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“Kill them…” I read the shapes of her mouth more than I heard her. The command. Perhaps she spoke something else entirely, but all I could do was think it. Kill them. Kill them.
Devour them.
I looked back to the woman who stands above me, a statue of stone carved from hate.
Her grin hardened. And I smiled back.
“You look just like her,” I said, voice a rumble of deep, scratchy tones. “And I often dreamt of what it would be like to devour her blood after she cursed me.”
The woman, Jak’s mother, lifted the dagger and placed the bloodied tip into the skin of her palm. “And what did you think she would taste like? Sweet revenge, or regret?”
My hold on Jak, his terribly cold body, shuddered as I begun to shake. “I don’t know. But I suppose I am about to find out.”
Her expression faltered and she parted her mouth to spit yet more hate. But this time I did not let her.
In a blink I was before her, my teeth clamped around her neck. She bled freely into my mouth. I sucked. Hard. Harder. Drinking every ounce of her as the warmth of morning intensified.
But her life source filled me with a renewed strength. So I drank on.
No one dared to interrupt.
She could not speak for my bite had ripped into her throat so deeply that only pathetic gurgling could be heard as she struggled.
The batting of her nails against me soon stopped and her arms hung limply at her sides. Her weight fell into me, dead and stiff. Like her son who lay at our feet.
I registered the knife embedded in my gut as I pulled back from her. Looking down, neck straining, I saw the hilt and grabbed it. The slick, wet song made me cringe as I pulled it from me, still gripping onto the dead body in my arm.
There was no pain, not with the thundering of fresh, weak yet powerful blood, joining my own. I cocked my head back, releasing a sigh as her blood began to dry across my chin.
“It tastes like neither,” I spoke to the sky as the euphoria of the feed took me captive for a moment of bliss.
When I was done with her, I did not lower her to the ground gently but simply discarded her with a push.
The sound of her skull cracking against the slabbed ground was a blessing. It echoed through my own mind on a pleasing loop. One I never wished to forget.
I did not bother to wipe the blood from my mouth and chin, not as I roared in the wake of the coven which was already fleeing back towards the waking town. Not a single person stayed to fight. Pointed stakes of wood and sharpened kitchen utensils were discarded across the ground, pointless.
“You need to get to cover.” Katharine’s kind voice registered somewhere within the internal roaring. “Do not die on me too.”
Her words were the anchor I needed from the euphoria. As her soft touch laid across my shoulder, I was brought back to reality.
To this living hell.
I turned to face Katharine who threw her arms around me. She was shaking, violently. Yet I could not find the strength to hold her, not as I looked back to where Jak lay across the ground, whose face was turned away from me.
I winced as more light joined the sky; the first rays of morning finally sliced into existence.
“We need to go now,” Katharine murmured.
“Jak.” I said his name aloud, hoping he would simply roll over and face me as he had so many evenings with me beside him. But he was still.
Katharine tugged at my arm, but I pulled away from her. I would not leave him, not beside the stiffening body of his mother. Stepping over her, I moved for him, Katharine’s pleadings becoming frantic. Jak’s head lolled backwards as I lifted him from the ground, his limbs hard and his body heavier as death truly took a hold of him.
Katharine was already moving towards the castle, beckoning to follow. And I did, slowly, allowing the discomfort to become true, burning pain as the light bathed over me. If I slowed to a stop, would I die with him? Together. The thought did not scare me. But Katharine, she caught my attention. I could not leave her behind.
The ruins of the castle were now empty of Jak’s fire; it had died as the knife was slashed across his throat. Only thick tendrils of smoke remained, walls of grey and silver which seeped up into the sky.
And towards the remains I walked, away from the now destroyed barrier keeping me from the world. I walked towards the charred memory of my life, my death, my eternal. I walked with him in my arms.
