#drifter deadlock

Blood carves a path through cracks in the cobblestones and snakes towards the gutter. The smell of it still catches you out at moments, a thick heady wrongness breaking through the wall of new instincts and reaching the old ones. You're wearing as much of it as the pavement. You haven't done a good job this time.

Your body count is still in single digits, which is way higher than you'd like it to be. You can reason each kill as not-your-fault, though absolution feels a long way off. The first is the most excusable. Blind with a hunger you couldn't — still can't — fathom, spanning incalculable time, you'd come around collapsed against a wall in the small hours of the morning. The carcass of what you initially thought was a dog lay a few feet away; a crude track of gore in its wake told you it had been dragged into the alley and thereafter mauled beyond recognition. You were holding a fistful of hair. You felt warm.

The second was cleaner. You'd gone for the jugular, an opener that wasn't survivable, but at least this time you learnt something. They bled out fast, and you'd panicked, thinking this meant a second kill before the night was done. You'd instead found yourself sated even as their lifeblood spurted onto the grass and soaked into the earth. This one was beyond saving, but the next one wouldn't be. That's what you'd told yourself.

The third was premeditated, and entirely your own. You followed your target a few blocks as she was heading home, cornered her, pulled together some mediocre spellcasting to keep her subdued. The smell of fresh ink and paper cut through floral perfume as you got close to her; the thrum of her heartbeat twitched against her throat, and when your hands closed around her waist hers found your shoulders.

For the first time, you'd felt unhurried. You found a vein somewhere in her shoulder, something nonlethal, and when you broke skin you heard her sigh and wanted to ask her then if she would do this forever.

She was dizzy and incoherent by the end of it, but she was alive. You'd coaxed her to leave, gently pushing her back the way she'd come from as she mumbled about being tired. With the benefit of hindsight, you should have walked her back, but your fledgeling appetite is volatile and unconfined to anything as pedestrian as hunger, and the pull of fresh wounds had been enough that you didn't trust yourself.

You watched her wobble back towards town, silhouetted in moonlight, coat slung over one arm and oblivious to the blood soaking her clothes. It had been raining that afternoon and the ground still shone slick and slippery; she stumbled and cursed, one arm reaching out to the wall to steady herself as she paused to take off her shoes. Your stomach knotted, a sensation you'd dismissed as a residual human urge to help, and you kept your distance. She was fumbling with a buckle when the lights went out.

You're still not used to it. You'll never be used to it. For a few seconds, you couldn't see anything, you couldn't think. You adjusted in time to see her look up. The way she turned, her posture open even woozy as she was from blood loss — she was talking to someone. Asking for a hand.

The figure advancing under the guise of help, the naive oblation closing the gap. Maybe otherwise she'd know better, but her capacity was diminished, the evidence of which coated the inside of your mouth, and the warning died in your throat. Two shadow puppets become one, a hand reaching out and in and through, wrenching their forms together incoherently as bones snapped and flesh contorted.

You could barely make sense of the silhouette. The vulgar distortion of a body folded like a pocket knife, impaled and just as quickly disengaged in an eruption of viscera. What was left of her slumped to the ground, ribbons of her insides streaming from her to the hand of her assailant. It was at that point that your voice came back, shock and horror mangled into wordless shouting. He turned on you then, eyeshine cutting through the dark, bristling and bemused.

You aren't sure who moved first, but he was on you, gripping your jaw; claws breaking skin and making your eyes water, tears pooling in the crease where his hand met your face. You tried and failed to hold your ground, and your knees buckled. You could smell flowers and paper and iron.

Low laughter broke the silence.

"That was a sweet plan. But I'm not havin' you goin' soft on me."

---

The taste continues to catch you off guard. Your body responds in strange ways: it craves, it chases, it savours — but if you think too long about it, it's still blood. You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and choke down your gag reflex.

"Not one for a clean kill, are you?"

Your grip twists in your victim's shirt.

