The Beast I Am

Chapter 5

My heart burst through my throat at the way his eyes paled, how the dark circles around his eyes seemed to deepen. Horror, he had witnessed something truly terrible- me.

He wasn't easily going to tell me what he heard. What he saw.

"Finally, I got through... You could barely move... like that..." Rhazien collected himself, the mask slipping back over his features. "What. Happened?"

"I was reading..." My beast curled at the lie, at the slight slip of tongue, the urge to apologize and confess dogpiling the guilt. The Bond would be harder to force through than I initially thought. "Then everything felt cold."

"Cold, how?" Rhazien took one of the smaller hand-bound books, resting it against the back of the chair as he flipped through it.

"I don't know. Cold." The irritation prickled again: hunger. I hated how he looked at me through his lashes, loathed how the deep, shining blue danced between my face and the bottle of red within arm's reach. My teeth squeaked as I grit them. "Deep cold. The kind that cuts you to the bone."

Rhazien hummed. The sound rippling across my skin, my beast crooning at the noise.

"I saw someone."

The wavy brown strands around his head whipped as he jerked up. The frown deepening the crease building between his brow. "Who?"

"I-I don't know. They barely seemed human." My voice was weak and strained as I tried to suppress the cough building in my throat, the need to quench a burning thirst.

My resistance was in vain, the snap of the book in his hands jolting me awake, "What will it take?"

I hugged my legs tighter, the glasses seeming to whisper my name, my stomach begging me for more, only a tease I had received thus far. "Morally...I just can't, Rhazien. And it's absurd for you to think I can be okay with the idea of cannibalism overnight. No matter the point source."

"A compromise then. Switch out the source you're so worried about."

"To what?"

Rhazien shrugged, "Another mammal. It's not to my personal taste but is a vegan alternative to the traditional vitae."

"Well, why didn't you give me that to start with?" The flare ebbed higher in my skin, making my ears burn.

"If you were to try to convince someone who's never drunk milk before that not only is it harmless, but beneficial and actually taste's good... Would you serve them the finest? Or spoiled goods?"

I glared at him, the words vacant on my tongue.

"Exactly. One sniff, and you would have never opened that door again." A flicker of fear shot through his expression in a way that made me reconsider the offer. That and the rolling hunger that now had burbled into an unending nausea. Something I could very much do without.

"Fine."

He was so loud as he moved, his broad frame creaking the floor, bare feet shuffling on the carpet like static. The bell from downstairs as loud as if it were in the room with us. I closed my eyes again as I rested, trying to muffle the sensitive sounds like I had done so many other times... before.

"I'm not a monster." The words jostled me in the still silence, time falling further and further away from my control each night I refused to eat. Torpor. The call to ancient vampires to sleep forever.

Ancient and hungry.

Rhazien had returned to the books, starting on a new volume. He added the medical journal to the stack on his right, a large palm correcting it so it perfectly aligned with the others.