The feeling sat deep in her belly, stiff like a splinter and aching like she was testing how deep a laceration can go before it stops being a papercut. The purple bulbous feeling bloomed at the base of her spine, coming out in tendrils behind her fingers as she drummed painted nails against the steering wheel. The theatre in front of her raged on, behind its four brick walls and beneath the neon sign radiating today’s screenings into the air around it, the audience laughed, indifferent to the comedy playing behind the silver screen, an electronic mist to replace the velvet curtain of her days.

Emmeline Sheeran straightened her spine against the cold leather of the seat behind her. She leant back and let the icy upholstery cup her head, golden curls falling like a cushion around her. She ran the tip of her tongue over her teeth, fangs sharp enough to nick the delicate skin, pink and slick as it moved beneath the blanket of her pursed lips. She pulled out, and the billboard gleamed back at her with a vicious smile: an old photo, her smile rendered in twenty first century Hollywood gloss, tastefully cropped to hide the disaster that lay beneath the cut. It had been her last performance, seconds running down to her final break from that sweaty, velvet lined cabaret club, so close she could taste the cool night air against her neck as it trickled in through an open window, neck craned, moments before the club’s doors had been blown clean off by old Jerry, the boss, owner and director of her shows and body. He had planted the bomb to go off at midnight exactly, the last second of her contract, to consign her body to his possession even in death.

It had disappeared, of course, and resigned her to the history books full of tragic figures of mysterious artists, sex symbols and feminine artefacts until a century later, her face now public domain again, had been picked up and swirled in with a lethal dose of revisionist progressivism. In her biopic, she had been rendered as a femme fatale, a suicide bomber, a rogue figure who forced mortal liberation upon herself and every other club-goer there that night. She trailed her fingers across the car’s body as she exited: the final remnant of her savior, a young woman named Amelia Burkhardt who had dug her blast-mangled body from the rubble and blessed her with that undead kiss, the cervical mark of a centuries long curse, as Emmeline made her way into the theatre.

Tonight was the night of the premiere, and the director just so happened to be old Jerry’s great grandson.