Struck By You

Chapter Three

I was awoken from my dreamless sleep by a gentle nudge.  Reluctantly, I opened my eyes.  I didn’t want to fight the darkness that had enveloped me, but something told me that now might not be the best time to rest.  Sitting up, I felt my new hyper awareness searching out around me, scanning for dangers. 

“We have much to discuss,” a voice said behind me.  I instantly recognized this voice to be that of Zet.  “Alex will be returning soon, and there are some things I need to make clear to you before he brings our…entertainment.”

Sitting down in a leather chair across from where I sat, he sipped from a glass before placing it before him on the table.  He took an appraising look at me.  I couldn’t have been much to look at, if how I felt counted for anything, but he stared at me for some time. 

I used his silence to assess him as he was assessing me.  He was obviously of Asian decent, although he spoke with out the slightest hint of an accent.  Very well dressed, he had the appearance of a well-to-do businessman.  His close cropped hair was black, and his eyes were dark.  Slim and obviously of an athletic build, he seemed to be about six feet tall, by a guess.  Yet with all this, he carried an air of intimidation, and power.  He had the aura of one that ought not be crossed.

As the silence continued, I began to wonder what he was thinking.  Carefully, I turned my thoughts to his, trying to see if his mind was still sealed as it had been previously.  Although this examination came very naturally to me for some reason, I still had absolutely no understanding of it.  Left to follow only my instincts, I reached out a vein of my mind, seeking to find his.

“Don’t bother,” he said, curtly.  “It won’t work.  No one is allowed in my mind except myself.  I’ll keep if that way if you don’t mind.”

The vein from my mind vanished in my mental image, and I opened my eyes to face him.  For some reason, the ideas that should have been in my mind were strangely absent.  I should have been considering the events of the past…day?  More than a day?  I wasn’t sure.  I should have been wondering just how far out of my realm I was.  Yet none of these thoughts clouded my mind.  It was as if the concern of such worries was entirely unimportant anymore.  The oddity of that fact didn’t even bother me, though.

“First, my questions for you,” he continued.  “Your name.”

Considering for a moment how exactly I should answer this question, I decided that with this man, I had to be honest.

“My name,” I said with a sigh, “is Pain.”

“Hmm…  An interesting name.”  A moment of silence, then “How did she find you?”

“By she,” I asked, “I’m assuming you mean Chase?”

“Obviously.”

“Well,” I said, pondering, “I guess I found her.  I’ve rather lost track of the days, so I can’t be exact as to the timeline, but I think a few nights ago she was out, and I stole something from her.  She caught me at it, and events progressed from there.”

“You found her,” he repeated, a bit confused.  “Okay.  Then what.  Please be specific.”

In rapid sequence, I recounted to him the events I remembered from the past days.  I didn’t leave much out, mostly just unimportant details, but I didn’t not tell him about my dream.  That wasn’t part of the deal, I felt.  That was my past, and he hadn’t asked about that.  I wondered briefly if I would tell him, if he thought to ask.  Leaving the question unanswered, I continued explaining things. 

I paused when it came to my battle with Chase, and the new hyper awareness that came to me.  It was difficult to explain, and I struggled to find the right words.  He questioned me about it, trying to make things easier to me by feeding me ideas.

“This… hyper awareness that you’re explaining,” he asked.  “Is it like seeing what someone else is seeing?”

“No,” I corrected.  “Well, not quite.  It’s like that.  There is that aspect to it, but there is much more to it.  It is like feeling the thoughts and emotions of another person.  Yet even further than that.  I can not just see these things, but I can change them.  Giving a nudge here and a shove there, I can change what they are thinking, and what they are doing.”

“Oh…” he said, now sounding uninterested. 

A dawning of realization touched his face, but was gone in an instant.  If it wasn’t for my hyper awareness, I might not have noticed it at all.

“We’ll set that aside for the moment,” he continued.  “Please continue with what happened.”

