A Sanguine Romance for the Dying

Baby, have you seen, there is a snake in our paradise A serpent that's wriggling between us and freezing our feelings to ice And with each drop of blood we bleed because of this something so precious dies and it feels it really is

-Sentenced, Killing Me Killing You-

"You dirty, cowardly bastard! How dare you destroy that poor girl's life with your flaccid sex! You will pay for your crimes with your life!" Katrina screamed as she brought her fist down onto the man's face again, and again, and again. At the eighth punch she heard the distinct

crack

of the man's cranium. As the man, now a corpse, convulsed post-mortem, she climbed off of him and got up, straightening her black dress, hands seductively running down her corset. The poor young lady still sat huddled in the corner. Katrina looked at her through the black veil that was attached to her hat. The lass looked at her saviour with eyes as wide as saucers, her bottom lip trembling. Katrina took a step forward and sighed tiredly as the girl screamed a raspy screech that must have pained her lungs. Katrina was at the girl's side in the blink of an eye, clamped down on her neck with sharp teeth, rending the recently deflowered flesh apart. The godhead hit her palate, but she was not lost in reverie. She really did not want to kill the poor thing, but she could not stand screamers anymore.

The girl hung lifelessly in her arms, and Katrina dabbed at her mouth with her smock before throwing her onto the cobbled stones. She walked toward the street, where underneath one of those damnable new electric lights her auburn-haired companion waited for her. The light made his mane glow in the night, contrasting sharply with his smooth, pale face. He looked at Katrina blankly, shoulders hunched.

"Done and dealt with, then?" he asked glumly. Without waiting for an answer he thrust his hands in the pockets of his grey greatcoat and walked the long way home. Katrina shook her head, a look of designation in her eyes. She did not even bother to catch up with him, she walked a polite distance behind him. Too many nights had passed in this fashion. After the catastrophe in Messalina's lair Edmund had changed. He often wanted to hunt alone. They no longer talked for hours on end, like they had done before. Even their lovemaking had grown...formal. Katrina thought he was acting like a bawling child, yet could not quite place where his general

ennui

came from. Perhaps it was because she had killed Messalina. Which would be preposterous because he had known that there was a slim chance of resolving their conflict without violence. But how would she feel if somebody would kill Edmund?

They would be greeting the sunrise, hanging from a tree from their own entrails

.

Katrina fell behind further as they walked into more familiar territory. Their hunting grounds were further away from their home nowadays. Their hunting had grown sloppier. Well, hers anyway. But people angered her so much more. So many filthy creatures, living solely to prey upon others, to cause them harm wilfully. If she could do anything to alleviate London's constabulary, then she would do so as she deemed it right. People turned their heads to look at her, and all Katrina could do was smile.

Because they are afraid

. And the cowering people did part for her like the Red Sea. After Edmund had vanished through the door of their home up ahead, Katrina walked a bit faster and went inside as well.

Their house had been redecorated after Edmund's last fit of rage. New colonial furniture, with that lustrous dark gleam to its wood, was carefully placed in the drawing room, making it look as welcoming and exotic as ever. Some of Edmund's drawings were framed and hung on the deep-red walls. There were three pieces of the same place: the look from their front door. All three of them were drawn at different times; the second without Murray, the bum who always hung around on the pavement until he was scared off, years were between the three pieces. But the most beautiful of them all hung in the centre of the wall, above the ornate white sofa. It was a portrait of Katrina and her Edmund. It featured only their faces; alabaster, both framed by lustrous hair and with sparkling eyes. Katrina's playful eyes were glancing sideways to her lover; as if her portrait-self could come to life any moment now to plant a kiss upon his face. It felt as if Katrina's heart sank down to her feet. This man, this horrendously beautiful creature had saved her life and had brought her beyond it. Everything she now was,

not everything

, she owed to him, to Edmund. She only hoped she could still set things right. To be left alone, with no one there to talk to...she did not want to think about the consequences that might have. And that was exactly what she was going to tell him now.

