but not all knowledge

Her name was Elizabeth.

Dressed in a blue, long-sleeved dress that went all the way down to her ankles, she was the very picture of a good girl. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, with a pair of studs in her ears. She kept her eyes on the floor when she entered the room as if hoping to disappear. But she hadn't wasted any time in getting down to business.

Sitting on the edge of Isaac's bed, she leaned back against his chest as he drank from her neck, savoring the taste and taking his time. Because he knew all too well how quickly a pint of blood could come and go with each feeding. Savoring the temporary sensation of her skin against his own, Isaac longed for the possibility of that feeling remaining. The way the blood brought his body alive, the way it made him feel things he never did any other time of the day.

But as the feeling was starting to sink in, Isaac felt a faint, tightening tug in his neck. Humming against Elizabeth's neck, Isaac continued as the tug got more insistent. He knew it was going to start causing real pain in a minute, but he didn't care. If he could enjoy this for a moment more, Isaac was going to take the chance.

When the collar on his neck cut through, forcing him to feel the pain, he let go of Elizabeth as he retracted his fangs.

"Are you satisfied?" she asked, as she applied pressure to the puncture wounds in her neck with a ball of cotton wool.

"Mmm," he said, wiping her blood from the side of his lips as he licked it right off his fingers.

"I'll see you in eight hours," she said, rushing from the room and almost colliding into Maryam who'd come in, still dressed in pajamas.

"Why do they always run out of your room like that?"

Isaac shrugged, still liking his finger, still sitting in the moment of his feeding so as not to let go.

"I was wondering," she said, falling onto the couch that was sitting against the wall by the door. "Do you hear anything from here?" she asked, pointing at Isaac's ceiling.

"Anything from where?" he asked looking up.

"They were there the whole night," Maryam said. "How come we can't hear what happens in Bassey's room but Ansa's room is like, normal?"

Isaac raised his eyebrows. "Why do you want to hear what's happening in Bassey's room?"

"Get your mind out of the gutter," Maryam chastised.

"You didn't care about this until Ansa got home so…"

"They were kissing and then Ansa went in there and didn't come out till this morning."

"Ansa's out?" Isaac asked, sitting up.

"Went down into the basement."

Isaac cringed, remembering the last time he'd been down there. The darkness. The exacerbated cold. The quiet. The loneliness. Nope, he never wanted to go down there ever again.

"I haven't seen Bassey though. Probably tired because of all the…" She opened her index and ring fingers on both hands and hit them together.

"And you say your mind is not in the gutter."

"Is this where you are?" Pan asked, peeping into the room as he rushed to Isaac's bed and took a dive into it, causing Isaac to get up and move to his desk chair. "What's up?"

"Maryam's obsessed with grandma and great-great-grandma fucking," Isaac said.

"Eww," Pan and Maryam replied looking disgusted.

"Don't lie."

"I'm not obsessed with them," Maryam said, lying across the couch with a forlorn expression on her face. "I just wish that were me."

"You wish you were fucking them?" Pan asked.

"I wish I was fucking someone. I hate this." She raised her head. "Can you imagine living like this for centuries?"

"It's not that bad," Pan said, turning on his stomach to look at Maryam. 

"Pan, I can barely feel my toes. Or my vagina."

"Is that all you think about?" Isaac asked.

"What do you mean you can't feel anything?" Pan asked instead. 

"It's all so numb," Maryam complained. "No sensation anywhere."

"Not twenty-four hours a day, there's not."

Isaac and Maryam turned to Pan in matching expressions of confusion.

"Unless you have some special kind of deal with the vampire cosmos, how the fuck does your body feel anything?" Maryam asked.

"When I'm feeding," Pan replied, looking at both of them like they were the ones who were crazy. "Don't you feel something? Doesn't blood run through your veins?"

"Yes," Isaac agreed. "But how does that help? I just finished feeding and my body's already going numb again."

"Which is why you fuck while you're feeding," Pan stated plainly.

"Fuck who?" Maryam asked. Then her eyes widened in understanding. "No," she gasped.

"Yes," Pan said with a nod.

"Who are we talking about?" Isaac asked.

"His feeding staff," Maraym asked, sitting up. "Pan is fucking his feeding staff."

"Wait, are we allowed to do that?" Isaac asked, touching the place where his collar sat beneath his skin and wondering if it would let him have sex. 

"It's what they're paid for."

"No, no." Maryam wagged a finger. "They're paid for feeding not fucking."

"It's the same thing to a vampire."

"No, it's not," Maryam said. "You'll dry up if you don't feed, but I'm pretty sure you can survive without fucking."

"Says who?" Pan asked, sounding genuinely worried. "How the fuck have you two not been fucking anyone? It's almost been a month."

"Don't make it sound like we're the strange ones. You're the only one who's been-"

"Daniel's been fucking his Thursday and Sunday staff," Pan said, smirking from the bed.

"What?" Maryam asked. "How come he never told me?" she asked, storming out of the room.

"Because he knew you'd handle it like a grown-up," Pan shouted after her, chuckling.

During his first feeding, when Owa had put the collar around his neck, Ansa hadn't said anything about sex. She'd regulated his feeding and that was it. Maybe she hadn't said anything because it wasn't the same. As Maryam said, sex and feeding were different. Maybe if he… he sighed and slumped against his chair. How shameful would it be to try and fuck someone only to end up screaming in pain because his collar was going haywire?

His best option was to ask Okonidiok. If he learned anything from his near-miss with the busher cousins, it was that he should ask. If Bassey had reacted like that because of Akpata, then Isaac didn't think he'd want to go against Ansa in vampire business.

There was a part of him that didn't think Ansa would be invested in his sex life at all. He was an adult. He could do whatever he wanted. Besides, if it was that taboo, how come Pan and Daniel had been getting away with it? He wondered if this was just another thing he was prohibited from doing that the others were getting away with.

"Hey," Pan said, tossing a pillow at Isaac's head. "Why are you so quiet?"

Isaac shrugged. "I don't want to get in any trouble."

"Since when?" Pan frowned. 

"I don't know," he said, touching the collar again. He hadn't told any of his friends about it.

"Is it because of what Bassey did?"

Isaac looked away. Frankly, if Pan and Maryam hadn't come into his room that night and witnessed his altercation with Bassey, he'd have never told them about it. He was usually the one who got away with things. He was unafraid and bold and unapologetic. Often. 

But he'd never felt the heat of a thousand suns burrowing through his body before. He couldn't get the memory of that sensation out of his mind. He'd died before already but since then, he hadn't known what it was like to feel fear until that night.

He didn't want to feel that way again.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?"

No, he wasn't. 

He'd resigned himself to feeling dry and sensationless till he got his own busher and even then, he'd never really understood what it felt like to have one. But every time he remembered Kubiat's scent or his cousins' scent, Isaac's cold heart felt even colder at the notion that he might never be granted his own. That his friends would go on to be revived by busher blood, while he was left to lurk in the shadows, a cold husk of a man with nothing but daily square meals of reluctant pints of human blood. Forever collared for his one mistake. 

Ansa didn't feed on humans. She ate human food instead. She bled like a human. She flinched away from contact like a human would. With the blood of a busher flowing through her veins, she was practically a human being again. It was no wonder that the chieftaincy wanted what she had.

No wonder that Isaac also wanted what she had.

It was just too unfortunate that he'd somehow managed to get the chance and lose it, in such a short time.