I went on, telling him how Chase had blocked her mind from me, and how I reacted.  Finishing at the point he entered the room, I started with questions of my own.

“What is this all about,” I asked.

“It’s not YOUR turn for questions,” he replied, slightly annoyed. 

“It appears as though an interesting culmination of events was involved here,” he said.  “How curious.  Hemira usually pick up on others, even prior to their divergence.  So that leads me to believe that Chase was either sloppy, or you are more talented that you may seem.  Or, perhaps both.”

“Hemira?” I questioned, when he paused for breath.

“Yes,” he said, giving me a piercing look.  “Hemira.  Or at least that is what I was told to call them, a long, long time ago. 

“In any case, it is pretty clear what happened here, I think.  You, my new friend, were forced into a division of being by Chase.  For lack of a better explanation, she awoke something with in you, causing your body react and change.  This change, or divergence, has transformed you from what you were into something very much like it in many ways, but also distinctly different.

“It is up for debate as to whether or not this would have happened to you eventually, were you not to have met Chase.  Perhaps a different series of events would have triggered it, perhaps not.  It’s hard to tell, but the thing you have to deal with is the fact that you now are very different from everyone else.  You are now what it is possible you were intended to be – a newly diverged hemira.” 

For some reason, this clicked with me.  It put things into perspective, in a way.  While I didn’t actively think about this new fact, my awareness put it into its growing catalog of information, yet at the same time digesting it, making it easier for me to understand.  I had always been this way, this different thing.  That much I knew.  But how different was the issue.  Now I knew that difference; I now had a name for it.  This realization within me caused a new peace to wash over me.

“The problem is,” he continued, as though giving a lecture to an apt pupil, “that this time right now is the most delicate you’ve ever been in your life.  It is apparent that you have a very strong mind, which is a good sign.  I’ve seen the newly diverged quite upset at this stage.  They have problems dealing with the fact that they are not human, that they never were human.  Yet you seem to be able to accept this fact with hardly a second guess.  That is very interesting, and very promising.

“Promise, however, will only go so far.  With out someone to explain things to you, with out the proper teachers and the proper training, even genius can be wasted and lost.  Thus I offer to you a proposal.  I can offer you many things – women, or men if you prefer; drugs, although I doubt you’ll have need for them; money; fame; power.  I can offer you the resources that you need to turn your promise into prospects, and prospects into accomplishment.  But it comes with a price.”

“What price,” I asked. 

“You really have much more to gain from this than I do,” he smiled.  “I offer you the world on a platter, and only asking that you allow me to give this to you.  This is an offer of employment.  Quite a fair exchange, wouldn’t you agree?  I get you, you get everything.”

While I considered this, he continued.

“Don’t answer me yet.  Let me give you a few things to consider.  First, you are in my debt.  You have taken from me a valuable asset, one which will be hard to replace.  Granted, Chase was impulsive and reckless, but she was also quite good at what she did.  Those drawbacks, however, combined with the circumstances of her death mitigate to a degree the debt you owe me.  Mitigate, but do not cancel.

“In fact, I may consider forgiving this small debt entirely if you agree to come and work for me.  Understand that your potential value to me is the only thing keeping you alive right now.  You maybe talented, but I am also skilled in certain things.  The abilities you possess might help you in a fair fight against me, but I don’t fight fair.

“I will not compel you to work for me under fear of your death.  If you chose not to accept my offer, you will be free to go.  Still in my debt, of course, and that debt is one I will eventually collect, to be sure.  But I wouldn’t waste a potentially useful resource by flat out killing you.  Unless I am forced to do so.

“So I give you a warning,” he went on, anger starting to show in his voice and his eyes.  “Do not cross me, Pain.  I am not a man to be upset.  Work for me, work for someone else, work for yourself, but do not work against me.  Because I will kill you, have not doubt, if you get on my wrong side.  Your value will become mute, and your death imminent if you betray me.”

