Blood & Power [Book One of The City of Eternity Series] [✔]

1.1: Crave

Blood.

A silent craving that lingered on the tip of my tongue, settled in the back of my throat and deprived the pit of my stomach.

It was a craving that had been circling for days, swarming my mind with ardent desire. It was an unfeasible task to ignore the whispering that danced in the back of my head, chanting 'feed, feed, feed' on an endless loop. Over the course of the week that I had been dry, it had become progressively louder; verging on agonising.

I vividly remember what hunger felt like as a human. The laughably crude pangs that twisted my gut then, were pale imitations of the hollow void that demanded mind-numbing feasts now. After a few days of hunger as a human, those pangs would dull - the need to eat was still there, but your body would give up, simply eating away at itself.

I breathe in the cold air as we walk wordlessly down the street. It was barely past midnight but the comfort of darkness had already draped over the city. The vast blackness that expanded across the sky and engulfed all of the previous light was almost absent from stars, but a few dull ones flickered every now and then. The streetlights dotted along the road were misted by the snow that was lightly falling and ice had blanketed the pathway ahead of us.

I looked over to my companion on this walk, Kara, who was lumbering along by my side, placing one foot directly in front of the other. Her lips have been in a straight, emotionless line since early this morning - they were usually plump and pulled into a genuinely happy smile. The hunger that was plaguing both of us kept us in a tight grip of unhappiness. It was hard to evoke anything when starvation was nipping at every square inch of you.

"Hurry," Kara had hissed through her teeth. The eagerness to speed up was one I shared, but Kara was younger in the bloodline and that came with a ferocious need to feed. It was a need that I understood, having gone through its deepened effects near the beginning of my life. It had lost its edge on me as the years had gone by - I could go for longer periods without blood and keep my composure; she could not.

It wasn't just the starvation that had been causing her steady decline in mood; The machines that had been adapted to provide for our kind operated on a first come first basis. A machine that had been filled to its capacity would often feed the majority of the bloodline it had been allocated to - the issue was what it was filled with.

Every bloodline had a preferred blood type. I can only presume this was due to the origins of the line and who that origin tended to sink their teeth into. Our bloodline - the seventeenth, often leaned towards B Negative and the brief encounters I'd had with the origin had always been in the presence of B Negative humans under his draw and attraction. None of those humans had survived longer than the meeting that had taken place between us. This inclination often meant that the machine would run out of B Negative as soon as it became available.

Kara and I would leave for the outskirts ahead of most of the bloodline in order to swoop the best packs for ourselves. This brought a need to be cautious; a need that is often missing when you try to collect the scraps of what is left. Although the bloodline was close, it was a dysfunctional family with outcasts. Some of the line was more than happy to rip another apart to get what they desired most; blood. The consequences of this were usually severe - but blood came from lust, which tried its best to hide the punishment that loomed.