Blood Rites by Elaine Bergstrom

her legs pressed against her chest, her arms hugging them, as if by protecting her body, Helen could somehow shield her mind from the abuse and the evil she shared. Sold and used and sold again. No wonder Phil was attracted by his daughter. His instincts told him what the girl had been too ashamed to admit.
    It would be so easy to feed on Hillary, to merge with her and dull the sharpest edges of her memory, but Helen’s instincts warned her back. There were feelings she must not touch—magnificent in their intensity, poisonous in their pain.
    “You become what you take,” Stephen had warned. He hadn’t needed to say anything at all. Helen left Hillary with one quick mental suggestion, then silently retreated from the room, from the house, from the town, and walked slowly up the mountain toward home.

    Even before she crossed the low stone wall separating the private Austra estates from the rest of the AustraGlass property, she sensed Stephen waiting for her. She adjusted the belt on her dress, ran her fingers through her tangled hair. Concealing her thoughts as best she could, she walked into the house past where he sat waiting. She reached out to touch him, then pulled back. Touching would strengthen their bond and she only wanted to hide.
    He stood and walked to the open door and looked out at the trees and sky, his long arms stretched above his head, fingers hooked into the molding. Her spider. Her web.
    Helen fell into a chair beside the oak table and buried her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
    “Don’t,” he said harshly without looking at her. “Don’t ever apologize for what you are. Especially not to me.”
    “You expected it, though. You wanted to hear me say I was sorry.”
    “ Tske !” He hissed the denial in his own language, then sat on the table beside her, reaching down to pick a piece of leaf from her hair. “You should be smiling, laughing, telling me how much you enjoyed him. You did enjoy him, yes?”
    “Yes . . . no. I don’t know. There’s something so sad about him.”
    “What you should have felt when you met him was need. What you should have received was life. None of the rest was necessary.‘’
    “Even sex?”
    “He didn’t force you. He could not.”
    “Couldn’t! He knew. Do you think there was any way to avoid what happened?”
    “He’s good at arousing guilt. And pity, yes?”
    “I never thought about myself; I wasn’t raised to think about myself,” she said honestly. “But I have to be that way now, don’t I? Cautious. Secretive. Alone.”
    “Yes. But you have the family. I brought you here to learn from them.”
    “And now they make it harder for me. I feel like I have a dozen extra people inside of me and every one of them is giving me different advice. That would be confusing in itself but I don’t even know who I am.” She felt her anger rising, took a deep, calming breath, and went on. “Once you were my teacher, and while I resented being treated like a child, I always understood what you wanted. That isn’t true anymore. Now you don’t state things clearly and when I do what I think you’re suggesting, you get angry.”
    “Not at you. Never you. I only find it infuriating that I must teach you the very things that will draw you away from me.” ,
    “How can you be so sure?”
    “Because my family cannot live on one another. And what we take from the humans we use binds us to them so tightly we no longer wish to be intimate with one another. Our mental ties are strong but our sexual bonds are frail at best. Only on nights when we have blood rituals or on occasional isolated hunts when the lust of the kill excites us do we ever have sex with one another. Then it is magnificent because the passion unites us all.”
    Helen had already sensed this. Since her changing, Stephen had lost much of his allure. Except for the night of the family bonding, sex had become satisfying but mechanical, as if they had shared fifty good years