by K. A Knight
With a scream trapped in my throat, I watch my wife’s dying body crumple to the ground as the creature spins to face me, its fangs flashing in the night, its chin covered in my wife’s and child’s blood as it taunts me.
“Do you want to die with them?” it questions, its voice strange, rasping around the fangs I can’t help but stare at. We have all heard the stories, believing them to be nothing more than tales to scare children, but before me stands a creature from myth…mocking my pain and loss as my wife and child’s bodies lie broken around us.
I grab my shells with shaking hands and try to reload the gun, but my eyes keep going back to Antoinette to see her gaze locked on me as tears roll down her beautiful face, her neck still pumping blood onto the floor. The creature laughs again and is suddenly before me. It knocks the gun out of my hand, and I watch it tumble to the ground out of reach. Dragging my eyes from my lost weapon, I meet the bottomless pits of the creature before me. I stare at it helplessly, my eyes defiant. I will not flinch in the face of death, my time was up many a year ago, only luck has kept me alive to this day. To see my dearest bear our child, watch her grow, and now watch her fall. Oh, this world is cruel. It is my time to go, I will join them on the other side.
“Kill me, creature, and I will rejoin them once again. I do not fear death, I have seen it on the battlefields,” I snarl, my head tilted back, arms straight and back proud. A soldier in the face of a nightmare.
It laughs once again, its eyes flashing in the night as the light goes out and plunges us into darkness. “No, my pet, I think I will do something much worse to you…”
A noise brings me back from the edge, a mocking laugh like the one in my memories, following me into the present. I hang there, limp in their chains, my mind shattered and falling apart, my body dying, crumbling into itself like a skeleton. My bones are brittle, my skin like parchment paper, tearing and old. My fangs throb, and my mouth is dry and screaming with a thirst so strong I have never faced anything like it before. I had tried to stop once, to sustain myself on animal blood, but this...this is so much more.
I am nothing beyond the thirst coursing through my body.
I let it fill me, guide me, make me until I am feral. I thought I was strong enough to face this, to die with dignity and not give in to their wants and demands, but this thirst is stronger than I could have ever imagined, and it will not let me just waste away. It will pull me back, kicking and screaming, and I know once I taste blood, I will be nothing more than that ravenous monster who killed those I held most dear and made me into what I am.
A monster.
I will bathe in blood with bodies drained around me until I come back to myself and the regret settles in, but in the haze, the red covering me at the moment, I don’t care. I would consume every single human in this city if it would quench this...this need.
The sound comes again, closer this time, and I recognise it through the blood gushing in my ears. Boots are heading this way, the tell-tale smack of the soles the only sound other than the human’s cries they throw in here. I know this time I will give in. They will throw me a blood bag, a human, and I will drain them, not stopping at just one, becoming their ravenous killer.
I brace myself, trying to stop my breathing, but I will still scent their fear, their blood, no matter what I do. It will not stop, I need to feed, it’s a craving so strong my head falls back and I let out a scream of grief and pain at becoming this monster. Reduced to a killer…
The door opens and I don’t allow myself to look, maybe I can fight it off. I hear it slam shut again, but there are no cries or movement, and that is what has my head jerking up and then the smell hits me.
The fragrance, goodness, I could bathe in it. Wrap it around myself like armour and wear it into war. It smells like blood, sex, and the fields where I grew up. I suck in lungfuls of it and it settles that thirst, covering it for a moment so I can have some form of rational thought, but just for a moment. A stolen moment of sanity, all because of how she smells.
Then I see her. The red fades from my vision and my eyes work again, resting on the goddess, the general of war lying before me. A face that men would race into battle for, that they would follow to the ends of the gallows, to death itself. A beauty like I have never seen through any of the ages I have lived. One that sends a punch straight through me and restarts my shrivelled, hungry heart.