Edmund has virtually locked himself in what they called the 'West-Indies room'. It was a small room with a window in a semi-circle. It was filled with exotic plants, which only he tended and nurtured. Katrina was not allowed to enter the room, nor did she usually feel the urge to do so. She had her own little cause to fight for. The last couple of years, London's heart had grown more polluted by the so-called canting crews and thieves' citadels: horrible boils festering with criminals, rapists and squalid moneylenders that harried the ordinary folk of London. She could still taste the letch she had drained earlier; it was fun and rewarding to nail those fetid little creatures, but it did not truly change anything. There once was a time when she would have grieved this, but all she could feel now was this barely suppressible anger, this rage at such an injustice being so openly displayed before an unwitting – and uncaring- audience of good citizens.

It can be dealt with.

She rapped softly at the door, her nostrils already twitching at the pollen from the flowers, Edmund's children.

"Go away", Edmund bluntly replied. Water trickled down onto soil, cascading like a waterfall to Katrina's ears. She sighed, knocking again, but more gruffly this time.

"Don't be such an oaf, my love. We need to talk. Now." She made that sound more demanding than she had intended to, yet what's been said cannot be reverted. Behind the door, she could hear Edmund laughing, mockingly.

The fool

. "It's alright Katrina, go ahead and do what you must do. I'll be there to save you. Your knight in shining armour." Again that horrid laugh, taunting her, daring her to lash out...

She smashed the door with her fist, nestling it deftly in the wood. Splinters jabbed and clung to her fist, but she did not feel it. She only felt the annoyance and yes, some sadness at having lost a lover and a friend. Thoughts raced in her mind, coagulated into an entirely different mindset and with a "Don't stay up for me" hissed at the door she left their home, with mischief,

and justice

, flickering in her eyes.

***********

Naturally her coffin was empty, again. Edmund stared at it blankly for a moment before moving upstairs, still wearing the same clothes he had donned a week ago. He went to the front door, opened it and found Jimmy the Leg standing there. The scrawny child grinned at him, holding the today's newspaper up proudly.

"There you go guv'nor, right on schedule as always!". The boy had shown up faithfully each night since Katrina left with the paper ever since he found the child somewhere along Oxford Street, wobbling uneasily on his one good leg and his wooden peg, pushed to the muddy ground by passer-by. He had given him a shilling and got a paper off him. It turned out that he lived not too far from Edmund's home, so he had picked him up, running through the streets fast enough to pass for a human, the delighted squealing of the boy striking a chord of joy in his otherwise troubled heart. Since then, the boy waited around for Edmund to show up, often talking to Murray as he waited on him. He would buy a paper, say hello to Murray and then would go back inside, reading the news with trembling hands. "Black Widow spotted on London Bridge", "Cockney perverts face the Widow!", " Lady taken to Asylum after Widow's 'Rescue'"...he always knew what Katrina was up to next, yet could no longer recognise the frail girl he had once loved so dearly, whom he had saved from certain death and had given so much more...yet had also condemned her to what she was now. He threw the newspaper into the roiling fires of the hearth and glanced at himself in the mirror. His skin was pulled taut, seemed to be almost translucent. His eyes were rimmed crimson. The hunger gnawed at him. He must have gone on without sustenance for about a month now, having merely been a spectator to Katrina's debaucheries before. He had been so very, very wrong.

He threw some coins before Murray as he stepped outside, where Jimmy the Leg was still reading the front page out loud with great difficulty, the more difficult words coming out all garbled. He flashed a yellow-toothed grin at Edmund, staring up at his slender form, draped in a long black coat and black top hat.

"You going to a party, guv'nor?" he asked in his usual cheerful, chirping tone of voice, hastily snatching up a tuppence that was beyond Murray's grasp. Edmund twirled his cane in his black-gloved hand and shook his head. "No my boy, I'm going out for supper." He grimly looked ahead as he disappeared into the descending fog and into the cancerous heart of London.

