Page 8 of The Sanguine Selection

More screaming, terror filled, even farther away, and my vision blurs, ears filled with the endless sounds of a stormy sea. Numbness creeps up my limbs from my toes and fingers, down my arms and legs.

Then I’m plagued by a frozen chill so icy my teeth would chatter if there wasn’t something between them. One final guttural cry plagues the air, the prey finally dying by the hands of a predator. I find myself pleased that I no longer have to hear its pain.

Then my world comes crashing down, the realization of what’s actually happened as her blood turns to ash in my mouth and I begin to violently vomit. Where once was a vibrant human, full of life—of love—now only a corpse exists.

Larissa…

“No!” Marek comes out of his blood-lust, like a crazed animal, his cock still inside her. “No! No! No!”

He picks up her lifeless body and slams it to the ground, beating on her chest, willing her heart to come alive again. Words are lost on my lips. My heart would have stopped if I weren’t already dead.

My insides recoil, rebelling against my existence. More vomit, the rest of her blood, now nothing more than ash and ruin. I risk a glance at the horror I’ve been party to and glimpse her bloodshot eyes, staring into the empty void beyond. Her open mouth, blood pooling from her lips in an endless, eternal scream.

No!

I can’t see.

Can’t hear.

Can’t think.

Death.

Murderer.

Killer.

I love you, Mikhail.

No. No. No.

Blackness creeps inside of me, winding through my veins, encasing my skin in an immobile prison, until I am nothing, no one.

Empty.

Devoid of all things.

Floating through the black vastness of time, I cease to exist. She was the harbinger of life and in return, I gave her death.

Falling.

Falling.

Down.

Down.

Down.

An eternity of torturous suffering, of insatiable thirst, of gut wrenching longing.

Withering.

Decayed

Rotten.

As the final strangulating strands of darkness consume my mind, I’m left with one final thought, a single vow, a promise to myself with my last shred of sanity, of humanity, should I ever arouse from this exhaustless sleep…