The Color of Moonlight

Chapter 3: The Offering

Caelum crossed the threshold like a man stepping into a cathedral — slowly, reverently, as though the act required some internal negotiation with a god he had long since stopped believing in.

The moment his foot touched the wooden floor, the temperature in the garret plummeted. Elian felt it against his skin like the first breath of winter. The candle flames bent sideways, leaning away from the vampire as though even fire recognized something in him that demanded deference.

But it was not the cold that held Elian motionless. It was the silence.

Caelum moved without sound. No creak of floorboards, no rustle of fabric, no whisper of breath. He was a void poured into the mold of a man, and the effect was so profoundly unnatural that Elian's mortal instincts screamed at him to run.

He did not run. He closed the door and turned the lock with deliberate fingers, and the click of the bolt sliding home was the loudest sound in the room.

Caelum did not look at him. His silver eyes — still dull, still shadowed with the grey tinge of starvation — were fixed on the walls.

The paintings.

Elian had forgotten, in the frantic urgency of the last three nights, just how many there were. Canvases leaning against bookshelves, propped on chairs, stacked in towers against peeling wallpaper, pinned to the ceiling beams with rusted tacks. And every single one of them bore the same face.

Caelum's face. Rendered in moonlight and charcoal, in silver and Prussian blue, in shades of grey that Elian had mixed with his own fingers until the whorls of his fingerprints were stained the color of storm clouds.

And in the center of the room, the portrait Elian had painted from memory during the second night of absence — the silver eyes glowing with an inner light that no amount of oil or canvas should have been able to produce.

Caelum stood before it, and his stillness deepened into something that resembled paralysis.

"You painted these," he said, his voice barely audible. "All of them."

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Forty-seven."

Caelum's breath caught — a purely reflexive gesture, Elian realized, because the vampire did not need to breathe. It was a habit retained from a life that had ended four centuries ago.

"Forty-seven," he repeated, and the number seemed to physically wound him. His hand rose toward the central portrait, hovering an inch from the canvas, trembling. "No one has painted me since 1643. A Dutchman in Amsterdam. He died of the plague three weeks after finishing the commission, and the painting was burned by his widow because she said my eyes looked like the devil's."

He lowered his hand. The silver of his gaze was beginning to brighten, the dull grey retreating like fog burned away by dawn.

"You see me," Caelum whispered, and the wonder in his voice was the most human thing Elian had ever heard from him. "Four hundred years of walking through this world unseen — and you see me."

"I'm a painter," Elian said softly, stepping closer. "Seeing is the only thing I'm good at."

"No." Caelum turned to face him, the movement so fluid Elian's breath stuttered. "You do not merely see me. You see into me. You have painted things about me that I have spent centuries trying to forget."

Caelum swayed.

It was a small movement, barely perceptible, but Elian caught it — the slight falter in his balance, the way his eyelids fluttered, the dark veins beneath his skin pulsing with renewed urgency.

"Caelum," Elian said. "You need to feed."

Caelum's jaw tightened. "I told you — I cannot risk —"

"You're dying." The words came out sharper than Elian intended. "Or whatever the equivalent is for your kind. You're fading. And I will not — I cannot — watch you destroy yourself because of me."

"Elian —"

"Feed." Elian closed the distance between them until the cold of Caelum's body seeped through his thin cotton shirt. He raised his left hand and turned his wrist upward, exposing the pale, vulnerable underside where the veins ran blue beneath the skin. "Feed from me."

The sound Caelum made was not a word. It was a noise torn from somewhere deep and primal, a sound of want so absolute it bordered on agony. His silver eyes locked onto Elian's wrist, and his fangs descended with an audible click that echoed in the silent room.

"I will hurt you," Caelum said, raw, stripped of all pretense. "I have not fed in three nights. If I begin, I may not be able to stop. I will drain you, and you will die in this room surrounded by paintings of a monster who loved you too much to let you live."

"Then stop," Elian said simply.

Caelum stared at him.

"Stop when you've had enough," Elian continued, tilting his head to the side, baring the long, pale column of his throat. The gesture was so deliberate, so achingly vulnerable, that he felt Caelum's composure fracture like glass beneath a stone. "I trust you."

Three words. Three small, mortal, impossibly fragile words — and they shattered four hundred years of restraint more completely than any force on earth could have managed.

Caelum's hand closed around Elian's wrist. His grip was iron, and the cold of his fingers sent a shock racing up Elian's arm that was indistinguishable from pleasure. The vampire lowered his head, his dark hair falling forward like a curtain, and Elian felt the ghost of his breath against the pulse point at the base of his throat.

"Your heart," Caelum murmured against his skin, and his voice was a vibration Elian felt in his bones. "It's beating so fast. Are you afraid?"

"Yes."

"Good." Caelum's fangs grazed the tender skin above his collarbone — a whisper of ivory against flesh that sent a bolt of heat searing through Elian's entire body. "Fear keeps the blood sweet."