***********

They were almost like a Catholic church, she thought to herself. Colourful and seemingly lustrous, but bland and unwholesome at closer inspection. But then London's ladies of the night were there for the laymen, so Katrina deemed the comparison to be appropriate. She had stolen the plain red dress and white blouse from a housekeeper somewhere in Kensington, and had left her with no tongue to tell the tale, and had buttoned down the blouse significantly, showing far too much of her pale flesh. Erect nipples pushed against the cloth, and with a little willing of the blood she had reddened her cheeks and lips to give herself that girlish look all men secretly craved in their dreams. The other slatterns seemed to turn into harpies when Katrina approached them. Perhaps some of their minds were already heated from the fever of syphilis, but Katrina argued it was just plain jealousy. She leaned against the wall of the gaudy pub, a short distance away from the other whores, curling her red hair around her finger like a child. A gentleman, accompanied by a perfect uptown lady passed them, staring ahead with the woman whispering tersely at the man as the women bowed deeply to show their cleavage and shouted lewd remarks at the man.

"Come on love, have you ever seen a pair of tits as nice as mine? A couple of shillings and they're yours! Oh come on John Bull, don't be shy! I can warm you up a lot better than that doll at your side, and I'm bloody sure my cunt's wetter than hers!" But it was all in vain. The man turned to stare hard at the women, then broke out into sneering laughter. " I wouldn't let my dogs crawl on you bunch of sluts" he barked at them, then turned to his companion hastily, begging forgiveness for his foul language in the midst of anger. Yet he cast a leering eye and a hungry smile on Katrina, and the other women noticed it as well. When they realised that all of their dubious experience was eclipsed by this maiden's innocent looks, they approached her with venom dripping from between their thighs.

"So you're new on the street are you, Miss Prissy?" a hag well beyond her thirties shrieked, revealing a rather toothless mouth on her jaundiced face. Another, a rotund lady with grey curls and drooping breasts wearing a blue dress reeking of sweat and stained with semen, laid a hand upon Katrina's bared shoulder...and felt the cold. She looked at her puzzled, then wailed out in agony as Katrina broke her index finger like a twig between her fingertips. She glowered, called upon the rage of her boiling bloodlust deep inside of her veins and whispered in a feral voice.

"Stay away from me. Steer clear of this street from now on hence, lest you want to die slowly and rather painfully. Sell your sodden wares somewhere else...in hell preferably. The toothless took another step forward, but backed away just as quickly when Katrina flashed her a smile; a fanged smile. The whores took their leave, shouting expletives at her louder and louder the farther away they were removed from her.

She sighed, fought down the anger clutching at her throat. Her chest heaved from the sheer exertion of willpower it cost her not to stalk after the women, not to rend them apart like rag dolls, not to lose herself in what she candidly relish the most. But other things soon occupied her predatory mind. She felt the eyes upon her almost instantly. The man was nothing special; dressed like a factory worker, along with the grime on his cheekbones and under his fingernails. His eyes were dim, thick black rings sighing under the strain of hard labour and destitute living. This was not the type of man Katrina hated to her core, the ones that would despoil girls like the one she had brutally slaughtered the night before. She smiled brightly, if still mockingly, as the man approached, shuffling toward her rather than walking.

"Do you like what you see, handsome? I'll give you all for a special price...a shilling and I'll take you to heaven" she told the man in a lilting voice. She noticed that despite all the dirt and his aura of poverty, the man was rather attractive. His blonde hair would shine if it were to be washed properly, and his body was ripped and strong from hard work and even harder nights on the town. He merely mumbled and took her hand in his, which was clammy. They sauntered toward the alley from which Katrina had come, and she pushed herself against the wall, hitching up her skirts in one fluid motion. The man gasped when he saw her bald folds, and his callused hands brought her breasts from their hiding place, rubbing his thumbs on the already hard nipples. He looked up at her like a child, his cheeks turning ruddy with excitement.

"You're beautiful. Not like the other ones" he said. Katrina smiled and sampled the bulge straining against his trousers, weighing the size and heat emanating from it...the blood pumping in it. This man was harmless. She grabbed his head and buried his face between her breasts. She crooned as his lips fell on her buds. "As long as you pay, you can call me anything, love." He was still the babe, sucking on her teat as he was. But his cock stirring and twitching in Katrina's hand was all grown up. She dropped to her knees and freed his cock from its cage and licked the head slowly. With his mouth free from her mounds, he moaned loudly, reverberating throughout the alley. He rested his hands against the wall, bucking his hardness inside of Katrina's mouth, who sucked hungrily on the blood-rich organ. As her hands rubbed his balls, she already felt them tightening. But she wanted to make him last, wanted to give him his money's worth. She straightened herself, saw his hard cock dangling and wet with her sanguine saliva. She smiles absently for just the blink of an eye, then pulled him close to her, gyrating her pelvis to make him plummet deep inside of her pussy, swallowing his hot flesh whole. He moaned and thrust madly at her, pushing her up against the wall. Katrina giggled, leaned in to lick his ear.