Her hair, long and blonde and the colour of wheat in harvest, is wrapped around her like a coiled snake. Her face is pressed to the cool cement and I’m jealous of it for touching her. Her skin is pale, covered in specks of blood, and I inhale again, noting it’s not hers. Her eyes are shut, black lashes resting along her cheek, her body curvy and slightly short, but oh so tempting. I can scent her blood, though, recent as well, and as I watch her body stitches itself back together from many, many wounds. What did they do to her?
A flash of hate and rage surges through me and I wrench on the chains.
Who is she? Another prisoner, a monster like me they are trying to break? What is she? I have never smelled something so delicious in all my life, and just like that my hunger roars to the forefront of my mind again. It makes me yank on the chains, my fangs snapping down as I try to reach her, to sink my incisors into her and taste that delicious blood, drain her dry and bathe in it.
She stirs for a moment, her head turning the other way as if to escape me. I glance at the guard they left in here, the one I injured, to see him still pale and asleep, but alive for now. A noise has my eyes dragging back to her, but she is no longer lying down.
She is staring right back at me, her black eyes peeking through golden hair as she crouches on the tiles like an animal, staring straight at my hunger with one of her own. What does she hunger for? I have the insane urge to ask and give her whatever it is.
Scratching sounds, and I glance down to see her long, black nails dragging along the floor as she watches me like prey, waiting to pounce for any wrong move I make. I stare right back, noticing the jumping pulse in her throat, feeling it calling to me, imagining the noise she would make as her blood squirted into my mouth.
I jerk forward, automatically reaching for it, and she pounces. Her body flies through the air like a blur and I fall backwards with the impact, still swinging from the chains that hold me. I snap forward, trying to bite her, but she grabs my head in her hands, her small, delicate fingers spread across my cheeks as her red, rosy mouth slants and comes down on mine. It’s enough to make me freeze, and then suddenly I’m opening wide, like an old habit, an instinct I didn’t know I had and she’s there…I taste her, her need, her hunger.
I feed her.
She pulls, not physically, but her kiss tugs at my energy, the very essence that animates me, sucking it from my mouth like a drink through a straw, again and again, drawing it from deep inside me and absorbing it into herself. Her claws cut into my face slightly, and the scent of my blood only makes her wilder. A whimper comes from her throat as she tries to get closer, to find a better angle on me.
It’s like she is draining the madness, the thirst from me with each pull of her lips on mine, taking it into herself and making it hers with a hungry sounding moan. Her hands splay on my face as she leaps onto my body, wrapping her legs around me to keep me still as she drinks and drinks. I gladly submit with every pull of her rosy, delicious lips as I start to feel normal. She’s warm, oh so warm, and her body is smashed against mine. With each ounce of blood thirst draining from my being, I realise another one is roaring forward.
Lust.
My cock tents my ripped, dirty pants, aching and pointing towards her. Each draw of her mouth makes it jerk and my balls swell like she is sucking me down. I groan into her kiss, rolling against her pussy which is pressed tightly to my stomach, her legs constrict around me like a snake wrapping around its meal. I would happily give it all to her, she can have it.
She can drain me dry, kill me, take all my energy. Everything that I am. She can devour it.
I don’t know why, but she can. I feel a thread, a small, thin one linking me to her and that pull, the one I thought was madness, is back, low in my gut...drawing me to her. Her mouth locks tight onto mine, no longer just feeding now, but sucking me down, each one a line straight to my cock until I am panting as lust roars through me stronger than I have ever felt before.
The taste of her wipes me clean, rebuilding me into something else...something hers. I feel it. Her call now rings through my head, reaching for me in the dark, in the blood lust, her black tipped hand encircling my own bloodstained hands as she pulls me free from the clinging fog and back into myself.
I’m thrusting against her, rutting like an animal, my cock jerking and precum leaking as she presses closer, rocking against me, her pussy rubbing back and forth through the ruined dress she is wearing. My hands ball into fists as I ache to reach for her, to rip the dress away and sink into her wet heat, feel her surrounding me fully, owning me, her pussy tight as I drive into her again and again as she feeds, her name on my lips...
