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The hunger gnaws at my innards, pulsates through my veins in the way only it can. There is no hunger such as this one, nothing in the mass of mortal experiences that can even relate and thus there are no words in any known mortal language to express it accurately. Liquid nitrogen shoots through my veins; i can feel in my fingers, my stomach and behind my eyes. Its icy pain permeates every movement down to the subtle twitch of an eyelid or tap of a finger.
But thats not the worst of it.
It is the worst that makes the monster. Every mortal has a distinct scent that permeates my nostrils which grow more acute as the hunger grows. The scent varies from mortal to mortal, mingling with cologne, fabric softener and perfume that masks their true scent from all but the most sensitive of olfactory receptors. Every emotion has a smell from horniness to fear, i can tell it all. But fear is the worst; like skunk it clings to everything. There is one smell that they all hold, the smell of blood and it is maddening. I can see it pulse through them, fresh, vibrant, titillatingly alive.
It is blood for which I hunger. But I will do nothing to satisfy it.
And don’t think I’m noble or kind in anyway for doing this. There is nothing of the sort behind this conviction. It is not a saintly aspiration I hold, only a masochistic desire to silence the voices in my head. All this power, this cursed energy that flows in me i would gladly give up if it meant for one more day with her. She is my angel, my one hold on reality and soon she will be placed beneath this green grass. Her body lies limp on the steel slab, lifeless. No blood pumps for her heart has stopped pumping it, never to grow into the beauty she could have been. My anchor has gone, my hold is slipping; I can feel myself sliding back down the dark labyrinth of my mind and weakening in the face of the power of my disease.
How silly this must sound to mortal and immortal alike; my self-pitying despair, even I despise myself for having it. I am god amongst mortals, it I who choses who lives and who dies in this city. Rapists, pedophiles, dirty politicians do not escape my judgement. But this death, this one meaningless natural death shakes me to my core. I could have saved her, I could have given her the world and instead I hid in the shadows and watched her die.
I let her die.
Leukemia is a bitch, a far worse demon than my kind could ever hope to be. Even the sloppiest of feeds are better than what that cruel spirit offers. There is in dignity in death, I having died once can be assured of that but what I offer my victims is a painless passage into the next world, I do not torment them and leave them to die in their own fecal matter. I do not make them suffer.
The irony of this situation is not lost on me and in my morbidity it makes me chuckle. A vampire in love with a mortal and is devastated at the death of said mortal. A creature who’s very survival depends on the death of others should not feel this way about one more death.
I haven’t been human in over three thousand years. I haven’t felt love for any creature since before my transformation. The question that begs to be asked is this: Why didn’t I save her?
It’s simple really: i am a coward. I can suck the life blood from a child without a twitch but i could not taste hers. Because to have done so would have been admitting who, or rather what, i am.
Ten years i hid it from her, ten years of lies and deceit. I could remind myself of the effort it took to keep this secret from her or think about all the time I had to live with The Hunger in order to be around her. But all of that seems so trivial now that I will never again run my hands over her body or gently kiss her lips. To go an eternity without finding one’s soul-mate is one thing, to do it after having found and lost said soul mate is another thing all-together.
That night my unholy eyes first laid their gaze upon her is still fresh in my mind’s memory. My nostrils can still smell her scent that overpowered my senses so few years ago. I lay my head back against the warm headstone and allow the memories to pummel into my cerebral cortex and knock all ability of conscious thought to the wet grass beneath my body.
She was fresh from the shower, running late for a night class. The sweet smell of her flesh mingled with the minty fragrance wafting off her pony tail. I was shadowed in an archway, flush from my latest hunt as she bustled past; had i not been i might have broken my rule about feeding from the skin of innocents. Her scent was intoxicating, debilititating and liberating. I was intrigued.