You can just about pick up his footsteps now, but only when you know to listen for them. It's a unthinking type of stealth, not magically enhanced but honed over centuries; deliberately confounding, profoundly disorienting. Even as you can sense it, you can't place the distance.

You move to stand, and a hand grips the back of your head and pushes you back down. You hiss an objection, and the noise that comes out of you is more animal than you're prepared for.

"Doesn't look much older than you, cher. Good choice… that's somethin' I miss."

You bite your tongue, unwilling to argue about it. It wasn't a choice it's just who was here. For a second, it makes you nauseous — it's not fair, that he's dying and it's your fault and he doesn't get another chance at it and you do. His grip twitches at the back of your skull. Then again, you're not sure you'd call any of this a second chance.

"Enough time passes, it starts to feel unfair, y'know. Sorta… dishonourable. You get too good at it, no-one stands a chance." He runs a finger down the side of your face to the crook of your neck, finding mottled scars and tracing a pattern. "And that's it's own kinda fun. But it'd be nice to have a fair fight every now 'n then."

"It wasn't a fair fight," you snap.

That gets a laugh out of him. "You believe that? Couple 'a kills under your belt and fancyin' yourself a predator. You got a long way to go yet, child."

He forces you down further, holding your face inches above your victim's rising chest. You growl and throw a hand out to brace yourself against the ground, warm and wet and rough. You're held fast, breathing hard and ragged but gradually evening out, until all you can think about — all you can feel is blood pulsing from an open wound, wasted on the pavement; the languid thrum of a slowing heart, slow steady breathing from untouched lungs, screaming tendons pulling everything in tandem, veins arteries muscle —

"You're still hungry, ain' you?"

Your hands tense. You want to put as much distance between yourself and that word as possible. You're fed, you're sated, you no longer need. You could walk away from this and feel no more loss than the cold empty one that's already set into your bones. You'll forget this corpse like you're already forgetting a lot of things: how long it's been since you died and your aversion to murder and the name you refused to share with the man who killed you after he refused to tell you his.

A few memories cling to you, however. The death-chasm you were unceremoniously dragged back from. The deep sense that something within you is missing. Feeling warm — you remember feeling warm. That wasn't even that long ago.

Your nails are starting to fray through the shirt; breaking through flesh would be trivial. The weight has lifted from the back of your neck, and you sense him settled behind you more than you feel it. You haven't moved.

"Wouldn' leave it much longer, cher. Clock's tickin'."

You remember dying. You remember dying for too long. You're weighing up how quickly you could swipe through the poor bastard's throat and spare him the same fate when you're caged in suddenly, an arm trapping you from the left while another reached under you. The back of a hand brushes along your clavicle as it carves a deep line through cotton and flesh.

The smell that hits you is novel. Rich and enticing, you inhale sharply and don't want to exhale. The not-yet-corpse is mumbling garbled nonsense and you know he's begging you to kill him.

One of your hands is anchored in his chest, the other poised tentatively to strike. There's soft laughter behind you, claws grasping around your waist: your fingers start to sink into an open wound and you bark an objection as you're jerked backwards.

Your hand plunges back into the wound. The texture grounds you for a second: it's nothing you expected, spongy and slippery at the same time, it takes a few moments for you to map in your head what you're holding onto. You feel rhythmic movement, but it grows erratic as you keep probing; ridges against the back of your hand; cloven flesh grazing against your arm as you dig deeper.

The heat is unbearable. Is this how warm a body gets? You steady yourself on its shoulder and you're starting to feel irritated by its whining. Your hand rips through tissue: you can feel the steady haemorrhaging, blood pooling in a chest cavity. It's spilling from his torso. Hands caress beneath your clothes, meeting in the middle of your abdomen, prickling the soft parts of you like they're going to split you open.

