breakin
You check your location on Google maps, check the building in front of you, then sigh. Twenty storeys high, glass-fronted, security on the ground floor and heavier security on the thirteenth. And which floor are you going to be spending time on, this early night? The thirteenth.
It’s another “favour” for a “friend”. When you owe a favour to that sort of “person” it’s always good to discharge that favour quickly. The email was scant text and a photograph of a family the matriarch of which you vaguely recognise from the news, with the face of the eldest daughter strangely warped into a distorted, grotesque weeping expression. In her hands, a brilliant white lotus flower, upside-down. You know that the lotus symbolises eternal life. Inverted…
Underneath, the email said: “be unseen and harm no one”.
You have quibbles about the word “harm”.
This correspondent is not the type to answer questions, though. So you turn off your phone and take a small jar of grey powder out of your long coat. The concoction of resins, blood, sodium and ebony, burned to ash under specific conditions, will blur your face in glass, scuppering any camera installed in the building. You apply unscrew the lid and apply it like war paint.
You sigh again, check your watch, then set off. Showtime.
Reception is manned by a rough-looking fellow with a buzz-cut who watches you suspiciously as you walk to the security gates. After a few mock failed attempts at scanning your Costa loyalty card you walk towards him, visibly frustrated.
“This damn ID card keeps failing. Could you check it on your system again?”
Buzz-cut frowns at you, suspicious; but when you hand him the card, palmed so he can’t instantly see that it’s a fake, he does reach forward.
Quick as a magician your proffered hand darts forward to close around his wrist. Unnaturally sharpened thumbnail expertly pierces the artery by the thumb even as you slam his palm to the desk. Releasing the hand you draw a line towards you with his blood, terminating in a circular glyph. His shout of alarm and anger cuts off when you finish the circle and then repeats, pitch-perfect: “Hey, what the f— hey, what the f—”, over and over as a trickle of blood continues to flow out of him and around the circle. The loop you’ve trapped him in will continue, sustained by the power of his blood, and he’ll be harmlessly held so long as a) he doesn’t become a moderately powerful occultist in the next fifteen minutes; and b) you don’t take more than that length of time, which is how long it’ll take for blood loss to become a problem.
You leap over the security desk and glance at cameras that will see him acting oddly but nothing of you. Sucking idly on your bloodied thumb, you pluck his access card from its lanyard around his neck and then stride to the lifts.
The lift speaks with a professionally bland woman’s voice: “Floor thirteen.” The doors open and immediately the man behind the security desk jumps to his feet.
You expected this one to be harder. The email had been needlessly cryptic, but then, it was impressive that a greater spirit had got a hotmail account at all. Your only clue that you were dealing with more than vanilla humans had been, “ils savent”, inexplicably in French. “They know.”
Thus the tendrils which had slipped through slits in your long, black coat had whipped forth, one for the heart and one for the hidden alarm button the hand was diving towards.
His hand recoils from the button and he jerks aside in time that both tendrils streak past him. No dumb projectiles, these are your limbs: they curl back around to ensnare him. But he spits out an old world like a curse, causing a grey cloud to envelop the hand you struck at. When he swipes it through the air to intercept both flashing blades of your vampiric limbs it leaves behind a smear of black, too unexpected for you to avoid.
Leaden cold floods your supernatural limbs. The effect is somewhat like a vampiric drain, but imperfect, performed only to waste and not for him to gain from you. Even surprised you feel his will buckle slightly when you begin to pull at his magic with your own; but, realising it will take too long to overcome his defences that way, you resist only long enough to keep his attention.
You started running towards him immediately that you began your assault. You’re mid-leap when you dismiss your tendrils into shadow and let them fray into nothing. The witchy security guard noticed only after you’d half covered the distance, and began to reach for a gun at his hip at the same time.
