The Vampire & the Rebel (Completed)

Part 3: Chapter 24

It was pitch black, and the only thing that existed was weary pain, winding through my body. It felt like I had been sliced in two and sewn back together again. Throbbing, aching, spearing. Every bone and muscle was on fire. It hurt.

My gums ached, my throat screamed, parched and crackling inside my neck. I floated in that agony for a long time. It could have been seconds or hours, there was nothing by which to tell the passage of time, or even if time was in that void at all.

It was as if my body was not there, although I could feel agony as if it was. Was this my punishment for all I had done? For all I had not done? My failures and transgressions? I had not saved Melissa, or my family. I had lived only for my own purposes, there was so much more I could have done. I had slain leeches without mercy and had never faltered, but perhaps they had not all been like the demon Jack.

Strange, that these thoughts consumed me now or perhaps fitting, if this was a place of eternal justice. Maybe I would just float in agony and ponder my choices, a limbo from which there would be no escape.

I longed for a way out of the torment, and was granted some mercy in the consuming darkness.

* * * * *

The darkness let me go, and I discovered my body again, but that realization was secondary to the aching pain rushing through me. My flesh no longer hurt as it had, but a craving so harsh it burned was in my parched throat and pounded through my mind.

I opened my eyes, and the world was unfamiliar. I could see too much, and my mind struggled to understand the detail before my eyes. I was in a room, and I recognized it as hers, but as if it were someone else's memories.

"Here, take this," Marcel boomed from somewhere near me, his voice too loud for the crowded space. I leapt to a sitting position far too quickly and stared at him, trying to understand what it was he was holding out towards me.

Blood?

"What are...?" The answer came to me, pushed forward by a rush of hunger directed at the fluid in the bag.

There could be only one reason that I would want to drink the blood of other humans.

Of humans, not other humans.

Because this desire proved that I was not what I once was.

I was what I had never wanted to be.

Anger overwhelmed me, and all I could think was red with rage. She had done this, and she would pay. Her pretense of not forcing her will on me had been just that. "Vienne," I growled.

"Just take this, you'll feel better," Marcel said, his voice still so loud it seemed to reverberate in my skull.

"I don't want that," I snarled.

"You do. Come on, man, drink."

I glared at him. He could keep that vile fluid away from me. I did not want to want it.

"Where is she?" I asked, my voice strange to my own ears. I did not know if I simply wanted her or if I wanted to kill her.

"Ian already went to find her," Marcel assured me. "And there's no good reason for you not to drink." He moved forward, holding the bag out towards me.

I snapped and slapped it away. It began to fly through the air, although it appeared oddly slow. Marcel reached out and plucked it mid flight, and I leapt to my feet defensively in case he had any intentions of trying to force it on me again.

But no force was needed. I wanted it so badly. Screw that, I didn't want it at all. Where was she? The least the leech could do was to stay near and accept the consequences for her newest crimes against me.