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I need to eat. Feed. Eateateateat.
All that matters. He can’t always predict when he gets—
Enough. Must eat.
Just one person.
Now.
Shoving the sheets away, Daisy gets off the pad as he, with supernatural quiet, pads out of the bed and to the door. He moves so quickly that he’s already out in near-complete darkness, the streetlights seeming to dim as his vision funnels. He’s almost tempted to run on all fours to go faster.
The sting in his throat is maddening in a way it wasn’t yesterday; it’s dry, two pieces of sandpaper scraping together. He barely resists the urge to claw at it.
He really wishes he had the finesse of a silver-haired Transylvanian count, that old stereotype. Maybe Paimon has a point. It’d be nice to have a velvet opera cloak and glide into the night. Maybe have a fancy gothic castle, but God, he already lives in apalace. He’s surprised Paimon is content to raid the minibar—
In the post-rain November cold, he clutches his chest and screws his eyes shut. In the alley between the motel and a Cajun restaurant, he senses the blood pounding hot but slow inside someone. Before he enters the alleyway, he digs his shoulder into the hard brick edge of the building, bracing himself.
No, no time to second guess. He’ll only get worse, start to deteriorate. He must—
The blood oozes toward him. Or rather, the person walks out. A young man with long, ponytailed brown hair smoking a blunt, who startles, stepping back.
“Whoa! You scared the shit out of me! Taking a piss or something?”
Eyes aching so much they throb, Lauren?iu pushes himself off the wall. He imagines how he must look: eyes narrowed and bloodshot, hair disheveled from a sleep that, though seemingly dreamless, wasn’t restful.
The man stares, his glasses round. “Hey, you all right? You look like you might have a killer hangover. Have you tried getting any hashbrowns at Waffle Duke?” When Lauren?iu steps close, he says, “Hey man, what’re you—”
Lauren?iu lunges and, as the man drops his cigarette and opens his mouth to scream. Before he can, Lauren?iu slams him into the restaurant wall and knocks the air from his lungs. The man only chokes and gasps, flailing helplessly, as Lauren?iu buries his teeth into the side of his neck.
The moment the blood hits his mouth, it sings in him. It’s different in Hell, where there’s an abundance of blood—lakes and rivers of it. For all the want and absence in Hell, his hunger was never physical; it was deep in his soul.
This is just a kiss. It’s been a while, either way.
The deep metallic flavor, mingling with the thick scent of tobacco, reinvigorates him, a jolt shooting down his entire body. He moans and buries himself deeper into the spurting opening; he plunges inside and devours flesh and blood like the summer afternoon when he’d rip apart a juicy peach. He swallows gouts of blood, gulping town the oil-slickness of fat and skin.
A pleasure-fog takes over his mind. He’s in the sky, like the time Anthony goaded him into eating two watermelon-flavored weed gummies when he’d never done edibles before, hadn’t even smoked a cig despite the constant nicotine haze in his childhood home. He’d thought he was dying. Anthony, ha, Anthony could be so funny, and so sweet and so good. He comforted Lauren?iu when he thought he was having an allergy attack from the edibles, not knowing he was stoned out of his mind.
Next thing he knows, he’s kneeling, knees damp with blood.
He looks down at the body, the mix of emotions numbed by his sheer ecstasy, the kind that makes him both numb and feel more than he ever could when he was mortal. The world is a mist of smog, asphalt, and blood.
Yes, right, thank goodness, he’s so full, he’s a live wire. scorching hot and cold at once, swollen and thriving from his tingling mouth to his groin.
Then, brimstone with something spicy-sweet, like carnations. He’s not alone.
He stares up foggily at Paimon, who examines the scene with unusual seriousness, but not anger or disapproval.
“What did he do?” Paimon asks him, and it takes a long time for him to process it, at first thinking that he’s asking what Lauren?iu did.
Then, he stares at the growing pool of blood, the man’s unseeing blue eyes.
“Nothing,” Lauren?iu mutters distantly. No grand retribution or justification. “I was hungry.”
A coaxing hand pats his shoulder. “It’s all right, darling. You need to eat.”
There he is, kneeling on the ground by a corpse, the man he murdered, and Paimon says it’s all right. He sees Lauren?iu, blood-drenched—caked from his nose to his legs—and heaving from exertion and the new blood pumping inside him, and he says it’s all right.
Lauren?iu will be all right.
