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Chapter Text

London, 1899

Kylo hadn’t meant to kill the whore.

It was supposed to be quick; a feed and maybe a fuck to chase the iron-tang of the bloodlust. 

He’d found her standing in the shadow of the gas lamp outside The Ten Bells. Her skirt hiked up high enough to show off the hem of a spoiled petticoat and the top of a lace-up boot. The only thing he really noticed about her was that she was young, her heartbeat steady and strong, a flush on her cheeks as though she’d had a couple of drinks inside for courage for the night ahead. 

London was full of girls and most of them were for sale. You just had to be the right buyer and Kylo, with his black tailcoat, top hat and ivory-tipped hand-carved cane was just that: a dream for a street orphan looking for somewhere warm to ply her trade and open her legs. She was probably used to drunken bricklayers and off-duty police officers. But Kylo looked the part he was playing: a perfect gentleman with long hair clean and a starched collar. She wouldn’t be able to tell what kind of creature he truly was. At least not until it was too late.

The girl said her name was Rachel, and Kylo knew it was a lie from the spike in her heartbeat, and an oft-repeated  one from how easily it slid off her quick tongue. Closer up she was freckled and pretty but the most important thing was that she was alive and standing in front of him, there on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier, ready to follow him anywhere for the promise of a few shillings.

God, it was easy. If being a monster was a sin, why was it so fucking easy? To take the girl’s hand and lead her trippingly along the streets of Spitalfields to one of many boarding houses with rooms for rent by the hour. Inside, past the madam, with her spotless apron and jingling keys, was the bedroom, candle-lit with wood-panel over the dry rot. Rachel lifted her tattered shawl from her shoulders and folded it neatly on a chair.

“How do you want me, Sir?” A line well-rehearsed, delivered in a voice that was practical and a little bored, rather than seductive. But now he could scent her.

I want you neck-first, he thought, and splayed open. Kylo could smell her delicate thready pulse now, thrumming and dangerous. She smelled of warm caramel and  sunrise. Of things he would never taste or see again.

It made his mouth water. It  made him hard. It made him want to turn her inside out where she stood.

“Naked,” he said. 

She stifled a sigh, and began unbuttoning the intricate shirt over her corset. But Kylo was wrong. He couldn’t wait that long. 

Crossing the room, he batted her hands away from her clothes, wrenched her chin to the side and buried his face in skin above her pulse point. His iron fingers tangled in her hair until she yelped. 

“Sir, you’re hurting me!” The fear made her smell even more exquisite. Perfect, quivering, blood-rich girl. 

Oh I’ll hurt you, little one. I’ll rip you open. 

He’d planned to take his time with his food, cat and mouse. To see that golden skin tremble and quake, and find out what sounds she’d make in pleasure and pain. But Kylo was overcome, plunged deep into frenzied need, and it rushed him forward, headlong, Bezerker-style. His teeth unleashed themselves with painful speed and she screamed as he bit her, latching into the artery and sucking out the throbbing life. It happened so fast, Kylo felt pulled under by the tide of her, drawn out into the sea of her, drowning as though he were not already dead. 

A more reasonable, educated part of him yelled inside his head. He wasn’t supposed to kill, to leave traces of his presence across the city. And he was usually disciplined about it too. He wasn’t a blood-drunk childe anymore, but a practiced thing of darkness, obliged to obey the codes of his own demonic society. Feed and move on; leave no bodies. 

What had Snoke said after he sired Kylo? “They may be humans but they aren’t stupid.” Even in this modern age of gaslight and telegrams there were still those among the living who suspected the undead walked the same fog-fingered streets. Kylo might be strong, he might even be hard to kill. But nothing was impossible and immortal life was a bargain not a promise. 

Still, he had already broken the first rule. By the time his bloodlust was sated and his mouth burning from the arterial heat of her, Kylo knew the girl was dying. He’d taken too much, bitten so hard her throat was half-torn out, vocal chords bloody and gurgling. Her face was frozen in a mask of shock and terror. 

It was a mess. The girl’s dress was blood-soaked and she was heavy in his arms. His hands and shirt were smeared, and the spray had even reached the ceiling. Kylo hated the new pall spreading across the girl's skin as he laid her out on the carpet, pale and green-tinged. The sunlight was gone, her golden hue fading into memory. He wanted it back. He wanted…

Even as he did it, Kylo understood the curse he was bringing down on his own head. He couldn’t say why he did it, only that it felt in the moment that there was no choice, or that the choice had already been made. Still, he knew the only thing worse than breaking the first rule was breaking the second: Sire no new children without permission.

“We cannot live in a world overrun with beings as powerful as we are,” Snoke had said, long ago in a different land and a different time. “There are ways things must be done. It is what has protected us for time immemorial.”

But even the weight of Snoke’s words could not reach Kylo now, in the small bedroom on the third floor of Mrs Hampton’s House for Harlots, as it was known in the neighborhood. There he was alone, save for the dying girl that he had not meant to kill and did not want to lose.

