Put your story text here...Morgead
As Jez collapsed, he managed to catch her in his arms. It happened so fast that he did it without thinking. Then he sat at stared down into her face.
Her skin wasn't the fair, dimpled, almost luminous skin that he was used to seeing. It was tinged with gray. Her eyes were open but unseeing. And her body was completely still.
It took a long time to realize that she was dead.
He'd seen enough dead bodies in his life that he ought to be able to recognize the signs. But somehow he refused to see them in Jez. The blue color of her lips, the cooling of her body, the flattening of the eyes.
And then suddenly he knew that he didn't want to live any longer and he was able to admit it. Jez was gone and he didn't want to be alone.
He never even analyzed why he should have thought "alone" when the rest of the gang was still waiting for him. The gang that he and Jez had created.
It took a long time for him to realize that there was a chance to bring her back.
It would take a tremendous amount of energy, though. And he just didn't have that. Even if he scraped the bottom of the barrel, pulling energy from his spine and the soles of his feet-he had nowhere near enough.
And meanwhile Jez's brain wasn't getting any oxygen. She was losing brain cells, which, even in vampires, was a disastrous thing.
They'd thought they'd been so clever in losing the gang. Now he could have used the others. He would have ruthlessly stripped them of energy to give Jez what she needed. If only they were here . . . even if it killed one of them . . .
That was when he realized he didn't need them.
He was here, and he had always had a particularly strong life energy. If he was willing to give it all to Jez, it should be enough.
He didn't waste a second after that.
He needed to get in contact with her, in better contact that just eye to eye and palm to palm. It only took him a second to stretch her out on the pine needle rug and brush her hair off her face. Then, holding both her hands he clamped his mouth over hers as if giving her artificial respiration. Which, in a way, this was.
And then he channeled the life energy which flowed in and out of him solely out-into Jez. Normally he generated it and it flowed through his body, refreshing and renewing the organs-making him lamia, in short. It was the energy that allowed him to choose to age or not to age, the energy which made him heal much faster than any human could heal and move much faster than any human could move. And then, when the energy had circulated throughout every part of his body, he took it back in, and it was mysteriously renewed by something in his heart, the way human blood picked up oxygen at the lungs. Then the cycle began all over again.
It was why staking through the heart was the only way to kill a vampire.
But now, he was channeling the energy outside his body and into Jez's. And once it completed its circuit he was channeling it to Jez's heart, not his own.
It was all he could think of to do. But . . . it wasn't pleasant. As each sweep of life energy went by, his own starving cells demanded their share.
He wouldn't let them have it. This was for Jez.
It got harder and harder as time went on. It . . . burned. His lungs ached.