I roar as I come, my cock jerking in my pants and spilling my seed there. She moans, rocking against me, licking at my lips before trailing them across my cheek to the cuts there and lapping at my blood. I groan, my eyes shutting as I shudder in pleasure.
I feel her stop and move away, so my eyelids snap back open and meet two bright blue orbs, no longer black as she blinks at me with a strange little smile on her face as she meets my gaze without fear or judgement, just an almost lax, lazy pleasure.
“Who are you?” I whisper, voice hoarse from disuse.
“Name’s Dawn, hot stuff, yours?” I reply, still wrapped around the man. It was like a haze. I woke up on the floor in yet another fucking cell after they beat me and tried to break me and I saw him there, hanging from the ceiling, waiting for me.
I couldn’t help myself, I needed a taste. I felt his power even though his body is almost skeletal. I could taste it and I wanted more. I remember leaping at him, wrapping around him, and draining. I can see it has taken its toll on his already lean and dying frame.
He has a face I can tell is super attractive even if it’s gaunt and frail at the moment. His dark eyes are almost sunken into his skull, his eyebrows brown and his hair the same colour, long past his shoulders like you used to see in paintings and pictures of times long past. Yet now it hangs lifeless and lacklustre, flat and bedraggled, cut in patches. His body feels frail like he will crumble to dust at any minute and float away, and for some reason that would make me sad. Very fucking sad.
His giant fangs hang over his lips, protruding from his face, it must be painful. Is he a vampire? If so, it doesn’t look like he’s fed, is that what he needs? Bad Dawn, he’s hungry and you fed from him. It’s a wonder he didn’t just strike and bite me, not that I would really mind.
The thought sends a shiver of thrill through me, straight to my wet, aching pussy which is still pressed to his hard cock. Even in the state he is in, he is still stiff and wanting against me, pushing close, seeking out my heat, and I have the insane urge to fuck him, but I don’t.
Yet.
He freezes, his eyes confused for a moment as he seems to be drifting away. “I don’t know,” he mumbles with the hint of an accent on his raspy words, a cadence to them that tells me this isn’t his first language, and I want to know what is. I want to know this man, this vampire. Why? Is he yet another monster I’m calling to me like Nos proposed? Or is this a temporary feeling from the feeding?
I feel weird being wrapped around him now, so I drop to the floor and we both let out a whimper at the lost contact, making me freeze and stare at him...what is he to me? “You don’t know your name?” I ask.
He nods, his eyes going far away. “My mind...is fracturing from the lack of blood. I can’t remember some things, but others I can see in excruciating detail...like…” He sucks in a breath and I fall back with a cry, my hands going to my head which feels like it’s in a vice as images rip through it...memories that aren’t mine. They imprint there as I fall to my knees, tears falling unchecked down my face. I can feel my body, feel the sobs escaping me at the pain in those recollections, but I can’t stop it...it’s too much, too powerful…
“No, no,” I chant, then I scream as my head is ripped to the side and fangs sink into my neck. I kick and yell, fighting, but the creature is too strong. My gaze lands on my baby girl as my life is drained from me. When my eyes begin to close and the darkness takes hold, I send up a prayer that the next life will be kinder to me, that I don’t lose my love and fate is not as cruel…
Then nothing but darkness encompasses me. I swim in it like a sea, paddling in nothingness. I have no body, only a consciousness, just floating, merely existing. No pain or grief, nothing but warmth. I sink into it, accepting its welcoming embrace, but just as I do, I am ripped away.
I feel a jerk of a pain then the sensation of choking. I can’t open my eyes, but I know I’m not dead, yet I’m not alive. I’m still caught in the dark, but the pain, God, the pain. It races through me, burning everything away like lava through my veins. Erupting, destroying, and breaking, and in its path something new blooms, something darker...stronger...a monster.
I scream both in the dark and in reality, the sound inhuman, and then something cool hits my lips, dripping down my throat. I drink it down, swallowing again and again, feeling each drop hit my stomach like water putting out the blaze, and only when there is none left do I stop, the fire burning low, still there, never gone, but simply subdued...ready to return at any time.
A thirst.