It took hardly anything to take his long left hand thumbnail and draw it across his right wrist, hard and deep, until the black, dead blood began to trickle out like drops of oil. Even less to bring his wrist to her lips and let it fall between her parted lips. 

The change was unpleasant but it did not take long. An hour in, the madam knocked on the door and Kylo bellowed at her until she left with the promise of a Guinea for her lack of curiosity. He rocked on his haunches, watching her like she was an accident he could not look away from. 

The girl thrashed and moaned on the floor, coughing up bile and vomiting blood, her body rejecting every trace of what was once human. The room stank of rancid human sweat and drying blood. Death was there with them, in all its strange glory. 

The room was a threshold and Kylo a witness. The girl crossed from one world to another with only him to watch, and when she quieted,  to brush the hair from her blood-smeared brow. Even like this, she was beautiful. If he understood the mystery of how one became a vampire, if anyone truly understood what  kind of raw, mystical transformation was being wrought on her slight frame perhaps they would have been able to say exactly when the girl became something new.

Kylo only saw the looseness return to her limbs, the light coming back into her eyes. Not golden now but bright and wet as river stones, her skin like moonlight. Not the burnt sugar beauty he’d found on the street but something new: something powerful. And hungry.

When she slowly pushed herself up to sit, Kylo knew she had survived the change and been reborn. Here was his new, ill-begotten child and he would never live in peace because of it, but just look at her: the most beautiful monster ever made.

The girl looked down at her hands, turning them over slowly. She reached up and touched her face, feeling its contours with her fingertips. Worrying the already healed wound at her neck, now just a silvery scar. 

Finally she looked at where he sat, back against the wall. She frowned, as though seeing him for the first time. Oh, the way her eyebrows knitted together and her nose scrunched up like a rabbit's. The things he would show her and teach her and the things he would do to her now he couldn’t break her and…

“What am I?” Her voice, strong and deeper now, startled him out of his dreaming. 

“Something special,” he said slowly. “Something truly special. 

Less frown now and more horror. A hideous kind of understanding settling over her face. “What have you done?” 

“It can be hard at first, little one, but I will show you…”

“You…” she spluttered, rolling onto hands and knees. “You’re a fucking monster.”

He was on his feet then, looming over her. “I saved you.”

“You killed me.” Each word a poison dart, as she pushed one shaky arm into the floor to stand. 

“I gave you a great gift.” A gift he shouldn't have given. A gift he was already starting to regret. 

At that she pursed her lips and spat on the floor at his feet, a bloody globule landing on the dirty carpet. 

“You took everything. I don’t want this.”

Too late, little one. Too late for both of us.

Kylo raised an arm, hoping to rest it reassuringly on her slender shoulder, but the girl wrestled herself away, turning for the door.

“No,” Kylo said, as she retreated from him in the dark hallway. “Don’t leave, it’s not safe for you.”

But the girl ignored him and slipped in the away and down the stairs without looking back. He wanted to call after her but realized he still didn’t know her real name. 

And besides, she could run as far as she wanted from him. He was her sire and already he could feel the tendrils of her consciousness in the back of his; her confusion, her rage. And her fear. 

Whether his childe went, he would follow. Especially since her very existence was a crime against their kind. She was the kind of mistake the others would move swiftly to rectify, and he could not allow that. 

Even if she ran for miles. Even across a lifetime. 

She was his.

And she would realize it, soon enough. 

Chapter Text

Rey ran as though she could outrun death, even though it had already claimed her.

She ran, the heels of her boots dancing over the cobblestones, moving faster than she ever had, the people around reduced to a grey blur, like children who could not sit still at the photographer’s studio. Her heart, by rights, should have been pounding, her breath furious. But it was not. No air in her lungs and no heart to beat.

This is what the man in the top hat had made her. The man with the beautiful face and the lying eyes. The man with teeth that were too sharp and a leer that was hungry in all the wrong ways. She had known, even as he’d approached her outside the pub that this one was different, not her usual drunk punter but something rich and strange. But she'd taken in the wrong details, seduced by the promise of his expensive wool coat and leather gloves. The promise of wealth, of a man for whom her month's rent was pocket change. She’d pushed her concerns away for the promise of a few pieces of silver and a bed for the night - the whole night, she remembered as she ran, he’d asked for the whole night and then lasted all of ten minutes.  Worse than that, of course, he taken something she’d never intended to sell.

Whore, she heard in rasped tones of old, mottled Plutt, governor of the orphanage, who had hissed at her when she’d refused his advances in the gloom of his cold office at the tender age of 14. You’re nothing but a little whore. And yes, she’d ended up on the street selling her body after all, so he hadn't been wrong exactly. But the years of street walking had taught her the dirtiest secret at the heart of it all. That it wasn’t the sex men bought, it was the illusion of intimacy. Often as not they wanted her to hold their heads in her lap and stroke their hair. Or whip them with their own belts. Or listen to the woes of their jobs and the good women they had at home. Fucking her was just one part of the exchange and anyway, she’d got so good at that it was usually over before it had begun, the men’s faces red, their mustaches sweaty and their brows knitted as she rode then fast as her legs could manage. 

