bloodwraith
Your weight loss started precipitously. Thirty-five kilos shed in three weeks through sheer willpower and the strength that flowed from the blood of hundreds, the lives and flesh of several.
Not everything that you took can be burned off, but your exertions catch up to you in the second month.
A knock at your door jars you awake. Light is streaming around the blackout curtains that never fit right, but it’s not morning light. The golden light of summer evening tells you that those aches and pains that have been building finally launched their coup. Your arms feel like lead. Your legs, for all that your thighs are lighter now, simply fail to move on the first three attempts, and only weakly on the fourth.
The knock comes again. “Raven? Are you in there? Lucy texted, asked if you were okay. Have you been in bed all day?”
You clear your throat and try to speak but your voice cracks on the first attempt. The crippling cause of your weakness finds a voice, though: a rippling rumble all through your rousing gut, protesting the missed meals. Meals it knows are far lighter than the fare it feasted on before.
You stroke your domed and grumbling belly like a favoured pet and make another attempt at answering. “I’m here. I’m fine.”
“You sure? You sounded—”
“Said I’m fine.” You wince. Your voice was a little harsh but you hate being checked up on, even as you realise it means someone cares. “Just overdid it? Down in ten.”
“Kettle’ll be on,” I call back, unfazed by your snap.
You hear floorboards creak as I disappear back downstairs. Now then, how to get out of bed?
You settle on levering yourself up with your tendrils. If anything, the essence of your blood-lust is strengthened by the sharpness of your hunger. Once upright, you can swing your legs over the bed. Another push from the tendrils and you are on your feet.
Dressing is slow and laborious, for all that you only don a nightgown. Venus di Milo was a couple of days ago so you’ve painstakingly pruned your wardrobe to more closely match your current shape. At the time you carefully folded the overlarge clothing into a leather-and-wood trunk, closed fondly with thoughts of the day you would need these articles again. Another trunk yielded this silk gown in royal blue, with silver fleur-de-lis patterning it in panels.
The stairs are a challenge. Your weight presses through each meaty thigh and causes the knee to tremble.
After seventy billion stairs you make it into the kitchen. I pick up a streaming cup. When I see you walking I put it on the table, not in your hands. I don’t offer you an arm—you’ll ask for help if you need it—but pull out a chair as a compromise with my desire to help anyway.
You flop into the seat. Your expression looks to me like you’re solving a difficult puzzle.
“You need to take a break from the diet?” I ask, drinking from my own cup. I lean back against the countertop and watch you over the rim.
“Nnn,” you say, shaking your head. A categorical no. “I do need something, though.”
“Can I help?”
You place your elbows carefully on the table and look up at me. Weighing things up.
“Grab me some clothes. We’re going for a walk.”
Your body is better once it’s moving, but the car journey was long enough to settle everything back down. Climbing out is an exercise in frustration, composed of many intermediate goals.
“Blood bank?” I say, still in the driver’s seat. I’m leaning to watch you through the open door.
“Stop guessing. You’re not going to get it. And you’re just making me more hungry.”
“Hospitals shouldn’t make you hungry,” I say, grinning. Then I follow your gaze and blanch. The building you’re examining with a proprietorial air is marked Maternity and Neonatal Unit. “… Smaller portions?” I say, my voice small.
“Still guessing. Still wrong. Keep going and I’mma eat a pile of babies and it’ll be your fault.”
“Yes ma’am. Shutting up, ma’am,” I say, sitting bolt upright. Then I drop the act. “Rey, what are you doing?”
“What can I eat that has no calories?”
You find what you’re looking for outside one of the high-dependency NCU wards. It’s kind of sad: she feels bound to respect the windows separating her from her newborn child.
I step out of the car when I see you arrive in the little memorial park next to the hospital. The late evening sun is almost gone, the last vestiges of light fading through purple. A streetlight flickers on. Its harsh white light illuminates more clearly what you’re doing.
It still makes little sense to me. You’re walking empty-handed, but your tendrils form loops behind you, a smaller one above a larger.
“Did you solve my riddle?”
I hesitate, then nod, lips thin.
“You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.”
“You brought me here. I’ll never hide from what you want to show me.”
