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Guillermo thought, at first, that some water had gotten into his gloves.
It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d dipped his arm a little too far into a bucket of sudsy water while scrubbing something down. He felt warm liquid seeping under his nails in the fingertips of his rubber cleaning gloves, squished down due to their slightly excessive length.
It stood as a testament to his experience that, when he saw a thin trickle of blood leaking out past the end of the long rubber glove like batter running over the side of an undersized baking pan, his body moved to contain the stream before his mind even recognized the blood as his own. He got up off his knees as he stripped his hand clean of its rubber casing and gazed at the thin webbing of wet blood that covered it. A small wound had been cut into the center of his palm, and as he watched, it slowly dripped a steady rivulet of blood.
The wound looked deep. He flipped his palm away from himself to see whether the back of his hand had remained clean. Another cut, the same size and circular shape, adorned the back of his hand as well. Was he allergic to his gloves? Had his existence really sunk that low? He held his hand up to the nearest lamp to gauge the damage.
Guillermo swore. And then, even though he didn’t really enjoy swearing, he swore again.
A hole, large enough to let a thin glow of light through, cut its way through the center of his palm. The weak electric light from the lamp made the edges of the wound glow a faint illuminated red, like a rotting halo around a saint’s portrait. Even as he watched, blood leaked out around its edges and crawled its way down the back of his hand.
His other hand was bleeding too, he discovered when he removed the other glove. Google had proved to be little help for immediate treatment, other than the usual “call 911” and “see a doctor immediately” without any advice on how to avoid the hospital bills that would haunt him after a doctor’s visit.
He hadn’t bought pads for himself in years, and he’d used up the accumulated stockpile from previous deceased familiars on a particularly egregious blood spill in the music room a few months back. So he wrapped his hands in gauze, palms stuffed with more wadded-up gauze on the second try because he hadn’t accounted for the curvature of his hand, then in bandages, and went to dump out the bucket of soapy water before he forgot.
He passed the sitting room as he headed towards his room to conduct a more thorough Google search on his new condition without worrying about smearing blood all over the screen of his phone. Tinny computer game music leaked out into the hallway. From the corner of his eye, he could see the rest of the household, along with the Guide, all seated silently and staring off into space in deep thought.
“Start it over, Colin Robinson, my concentration has been broken,” Laszlo said.
Guillermo heard Nandor groan quietly and what was certainly the sound of a head dropping back against the top of a chair in exasperation.
“It’s your familiar who decided to come traipsing by smelling like dinner,” Laszlo said pointedly.
“That was Guillermo? Guillermo, get in here!”
This time, when Guillermo looked through the doorway, everyone was staring at him. The change was uncanny, like something out of a horror film. Colin Robinson sat with the needle of the record player grasped between two fingers, a brightly-colored record slip wedged between his leg and the side of the armchair.
“Guillermo, what have you been doing? You know better than to walk around with open wounds in this house!” Nandor addressed him like he was a dog that had been caught piddling on the rug, but extended a hand for Guillermo to present his injury for inspection.
Guillermo stayed in the doorway. “I didn’t mean to. I was cleaning, and they just appeared.”
“Well, that just makes it worse, doesn’t it? You were being careless, like you always are, and then you go running around and dragging your blood beneath our noses, because you are all high and mighty now thinking you are too dangerous to get eaten,” Nadja snapped.
Guillermo could feel an angry flush creep up his neck. “No, I didn’t intend for a hole to appear in each of my hands, and I don’t appreciate you talking about me like I didn’t spend months keeping you all from getting staked to death by vampire assassins!” he replied.
“Stop making up ridiculous excuses for your inept fumbling, then,” Laszlo said, while Nadja muttered something about inflated egos too loudly to be under her breath.
Guillermo unraveled the bandages binding his right hand, a jaw clenched in anger a ready bolster against the sharp pull of yanking the cloth free from the dried blood that had cemented it to the raw skin around the cut. “Look,” he said, “see?” He held his palm up, hoping the light from the hallway would be enough to illuminate the actual hole running through his hand for sufficient dramatic effect.
