Only To Be Without, Book 1

Chapter 2

(December 2019 Gravesend, Brooklyn, NY, USA)

She wondered for a moment if he were terribly attached to his roommate, because the man was treading on her very last nerve.

She had been keeping a stranglehold on her self control for an uncomfortably long period of time now, and that had not at all been her intention for this evening. That particular ship, however, had been blown out of the water at about the time she had descended the last few steps into the narrow entryway.

After she had gotten past the feeling that someone was playing an absurd joke, she had become aware of the more absurd reality.

He was quite real, he was quite clumsy, he was quite serious, and he was absolutely precious.

This led her to the rather uncomfortable intersection of wanting to eat him alive and... well... wanting to eat him alive, just without the euphemism. Various alleyways were to be found here, including a particularly hairy looking one down which there was the realization that she did, in fact, want to see him again.

Imagine, actually being interested in a human... It was a humiliating, terrifyingly foreign prospect. Think, as hard as she could though she did, she could not think of one time in the prior three centuries since she had risen from her own rot that she could remember ever, just once, a human who had merited her attention, a human that everything from her blood to her marrow told her was hers to ravage. He was made for her, the darkness whispered.

Then again, she could not think of a time in which she had associated with a human who did not know just what he was dealing with without that human meeting a grisly end, but she thought of simply feeding and being on her way and it made her... sad.

It seemed terribly boring, while the option of discovering more about this strange man seemed quite interesting.

And she had thought this at just about the time he had been unceremoniously mauled by that feral feline.

She couldn't help but feel as though the mangy beast were laughing at her. Because... the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and once she had caught the scent of his blood, it was all she could smell. Rich and resinous, something earthy like cedar and musk and freshly turned soil, and while she had learned long ago that humans often had their own distinct scents, this was not one she could remember ever having sensed before.

What was he, exactly?

She had drawn tantalizingly close to understanding some new level of that question, the taste of it had been in her mouth when the greasy man, Tony, had interrupted them again, and it was amazing how cranky she got when she was hungry.

She briefly considered the logistics of killing the one and pinning the other down to see just how much jaw pressure it would take to sink her human teeth into his throat.

But that would certainly make further conversation terribly awkward, and she rather enjoyed listening to him speak.

It was so much easier dealing with humans who knew their place in the grand scheme of things. She had known some individuals who had shown a proclivity for such things as keeping pets, the Priest, for instance, but she had never found the time to wonder how exactly they had managed to achieve that relationship. How exactly would she explain what she was to him?