Charisse

The train hissed into Oradea like a serpent exhaling secrets.

Elara Moranu stepped down, gloved hand clutching the parcel that had arrived weeks ago. No return address, only a crimson wax seal and a name written in calligraphic blood: Casa Moranu.

Inside the parcel was a deed, a key, and a diary.

She hadn’t known Katrinel Moranu at all. The woman had died before Elara’s tenth birthday, remembered only in fragments passed down through silence, a scent of rosewater, a velvet box no one opened, a name spoken like a spell and then buried.

But the diary was unmistakably hers. And it was not a record of domestic life. It was a confession.

She adored me. I sang as the veil lifted. I sang as the hunger came.

The entries were scattered, fevered, erotic.

They spoke of a lady named Contessa Charisse Velora, of a lady evidently from the old country, and of a love that could not be named, only ritualized.

There were no dates, no locations, only longing.

Elara absorbed every page.

She dreamed of mirrors, of silk. She dreamed of Charisse.

And then a parcel arrived.

From it, Casa Moranu rose from the mist like a cathedral of velvet and bone. Moorish arches, veiled windows, ivy like veins. The gates opened without touch, and inside, candlelight flickered, but the mirrors were strangely veiled. And an eerie silence settled into the wood.

Elara found the mirror in a chamber lined with silk and dust, crimson veil, ornate frame. Her breath caught. She reached to move it, and the veil fell like a sigh long overdue.

In the glass, her reflection shimmered, but it wasn’t hers…

The woman before her wore silk, her hair meticulously pinned in 1940s waves, mouth parted not in fear but in longing. She looked like identical to Elara. She was Elara. Only older, softer, and somehow hungrier.

“Katrinel Magdalena Moranu,” Elara whispered, bespelled by the image. The mirror pulsed.

Returning to the diary again, Elara filed the strange apparition into her memory as she glanced through the page. The final entry seemed oddly new.

She returned. She remembered. She sang.

The light seemed to bend then, and the air thickened.

Only then did Elara see; the memory, not as words but as flesh.

Katrinel bowed her neck forward, tendrils of dark, silken curls trailing across her ivory skin. Chill bumps rose along her exposed flesh, and a soft sigh escaped her lips. Charisse, veiled in crimson, watched with reverence and hunger. Her mouth was stained the color of ripe pomegranate.

“So easily doth the dove bow to the lips of a predator,” Charisse mused, as the gorgeous woman in her embrace lay unsuspecting of all that await. Her thoughts flirted with the possibility of engaging this one differently, a purposeful change, a ritual rewritten, an angel turned to the most beautiful of demons.

The vampiress slid her long finger between the young woman’s thighs, fingertips slick with the sweetness of her surrender. Katrinel gasped, intoxicated by the entrancing woman whose lips now pierced her tender flesh. Writhing against Charisse’s hand, she moaned softly, willingly acquiescing to the hunger that had waited generations to be fed.

Now, Charisse’s chosen, Katrinel bit into her lower lip as waves of ecstasy coursed through her veins. The manor pulsed around them, candlelight bending, mirrors shimmering. Charisse broke away from her skin, droplets of soft scarlet dripping from her potent lips, a sultry whisper escaping her.

“Heaven, ’tis such a wondrous place to fall from.”

The mirror shimmered, and the memory dissolved.

Elara stood in the chamber, breath shallow, thighs trembling, with a pulse singing in places she had never named. Her fingers hovered over the final page, her body flushed with heat she could not explain. She had come seeking answers, but what she found was herself split open, aroused, aching.

She had never known this kind of hunger, and hadn’t even known she could feel it.

Her hand slid to closed the diary, and just then a sultry voice slipped through the air just behind her.

“You read it all,” Charisse cooed against the nape of her neck.

Elara turned with a low gasp.

Charisse stepped forward, eyes gleaming, her voice suave like velvet, “Come, allow me to show you the tastes of the sublime.”