He expected Laszlo to make some comment about jerking off gone wrong, or maybe Colin Robinson to pipe up, eyes brightly aglow, with a facile comment about workplace safety hazards dribbling from his mouth. He hadn’t expected the actual reaction he got.
Laszlo flinched and grimaced, while Nadja fully recoiled, screwing her eyes shut tight and raising her hands as an ineffective shield against whatever her newest problem with Guillermo was.
“Seven hells, he’s got the blood stigmata!” Laszlo cried.
“The what?” Nandor, who was not at all disturbed by Guillermo’s most recent injuries, said.
“The stigmata! The same injuries that that bloody jeepers man got!” Laszlo bit out at him.
Nandor still didn’t appear to grasp the problem. “I thought he was stoned to death. Did they drag him behind a cart while they did it? Put the hooks in his hands like grnch,” Nandor mimed putting a hook through his limp, outstretched hand like he was stringing a piece of bait for fishing, “to drag him?”
Nadja and Laszlo boggled at Nandor from behind their raised hands, and Colin Robinson stared at him blankly as well, for good measure.
It gave Guillermo a little time to berate himself for not connecting the dots sooner. He was the one who’d spent nineteen years getting dragged to church every Sunday, and eight of those covertly mentally ranking the male saints in the stained-glass windows by hotness. He’d seen the little whorls of red paint adorning the praying hands on the portrait of St. Francis of Assisi and heard the story in Sunday school.
“Close those up immediately,” Laszlo ordered. “Don’t bring that into this household, where my lady wife can see.”
“How did you get chosen for a miracle anyway? Been hiding some serious sainthood underneath those sweaters?” Colin Robinson said.
“I didn’t do anything. It just happened while I was scrubbing the fireplace. I didn’t even know it could happen,” Guillermo said, cradling his unwrapped hand.
“It’s a very, very rare occurrence. They say the blood burns going down. Some vampires consider it a delicacy.” The Guide affected a bug-eyed look of mock innocence in Guillermo’s direction. “I’ve never had a chance to try it, personally.”
Yeah, no. She wasn’t getting anywhere near any of Guillermo’s holes, wounds or not.
He started to rewrap the bandages before he could give in to the temptation to walk towards his housemates with his hand outstretched to see how they’d react. “Do you know anything about how to make it stop?”
“Why would you want to ruin the first thing that’s made you interesting?” Nandor asked.
Guillermo flushed. “Never mind,” he muttered.
“Now, Colin Robinson, drop that needle and allow us to resume our contemplation of your newly discovered tunes,” Laszlo said.
Colin Robinson dropped that needle, and the computer game music resumed. Guillermo decided to head to his room and do some more internet searching.
He could tell they were watching his back as he left, though.
A cursory search for “stigmata” yielded little practical advice, though it did send him clicking over to his ancestry test results to make sure he wasn’t actually related to that Magdalena de la Cruz. Figuring out how to close them didn’t come up, probably because most documented cases had been hoaxes.
His own had stopped dripping, though, for the time being.
Guillermo could sense Nandor standing behind the curtain that hung in the doorway to his room, hesitating at the threshold. He tried to draw the curtain aside and greet his master, but the angle of the desk left him little room to maneuver his arm, meaning he ended up with a wad of curtain scrunched awkwardly in one hand.
Nandor asked him about his hands, his own clasped loosely in front of his chest. Guillermo unwound the bandages from one- the left, this time, because otherwise the lack of symmetry would bother him for the rest of the night- and extended it for Nandor to inspect.
He thought Nandor would lean over to peer at it from a safe distance, and was surprised when he cradled the offered hand in one of his own, fingertips delicate as a breath on the back of Guillermo’s knuckles.
Guillermo looked at his furrowed brow, his dark eyes, his hair swinging forward over his face, all etched in the bright illumination and harsh shadows from the light of his desk lamp, so incongruous to the candles and shade of the rest of the house. He saw how carefully Nandor held his hand, though it may have been that he was repelled by the threatening proximity of something apparently holy.
