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He’s in love with her from the moment that he crawls out of the grave. She’s waiting for him in the cemetery with a present: an older gentleman with silver hair and a rumpled oak-brown suit, his eyes glassy with her thrall. William moves to sink his fangs into the man, but Drusilla tuts at him scoldingly.“Let Mummy feed you from her beak, baby bird.” She lowers her head and drains the man, fast and vicious, and then lets his body slump to the graveyard grass. She holds out a hand, her mouth stained red. “Come here, my William.”Drusilla cradles his head in her palms as he nuzzles along her neck. The flesh of her throat parts easily for his teeth, and he sips the man’s blood from her veins while she hums quietly to him. He wants to write.He sees flashes of words in his mind’s eye, envisions putting them to paper. A sonnet, a villanelle, a ballad. He could wax lyrical about the shine of moonlight on her hair, or the glitter of her dark eyes, or the softness of her pale skin, or the beautiful lethality of her fine teeth. The way she walks as if she’s dancing, speaks as if she’s singing. The words that fall from her lips as sweet as summer rain and full of lovely metaphor.Her whole existence lends itself to poetry. His darkling muse.They haven’t much time that night before the sun comes up, so she takes him by the hand to the lavish home that she’s been nesting in. There are bloodless bodies piled up against the walls and scratches in the wallpaper, but it’s warm and dimly lit and safe from prying eyes. As he follows her through its hardwood hallways, he realizes that there are not enough words in the English language to say all that he has to say about her.It doesn’t matter, for now; she takes him to her bed and he forgets how to form words entirely. He knows that plenty of other men his age have had this experience before, clandestinely, but William has always been a romantic, and saving himself for marriage was a given. He and Drusilla may not be married by any human laws, but in their stolen bedroom he comes to think of her as his wife, and in fact their connection is more binding than that of the living, because death will not do them part.Afterwards, as she lies in the bed and dozes, he scrounges up pen and paper and tries to put his thoughts to ink. Just as they had when he was making love with her, the words elude him, and he sits there scribbling out line after line after line of unsatisfactory verse. What is there to say about a woman who transcends his very language? He feels like a schoolboy again, struggling to spell his own name.Before he can get anywhere with the poetry, the door crashes open somewhere downstairs and the other two go tumbling through the lower part of the house in a whirlwind of laughter and stamping boots. Drusilla rouses from her nap, delighted to bring Will down to them and introduce her family to its new member. He scrambles to put paper and useless pen back in their drawer.
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There is nobody in the world who is quite like Drusilla, but William is somewhat surprised to learn just how different she is from her grandsire. Where Drusilla is whimsical, Darla is pragmatic; where Drusilla drifts, Darla strides; where Drusilla is sweet, Darla is acerbic. Drusilla has wide shining eyes like a doll’s, and Darla narrows hers at him like he’s an unpleasant smell. He’s on guard straightaway.But as the days go by, he starts to work out the words that describe her best, and finds that she’s not as difficult to get along with as he’d thought. He figures out how to read between the lines of her different smiles and what they mean: the little smirk that signals amusement, the sharp-edged grin that means he’s about to be beaten for something.He supposes that it’s a quirk of vampirism that he no longer minds physical pain, and is oftentimes happy to receive it. Sometimes, he provokes Darla deliberately, because he knows that she likes hitting him just as much as he likes being hit. The ways they like to dole out pain are another difference between Drusilla and Darla: the former preferring the romance of getting her teeth around him, digging her nails into him and clinging until he bleeds like it’s her way of holding him close, and the latter favoring the sharp crack of her hand across his skin, fleeting contact but a lasting mark.Darla finds William irritating on occasion, he can tell. He’s boyish and reckless in ways she doesn’t always like, ways that make her sneer and roll her eyes. But he also knows that she’s fond of him, too. If she wasn’t fond, she wouldn’t look for excuses to smack him around. Wouldn’t touch with such admiration the welts she makes on his back and his arse and his thighs.He tries to write poetry about Darla, too, but he finds himself distracted by the way the switch-marks sting when he sits. In the end, he puts hardly any words to paper.
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And then there’s Angelus. His favorite move is to shove William bodily up against the nearest wall, arm across his throat and fangs in his face, scolding, deriding. It’s fine by Will; it means that Angelus likes touching him just as much as the girls do.In fact, Angelus isn’t unlike either of them; he’s just as eager as Darla to bloody up Will’s back, and he clasps the back of his neck with a possessive affection that could give Drusilla some competition.In life, William didn’t think much of other men in the way that he thinks of Angelus now. Or at least, he didn’t let himself dwell. And yet the newfound want hardly takes any getting used to. Angelus’s hands are so much bigger than Dru’s or Darla’s on his body. So different, but if Angelus likes touching Will, Will likes being touched.He has never written a poem about a man before, but then again, Angelus isn’t so much a man as he is a monster. William scrawls down verses about the things that lurk in the dark, demons with the faces of angels, and when he’s finished with it he wants to burn it all. It’s not right. It doesn’t describe all the things that Angelus is besides a monster.Angelus teaches William about the giving and taking of pain. The thrill of the chase and the hunt. The art of getting away with it. Angelus is there with his broad hands spread over Will’s ribcage, grinning at him. Angelus holds Will’s chin to growl into his face. Pins him against the wall, using anger as an excuse to press their bodies together.The poetry’s inadequate once again.
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“What is this?” Angelus is holding up the rumpled scraps of paper. Will’s own spidery handwriting stares out at him.“It’s nothing,” he starts to say, and tries to snatch it away, but Angelus holds it out of reach.“It’s not nothing. It’s poetry. I read it.”Will puffs out his chest instead of shrinking in on himself. He says, “You had no right.”Drusilla appears in the doorway, Darla half-dressed and hanging off her shoulders.“Be nice to William,” Drusilla coos. “Don’t make him cry.”“I’m not going to cry,” Will says, bristling.“You did, once. I remember. Pretty golden tears, bright like sunshine on your cheeks.” She leans in to stroke his face, as if wiping them away.“Poetry? What could he be writing poetry about?” Darla asks, eyeing the pages that Angelus holds.“None of your business,” Will spits.“Why was the boy crying?” Angelus asks of Drusilla.“The other boys were being naughty. Took my poet’s words and exposed them to the daylight. So cruel.” She puts her chin on Will’s shoulder. “Spikes through all their heads. Isn’t that right?”
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They’ve all got blood on their mouths and rust on their hands as they leave a pile of corpses beside the railroad tracks. His body is warm with the recent meal and the joy of hunting.He can’t be sure why they’re not having a laugh over his clumsy verse, but Angelus doesn’t bring up what he’s read, and so it’s forgotten in favor of play. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter that none of the writing was any good. Darla is tossing another spike at him with a grin on her face, and Drusilla is tittering like a bird, and Angelus looks contemplative, eyeing him up like he’s seeing him in a new light. This—his little family—is all that matters. Who cares about poorly-constructed metre?He’ll write nothing more. The words have never come out right, not once in his life or unlife, and there’s hardly a point. He’s not William the Bloody anymore anyway.