He stopped then, letting the information, promises, and threats sink in.  I didn’t take the time to consider them all at this moment; I had the feeling he wouldn’t accept a rushed, uncautious decision anyways.  I also knew that he would give me time, all the time in the world, in fact.  But he was determined to have me, that was clear.  Regardless of how long it took me to come to my decision, I knew that in the end, my fate would be with him.

Still, there were clearly things with in any potential arrangement with him that were negotiable.  Of all things that happened to me recently, I found that one fact, his desire for me and what he would do to get me, the most shocking.

Never one of high self-worth, this new position I was in confounded me.  Me, Pain Thaddeus; me, the orphan; me, the addict; me, the street urchin.  Me. The nothing.  I was now valuable.  Possibly even very valuable.  This change of my standing was difficult for me to digest.  Even with my new awareness, my new skills of the mind, I was unable to grasp that I know had value.

“Enough talk and serious for now,” Zet chuckled, disrupting my train of thought.  “We both need to sate ourselves.  I do home Alex was careful with his selections.  We are celebrating, after all.”

“Sate?” I inquired.  “And what are we celebrating?”

“Your divergence,” he said, tactfully dodging or ignoring my first question.  “Any divergence warrants celebration.  Too few of them go unrecognized to begin with.  And one that has gone as smoothly as yours deserves a reward doubly so.  Let us be merry, then.  Here is Alex.”

My mind had been so distracted, I hadn’t noticed Alex returning.  Indeed, there was much I hadn’t noticed at all.  The flat had been returned to order.  The body of Chase had been removed, and all evidence of the circumstances that had transpired in this room had vanished.  It occurred to me then that Zet was obviously not one to scoff at getting his hands dirty in order to do what needed to be done.  This fact endured him to me while at the same time striking me as deeply disturbing, for some reason.

I had little time to consider those things, though, because at that moment, Alex returned, escorting three pleasant looking women.

“This is the party,” one asked, looking rather disappointed.

“It’s a private party, ladies,” Zet was quick to answer, rising to meet them.  “You see, my friend and I just got word that a very lucrative business arrangement has been completed.  He’s a private sort of guy, though, not one to be extravagant.  So he was completely willing to let this event pass by with out even a drink.  I wouldn’t have that, so decided to invade his house and his hospitality to insist that he celebrate.”

I let a sheepish look settle on my face.  He had made clear the role I was to play.  Listening to Zet’s inventions was more fascinating than hearing a serpent speak with forked tongue.  His lies were not only plausible, but entirely believed by the women.  Zet’s abilities to compel made me reconsider our conversation earlier.  I didn’t have time to think on it, though, because the party swiftly got underway.


Kissing each of the ladies on the cheek in greeting, he deftly put his arms around tow of them, quietly whispering into the ear of the third.  I didn’t need my mindskills to understand what was said.  Confirming my mind reading, the last woman made her way across the room toward me.

“Wow,” she said, greeting me.  “Those are some amazing scars.  Branding, right?  I’ve read about that.  Did it hurt very much?”

Glancing down to follow the gaze of her eyes to my chest, I realized in disbelief what she was talking about.  I knew that I had felt better than I should have felt, considering everything that had happened to me recently, but I had not idea as to the reason.  The burns on my chest had stopped bothering me long before I had woken up, and now I realized why.  Chas had left certainly left her mark, or more precisely marks, on me.  A series of downward slashing burn patterns were displayed on my body now.  Yet they didn’t look new; in fact, they looked like very old, deep scars.

“It’s just something I’m into,” I lied.  “It hurt, but it was worth it.”

Drawing the woman into my arms, I shot a quick glance to Zet.  As if he was listening to the conversation I was having, our eyes met in acknowledgement of it.  Mouthing the words “a gift”, he broke the visual contact and returned his intentions to his companions.