He thought about what Nandor had said. The first thing to make you interesting. He could have been trying to save face in front of his roommates, the same reflexive, defensive cruelty as always.
“It is a very thorough hole you have here, Guillermo. Not much new blood, though,” he finally said.
“I think it comes and goes. The bleeding, I mean,” Guillermo said.
Nandor told him he was going to the council offices for a thing, a vampiric council thing he refused to elaborate on, which Guillermo understood to mean that Guillermo was coming with him. Nandor said he could look through the books in the library there. “You can peruse the superior vampire literature, instead of the weak answer box website you are so fond of.”
It took Guillermo a second to parse what Nandor was saying, not because it was complicated, but because he was watching the way Nandor’s head was nodding over his hand like he was falling asleep standing up, an unconscious flickering movement towards a source of blood.
It made Guillermo wonder, as he rewrapped his hand and wrapped his coat around himself, what Nandor thought of burning sensations.
Despite the lack of any useful organization method or search function in the council library, Guillermo did manage to find a few books that made mention of stigmata. But it was like using an old-timey cookbook- it assumed a lot of context that would have been obvious to, say, a vampire in the twelfth century, and not so much to a human in the twenty-first. Unfortunately, the Guide’s comment about the blood burning helped him a lot by directing him towards a more recent blood-tasting guide. Recent, as in from the eighteenth century.
Beware of humans who live near the docks, for their littoral diets impart a scaly, gritty texture to their blood. The blood of a tall human man must drop further in circulating through the body than in a short man, and therefore gains air as it drops and loses it rapidly as it climbs, making blood drunk from the neck of a tall man thin in consistency and flat in flavour.
He knew the first thing was wrong, because he escorted the rest of the house to the Go Shuck Yourself fundraiser every October at their request, and he’d never heard a peep about the second.
Finally, in a section titled Curious Flavourings in gothic script: The blood of the stigmatic is polarizing within the vampire community. Its burning sensation has been compared to human whiskey, and also lye. It is notably painful to drink either way. Julius the Coolius expanded upon this in his philosophy on vampires and holy (and holey) objectes, titled This Newfangled Christianity Thing: What It Means For You!
By the time Guillermo found the copy in the Julius the Coolius section (he had written quite a lot, apparently, and most of it pretentiously incoherent), he could hear Nandor’s footsteps approaching.
“I think I just found something, Master, if you’ll give me just a minute,” Guillermo said without turning around.
“Julius the Coolius? I knew him back in Wien,” Nandor said, looming over Guillermo’s shoulder.
Guillermo flipped through the book, not bothering to look for an index. “Oh? What’s he like?”
“He never got over the fall of the Roman Empire, or the Byzantine one. Always griping about how the Holy Roman Empire couldn’t compare.”
“So you didn’t get on then, because of your whole Ottoman thing?” Guillermo asked, finally stopping at Stigmatics: Fact from Fraud.
“I never said that,” Nandor said.
But a real stigmatic, the kind whose manual gashes can be dangerous as one of those newfangled sideways X’s that vampire killers are now using, leaks a blood from those wounds that is as euphoric on the tongue as the golden rays of light from a sunrise.
“What does it say? Read faster, Guillermo.”
“It says that…” Guillermo skipped over the part about the blood being a delicacy, best not to remind a vampire that he was full of its food without extracting a promise to turn him in exchange for a sip first, “That… you can only drink from a stigmatic once, because-”
Our mutual entwinement with all that is unholy renders our consumption of their blood an act of desecration, and so by drinking from a stigmatic, we render their holy blessing null and void, closing the wound and depriving us of this wellspring.
So savor this act, for you will know a pleasure that few will have the opportunity to experience. Embrace this stricken saint, and watch the fear and anguish in their eyes as you drain their bestowed glory, and leave them marked irreversibly by the power of the darkness.