The barrel swings up towards you just as your foot connects with his arm. He keeps hold of the weapon but it’s knocked aside. His other hand with its draining darkness falls on a backhand swat of your own. Blood red clashes with black, but you’re prepared to sacrifice a little vitality and burst through the effect. The result is his own physical hand is left naked and ice-pale, the blood drained at the instant from every capillary by the scarlet flames pouring from your left hand.
The momentum of your leap carries you both bodily to the floor. He screams the beginning of another Old Word while looping the gun back to bear on you, but you’re too close, and within range of, well, everything. A swat of your left hand across his chest passes just north of his heart—“harm no one”—and his eyes unfocus for a fraction of a second.
It’s enough. Scarlet flames banked, you grip both his arms and sink your fangs brutally into his throat. There is a way of pressing with the chin that renders your victim unable to scream, and you employ this now until, ten monstrous swallows later, he is naturally unconscious.
Blood the volume of his whole heartbeat pours in great swells down your throat. Heightened as you are you can feel the rest inside his body, even feel the soul it carries, connected to you by your mouth. He blossoms open, soul recognising you as its master. He is utterly vulnerable to you…
It takes effort not to pull this enemy occultist down into your gut to let your stomach finish him off. Instead to tear out only the last moments of his memory and slow your feed, drinking as quickly as you think he’ll survive, and then only enough to incapacitate. Licking the wound clean covers your tracks, and while technically he’s harmed, he’ll make a full recovery.
You slosh slightly as you stand up. Your target is somewhere in this floor. Time to go hunting.
Disaster.
Well. It depends on your perspective. Thank Christ for the facepaint. Whoever those three people were Zooming saw only brief chaos as you fell upon them.
The two men didn’t move fast enough and you bit and grabbed, teeth in one throat and scarlet flames lapping at the other. The woman you failed to reach pressed herself into the corner of meeting room 13.4, staring in horror. She never screamed, though. As you fed to held her eyes in yours. She watched, pale and paralysed, as you gulped and drank noisily from her colleague’s carotid. The fellow in your vampiric grip was in far greater danger: you had to exercise extreme care that the deadly flames did not stray too close to the spinal column and thus damage the cord. Where you were gripping would have left him dead within minutes, unable to breathe. Instead your flame flared invisibly within long vessels, scouring him from the inside. Both of them succumbed to your tender manipulation of their minds, being left with two hours of blankness; a damn sight better than being left with an afterlife of crowded, overwhelmed, crushing dissolution inside you.
Those remote attendees watches a strange visual distortion approach the woman in the corner, who soundlessly collapses to her knees. You sway as you approach, slightly unbalanced from the heavy counterpoint of your sanguineous gut. This was not your first encounter with people working late nights. You have drained and erased the memories of five people working at isolated machines, one other meeting of two people drawing weird alchemical-derived symbols on a whiteboard, and one person doing a run to the snack machine. You are swollen with blood.
Even full to bloatation, you look down on this mascara-streaked woman and feel a bone-deep need to devour her. She would, says your subconscious, feel so very good raised up against the wall, held by her hips, and those legs pushed down a throat still ravenous despite its work this evening. Let gravity pull her in, says your subconscious. Let her swim in an ocean of already-consumed blood. She wouldn’t even notice when the acids stripped her and the walls of her cage became slicked with her blood.
Surely you can take one person with you?
The regret in your expression, paradoxically, convinces the woman you are going to kill her. Being bound by your eyes she cannot scream as you lean in to press your lips to the pulse at her throat. And as you puncture her and she feels herself flowing into you, she mentally says goodbye to everything she knows. The brush with death is erased from her mind by the forceful grazing of your own soul, but I wonder if it would amuse you to know that the experience stayed with her, and she made many positive changes to her subsequent life due to a brush with death she could no longer remember?
“Johnson, where’s that tea— oh.”
You step into the final office. A stern-looking woman of maybe thirty steps back against her desk. She looks like she hasn’t slept for days.
Names scribbled on the whiteboard behind her are written in many languages, some scripts non-Latin. Some are familiar to you.