You smile crookedly. Your stomach groans and squorts. It’s confused, because your mind is telling your body it’s about to eat, but the only flesh and blood here belongs to me or you.
You bite cleanly into the fleshy part of your thumb and suck. The taste of blood, even your own, makes your knees weak and your eyes close. For a moment you reconsider that there is actually flesh and blood available in this little park.
You see me take a step back. Oh. You must have shown even a sliver of what you’re feeling. Still, I don’t run. Good.
A flex of your will draws the two loops closer. You murmur an incarnation and hold your bleeding thumb above the gaps.
Blood drips onto the tarmac. You continue to chant as it does.
The fourth droplet stops in midair.
Like smoke, it seems to be being pulled by tiny currents of air. More droplets follow, staining empty space in the same way, diffusing all together.
The expanding cloud finds boundaries. Something connects the two loops, and longer streamers flow down to the ground, in a complex bend below the top tendril. A bulbous form develops above the top loop.
Blood that was once like mist grows brighter, redder, more substantial. At one point the shape snaps into clear focus.
Your tendrils hold a woman by the hips and by the throat. She licks and scrabbles at the black appendages, no more successfully now she is made of blood than when spirit unbound.
“That’s…”
“Died. During childbirth. Couldn’t move on. Just standing there, watching her child.” You stroke your hand against her cheek. The features and hair have been smoothed out by the blood binding but she remains surprisingly expressive, flinching away from your touch and silently screaming for help. “A waste.” The tendril around her throat shivers and then raises her slowly aloft. Her legs are free to kick as the other slithers open and draws back.
“I hate waste.”
The skin at her belly depresses and then punctures like the surface of a pond to the blade of the lower tendril. She freezes and your lips part in an unconscious gesture of hunger. The streetlight catches the texture of your tendril as it continues to slide into her temporary body.
Then it swallows.
The bound soul is frozen no longer. As the first black swell bears away a great fragment of her being like a monstrous umbilicus she begins to kick and scratch and fight the restraining bonds with insane energy. It does nothing, your tendrils may as well be made of iron.
Another swallow, and her shape is visibly distorted. Her belly and hips are lopsided, mass of your own potent blood sucked down and bearing parts of her alongside.
The grieving mother tears at her hair, or where her hair would be. Her renewed struggles are as effective as when she was more whole.
“It’s okay, not long now,” you say. You look almost hypnotised. The first swallow has travelled its length and in profile I watch it siphon into your body. You shudder in pleasure. “Not long now.”
I don’t know if you even realised you were pulling her close to you as your tendrils drank. It didn’t look like a conscious decision when you opened your mouth and closed it on her arm. The skin broke but not a drop was spilled except into your mouth.
Hot blood. The taste fills you like an orgasm, like a religious experience. The mere act of swallowing full, greedy, coppery mouthfuls brings with it pleasure enough that tears stream down your cheeks.
You drink and drink with abandon until you are stuffed with your own blood. It carries with it a soul that has no choice but to submit to your hunger. A fragment of something divine screams inside you as it dissolves, pulled apart and subsumed by your vampiric essence.
All too soon she is gone. You are left panting like you’ve been for a run. Drinking was more important than breathing. With startled delight you let loose a sharp burp. You have missed them dearly. Sensible food portions don’t give you cause to swallow much air in the frenzy of consuming your prey.
Another. ~Blaaaourp~
“Raven?” My voice is small and brings you back to earth a little.
You round on me, eyes still bright with the frenzy. You half-expect me to cringe. If I do, if I act like prey, there’s no telling what you’ll do.
“Rey, do you feel better?”
The beast doesn’t know what to do with concern like that. After what I just witnessed, my only thought was for you. Another pull, a link back to earth.
“Yes,” you manage. Your voice is hoarse but stronger. You feel like you’ve been howling at the moon. Inside, blood still swells your gut and near the heart. Inside, the warmly-melting sweetly-drowning voice is still screaming.
“Good.” I approach you and place a hand on your forearm. “I think it’s time for cake.”
There’s no way a predatory frenzy can withstand the third and final bond of the promise of cake. You take my hand in yours and smile. I see my warm, caring Raven once again.
The other Raven was just as much Raven. It’s just that I can never call her mine. Only the other way around.