Music started to play, something I hadn’t heard before.  It was good and set an interesting mood for the party.  Recklessness, with a strong shot of violence, anger, and fear, as if captured in audible form, set the ambiance for our event.  I noticed also that Alex shuffled out of the room shortly after the music started.  Clearly, he was either not interested in partaking the events that would come.  Or perhaps he wasn’t allowed…

“My name is Sydney,” I said to the woman.  “What’s yours?”

I didn’t need to ask, I already knew.  But I think she would have found it very disturbing to know that I already had her name in my mind.  Her name, and so much that I know knew about her. 

“Candice,” she answered, blushing.

“Mmmm…” I answered, pulling her still closer to me.  “I like candy.”

Bringing my lips to her throat, I let my tongue touch her neck, sliding upwards to her ear.  She sighed, putting her hands on my chest as if to push me back.  She didn’t, though.

“Sweet,” I whispered.  “But are you soft candy, or hard candy.”

Sliding her hands down my chest, she hesitated to reply.  As her fingertips made contact with my scars, pain blossomed in their wake.  It was almost as if the burns were still fresh and tender.  Strangely, instead of the pain putting me off the mood of the environment, it increased it.  I now knew exactly what pleasures sadomasochists found in their acts.

Something else was in the pain, too.  It triggered in me another new, yet slightly familiar sensation.  It was hard to put a word to this feeling.  It was like a hunger, or a thirst, but not.  It was closest in kin to the wanting and needing I once felt for drugs.  It possessed my entire being, all the while evading any solution I could think of to quench it.  With a flash of understanding, however, the word sate suddenly made sense.  The concept now understood, I had to discover the method.

All of these thoughts took place in the blink of an eye.  Candice hadn’t even notice my momentary lack of focus on her.  She had been examining my scars and guessing in her mind as to what would be the right answer to my question.  Playfully and experimentally, I bit her ear gently while manipulating her thoughts so she would enjoy it.  A moan issued from her lips, and I interpreted her answer.

“Good, I like hard candy best.”

As I attempted to refocus my lips intentions on her neck, I was rudely interrupted.

“There are vitals on the table,” he said, handing us each a drink.  “Had her is some liquid to sate yourselves on.”

While I watched him return to his companions, a new connection was made inside my head.  Using his words as hints, the method of sating myself became clearer.  Acquiring the method, I would wait for its execution.

My mind, now capable of following so many thought patterns at the same time, flowed down several paths at once.  One path examined the mind of my partner, and exactly what she thought she would and wouldn’t do with a stranger.  I prodded these thoughts, making some of them disappear, forcing others to bloom, even planting new ones in the fertile soil.  Another path allowed me to continue my mouths activities on her body, letting it fan the fires inside me.  Yet another path considered vaguely the minds of the other women in the room, who were very entranced with Zet.

It seemed as if these paths could be infinitely numerous in my mind.  Each one maintained with the same intensity as the others, all the while not letting my attention waiver from any of them.  That was, until the path that was searching out similar experiences in my mind brought all of the activity in my mind, and in my body, to a crashing halt. 

Sydney!

“Excuse me,” I muttered, switching Candice from my lap to the couch.  “I need a moment, please.”

Not bothering to deal with her confusion, I retreated from the room.  Zet noticed my retreat and gave me a questioning look.  Ignoring him, I slipped into the bathroom, locking the door behind me.

At the sink, I doused my face in the ice cold water of the tap.  With much effort, I tried to halt my spiraling thoughts.  I also tried to stop my mind from the course of action it had seemed intent on taking me.

“Is there a problem,” Zet asked me flatly, his voice coming from behind my back.

“Fuck,” I cried out, spinning to face him.

“Well, that was my general intention,” he stated, “but not with you, of course.  No offense, but I don’t think you are my type.”

“What is this?” I demanded, glaring at him.  “This need!  It’s dangerous.  Do you have any idea of what I am capable of?”

“I am probably one of the few that know best,” he said, slightly amused now.  “So it seems your divergence has been struck with a fit on conscience.  And you were doing so well…”

“I killed her,” I interrupted, still glaring.