She stares across the room at you. You’re a hulking brute of a man, long coat breaching around a stomach pushing two feet ahead of you. You really didn’t mean to feed quite so much, but well, Mr #4 on the whiteboard there knew full well what it was hiring when it sent you this mission. Blood that is a mix of twelve people has pumped from a stomach that certainly couldn’t have handled that load into intestines that are still fat with it, like black pudding running through you, and gathered together behind fat. You revel in the sheer physicality: your belly hangs below the level of the shirt which itself has burst the four lowest buttons.
“… I suppose I couldn’t convince you to allow me to live.” It’s a statement: made without any hope. You shake your head and start walking towards her. She stiffens and leans away from you but does not try to run.
She continues. “You don’t look like this is your fight. Please, reconsider. If they have a hold over you, we can help. If you require help of any sort we can do our best. Plea—” she cuts herself off from breaking into pleading, instead forcing herself to stand up straight, drawing on formidable reserves of self-possession. “If you are unmoved, consider that my mother will avenge me. She will know my killer.”
You shake your head to each plea. To the threat you merely give her a crooked smile. “None out there will know me. There will be no record of me. And if you are thinking she can find you once you are gone…” You stop right in front of her and brush imaginary lint off her shoulders. She shudders beneath your touch. Idly, the peak of your belly brushes hers. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible either.”
Her knees drop, then, and you can see the fierce pride that prevents her from simply melting into a pool of horror. “… You still take on a deadly risk. Please, turn back. You don’t have to do this. Please.”
You shake your head, and raise one hand to her chest, one to her neck. “I do this because I want to. The truth is…” With a pulse of your will the crimson flames pour into her chest, emptying her heart. You feel it quiver and strain to beat. It will manage perhaps a dozen beats dry before it succumbs. Enough time for her to hear, wide-eyed and gasping, the last words she will hear. She watches your mouth as you speak. “You are all so delicious. I want you all.”
She collapses. Your hand at her throat relaxes and then clenches, soon joined by the other hand in a ring around an invisible throat. The faint shimmer in the air that is her soul doesn’t need to take a particular shape: she could imagine herself a snake and slip through your fingers. But it is a rare person who can let go of their physical form so quickly after death.
So in a very real sense she still has lips when you kiss her, a little way above your suspended hands. You barely feel the faint disturbance as ghostly fists pound your chest. She feels you, though, your demon’s flesh being impassable to her. When you deepen the kiss like a passionate lover she cannot resist the draw, deforming like a memory and slipping between your questing lips. The pure and perfect form of her spirit rides the brute physicality of your smoothly bucking tongue, which forces more of her irresistibly into the back of your throat… and then you begin to swallow.
Once she is this far gone there is no chance of resisting by taking charge of her appearance. She is a candle at the mercy of a hurricane. You need not use your hands but it pleases you to lift her up and feed her in to your mouth. Her scream is pure and perfect, too, a tone that your mouth and throat alter, and which disappears slowly but surely beneath your collarbones, down to drown deeper inside you. The path she takes is no longer physical. She doesn’t sit within your blood-fatted belly, though you could choose to make her. Instead you let her flow into your astral body, discover more of yourself by feeling the path she takes.
It will never end, for her. She will always have deeper to fall inside you. There will always be more you can take. The outside world falls away and you become her everything, but for you, she is simply a pleasant full feeling.
You step away from the body and make your way to the lifts, then proceed to the lobby. After vaulting the desk again you set down the guard’s keycard and track your thumb through the blood circle. By tracing it backwards a few times you seem to cause him to reverse his actions, abandoning the challenge then sitting back in his chair and staring at you suspiciously. With a flick you break the effect. He opens his mouth to accost you and then faints dead away, drained by the spell. But he’ll live.
You waddle your way out of the front door. Hometime. You’re going to need to digest. So full, for a night of having taken only one person.
You needn’t email back your friend. They’ll figure it out. And you have a full belly to enjoy.