Now her legs flew over the filth and effluence of the London streets, carrying her through the alleys and byways of east London until she came, by surprise and perhaps by instinct, to the river. 

The cut, they called it. The drink. The place grief could bring itself to disappear into the mud brown arms of father Thames. The docks, loud and bustling by day, were empty, filled with the kind of silence that only falls after a days industry is done. Rey slowed to a walk, then a trudge. Then a hop over the iron railings of the Embankment and down onto the strand, the grey stinking sand revealed only at low tide. She could see the forgotten detritus of the city poking up through the sludge; the discarded clay pipes, rusted horseshoes and broken tea cups. And there she was, washed up with it all.  

I’m dead, she thought, and still here. Everything was heightened, the smell of oil lamps and fish guts so rancid in her nostrils that her stomach heaved. Nothing came out, as it never would again. Dead, and still walking. Dead, and with a gnawing hunger the like of which she’d never known, even though she'd never lived a single day of her life with enough to eat.  

Vampire, then. The stuff of whispered nightmares from her childhood in the long, freezing dormitories of the orphanage. One of the many bogeymen the other children used to frighten one another. The sandman who would come as you slept and steal your dreams. The ghosts of children who had died mysterious and bloody deaths that would come back clutching for revenge.

The vampires, who lurked in the darkness and longed for the blood of the living, had been the least of Rey’s fears. She was a child who already knew the horrors of real life could surpass any fiction. Left on the doorstep of a workhouse as a swaddling babe wrapped in a newspaper. Hadn’t she already lost everything except her life?

Now that was gone as well. She toed the edge of the brackish tide and wondered whether it was possible to fill her pockets with stones and walk straight in. 

“No,” a quiet voice said behind her, a little way up the sand. “You wouldn’t drown. And you can cross the moving water. That’s one of many myths about us.”

Rey turned her head and there he was. The blood stains on his shirt were black in the midnight gloom, his pale face half shadowed in the moonlight, his top hat lost somewhere in the chase. Her new eyes picked out details her mortal ones had not. The shining yellow at the very core of his irises that was more snake than man. The way he moved, a little too fast and fluidly, every gesture smooth. The coiled strength of his shoulders under the long black coat. 

“You're a monster,” she spat at him. His face darkened, and he took a looming step towards her.  

“Perhaps,” he said. “And now you are too.”

Rey looked back to the water. “How did you find me?”

“I’m your maker,” he said, as though it were something only the uneducated wouldn’t understand. “I will always find you.”

Rey didn’t reply. Her body was throbbing with hatred for him, with anger and resentment and fear, a mix so potent no words could do it justice. How could he? Why hadn't he just let her die? Did he think this was the bargain they had made?

“It’s time to leave,” the man said, glancing east, towards the estuary where the river ran eventually to the sea. “Sunrise is coming and you must eat to keep your strength. I will show you how.”

“No,” Rey said, before she could think. “I ain’t going nowhere with you.”

He was at her back faster than she could even turn her head to see him move, one huge hand circling her upper arm in a steel grip, his long finger strong as talons. “I am your maker and you will come with me, childe.” He spoke like a man who had never been disobeyed. 

There was some kind of power in his voice, a thread that tugged at her heart, that reached inside and pulled at her like a compulsion. Of course she must go with him, of course she would always…

“No,” Rey said again, jerking her arm away and turning to face him, raising her chin to meet his yellowed gaze. “You bought my time but you wont’t ever own me. I’ll not go with you. I am not yours.”

His mouth was set in a hard line and he seemed to tremble even though Rey knew that like her, he felt no cold at all, nor heat, nor warmth, nor love. 

“I will say this only once, girl,” he began, and Rey’s blood curdled. He was as much a man as a vampire then, and she was always “girl” when she didn't please them. “My name is a Kylo Ren and I made you. You are my childe to mould and teach. You will obey me and I will show you the ways of our kind. Without me, you will not survive.” His voice softened, ever so slightly, and his eyes moved across her face and to the silver scar on her neck in the shape of his teeth. “ The sun is coming even now. There are rules that must be followed.”

Rey stepped back, away from him and the water met her, rising up over her shoes and soaking her heels. The tide was coming in. “My name is Rey and I will not follow you. I will not obey you and I will not be yours. I would rather run to the ends of the earth and burn in flames before I belong to any man.”

Kylo Ren drew his lengthening teeth across his lip, brows furrowing into anger, fists clenched. “So be it, insolent child. Go your own way. We shall see if you live or die. But know this: I will always, always find you. You will never be without me, as long you walk this earth. There is no time too long for me to wait.

Yes, Rey thought bitterly. You have left me nothing. Nothing but time.

She could not know it then, and would not have believed it anyway, but Kylo Ren was right. It would take a whole decade and a thousand miles, but they would meet again. In another land, and another time.