“Yes,” he answered.  “You killed her.  But I told you that was all okay now.  Besides, she was going to kill you.  I promise you that her conscience wouldn’t have given her any qualms about it afterwards, as yours seems to be doing.”

“Not her,” I yelled.  “Fuck HER.  She’s better off dead.  No, I’m talking about Sydney.”

I was getting upset, both with anger and with fear.  These emotions, though, I knew how to deal with – I needed to get high.  Twisting back around to the sink, I opened the medicine cabinet, determined to find something that could help me handle these well known feelings.  I felt Zet’s hands on my shoulders, but I paid them no mind.

With a strength I hadn’t known he possessed, he spun me back to face him.  Staring me in the eye, he reached up and slapped me across the face.  It stung, but not in a good way.

“Sydney?” he asked.

I tried to stammer a response, but he stopped me before I got my words straight.

“No, damnit,” he said, clearly irritated.  “Just show me.  Concentrate on it when I touch your head, and I’ll understand.”

His words were followed by a light touch of his fingers on my forehead.  Feeling a strange sucking sensation at the contact, my mind spun.  The memory was at the core of this spinning, and I could feel it transfer through this touch.  In the blink of an eye, it was over.

“Oh,” he said.  “I see.  Well, this is interesting, maybe even a first that I’ve seen.  Quite remarkable…”

“Is that what I’ve become?” I demanded.  “A monster?  Is that what you are?”

“Quiet,” he barked.  “You are whatever you let yourself become.  But let me think for a moment.  I’m still trying to understand all of this.”

The seconds ticked by like hours, into what seemed like eternity.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he finally began again.  “You are indeed an interesting creature.  It seems you have had two divergences, of a kind – one incomplete, and the other now waiting to become complete.  There is this most recent one, obviously, but there was also one that occurred when you killed that girl.”

“And I’ll kill Candice too,” I lamented.

“Still so human,” he said, pityingly.  “You aren’t human anymore, Pain.  Try to grasp that.  These human concerns, these human ethics, these human morals – they mean nothing to you now.  You have risen about that, don’t you see?”

I made no reply, clearly seeing nothing.  Even my eyes were unfocused, and I stared off into space.

“Fine,” he spat.

I heard a snap, then a beautiful smell filled the room.  My eyes, seeking out the source of this smell, focused themselves on Zet’s open palm.  There, a small pool of blood was forming, threatening to start spilling out of his hand and onto the floor.  No more did I realize this and made an effort to speak than I found his hand pressed against my open mouth.  The hot, red fluid filled my mouth and I grabbed at his hand to hold it to my face.

The blood flowed down my throat and the new desire I had been contemplating earlier became dimmer with its taste.  Another layer of understanding took place in my mind.  I suddenly understood the desire completely.  As I realized this, the flow of blood stopped.

Not noticing I had closed my eyes during this exchange, I opened them while releasing my hold on Zet’s arm.  It was as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes.  I could see the world anew again, where as before I had been completely blind.

“The blood,” he started, “is the key.  We are different, Pain.  But to sustain this difference, to use our differences, we must sate ourselves on blood.  It doesn’t have to mean killing, but to each their own method.”

Holding his hand in the other, he winced.  Then, he held it up to my face.  Not only was it now free of blood, but it didn’t even show an injury.  I marveled at this unmarked hand, and the sudden rapid healing of my own body made sense.

“I can do that too?” I questioned.

“No,” he answered.  “I can.  Your differences seem to be in your mind.  But whatever our differences are, we can use them to help us meet our needs.  It takes some work, but you’ll find out how it works for yourself over time.

“Are you okay now?”

My mind was overtaken by my awareness again.  I could feel it continue to change, now even more rapidly after its brief taste of blood.  With each new twist and turn, with each new revelation, new insight was also brought.  Eventually, I nodded to Zet.  We both turned and left the room.