And then he bit.

The pain was sharp and immediate, a bright, crystalline flash that lasted exactly one heartbeat before it dissolved into something else entirely — something warm and liquid and overwhelming, a rush of sensation that flooded Elian's nervous system like color bleeding across a wet canvas. His knees buckled. Caelum's arm caught him, holding him upright against the vampire's chest with an effortless strength that reminded Elian, even in the haze of euphoria, that he was being held by something that could snap his spine like a twig.

But Caelum did not snap him. He held him with a tenderness that was almost unbearable, one hand cradling the back of Elian's head, the other pressed flat against the small of his back. The sounds he made as he fed — low, reverent, almost prayerful — were the most intimate sounds Elian had ever heard.

The room tilted. Elian's fingers tangled in Caelum's hair, gripping the dark strands with a desperation that surprised him, and he felt the vampire's body shudder against his own — a full-body tremor of relief and hunger and something that might have been gratitude.

He's drinking from me, Elian thought, and the thought was not frightening. It was exhilarating.

Caelum pulled back.

The separation was abrupt, almost violent, and Elian gasped at the sudden absence of warmth. Blood trickled from the twin puncture wounds on his throat, and Caelum's mouth was stained crimson — a portrait of devastation and desire that Elian's artist brain immediately, involuntarily, began to memorize.

"Enough," Caelum rasped, his eyes blazing now, the silver so bright it was almost white, incandescent with a hunger that had shifted from blood to something far more dangerous. "I have to — I need to —"

He pressed his mouth to the wound, and his tongue swept across the punctures with a gentleness that was obscene in its tenderness. The bleeding stopped. The sensation of Caelum's tongue on his skin — cool, smooth, impossibly precise — sent a jolt of pure, electric want crashing through Elian's body like a wave breaking against a seawall.

"Caelum," Elian breathed, his voice wrecked.

Caelum's hands were everywhere, all at once — sliding beneath his shirt, mapping the planes of his back, the sharp jut of his hip bones, with the same reverent precision with which Elian mapped a canvas. The vampire's mouth moved from his throat to his jaw, his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth, and every point of contact was a brand, a claim, a confession written in cold skin and burning want.

Elian arched into him, pressing his body flush against Caelum's chest, and the contrast was staggering — his own warmth against the vampire's chill, his frantic heartbeat against the stillness of Caelum's chest, his mortality against four hundred years of accumulated longing.

"More," Elian whispered against Caelum's lips. "I want —"

"No."

Caelum tore himself away with a violence that sent Elian stumbling backward into the easel, knocking the central portrait to the floor with a crash that shattered the silence like a gunshot. The vampire stood in the center of the room, his chest heaving, his silver eyes wild, his hands clenched at his sides as though physically restraining himself from reaching out again.

"If I take more," Caelum said, his voice a ruin of velvet and ash, "I will take everything. Not just your blood. Not just your body. I will consume you, Elian — your warmth, your art, your fragile, beautiful, finite life — and I will not be able to give any of it back."

In his silver eyes, Elian saw the truth Caelum was too afraid to speak aloud: I want you with a hunger that makes the thirst for blood feel like a mild inconvenience. And that is precisely why I cannot have you.

Elian stood amid the wreckage of his studio — the fallen portrait, the scattered brushes, the smear of Prussian blue where the canvas had struck the floor — and thought: I am going to ruin myself for this.

The sound came from the window.

It was soft — a slow, deliberate applause, three claps that rang out against the glass with the crisp, mocking precision of a metronome — and it froze the blood in Elian's veins more effectively than any vampire's touch.

Caelum's reaction was instantaneous and terrifying. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, he moved from the center of the room to the window, placing himself between Elian and the glass with a speed that blurred the air.

"Well," said a voice from the darkness beyond the glass — smooth, amused, laced with a cruelty that curled around the syllables like smoke. "How touching."

A figure sat on the windowsill, one leg draped casually over the ledge. His hair was white as bone, his eyes a deep, unsettling gold, and his smile revealed fangs that were longer and more pronounced than Caelum's.

"Soren," Caelum breathed, and the name fell from his lips like a curse.

The white-haired vampire tilted his head, his golden gaze sliding past Caelum's shoulder to fix on Elian with an interest that made the painter's skin crawl.

"So," Soren purred. "This is the little mortal who has made my darling Caelum forget four centuries of discipline. He's adorable. And he smells absolutely delicious."

Caelum's hand shot out and seized Soren by the throat, lifting him off the windowsill with a single fluid motion.

"Touch him," Caelum snarled, the sound not human, "and I will end you."

Soren laughed — a bright, crystalline sound that echoed off the cobblestones below — and his golden eyes gleamed with a delight far more dangerous than any threat.

"Oh, Caelum," he sighed, his smile widening around his fangs. "You always were my favorite mistake."