Stalking my every move.
I groan as memories of being dumped on Dafoe’s doorstep by my kidnappers resurface. I was somewhat roughed up but relatively untouched. Dafoe gloated when I was presented to him, telling me with great relish what he intended to do to me—in payment for saving me, of course.
He took my blood, but things went sideways when I refused to give in to his demand that I pledge to his house, and I found myself imprisoned. When starvation didn’t work, he tried to persuade me in different ways.
Hour after hour full of torture and pain.
Days of absolute hell on earth.
My continual refusal to let him take possession of my soul only pissed him off further.
I’d still been alive when he handed me over to the rest of his clan. My body was a bloody mess, just a bag of broken bones and abused flesh, my skin barely able to keep my organs from oozing out. I can still feel their claws tearing into my skin, their fangs piercing my flesh as they violate me in every way imaginable.
When I couldn’t hold back my screams anymore, they laughed.
The lack of blood dropped my blood pressure so low, my wounds stopped bleeding and just oozed a clear, red-tinged liquid.
My vision darkened, my heartbeat slowed.
I don’t remember anything else.
But I know what happened.
They killed me.
I turn my head slowly, bile rising when I see they have discarded my body on top of a pile of rotting, mutilated corpses.
Tossed away like trash.
Some bodies are nothing more than bones, a few are still fresh and juicy with decay, while others are so rotted that their flesh just slips off their corpses.
I should be dead.
My heart struggles to beat, thumping furiously as it gives a death rattle in my chest.
It skips a beat.
Then two.
Slowing so much that panic tightens my chest and I struggle to process what’s happening.
I should be just one of the many corpses that lie forgotten and abandoned.
I try to process why I’m still alive, but the only logical explanation should be impossible.
I’m stiff and cold, not because I’m dead…
Because I’m no longer human.
My heartbeat is so slow that it takes a full minute to even hear a single beat. I actually feel my body knit back together, like worms burrowing through my flesh, and it’s a struggle not to gouge at my own skin to stop the unsettling sensation. My bones itch as they mend, feeling like spiders are nipping and crawling over every inch of me. Every part of my body aches, even my hair hurts as my body transitions from human to monster.
My senses sharpen to the point of madness, and I clutch my head when it feels like my skull will crack open under the pressure. Countless rotten smells overwhelm my nose, the taste crawling into my mouth. I can hear rats scurrying as they wiggle through the corpses, bugs burrowing through rotting flesh as they scavenge for food. Nausea swirls in my gut, my stomach cramping, and I barely twist in time, dry heaving and hacking up a thick black sludge that seems to go on forever and leaves me feeling hollow.
I collapse on my side, my whole body throbbing in pain, my emotions draining out of me as I come to one irrefutable truth.
I’m a fucking vampire!
It should be impossible.