You grab hold of something alluring and pull. The wet sound of it makes you shudder, as does the ease at which it tears free. Your disgust is cut short as you're thrown off-balance, hands finding your hips and hauling you back again. Knives rip into through your flesh as you're mercilessly disrobed: you flail, losing your grip and throwing your hand back down and there's a sickening crunch as your weight comes down on bone.

You look up to see the not-corpse coughing blood. It makes you feel… something. Your hand curls against splintered protruding ribs, slick and warm, and your laboured breathing twists into a wail as a cold tongue drags along your cunt.

The assault is immediate: his hands almost encircle your thighs, holding you fast as he devours you. You claw against the flesh beneath you, trying to push yourself upright. Everything splits and tears and breaks under you in your disoriented half-panic, disgust and fear and pleasure and pain and hunger too much to make sense of. A slow deliberate motion savours every part of you, against your clit and your folds and digging inside you, repetitive and ravenous. You feel teeth.

A groan ripples out from you into languishing organs. One half of your face is pressed into a gaping chest cavity, blood congealing against your skin and hair and forced into your open mouth with each jolt of your body. The grip on you adjusts, manoeuvring your hips up to taste you from a deeper angle and forcing your head down further. The ground disappears from under your knees and gravity lacerates your tender flesh. You feel blood running down your midsection, smeared across your stomach and between your legs, thinner and more fluid than you know it should be, more human — an approving growl thrums against your cunt, and your insides clench unwillingly.

Your breathing comes hard and heavy. You're choking on fluids that aren't yours, you feel like you're drowning. Your hands find purchase in a wet snare of gore, your pulse hammering in your veins, except it's not your pulse.

You can feel it, thrashing against your palm. Desperate twitching muscle clinging onto the last dregs of life. Your grip closes around it.

As close as you are, your face buried in amalgamate viscera, you don't bother to pull it free. Another violent jerk of your body, your assailant lapping at your clit chasing the taste of your blood; your insides twist in rapture and you bite.

Lifeblood ruptures in your mouth and it's like nothing you've felt before, thick and rich and alive. The ecstasy ripping through you is excruciating: the heart is collapsing in your vice grip, you drink deep and unending, muscle snaps in your mouth, the world around you a distant memory.

It dulls eventually, and bliss overturns to panic. The taste dies in your mouth and you feel, instinctively, like you're swallowing poison. You wail and push off the cadaver, halfway upright before someone catches you by the hair and hauls you the rest of the way onto your knees.

"Gotta be faster'n that, cher."

He's pulling your head back onto his shoulder, and you get a look at him for the first time tonight, the dishevelled hair and carmine eyes and mouth full of broken glass. He's watching you how he always does — intrigued, possessive, cruel; itching to tear you apart and see you pull yourself back together.

"Or careful," he continues. His free hand brushes against your chin, wiping away drying blood, "The light goes out quick."

Teeth lock under your jaw deep enough that you feel it in your windpipe, effectively silencing you. Blood — your own blood, this time — floods your throat, seeping into your stomach and lungs, a sensation that feels dangerous even as you know you can't die twice. He lets go of your hair to grasp your face and wrench your jaw higher, and when his fingers hook into your mouth you ignore your better judgement and bite. The blood you taste is sour and cool.

Claws creep under your shirt, shadowing the thick scars leftover from when he first split you open. His restraint is palpable.

You're released unexpectedly, unceremoniously; left scrambling not to collapse onto — into — what remains beneath you. Your hand flies to your throat, but the flow steadies quickly and spares you the urgency.

He's strolling off down the alleyway, whistling to himself as you're struggling to pull your clothes back on over your torn aching flesh. You pretend for a second that he's abandoning you for real this time.

You pull yourself to your feet and set off in the opposite direction, and he lets you, because it doesn't matter. You won't make it further than Downtown Manhattan.

"I'm lettin' you hold onto that, f'now."

The words bury themselves in your head like a gunshot, stopping you in your tracks, knocking you dizzy for a second then mellowing you out into an unnatural calm. You're not even certain he said it out loud.