“Well, apparently, if a vampire drinks from the cut, it heals,” Guillermo said quickly, shutting the book.
The pattern of bloodshed made itself immediately apparent: once at midnight and again at noon, lasting for who knows how long because he immediately wrapped it in a new set of bandages. Guillermo tried to keep them covered as a default, because he was tormented by intrusive thoughts of a pencil getting stuck in one of the holes. (Why a pencil? He had no idea. He vaguely recalled some gory fake-real video that one of the other kids in his high school DnD group had pulled up on the computer.)
The timing never varied, but the flow did. It took him a few days to realize that the presence of his cross necklace- or any crosses, his knuckledusters included- meant a more voluminous output. Guillermo grimly wondered if this was meant to provide more of a show in any church he would happen to exhibit his supposedly sacred injuries in. Then he felt guilty about thinking that.
Whatever it meant, he wanted it gone. His desires were simple: vampirism, respect, maybe some erotic mouth-to-mouth blood transfer while he was at it. And yet opposition kept welling up from his very own flesh and blood, between his bloodline to, now, his physical body.
Remember me? Each rivulet and trickle seemed to say. Remember who you never even tried to be?
At least the worst the slaying had done for him was mess up his sleep schedule and kick off anxiety attacks. The wads of bandage stuffed in his palms meant he couldn’t even wear his leather gloves, much less wield a stake. He’d already lost a pair to a twin set of matching maroon stains.
“Are you still bleeding?” Nandor asked him during his bedtime routine one morning, tapping a finger teasingly against Guillermo’s knuckles gripping the side of his coffin, his voice warm like they were huddled together in the campfire of a shared joke.
He wanted it gone. He wanted his hands back, he wanted the Guide to stop slithering all over him more than she usually did, and deep down, he wanted to draw Nandor in like his blood was a lure.
“Master,” he said, and swallowed. “Would you be willing to help me with something?”
Nandor watched Guillermo’s finger trace over the bandages covering the back of his hand. His eyes became very dark.
“I suppose I could help you, Guillermo. I will have some time tomorrow night,” he said, not looking away from Guillermo’s hands.
At 11:47 p.m. the next night, Guillermo laid a shallow dish on a table he had just brought into Nandor’s crypt. He was originally going to use a mixing bowl, but he had a vivid mental image flash in his mind of Nandor sticking his face in it and getting blood in his hair.
Nandor watched him. He’d dressed down, in the loose white tunic the cameras never saw, changing sometime while Guillermo was out of the room.
Guillermo had already removed the bandages and thoroughly cleaned the holes, careful not to graze the skin too roughly and start the bleeding before it was time. He held them, palms up, over the dish and waited.
As the day turned into the next, the low throbbing pain started around the wounds and blood slowly began to seep from them, his hands pulsing as his veins pumped more blood out of the holes. Guillermo was wearing two cross necklaces and had stuffed all the rosaries and excess crosses he owned in his pockets, and he could feel their effect in the throbbing force around his wounds.
The first drops of blood pattered onto the bowl like the first signs of a thunderstorm on concrete as Nandor took his right hand and cradled it in both of his, long fingers spreading up the sides of his palm.
“You have such small hands. Like a baby,” he said, and lowered his head to press his lips against Guillermo’s palm.
Guillermo heard a very quiet sound like water droplets in a hot pan, unholy skin burning from a holy substance. A sound tore its way from the very back of Nandor’s throat and vibrated from his cool, dry lips into Guillermo.
Nandor drank slowly. He barely needed to suck to enjoy the wellspring of blood that was flowing from Guillermo’s hands.
Guillermo saw a thin stream trickle down the underside of a finger, and Nandor caught it with his tongue before it could form a bead on the edge of his nail, swallowing his finger in its entirety, wrapping it in suction, pulling back to run his tongue firmly back up the trail it had created.
