Sable looks up, blushes, smiles. "That is useful self-discovery! Probably rule out Dinner with Love and The Witch's Feast then. And there's a scene you may want to skip in the second Sarah book, Sarah's Swashbucklers."

"I didn't, like, actively hate it, it just wasn't appealing. Biting without removing flesh is really good though."

That gets a grin and more blushing. "Noted. I'd probably suggest Diaries of a Vampiress, then."

"Okay!" 

She has any idea what a vampire is and that does sound much better. She goes off to investigate this book. 

Diaries of a Vampiress follows the adventures of a vampiric lesbian named Lilah. The book follows an epistolary format, made entirely of excerpts from her diaries over her very long life. It opens with a caveat that she is reconstructing her first two decades of unlife after the fact, and a regret that she did not realize the value of it before her thirties.

The first entry is when she's seventeen, a hundred years or so before King Arthur's time. She runs away from home after her family arranges her marriage to a much older man, only to be found by a vampire named Leander. Leander turns her, and uses mind magic to compel her loyalty and sexual favors. She learns much of being a vampire from him — including, eventually, how to defend her mind from intrusion. This backfires on Leander, though not immediately. She takes her time, making sure she learns everything he knows, and then waits to catch him unprepared.

Wow what an asshole! Oh she is so in favor of things backfiring on this guy. 

Leander meets the sun when Lilah is twenty-three. Lilah forces herself to stay awake and watch him burn to ash, bundled up in several layers and under the roof of the gatehouse of his her castle. It's the most cathartic thing she's ever experienced.

AW YIS. 

From then on, Lilah doesn't kill her meals as often (Leander had insisted on doing so), and almost exclusively drinks from women. She learns basic healing magic, and spends three years in a convent putting it to use covertly on behalf of the nearby villages. She takes great pains to reconstruct her memories of her first lover — the first she'd chosen, anyway: red hair, green eyes, slender, a fellow nun, freckles all over her chest and arms (she checked). It was with this first girlfriend that she learned to make feeding pleasurable.

Awwwwww. 

Eventually, a witch-hunter hears rumors of her work as a healer, and comes to hunt her down. The convent is burned down, and her lover perishes in the blaze. Lilah barely escapes.

Oh no!!! Lilah's poor lover!!!

She spends a decade wandering the British countryside, mourning, and then returns to reclaim her castle. This catches her diary reconstructions up to the present day, and she remarks that her next goal is to find a safer way to get meals and give back to the populace without drawing the attention of a witch-hunter or a vampire-hunter.

She spends a few years doing a convincing impression of one of the High Fae, making use of her vampiric speed and subtle touches of mind magic to keep from being tracked or recognized. At this point she starts using the name Morgan in public, and eventually discovers a good-hearted mortal mage named Myrddin Emrys. She challenges him as hard as she can, pushing him to learn and grow, but otherwise stays out of his way. She's quite proud when he picks and helps Arthur. Unfortunately, someone catches wind of her scandalous romances — being a lesbian is almost more shocking than being a vampire — and convinces Arthur and Myrddin that she's evil, and the resulting fights go down as legends.

Wow. 

Anselma is not so well-read that she had ever heard of lesbianism before, but she is certainly well-read enough to have heard of King Arthur and Merlin. 

Why would lesbianism be more alarming than vampirism??? This version of Merlin and Arthur are pretty dumb. 

It's implied that Lilah doesn't blame Arthur and Merlin for this so much as whoever was whispering in their ears, but powerful men do have a history of being dumb sometimes. They seem to care an awful lot about heirs and inheritance.

Lilah is forced to abandon Britain for a time, and her entries over the next three decades are scenes of debauchery as she sleeps her way across the convents of Europe. She hones her skills as a lover — and as a healer, because many times she scratches and cuts her lovers in the throes of passion. She kisses with hints of trailing fang, teases along her lovers necks, lets them playfully bite her in return — though never enough to draw blood, because she's not ready to turn any of them.

This sort of makes Anselma sad about Lilah's first lover again. 

After this, she picks up a hobby of finding abusive husbands, draining them dry, giving their widows a night or three of passion, and then vanishing into the night leaving a bit of money behind. A decade passes like this, before she decides it's time to return to Britain again.

She reclaims her castle (again), and then probes nearby towns for cute lesbians, for clever girls who long for more interesting lives than being married off to some petty farmer. She finds two, and whisks them off to her castle. They study literature, philosophy, science, magic, and each other's bodies.

After several years the girlfriends start craving a return to the sunlit world, and she sets them up with money in towns that can make use of their intelligence, then spends a few years fucking and drinking her way across the island again.

This cycle repeats twice more, transcribed to her diaries in lovingly graphic detail, before something unexpected happens: she falls in love with one of her mortal girlfriends.

Is the castle associated with Morgana's legend? Do stories arise as a result of the drained husbands?

(Gosh the porn is hot.)

There are tiny hints that imply the castle might be a secret one that Morgana was known to have but no one ever found, but it's never outright stated.

Lilah is bewildered, feeling things she's never known before. This girl, a pretty brunette named Amber, is whip-smart, incessantly curious, and absolutely devoted to Lilah. After a year, they start talking about maybe turning her.

And then a convent of vampire hunters, nuns who'd been mentioned in passing during some of Lilah's wanderings, track her back to the castle.

The nuns arrive in force. There's a pitched battle. They nearly kill Lilah twice, and even almost kill Amber.

Hot take but people need to stop trying to murder Lilah!!!

Lilah kills most of the sisters, and captures three. For the first time since Leander's death, she uses mind magic in anger. She rips the knowledge of the convent's secret base from the minds of her prisoners, then finally accepts that she's overdue to turn Amber. They spend the night together, and Amber drinks Lilah's blood, her heart beating its last beat as she lies in Lilah's arms, and reawakens to her new unlife and first lays eyes on her love.

Amber's first meal is one of the captive nuns, and then they go to the hidden convent and destroy it together. When they return home, Amber has an ambition to learn to extend the healing magic to affect aging as well. The Sisters of the Hunt had only discovered Lilah on her wanderings outside the castle, she argues, and so if they could keep mortal lovers alive indefinitely, they could avoid leaving a trail of suspicious bite-marks around the countryside every decade or two, and avoid ever attracting more hunters.

YAY DESTROYING THE HIDDEN CONVENT!!!

Lilah is impressed, and the two vampires set to researching. They experiment on the captive nuns, and over the course of two decades they unravel the mystery. Their studies accidentally kill first one nun, then a second, before they finally figure it out.

They spend the next two years carefully exploring for a mortal lover, and keeping their nun alive as a food source while they search. Eventually they find first one, then two, then a third. They drain the nun, and savor their new lovers. Over time they have to set a few girls up in new lives elsewhere, as chemistry fails to connect or romance fails to spark fully.

But eventually they fall in love with three mortals, and show them the magic of reversing age.

And they live happily ever after. There are a few entries here and there showing how they've all settled happily into their sexy new life together, little hints that they still linger and dabble in mortal science now and then over letters, gradually trailing off and wrapping up the book.

Hm. 

It's good, but...it feels like there's something missing, almost? She's not sure what. 

Maybe...it's the part where their good ending involves hiding better. They shouldn't have to hide. 

Maya steps in a moment later. "Okay, darlings. You two need to eat. I made chicken stew, it's in the galley and ready to be served."

She steps 'round Sable's desk and starts tugging her to her feet.