Blindness

Chapter 28: Red Worm in a Dove Grey Heart

There is something in this, this feeling, bittersweet and angry and desperate.

The vampire runs teeth across dry lips, can almost feel the pulse of life under tongue, a crashing oceanic storm, electric and fierce and alive.

Rapture, waiting under a thin barrier of flesh, waiting for its release to flay them alive.

Flay them alive, the vampire silently laughed. Flay them to life with each painful pulse.

They had to taste. Just one taste, to know what is was to be that level of alive, hold that level of creation. They had followed the scent of that power for months, tracked it to its source with slow, meticulous days.

They were dying, all of them, some more slowly than others. They moved through life and forgot, a sharp and steady decline of forgotten days. There was no true childhood, no unique birth, no perfect creation.

They were monsters walking in the shell of a man, moving mans hands and mans feet to do monsters work. Looking out of human eyes and speaking human words, thinking inhuman thoughts.

They can all smell it so strongly now, that power, a force that licks at their skin with painful shocks, a vicious warning that what was inside such a storm would surely kill them, finish the task of their death in one rapturous moment.

The vampire's nose burned, skin aflame from the brief touch of such power. The family waited, shaking, their own magic its own hunting storm. They surrounded a force that could sustain them if only it would open itself up and die for them.

The wolves chased the moon by killing. The vampires chased after life by taking it. Theirs was not a true life. They had no life. They were nothing. Puppets held alive by dark magic from ages past, that no one left could remember clearly.

The ones they drank from, willing or unwilling, if left alive were tainted by that death. A poison that seeped inside of them and made them into mutants. Stronger, their life sustained by half its normal length. No disease touched them, magical or mundane. Their bodies forgot to age for a time; they became pristine, blood clear as water from a spring brook.

Mutants who gave up a portion of their life so that the vampires might live. Fuel to run a body that only took and never gave back. Life.

But for a time. Only for a time.

The vampire cut the man's skin with sharpened nails, watched the blood bloom and spill over long fingers, heard the family sigh with longing.

So much power. Just a taste. Just a small drink, to seal the bond and make him theirs, ours, us.

Nothing so sweet could be savored, though. The blood burned like exquisite fire in the veins, and down the vampire fell, contorting with pure pleasure and sharp pain alike.

Never had there been It's like. Almost, It might kill them. Almost It could resurrect them in truth.

But the power was taken from them by Its own hand, leaving behind only supreme desperation. With It went what semblance of hope they had, the small sustenance they had paid dearly for days before.

The vampire was empty, a husk, a cadaver. A loose bundle of memories with no tether, thoughts drifting away like leaves in a fall wind.