He brushed his lips across the junction where his fingers met his palm like a kiss, setting off goosebumps along Guillermo’s arm. He attached himself to the wound again, pressing hard enough that Guillermo could feel the edge of his teeth against his skin. Guillermo could feel them scrape as he opened his mouth wider, and then it was the tip of his tongue flicking against the wound.
That tongue, that talented tongue that Nandor loved to put to uses other than talking, probed the hole in his hand, twisting itself down, down, forcing itself as far as it could go and violating the raw flesh. He had to force himself to breathe. He imagined Nandor’s tongue passing through entirely, bowing the bones and bending the muscle around its force.
Nandor’s hair had draped itself around his face like a curtain, closing the scene off from Guillermo as thoroughly as if he had closed his eyes. Guillermo felt as if he had closed his eyes. He could hear the deep, guttural groans coming from Nandor’s throat, and he could feel Nandor’s tongue pressing deeper inside his wound, a tense ache that turned his nerves into live wires all the way up to his elbow, but his other senses had stopped mattering. If all the lights had gone out in the room, he wasn’t sure he would have noticed.
The tips of Nandor’s fingers flickered and pressed against Guillermo’s hand where he was still holding it, a reflex triggered by each new spasm of blood that Guillermo’s veins dutifully pumped out for his consumption. Guillermo had never thought of how the tongue was mostly muscle until he could feel each contortion from Nandor’s, how he traced the edges of the hole with the tip, then the sides, then let its slick, smooth back slide against those edges as he penetrated deeper.
Nandor caught Guillermo’s other hand by the wrist- he had raised it unthinkingly and let it hover next to Nandor’s face. He could suddenly feel blood running all the way down to his elbow. Here, too, Nandor cleaned him with his tongue, the end laid flat as it dragged along the delicate skin of Guillermo’s inner forearm. The other hand, still held at the wrist, spasmed as he caught sight of Nandor’s face.
He looked wrecked, helpless. His eyes opened slowly to look at Guillermo, as if the weight of their lids had become unbearably heavy, staying half-lidded. Guillermo was caught in his unfocused gaze, surrounding him like a shroud. The irises had turned a dark, dark red.
Nandor bowed his head and lowered Guillermo’s hand with him like a sea creature returning to the depths, and Guillermo gasped for breath as Nandor set upon his left hand without mercy, still unbearably slow in his ministrations but brutal in his intensity, like the only thing that mattered was satisfying his own desire.
Guillermo wanted to empty himself out and pour himself into Nandor and complete him, leave traces of himself inside that could never be washed out. The intensity of the feeling terrified him, like looking in a guidebook for the first time and realizing that the large dog that walked occasionally across the yard was really a wolf. He wanted to burn through Nandor like a forest fire, to spread through his veins down to the smallest capillaries and suffuse throughout his body. Nandor’s lips had been burned until they were red and swollen, like they had been kissed to near-bruising. The dull, pulsing pain from the stigmata and the intrusion of Nandor’s tongue passed into the fiery burn of his blood, and he thought the pain connected them by a spider-silk thread, passing a current of sensation between them.
He felt a little light-headed, from blood loss or pain, he wasn’t sure. The hole on his right hand had closed, leaving behind a small circle of shiny pink skin.
Nandor flipped his left hand over, and Guillermo reflexively curled his fingers around Nandor’s, held in place by Nandor’s thumb over his knuckles. It felt like an old-fashioned kiss, before Guillermo had to grip Nandor’s hand at the returning intrusion of his tongue, to brace himself against the ecstatic agony of the rough scrape against the flayed tissue. He had to bear the sensation, he wanted to let the tears gathering along his lashes fall as an expression of something, because he’d lost all words for the way he felt. His entire being had been reduced to the fleeting places where Nandor’s mouth connected to his body.
As Nandor took his mouth from the clotting wound, his tongue again passed over the fragile crevice between Guillermo’s fingers, a teasing moment of pressure, chasing a line of blood that had escaped from his palm and trailed down towards Nandor’s hand. Guillermo shivered, hand twitching in Nandor’s grip.
