She eyed the huge purple neon sign of the club. The lettering was suitable... a kind of Bloodletting script, she would say. It was the summation of her life: bold... glitzy... Gothic... and empty with vanity... but vanity is all that we are, she reasoned to herself in her odd way.

“You, you, and you,” the bouncer – Gawd – pointed at Alyssa and her two friends with a fat finger.

Alyssa smiled, they always got in quick.

Who could deny us, Alyssa thought, I am the Crypt-Pixie. Many see my death-pale skin, but not many see the beloved malfunction that abides underneath it.

As the trio strode through the club’s door, Trish, adorned in her black velvet gown that brought out the true novelty of her dark purple hair, poked her right forefinger in the left eye-socket of the ceramic human skull that was mounted on the door.

“Bad luck be mine,” she said with solemn grace.

“Fuck luck,” Sasha said, “its all karma and you know it.”

“Karma doesn’t exist hun,” Trish retorted.

Alyssa rolled her eyes and allowed the two sisters of the Wyrd to wander off into their own orbits inside the club’s manufactured night.

She smiled a black-lipped grin, but broke it before she was caught being momentarily happy. Being inside the Sukkubus always brought her happiness. It was so cliched and yet so much more. One had to love the club’s set-up. To the infrequent visitor, the infamous bar of the Sukkubus was a thrill. Its black marble surface was decked out with black roses and a grim rope of dingy bones that gilded its length like an ivory snake. Behind the bar was a pictorial tribute to the band Joy Division. It was thought that the club’s owner, Vlad Impericus, once knew someone from the band.

“They rule and you know it Crypt-Pixie,” Raven the bar mistress said.

“Hell no,” Alyssa rejoined their classic Goth argument, “bands like Stone 588 and Autumn totally thump those old dinosaur Goths. Give me the usual.”

“Adventurous tonight,” Raven smiled as she sat a triple shot of tequila laced with black licorice syrup on the bar. “I thought you were done with this place.”

“Oh?...” Alyssa smiled as she sipped at her Necropolis, “I’m bored, so what.”

“I thought you were dead. How can the dead be bored?” Raven teased.

“Still working on that one,” Alyssa smiled.

The lower regions of the club, the Crypt as they so lovingly called it, gave away the establishment’s movie theatre past. The tired old movie screen had been spray painted a gaudy purple and later embossed with a silvery wilting rose. Large colored spot lights beamed through the screen from behind, lighting it up like some impossibly creepy tombstone for humanity. When the house lights were turned off and the fog machine turned on, the whole area resembled some forgotten level of Hades complete with writhing dancers.

“Who’s that,” Alyssa asked out loud. She didn?t really mean to ask Raven anything, but she did.

“Who?” Raven asked.

“Her,” Alyssa pointed into the depths of the Crypt.

“Dunno,” Raven said with feigned disinterest. “New face. Probably some pseudo-gothic poseur.”

The overwhelming sound of Samantha by Theater of Tragedy mixed with her Necropolis emboldened Alyssa to approach the beautiful stranger’s table. That and the fact that her friends were already there.

Alyssa couldn’t begin to describe the woman’s beauty.

She was immortally beautiful in her metallic make-up and dyed black hair with tinged red tips. Yet it was the woman’s eyes, sexy and darting, that attracted Alyssa.

“C’mere,” Trish said as she intercepted Alyssa in her tequila haze, “I finally found someone just like you, you’ve got to meet her.” Trish grabbed Alyssa’s dainty hands and led her toward the table. The encounter was a once in a lifetime thing.

Alyssa’s sense of time stuttered with the sudden gravity of fate as the stranger loomed into her consciousness. Alyssa, always sensitive to such minute karmic changes in her surroundings, sensed that the invisible pathways behind the scenes of time and reality were opening to her; she shivered with anticipation.

The soft colored lights of the club’s movie screen made a breathtaking backdrop to the stranger’s whole scene. I know you are not one of Us, Alyssa lisped to herself in her prophetic way as she drew near the table, you who are Eternity already and Death already in my palpitating heart, Juliet and Cassandra redeemed.

“Alyssa?” the stranger asked as she extended a pale hand meshed in a sheer black glove. “I’m Damiana.”

“Dami,” Alyssa smiled with a crooked grin as she took in the girl’s long pale legs that vanished endlessly up her short leather skirt. There was a perceptible feyish glow about this one. Alyssa’s instincts told her to flee, but her curiosity made her stand fast.

“You’re a vampire your friends tell me.” Dami said with a knowing smile.

“A Crypt-Pixie!” Alyssa smiled ironically at Dami’s leering grin.

“Trish showed me some of your poetry,” Dami nodded to a creased sheet of purple notebook paper.

“You understood it?” Alyssa accused in a playful manner.

“Mmm,” Dami said as she placed the tip of a stiletto booted foot next to Alyssa’s ankle, “not many can invoke the Fey in such mood and grace. I want to publish it in my quarterly.”

“We’ll be going now,” Sasha mouthed with a quick smile and forced Trish up with a jerk.

“Bye girls,” Dami smiled at them appreciatively.

Later, after a few rounds of drinks, Alyssa awoke drunk to a fuzzy world of tall dark pines, and a purple night sky that seemed to leer down upon her, and press her to the ground with its omniscient presence. She didn’t recall the driveout to the country at all.

