Page 14

Chapter Fourteen

Fuck. I’m in the sewer again, drained again, trapped and violated, again.

But this time is different. He said he was taking my blood “the old way” and bit my chest. He sucked the blood though my skin.

I die before I am dead—flying into the bliss of a man who was never born.

I can hear my own heartbeat, like the flutter of butterfly wings in a storm. It’s trying and failing.

I want to die. I will die. Finally, I am dying.

The creature leans over me, looking deeply into my eyes. Even this close, he exists in a fog of tears and snot. I am finished, empty, broken, halfway down the tunnel of death and praying I can make the journey to the end.

In a barely conscious fugue, I know he has something I need. He can end this inexplicable starvation.

“Harder this time,” he commands from the bottom of a well. “Bite harder.”

He puts his wrist to my lips and the last bit of life in me obeys because even in this state, I am hungry, so hungry. I clamp my jaw on cold skin and break it. My tongue tastes blood so thick, so alive, that it explodes in my mouth.

Falling stops. I am yanked back up into a kind of blind consciousness. The blood is disgusting, but after the first gulp is forced down, the need to suck and swallow again is as raw as an infant’s. I reenter life with that as my only purpose.

My death is averted. His blood enters my veins like an army.

He is thick on the tongue and runs down the throat with a will of its own.

It pulls the tubes inside me. I am swallowing fishhooks, but I am swallowing.

I can’t stop. The taste is foul and wrong.

It stabs me inside. Yanks. Pinches. Pulls.

It’s as if I’m being rearranged from the inside out.

My stomach has forgotten how to be hungry, but my heart, my veins, my guts…

those are starving. Even when the hooks go blinding hot, I suck on this thick, metal death.

Clutching his arm, I suck as he strokes my hair, cooing encouragement. I need all of it. Every drop and then more.

He lays his hand on my forehead and presses down so he can pull his arm away. I scream like an animal.

I smell its blood. It’s the same blood speeding through my veins like lightning ripping through a tree trunk.

Everything is brighter, louder, harder. Muscles twist and spasm, ripping apart and knitting together. My lungs are filled with broken glass and my veins push sand into my heart. The agony in my bones is less like pain and more like the infuriating itch of a healing wound.

Through this all, I am as conscious as I have ever been. Sleep will not save me. I feel every internal jab and grind with the acuity of a child.

“What did you do to me?” I ask.

“We shall see. Maybe I killed you. Maybe I gave you life.”

I open my mouth to curse him, but all I want to do is fill it. Hunger twists inside me. It’s a ravenousness not of the belly, but the bones. My teeth hurt, and like an infant, only biting will soothe the ache. The agony is hunger and the hunger is agony.

The creature tenderly pats my forehead. “Now, my beauty, you will want with your entire being. More than anything, you will want .”

Settling into a crouch, he moves away long enough to trick me into thinking I’m being abandoned. He is tricking me into wanting him.

My mouth opens to scream, but again, it’s too empty to make a sound.

I am on my hands and knees on this cursed stone floor with a stomach pinched into the shape of a pinecone.

The pain is uneven, cacophonous, a hot poker to the mind.

I heave, but nothing comes. It’s hooked inside me. I can’t go on another second.

I drop to the floor, cheek to the cold stone. This pain is mine alone. Not his. I own my body again. My heart has separated from him. The thrall that tortured me has been lifted, but what has taken its place?

The stones under my back are cold. The flickering firelight blasts through my closed eyelids. The smell is like a punch in the face. Shit and blood and piss. Human leakages made bigger than the sky. I should be overwhelmed, but it’s not completely unpleasant.

“You are no longer forced to obey me.” He stands above me. His bare foot is a finger-length from my face. “But you will. At first, to survive. Then, out of gratitude.”

I don’t want to survive. I want to die. I will never see my son again. The city will burn with or without me, and this creature will feed on it, starting with Paolina.

It doesn’t matter what I want. I have to survive.

“I will. Live. To kill. You,” I choke out.

A burst of laughter leaves the creature’s chest. “Your heart hasn’t even proven a worthy vessel yet.”

That heart beats two more times before it breaks into pain that blocks out every whisper of thought.

I have no name, no body, no soul in the face of such agony.

My joints—from toe to spine—blare like horns.

My muscles are strands twisting into rope.

My jaw feels as if it’s getting ripped apart.

Every root of hair is engorged and inflamed. I cannot even pray.

His smile is blood-toothed and his balls hang between his legs. He is careless with his vulnerability.

I should want to die.

I do want to die, but I will kill it first. Later. The hunger is all-consuming. It has a life of its own. It is a persistent voice inside me, screaming consume-consume-consume .

The creature gets on his knees and inspects me as if I am a weapon and he has a job to do. He squeezes my face so hard I feel it over the throbbing in my jaw.

“Sharp.” He runs his thumb along the edge of my front teeth and shows me the bloody line.

I leap for that thick red drop with a strength and speed I didn’t know I had. He gains control of me easily and pushes me down against the floor, holding me there. As strong as I felt just now, he is stronger. He will always be stronger.

“You have to be careful with your tongue.” He kisses his cut, and it’s gone. “You can’t fill up on your own blood.”

“Why?”

“Because the one who walks with me needs power equal to his beauty.”

In a breath, I smell a sweetness that sets my whole body aflame.

A roar explodes from my throat. When the echoes die down, a woman’s wet gasp fills the silence.

“Paolina?” I look around for her as much as I can with his hand pressing against me.

The room’s corners are still engulfed in impenetrable shadow, but I see her crouched in a corner that was always too dark.

Now it’s not. The nature of light hasn’t changed.

I have. More than that, I can hear her breathing.

Her heartbeat. The blood in her veins. I want her in ways I never did before.

She is the source of that flaming blossom of sweetness.

I want to consume her.

My mind is unable to parse the morality of my desire. My brain is as starved as my body. I need her. I try to wiggle out from under the creature’s pressure, holding my hand out to Paolina—to touch her, yes. And to tear her apart.

“Not yet.” The creature takes me by the back of the shirt and drags me from her. “You must hunt for it.”

“ Huh-huh ?—”

Hunt?

“Yes, then you shall know my name,” he says to me, then directs his command to Paolina. “Run, little whore. Run.”