His hands felt cold and sore, like he’d been holding his phone too much above his face. They were streaked in places with traces of diluted blood. Nandor uncurled his own from Guillermo’s grasp and mouthed off the thin streaks that had dripped onto his own knuckles.
He looked groggy, intoxicated. His eyes met Guillermo’s as his tongue flicked over his fingers. A bit of a flush had risen in his cheeks, formed from Guillermo’s offered blood.
Guillermo looked down at the bowl. A few drops of blood had fallen onto its white surface, droplets forming small pools around its center. Nandor’s hands came into view as they braced themselves on the edge of the shallow dish. He looked at Guillermo, before leaning down to lower himself to clean the bowl. Guillermo gathered his hair and held it as the base of his skull.
Guillermo watched him lap at the blood like a dog and thought about how he had once been royalty, and in a way, he still was- he was inscribed in history books as grand vizier of Al Quolanudar and was half of a judge-jury-executioner as leader of the vampiric council. And Guillermo had reduced him to a supplicant.
Nandor finally pulled his head from the bowl and staggered backwards to the chaise, Guillermo still holding his hair as he followed. He sat heavily, sprawled like a puppet with his strings cut, his eyes glassy as they looked at Guillermo.
Guillermo let the hair drop back around Nandor’s face. “Are you alright, master?”
“I am wonderful, Guillermo,” Nandor sighed.
“I’ll go get a towel to wipe your face,” Guillermo said, and walked out of Nandor’s crypt and straight to his own bedroom.
He realized he was so wet he’d soaked through his underwear and so achingly hard that the way his underwear rubbed against his clit with each step was almost painful. He was so frantic that he barely remembered to close the curtain to his room before he laid his torso sideways on the cot, legs hanging over the side and his boots braced against the floor for leverage, stuck his hand down the front of his pants, and immediately began to hump it frantically.
His own slick seeped between his fingers as he fingered himself, the base of his palm grinding against his clit. His hands had remained slightly chilled from blood loss, and he tried to imagine that it was Nandor’s fingers fucking him, his other hand reaching between Guillermo’s legs to circle his clit.
Nandor’s saliva had coated Guillermo’s hands, from sucking on his fingers and tonguing at his palms, and though it had dried since, Guillermo tried to apply the memory so the thin membrane between his fingers that had been traced by the tip of his master’s tongue was the edges of his labia, but thought of Nandor’s tongue on his hand was enough to send him over the edge, body seizing as he came.
He panted into his thin mattress, lightheaded from blood loss and pleasure. Awareness slowly trickled back into his mind, until he couldn’t ignore the nagging necessity of his promise to return to his master with a towel.
Nandor sat where Guillermo had left him, the only difference being that his linen tunic had been wadded up and tossed onto the floor. Guillermo weakly proffered the towel at him, only for Nandor to tilt his chin up, obviously expecting him to personally wipe the blood off of his face.
“Was it good, master?” Guillermo dabbed at the bare traces of blood. He’d scrubbed his hands in scalding water beneath the faucet, but he wasn’t sure if Nandor would be able to smell what he’d just been doing with them.
Nandor pressed his cheek into Guillermo’s palm and took a deep breath. “You were delicious.”
Guillermo’s heart stopped. It began again, building to a pounding pace inside his chest, as if the pause had been the moment before a starting pistol had been fired. He squeezed the towel and stepped back. The faded patterns on the rug swirled between his feet. He couldn’t look up, couldn’t look at Nandor.
The scrunched pile of worn linen fabric glowed in the white candlelight, catching his eye against the dark surfaces of the rest of the room. Translucent patches streaked its rumpled folds in irregular patterns, as if Nandor had worn it while running through a sprinkler.
Guillermo remembered the Nandor of a few minutes past, sprawled like a puppet with its strings cut, legs open like the split stem of a plant.
The front of his pants pulled tight over the boner straining their fabric.
Nandor opened his mouth and touched the edge of a fang to Guillermo’s thumb.