Still processing this flood of new information, one thing became clear above all else.  I needed blood now.  It didn’t matter how I got it, but it was required.  All those years since Sydney were wasted effort.  I had been resisting becoming that which I already was.  Acknowledging this, I started to embrace my true being, and all of the consequences it would require.  Then, I truly became a hemira.

“Sorry about that, dear guests,” Zet said as we returned to them.  “We just had a little panic.  Sydney thought he had over looked something, that he had skipped one very important detail of our big deal.  But he was only doubting himself; he’s far too good to make any mistakes, even small ones.  Shall we continue?”

Drawing his women to his outstretched arms, I returned to the couch.  Candice was still sitting there, with a put out look on her face.  Stooping down to bring our faces level with each others, I took her head in my hands.

“Please forgive me,” I said, restoring my mental link with her.  “I’m a bit of a perfectionist.  I get very caught up in my work that I become obsessed by it.  But don’t worry.  I won’t let that happen again tonight.”

To prove my point, I pulled her close to me again as I sat back down on the couch.  A squeal from the other side of the room told me Zet had also returned to his distractions.  Carefully, I began dictating to Candice’s mind exactly what I wanted from her, all the while preparing her mind for what I would do to her.  This was almost too easy; her mind was as moldable as warm clay.  Knowing it wouldn’t always be so easy, that soon I would grow to want more of a challenge, I enjoyed the simplicity of this first time.

She was resistant to quite a few of my ideas, but not all of them.  I found it amazing that besides the fact that she had slept with both of the other women in the room, she was hesitant to have do much with me in full view of them.  It was even more amusing that besides not wanting to exhibit herself, she did want to watch them.  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to watch, though, so I gently prodded her, both mentally and physically, to the direction of the bedroom.

Finding privacy at last, I decided to play with her a bit before we moved on to the main event.  Freezing her body with my mind, I made her unable to move, with exception of her breathing.  She panicked at this initially, but I soothed her with calming feelings and eventually she calmed down.

Although she couldn’t move, she could still feel what I was doing.  Slowly, I started kissing down her neck to her right shoulder, removing the strap to her dress on that side as I went.  The dress slipped downwards, revealing more of her small round breasts.  Casually, I let took the strap off her other shoulder and let the dress drop to the floor.  Stepping back, I took in the sight.

In her mind, she was shivering.  While she was much calmer that a person might have been in her situation, she was still afraid of what she was doing.  Thoughts danced through her head, all of them dealing with the fact she was alone and naked in a room with a strange man.  She was confused as to why she couldn’t move as well.  Instead of pushing these thoughts out of her mind, I decided to let her have them, increasing her fear of both myself and the situation.

Approaching her again, she shuddered when I touched her face with my hand, pulling it up to kiss me.  Letting my hands flow down her body, my lips again worked down her neck, but this time stopped half way down.  Pressing my tongue to her body, I could feel the strength of her racing pulse.  The sensation excited me, and with out thinking I opened my mouth and placed my teeth on the skin above her pounding artery. 

When I bit down hard, she actually managed a scream.  It wasn’t a loud one, though, and it could have been easily confused with passion, but I knew it to be pure terror.  Cupping a hand under one of her breasts, I pulled her body towards mine with the other.  Sweet, hot blood trickled from her neck into my mouth, almost sending me into a frenzy.  Taking a hold of myself, I quieted my racing mind all the while lapping at the now decreasing amount of nectar from the wound.  As the flow stopped, I took another step back from her.

Her eyes were wide in terror.  In her mind, images kept popping up showing her the many ways she might die tonight.  But one thing was certain: she would die.  Grasping this, she began to reflect over her life.  It hadn’t been a good one.  She wasn’t good to her parents, who now no longer even called her.  She wasn’t good at her job, although she was able to keep it by sleeping around.  She wasn’t even good to her friends, who she used to get by or get ahead.  Overall, it was a sad and uneventful life she had lived.  She regretted that now.  She was wishing she had at least prayed more; something, anything that might help her out of her current situation.  I listened to these thoughts with out disturbing them.  It became clear to me that she almost deserved the fate she would have to night.  Or so I told myself.