“No!” comes a scream, and I’m thrown backwards from the memory, into my own head, my fingers on the cool, stone floor, my chest heaving as I suck in desperate breaths, my tears still falling as I look up slowly to meet his eyes.
They were his memories...of how he became a vampire.
“Wh-Who did that to you?” I whisper brokenly. I felt his pain, his utter grief. He wanted to die, welcomed it...had lost something so precious, but his own life, his own choice to die was ripped away from him and in its place he became this—a vampire controlled by thirst. God, the thirst. I couldn’t imagine it, it’s so much worse than mine, a pain unlike any I have ever felt, controlling him, guiding him. To fight that for so long…the strength he must have. I shake my head and wipe the tears away as I gaze at him.
I have seen the darkness in his mind. I know him. He thinks he doesn’t know himself, he has no name, no memory of his identity, but I know him. I do, right here and now, I know it. He’s mine, my destiny, meant to be here. Like I am meant to be. His human life was cruel, his vampire life not much better from what I can gather, but it led him here…
To me.
“You don’t want to see that, see what she made me.” He spits the word ‘she,’ his distaste clear.
“I can see it already, I don’t need your memories for that,” I point out, reining in my breathing as I sit up and scrub my face clean. He looks away, not meeting my eyes, his hair hanging like a curtain before me as he shudders and sucks in breaths, muttering under his breath. Words, phrases I can’t understand, to push back the memories, I think. I leave him to it. He exposed himself without meaning to, and one of the hardest moments of his life was shown like a video to me, a stranger. I’ll let him rebuild and pull himself back together. It’s not like I’m going anywhere, so I sit back and wait.
I tried to release his chains, but I couldn’t. I also tried to feed him, but he wouldn’t let me. After I saw his memories, he isn’t even looking at me, his head hanging in shame. I’m leaning back against the wall, watching him.
I think he’s worried about what I think of him, that I’ll be disgusted at what I saw. He doesn’t understand I was awed. Many would have given into that fire before now and ceased to exist or become nothing but death, yet I found peace and lust in his arms, not mortality. He doesn’t know himself, doesn’t see himself. That’s hard, I imagine, when you can’t remember bits of your life or even your name.
Maybe that’s a good thing, a fresh start for him. With me. It’s clear he isn’t comfortable with what he is, maybe even hates it. I can’t imagine going through life like that, perhaps I can help him. He helped me, after all. I know now how easily he could have killed me, I left my throat vulnerable, but he didn’t, he let me feed, heal, using his energy.
My eyes flicker to the other man in the room, the guard. He’s on death’s door, I can feel it. Sense it. “Want me to kill him or are we keeping him as a pet?” I muse.
He gazes at me then, seemingly more put together. Less...fragile and fractured, even though those are not the words I would use to describe the warrior, the fighter before me. “Do what you want with him,” he mutters, his voice hoarse and cracking. He needs to feed but he won’t. He looks away again, and I ache to see those eyes. I debate what to do and finally sigh as I slump against the wall, stretching out my legs, not staring at him but at my feet.
“I was murdered,” I start, blowing out a breath. “By my husband, ex,” I correct, knowing my mates hate it when I refer to him in the present tense. “He was not someone I chose, I was a fool. I was charmed by his money and face, and I didn’t see the monster hiding below until it was too late. I needed to get out, but I couldn’t. He made me his little pet and I caved, sinking into myself. Doing everything he asked just to not feel the pain of his anger. I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognise who stared back.” I raise my eyes then, unwilling to be ashamed about what I survived. “I endured it, waiting, becoming what I had to be to get through every single fucking day, and do you know what I became? He raped me, killed me, and buried my body, but I still wouldn’t fucking die. Too stubborn and filled with the need for vengeance, I rose back up into what I am now. I don’t know whether the pain, death, or need for his blood changed me. I don’t care, I’m not ashamed of the monster I am. I’ve seen those human monsters, and they are so much worse than us. They hide behind masks, being cruel and craving pain and control. We are monsters from circumstance, with no choice…”