Elinor’s lips are dripping blood on Apollo’s throat. Her nails scrape against his arms. Against the spread of her ribs, he presses the tip of his stake.
She smiles.
Under the silvered tip, her skin burns. Under her kiss, he freezes.
“Are you going to kill me, sweet thing?” Her teeth fit themselves around the pulse of his throat, and with a squelch, the stake breaks skin. “Do you know how?”
A staked vampire bursts into flames and turns to ash in his bare hands. A moth dies by the same flame that pulls it, desperate for things it cannot touch. The sun sits low in the sky and in the spilling of her hair. It almost looks red, like this, dripping blood and sunlight.
He pulls on it, until she looks at him, smiling still, her lipstick smeared. Softly, he drives the stake in deeper. Elinor doesn’t flinch.
“I will find a way”, he says into her laughter. “If it takes all my life.”
She has dimples. Her eyes crinkle when she smiles. Her chest rises with every breath she takes. Her blood runs warm over his fingers. When she kisses him, her hands tremble.
“You have less time than I do”, she says. “Better move quickly, hunter.”
Isn’t it funny, says the Theseus that is still alive in Apollo’s mind, that you are Apollon, the hunter? Where is your Artemis, bare and unafraid? Haven’t you always been, truly, a twin-less brother, looking for your mirror?
He drives the stake deeper into Oliver’s twin. When he feels it hitting her spine, he twists it. Slowly, like he was taught.
Elinor laughs. She wraps her legs around his hips. Her heels clatter to the floor, one after the other, and her skirt rides up. Her hair gathers against the wall, and her neck is bare. Apollo doesn’t reach for her.
He doesn’t.
“It’s time enough for me, darling”, he says. “Decades, Elinor.”
Her hair is silk under his fingers, a soft, cool thing that drapes itself, carelessly, around his palms. When he kisses her, she sighs. Her lips move under his, and her teeth drag against his tongue. She drapes her trembling hands around his throat.
And Apollo pulls out the stake. She sags against the wall, gasping into his mouth, her claws curling, her teeth razor-edge sharp and – Apollo, hunter that he is, pushes the stake back in.
Elinor moans. Her blood floods the little bathroom until the cream carpet is soaked so full that it looks red. Soon, it will be brown, and hard. Apollo’s hand is dripping into the wound on her stomach, his muscles pulled taut against his bones. He doesn’t move it.
He cannot.
“Sweet thing”, says Elinor, staked. “What makes you think that will ever be enough?”, asks Elinor, bleeding. She doesn’t burn. She doesn’t scream.
Apollo kisses her. She tastes of iron, and of blood, and when her hands drop onto his shoulders, he holds her against the wall until she draws that last breath.