Pushing up to her elbows, Alyssa found that she had been lain out on a green chenille blanket. Fat red candles sputtered and hemmed her in on all sides. Squinting, she scanned for Damiana, but her would-be publisher was no where to be found. The glittering candles didn’t help her night sight at all.

“Do you believe in fairies?” Dami asked suddenly as she stalked into view from the darkness beyond the candle light. Her eyes, bleached red from the candle light, glinted at Alyssa with avid curiosity.

“Yes,” Alyssa whispered in her quietest tone, “I have always believed in your kind.” Alyssa went with the flow; she had been through stranger initiation rituals. If it got her work published, what was wrong with a little role playing?

“I know you have,” Dami smiled, “we know about people like you who are ever faithful to our needs. I’ve heard your moonlight rituals, read your kind poems devoted to the fairy-kin. I assure you, though the world has grown forgetful in its ways, our magic still owns the night.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a fairy childe,” Alyssa admitted honestly, “a changeling in the midst of the Unseelie Court.”

Damiana smiled; she was thrown off guard by this one. Did Alyssa believe that this was some college sorority drama? Or did she know? Did Alyssa really know?

Damiana’s face dimpled with a sudden frown.

“What?” Alyssa asked, staggering to her knees, “did I say something wrong?”

“No,” Dami said with sad finality as she turned away to stare at the lonely horned moon. Damn you Oberon, Dami whispered at the moon’s shadow, damn you forever. Must this one too be taken in your name?

Dami turned, her chin held high, red sparkling eyes fixed upon the innocent form of Alyssa. “You wish to see the Unseelie Court?” Dami asked firmly in a dead pan tone.

“Yes,” Alyssa nodded faintly. But something had changed in Dami, she could sense a new gravity that made her fearful.

A lone tear edged forth from Dami’s left eye; the opalescent bead sparkled in the candlelight and betrayed her true feelings. “Then may the maiden moon be my witness, and Tree-Sprite the same; as well as the Sisters of Night, and the lone Walker of the Wood, I consign thee to Oberon so that you may do all that he will command.”

Dami lifted her arms to the moon as her body began to shake.

The candles flickered and sputtered as a north wind began to blow.

“It comes,” Dami said in a terse voice as she lifted her left hand and revealed her blood-red tattooed palm to Alyssa.

Alyssa would come to learn that the curse of the Fey is their blood bond to Oberon; for the Horned One was always hungry, and thus his children are ever bent in loneliness to feed his dire appetite with the souls of mortals.

The blood-red pentagram tattoo in Dami’s palm surged to life. In its gyrating center, a winking of purple light began to spill forth.

“Run, Alyssa. Please!” Dami begged.

Alyssa blinked.

The faery light from Dami’s palm had now morphed into an amorphous cloud, a growling maelstrom of eerie iridescent purple arms that radiated from a central glowing hub. Its strangeness held Alyssa spellbound.

Hesitating there before summoner and victim, the vortex warbled angrily. Deep inside it a war of wills was being fought. But the momentary stay in execution willed by Dami could not last. With a shrill shriek of nether-wind, the dark vortex spun out of Dami’s control and quickly spat out a dozen fleshy tendrils that burned forth from its eye like hungry desert vines in search of water.

The pale white things instantly plopped down on the Alyssa-scented blanket and shredded it with razor-sharp suckers; yet a main arm, thicker and more thorough, guided by a careful intelligence, snaked along of its own accord until Alyssa’s true scent was discovered.

Her screams are like all the others, Dami promised herself as she turned her back on the scene she’d seen a hundred times, so piercing and harrowed. No different, no different, she swore.

The long, thick arm violently attached itself to Alyssa’s navel. She lurched backwards, hands defensively gripping the fleshy trunk, face etched with the terrible knowledge that an evil older than man itself was now plundering the very core of her being.

Shuddering with obscene hunger, the vortex’s veined trunk began violently tugging and sucking at Alyssa’s mortal soul. Minced flesh splattered in all directions until, with a shiver of ecstasy, the thing gurgled with glee as soul-matter began to wetly slide down its long muscular white throat and into the whirling vortex.

Satiated with Alyssa’s soul, tendrils and vortex winked silently back into the hellish dimension that spawned it, somewhere in the wind between night and day, where all good fey return.

Looking down, Dami saw herself reflected coldly in Alyssa’s soulless, dead eyes. Predator, lover, and rueful executioner, damned am I to be all three, Dami snarled, alone... forever... alone.

The horned moon looked on with cold disinterest when Dami finally buried Alyssa’s corpse in a shallow grave, complete with the green blanket that had given Alyssa comfort in her last hours.

Just like she had done on past occasions, Damiana slowly slipped into a willful oblivion of unfeeling. It was a thing she did when her prize mortals were ripped from her. For that which is loved best by fairies is loved thrice more by Oberon; and he is a jealous master whose appetite knows no appeasement.

Days later, Dami found herself in a strange new city.

Her eyes yet glistened with tears as she recalled Alyssa’s velvet-red hair and the way the girl had ached to know her.

Surely, she thought, I shall be awarded one for the hundreds I’ve collected for you Oberon, surely only one?

Someone with real warmth just like Alyssa had.

Someone, if only for the night.