"Is your wife as pretty as I am?" she whispered. His fucking stopped momentarily, shaking his head as he breathed heavily, shirt stained with sweat. She sucked on his earlobe again and saw the hair in her neck stand on end. "What's her name?" she hissed in his eye, rubbing her pussy on his cocktip, eliciting another moan from him. " M...Mona." Then the images of his wife lit up in his aura like a beacon. Katrina stared at the woman, loving her husband desperately, always supporting him, even though he did go out on a bender every once in a while. But he worked hard, and he brought in what little money he could muster to feed her and their five children. Painstakingly slow, Katrina goaded him inside of her again, letting him suck on her finger as his eyes went wide with lust.

"I want you to call out her name when you cum inside of me. Scream it out, then go home and make her scream. This is what I want. This is what

you

want" Her eyes flowed from green to blue into violet, the moonlight seemingly making the irises sparkling, forcing her will in to his mind, shattering all objection. He smiled sullenly, the child happy with his reward after his chore, and he plunged his cock deep inside of her again, moaning and softly muttering his wife's name in Katrina's ear.

Harder

, she pierced the jelly of his mind,

call out louder.

The sucking sound of her pussy first overwhelmed his voice, but as his passion mounted, he called out louder. Katrina relaxed against the wall, lifting a leg to make sure that her customer could bury his cock completely inside of her, loving the way his throbbing flesh rubbed against her clitoris. She moaned and squealed with coquettish delight herself, loving this more than she cared to admit. And again and again he called out his wife's name, his hunger increasing every time he said it, seeing her in front of her, feeling her as he fucked Katrina.

"Hrrrmm, yes Mona, you like this don't you? Your man taking control like this. I'm going to cum inside of you. Tell me, oh God, tell me you want it love", the man sobbed as he reached his climax, but Katrina did not play the part of his wife. He barely noticed it was a whore he was fucking in some dank alley.

"Oh Mona, God Mona, I'm coming, I'm....oh Mona! Mona..." The man did not see his semen pearling in the moonlight, down Katrina's alabaster thigh. She scooped it up, licked it from her fingers as she watched the magic dissipate from her customer. He shook his head, then threw a couple of shillings onto the cobbles and tucked his still-hard cock back inside of his trousers. He had the look of all men who left a whore. Sated,, yet somehow ashamed. But judging from the determined stride with which he set course toward Piccadilly, she was assured that he would do what she had told him to.

She closed her eyes and laid her cheek against the cool wall. She would not bring justice to the streets today. But at least she had performed a little, lusty miracle.

********

"I swear, the next time I see that cunt, I'll tear off those pretty little tits of hers", the fat Daria spat at the uncaring fog, clenching her fists. She winced and bit her lip. The gin she had guzzled down after that tart had broken her finger no longer hid the pain, but her anger made her forget about it. Toothless Tess brought a hand under her skirt and teased her prune-like pussy, trying to distract her from the pain. "Easy love, we'll get our revenge. But I reckon we need to give ourselves a treat first when we get home. No men for us tonight. Right Fanny?" She smiled a black smile at the girl-child trailing behind the other two, who nodded and laughed stupidly. Fanny couldn't speak and was, frankly, retarded, but she also had a knack for bringing in plenty of money for the three of them. She never objected to anything the good and dutiful patrons of London's backstreets demanded of them. Not that she could comprehend any of it, let alone object against the atrocities. Onward they plodded, pawing and groping each other, waking up the good people already fast asleep in their middle class homes. Deeper and deeper into the decrepit bowels of London they spiralled, and the fog cleared in the dead of night as their hands trailed along the rusty fences of Carfax Abbey. Daria threw her head in her neck and howled like a wolf, much to the amusement of her two colleagues. They were still a long way from home, but no husbands or children waited for them. Something else did, however.