The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Black-nailed fingers twined in the sticky snarls of Victorine's hair, pulling her up to the tips of her toes, yanking her head back to expose the scarred flesh of her throat. Her scalp burned and the knots of scar beneath her chin ached in curious anticipation, like track marks longing for the needle. She wanted to open her eyes, to drink in the living image of her beautiful mistress, but she was paralyzed with desperate desire. It didn't matter. Every angle, every curve of Diva Demona's fierce body and proud face was burned into her memory. She could see the lush black lips part, revealing shining canines like twin scalpels, seconds before she felt the caress of cold leather and the vicious, crushing pain of her mistress's bite.

Then, like a stiletto to the heart of her fantasy, the harsh voice of the doorbell.

Fighting for control outside the door of her old apartment, the doorway to the past, to the tomb of Diva Demona, the new Mona stood, hands opening and clenching without purpose. What the fuck did she think she was doing anyway? She had no desire to see Victorine or her new Diva knock-off. She told herself a thousand times to get out, to let dead dogs lie, but yet here she was. A film of chilly sweat coated her body. Her heart pirouetted madly. She had to piss. She could hear her own muffled voice, singing. She rang the bell again, following it up this time with her fist against the painted metal.

The door opened and in the thin slice of darkness, Victorine's narrow white face, first suspicious, then blank with shock.

The past ten years had been cruel to her former slave. Her hair and make-up was identical, but the face beneath was worn and plague thin. Her body beneath the tattered black kimono was hardly more than a skeleton, sharp bones straining against grey, unhealthy skin. She even smelled wrong. Under the heavy mask of her perfume lurked the thin, acrid stench of a skewed metabolism, of madness. Her unclean throat was smeared with blood.

"Victorine," Mona forced herself to say. "We need to talk."

Then, from over Victorine's knife-blade shoulder, a voice, her own. So young and arrogant, pretentious, real as flesh.

"Who dares to interrupt our pleasure?"

Mona would not allow the sickness in her belly to rise up and drown her. Anger was her only strength as she pushed the grimy door open all the way.

The apartment was unchanged, a meticulous shrine, just the way she remembered it.

And standing in the middle of the clutter with leather fists on her hips and black eyes blazing, was Diva Demona.

The air between them seemed to gel to a hideous thickness, skewing off into monstrously distorted perspective. Her own burning, kohl-smudged eyes stared back at her from the end of a howling tunnel. Greedy animal paws clutched at her intestines, pulling and twisting. She staggered to her knees in a pile of dirty black lace.

The stench of stale sweat seemed like the only normal thing in this mad new world, and Mona's floundering brain clung to this simple truth like a life preserver as the tips of her fingers began to split and bleed, spontaneous stigmata opening like crimson orchids, drops of blood slithering through the strange air towards a vast and gaping mouth (her mouth), pink tongue tasting, shiny black lips peeled back over fang teeth and there was blood in her mouth, just like it used to be, sweet and sickening, real as memories. She felt so weak, each beat of her heart like lifting a tremendous weight while Diva Demona stood above her, suddenly pure of outline like a living photograph superimposed on to the blue screen of the real world.

Mona's bloody hands seemed a thousand miles away, cold as moon rocks. Her flesh felt insubstantial, fading slowly, dissipating like some theoretical gaseous element. She felt so tired, but at her core was a white-hot rage slowly burning through the layers of narcotic lethargy. That thing walking around in Mona's cast-off skin was not her. It was nothing but a figment of Victorine's twisted imagination, clothed in fragments of dead love. Mona was real, flesh and blood, and she was furious.

"No," she said, forcing her numb lips to move. Heat pulsed though her body, bringing distant limbs back into focus. "You can't have this. I own who I am."

Mona closed her cold fingers into a fist and punched up through the apparition's pale chest.

The fine skin parted like rotted silk and a dull pain gripped Mona's struggling heart, but she would not flinch. Beneath the flesh of this lanky doppelganger lay not the heat of living organs, but a strange chaos of texture that came loose beneath her fingers. There was a screeching wail that twisted up through the octaves until it lost all resemblance to Mona's voice and when she pulled her hand free, she held a fistful of crumpled letters.