Picking her up in my arms, I moved us towards the bed in the corner of the room.  I laid her down gently and lay beside her.  Caressingly, I ran my fingers through her hair several times.  It didn’t sooth her, though, but I hadn’t intended it to.  I just wanted to feel the silky smoothness of its texture.  Contemplating what I would do next, I slid one arm under the pillow I had rested her head on.  What I found there helped me decide on my next actions.

“If you’re convinced you’re going to die,” I whispered to her, “shouldn’t you at least have fun before you go?”

With those words, I eased her paralysis though still controlled her actions enough that she wouldn’t or couldn’t run away.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that once she had some free movement, she become much more sure that she wasn’t going to die after all.  She also realized that the experience so far had highly aroused her.  Deciding to take control of the situation, she swung herself on top of me, trying to hold my arms down in her hands.

Deciding to let her have her fun, I kept a tight grip on the razor I had found under the pillow as she began to kiss me.  She wasn’t as seductive about it as I would have liked, but since I didn’t want to dictate to her every action she took, I let her do as she pleased.

Again, her hands brushed gently down my chest, setting of the blood burning desire with in me.  Struggling to control myself, she began tracing the scars with her tongue, slowly edging lower.  I hadn’t realized how extensive the burns had been until I felt her lips map out their presence on my body.  Every contact, every touch, every breath that touched them presented me with a renewed need to control myself.  As if she could sense this, she looked up suddenly and into my eyes.

The look of horror had gone from her face, and deep lust was replaced there.  She had convinced herself of her safety now, and was sure she could control me through sex.  A quiet chuckle escaped from me as I noticed this. 

Continuing with her amusements, she undid my pants, finding my erect penis with her hands.  Gripping it tightly, she spread her own legs apart and forced my entry into her.  Indescribable pleasure took hold of me, but I still maintained control.  That is, until she pressed her body to mine and her hard nipples came into contact with my fresh burns.

The blood burning welled with in me, and in a flash, I was on top of her.  Startled, she didn’t yet understand what was happening, mistaking my actions as being passion driven instead of containing other motives.  The first cut smashed that idea to pieces, and as she felt the blade at her neck she struggled to scream, grabbing at my hands in futility. My free hand went to stifle her scream while my face pressed against the new opening. 

The blood didn’t come in a simple trickle this time, but in pulsating gushes.  It rushed into my mouth as if it was glad to have an outlet, as if it wanted to be drank by me.  As it reached the back of my throat and I swallowed my first draught of it, the world turned red.  I dropped the knife and threw my arms around her body, pulling it closer while tearing at her back with my nails.  My thrusting became faster as I begin to feel her life fading away. 

My climax came like a bolt of lightning.  Loosing control completely, I sank my teeth deeply into the flesh of her breast, eager to get to the last bits of life her heard held.  I could feel the flow of the blood from the cut was down my face and neck, and the sensation only further focused me to my task.  Again finding the razor, I franticly slashed at her chest, releasing the last remnants of blood her body held.  When the blood finally stopped flowing, I collapsed on top of her dead body in exhaustion. 

As sleep came to me, I thought I heard quiet footfalls near the door of the room, followed by a muffled laugh.  When I tried to rouse myself enough to look up and see who it could have been, I realized that I had been sleeping.  Clearly I had been asleep for some time, because the body I had been lying on top of was getting cold where my body had not been keeping it warm. 

Disgusted, I went into the bathroom connected to the bedroom and showered to remove the bits of blood and flesh from my body.  No matter how hot I turned the water to, it refused to come out of the tap as any temperature but freezing cold.  Bracing myself against it, I swiftly washed the blood off my body and out of my hair.  Toweling off, I glanced to the mirror, find it completely covered in steam.  Confused, I left the room and returned to the bed.

Haphazardly, I threw the body and the blankets off the bed, and with hardly a second thought was soon in a deep, soothing sleep.