was, but her mind dwelt on that other girl. She felt anxious and insecure and childish.

She could not tell him, of course. She would appear jealous, and foolish, and Professor Viccari would hold her in contempt. Besides, what would she say? What could anyone make of that odd exchange? It had seemed as if the red-haired stranger had known of her affair with the professor, somehow, but that did not make sense.

Perhaps she had dreamed it all.

He kissed her nipple, then took her head and made her look at him. His gaze was very intense, and she shuddered.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked.

She shook her head very slightly. "Nothing important."

He tilted his head, and still his eyes were fixed on her. She bit her lip. It did not feel as if she could hope to hide anything from him.

(The angle of his jaw, the color of his eyes... He was *beautiful*. She could not bear how much she loved him. She could not bear the thought of losing him.

She thought of what that girl had said.)

"Am I yours, sir?" she asked. It came out more plaintively than she had intended.

His eyes flashed, and he kissed her, deeply, the same way he always did: holding her hair, controlling every part of the interaction, taking exactly what he wanted from her lips. He broke away, now, and she gazed at him.

Her heart was racing. Viccari put his hand upon her chest and felt it.

Then he slid his hands out across her arms, took her wrists, and pinned her to the bed. His face was still very close to hers, and their noses were nearly touching.

"Yes," he said, very softly. "You're mine, Priscilla. My property. You will never be anything else."

Her breath caught. "I -- I see, sir."

He kissed her again, and she felt as if she was about to cry.

"Do you trust me, Priscilla?" he murmured.

Did she? She honestly was not sure. She had known him scarcely two months. He told her so little, and kept so very many secrets.

But she belonged to him. She *must*. To deny his claim to her was too painful to even think of. She wanted to be his. She wanted him to hold her close and take her and mark her and control her for all eternity.

And how could she possibly belong to a man without trusting him?

"Yes," she whispered. "I trust you, sir."

"Good girl," he said, and petted her hair. She shuddered.

He had grown hard inside her again. He did not ask: only adjusted his position, squeezed both her breasts with his hands, and took her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and moaned softly.

Yes: she was his. She needed not worry about anything so long as she was *his*.

When he had finished, and was holding her close again, their bodies side by side upon the bed, their heads side by side upon the pillow -- when he was holding her gaze with his, and she was blushing and basking in the glow of his pleasure, he asked:

"Will I see you again tomorrow?"

There was just the faintest hint of vulnerability in the way he spoke, and it startled her. Yes, she knew that he desired her fiercely (or at least she hoped so), and of course any kind of desire was a sort of vulnerability, but...

He did not often show a crack in his armor.

It made her feel all the more desperately sorry to disappoint him, but there was nothing to be done. "I'm afraid not, sir," she said softly.

He growled, pulled her close, and kissed her. He was strong, and his muscles were taut, and she could not have escaped if she wanted to. That was frightening. But --

She was his, and she trusted him.

He pulled back. Regarded her. He did not look angry anymore. Perhaps...disappointed. Perhaps afraid.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said, meaning it in her deepest heart. "There is work I must do. I've fallen behind, and -- I mustn't be expelled." She blushed. "How could I be yours then?"

His jaw tightened. "I would find a way." He sighed. "But very well."

He kissed her gently on the nose, and for all that she trusted him, Priscilla felt very relieved that he was not really angry.

"How long?" he asked.

Priscilla drew in a breath. "Probably not less than three days," she admitted. (The pile of work she was neglecting had grown *rather* tall.) "But not much more, if I can help it."

Viccari ran his hand slowly down her bare shoulder. "So be it," he said. "But work swiftly, Priscilla. So that you may be back in my arms as soon as you can."

She nodded, shivering.

(She really did feel sorry to fail him, and she would not enjoy the time they spent apart any more than he would. But a part of her was grateful for this, that she'd had no other choice. Because... To see how intensely he desired her was a truly special thing.)

He caressed her face. "Yes," he said. "Come back to where you belong. After all...

"You're mine."