Your bloodlust pierces my throat
And throes of ecstasy consume me
Your claws call forth my lifeblood
And as death beckons, I delight

Sweet vampiric Mephistopheles of mine,
Invade my veins, my dark soul, help me find
The door to Tartarus, your eternal home
Rip me apart, immortal love, make me your own.
Sweet vampiric Mephistopheles, my soul
Cries out for you to devour my body whole
My heart hungers, thirsts for your passionate bite,
Tear it out, consume me, make me one with night.

"Hades!" Die bursts into my room with his eyeliner smudged, his bondage pants – borrowed from Pain, embellished with new zippers and patches, a crucifix and a skull and crossbones, he bought on our way here – unfastened and slung so low on his hipbones that I divert my eyes from his girly panties. He's not wearing a shirt, his hair is limp and damp, and he's only wearing his contacts, not his makeup (except for smudged eyeliner and mascara left over from yesterday, as if he hasn't quite discovered how to wash his face using soap, deeming himself too übermensch for such baseness). He looks like his true self: a washed-up, washed-out, play-pretend poet whose "vision" has so often mislead us into foggy, dark woods filled with wolves unwilling to commune with us and all too ready to laugh us off the stage. He's dragged our music, my music, crying and begging for mercy from the all-consuming fire of uncreative lyrics clawing into its flesh to shove us away from our success.

I cover the lyrics I've written and drop my pen, the clicking of plastic hitting laminated corkboard echoing like a wailing cry through a graveyard, which is, strangely enough, exactly where our musical career is headed. "What?" My voice sounds too loud to me; if only Die's eardrums would burst and prevent him from performing again. But that's a morbid thought, worthy of his death fantasies; he's taken to describing them aloud to be and expecting me to do more than bat an eyelash or a few falsies and tell him to shut the fuck up when he illuminates the subject of "your unrecognizable head, bits of skull and brain splattered over the walls" or, "how I'd love to rip at your bones until I pulled them all out of your useless sack of flesh."

Disgusting, dirty little Mr. Violent-as-all-Get-Out-and-Get-Off-On-It bitch.

"I got us a gig with that Johnny moron," Die says.

He's also a nonplussed bitch. We know each other's routines by now, and any minute he'll be decrying my talent, claiming to be the genius behind the band that I still know will take over the world, even if we have to throw him out of it to give us air to breathe and an uncontaminated well of talent to draw from.

"You mean at his bar."

Die rolls his eyes, and as different as I know we are, I feel another death fantasy coming on as I wish his contact would get stuck under his eyelid. Pathetic, ashamed tears, worse than any that Pain sheds during his menstruation - or is it menopause? Either way, he's moodier than ten pregnant banshees or a thousand cats in heat, even without Die's input - would stream like ether bands burning down his cheeks as his perfectly ordinary eye color is revealed. (They're not red or white ringed with black flames, as he wishes we'd believe, but are instead plain, dark gray. Boring as shit.)

"No shit, you lobotomized daywalker," he says.

"Oh, go piss and PMS at Pain."

On cue, Pain appears, hovering ghostly pale and les miserables behind Die with an expression of concern painting his already excessively doll-like features. I can see his eyes glimmering with unshed tears, bright even in the dim light. When we first moved in, Die skipped all the other furniture and, like the mindless heliophobic drone he is, hung double layers of black curtains on all the windows but those in my room. He claimed he was saving our complexions as well as our "immortal souls" from the prying eyes of Phaethon, but I know better. He just doesn't want to see himself clearly, see the lines of delusion snaking across his pallid face.

Pain, at least, knows his place. His mascara is smudged and has practically poured down his face in rivers broader than the darkest swells of the Styx. His eyeshadow gives his face a hollow look, as if he has been punched in the nose by mortality and his spirit, crushed and imperfect as it is, sucked out through his fingers as he plays melancholic (whiny, meaningless) songs on the keyboard. But Pain knows that he'll never amount to anything at the rate he's going, always being the peacemaker, the downtrodden piece of filth that Die scrapes off his boots.

"Are you writing a song?" asks Pain.

I shoot him a look of hellfire.

Die, who had looked away from me to glare at Pain, whips around so quickly that his empty head must be reeling, more addled than ever. He says, softly and what he thinks is dangerously, "I want to see you decapitated. I want your hair matted with your thick blood, mouth frozen in terror and stained with last, pleading requests I'd never grant you - I would sooner saw a steak knife through your spinal column and your carotid than forgive -"

"Die!" Pain cries, snatching at his arm.

Die has advanced on me several steps since he began talking, but if he can pretend not to give a shit what I have to say, he can kiss my ass and eat my shit while he's at it. I blink at him. "Shut up, Die," I say quietly. "You fucking failure."

Eyes blazing in rage or the inflamation and redness caused by his contacts, Die shoves Pain into the doorframe so hard that a grunt breaks from his glossy lips as one set of his ribs slam into it. Die doesn't pause or stop to see that he didn't wound more than Pain's nonexistent pride; he flounces on, the zippers and buckles on his falling-down pants jingling as he makes his escape like Orpheus from the vaults of Erebus. But Die, unlike the legendary poet, is unable to comprehend that music is alive and deserves greater respect than all other human creation.

Certainly it deserves a hell of a lot more credit than Die gives it. He's under the impression, as mistaken as Pasiphae in her lust, that music bows to his whim. As long as he writes our lyrics in that red correction pen he didn't see enough of when we were in school - teachers wrote on his papers, but they didn't do it in red, and he always said that they hadn't understood his vision and creativity - we'll never see more than a destructive Minotaur and a few pity coins.

After all, on our way to this new town halfway across the damn country, the only thing that kept us in motel rooms and put gas in the van was money from selling extra furniture from our house back in that shit-pit of a hamlet, Pleasant Grove, and what little we could scrape up playing outside casinos and bars on the roadside. We made exactly thirty dollars in CD sales, and even those weren't our own albums; they were Pain's bitchy piano ballads, the kind of shit that chicks shell out for when they think that sentimentality is the key to expressing their inner feminine side. It isn't. They're all going to become pillars of salt the minute they open those CD cases to look at what they bought.