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They don’t faze him anymore.
The booze, the powder—they don’t work. They are feeble, fickle things that bother the sandpaper skin on his nose, mouth open, dry-heaving, eyes ablaze. For someone so dried out, he can hear the humming of viscous blood inside his pallid veins sending staccato pulses of life, or death perhaps would be more fitting. Or the discomfort of toppling purgatory, this angel-demon nonsense that keeps him buoyant in this possession. His tongue tastes bitter, parched and sharp with the soiled reminder of last night’s frenzy.
He hasn’t felt this… good in ages. Physically well, as if he never experienced anything mildly uncomfortable. His hips don’t make a sound when he gets up from his seat anymore. His spine is straight and he feels twenty-five all over again. He ignores the way his hands shake upon the frailest necks of martini glasses, but those don’t even taste nice anymore. He swallows down a lump in his throat. Would the undead still produce saliva? Somehow the thought never crossed his mind all those moments ago.
Louis, you there?
Louis?
He stumbles over his own left foot when he takes another step forward.
Louis, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing out here.
He senses movement behind him, languid and slow like prey. He doesn't look back.
Everything is louder. Stronger, vivid like the clearest of images conjured in the back of his mind. Neither a memory nor reality, but a constant running film that is projected just for him. Every single day. Something within him constricts like an anvil pulled taut. He smacks his lips. Craves something. Something sweet. Salty. Something grandiose, thick and heavy on his tongue unlike anything else he has indulged himself with.
He swallows air.
(Daniel, where are you?)
Seattle. I’m in Seattle.
He says this out loud. He keeps doing this, surprisingly. He always thought it would be an easy, mindless thing, to slip in and out of the process of verbal speech and vampiric telepathy. Perhaps he’s just sloppy. Perhaps he needs to put more thought into it, more effort.
He’s starving.
(Seattle! What are you doing in—Daniel, go home.)
Don’t tell me what to fuckin’ do.
He doesn’t recognise anything, somehow. The corner of the street is nothing but a concrete maze. The ground feels like pre-historic marble under his boots. His boots? Or someone else’s? He has stopped thinking, and then the memory returns anyway. They are indeed his own. The soles are thick and soiled with wet dirt. They feel sticky when they walk past a strange puddle.
Louis?
(Yes?)
Nothing is good enough.
(What do you mean?)
It’s like nothing I eat tastes good enough. Do you get that? Sometimes? Did you feel anything... like that... when you were away from… y’know.
(No. No, I don’t.)
Mm, yeah. At this point I’m gonna go on a fucking rampage.
(Do you know what it… is that you need?)
The laugh that escapes his lips is choked out. There lies a kind of fury residing within him that he has never felt before.
Million dollar question, man.
He watches in the shadows as the night slowly slips into solitude. Now all that remains is bodies with leftover souls. And his fangs are perpetually bared for whoever’s second best.
To whom?
Even thinking about it makes his insides unfurl; as if he could feel nausea anymore. Maybe he could. And maybe it does not sound half bad. Cleanse himself from the inside out, perhaps. Then his presence could mean something, evoke some sort of concern from anyone who gives a fuck, considering.
His eyes set upon a lone figure with headphones on. Silly, and mind-numbingly stupid. He presses himself against the wall and waits, near patiently as the figure walks by. Not a care in the world, it seems. Optimism or hopelessness?
Either way, it’s luck on his part tonight.
Daniel takes the young man by the hand and drags him behind a dumpster. The movement was swift enough that the man gasped, his plasticful of groceries abandoned on the damp, ash-smelling ground. Everything feels too wet, too dry, a bit too hot and freezing. It makes the back of his neck sweat and feels a hell of a lot like high school.
The man is splayed on the ground with his clothes askew. There is something in his eyes that Daniel cannot quite understand, nor does he have any interest in understanding. He looks young enough to be in college, with his face luminous and free of any signs of crow’s feet. There is little resistance to him, the way his eyes are fixed on Daniel’s approaching figure like he knows how this will end. Like it would be meaningless to resist, to fight back. He has his hands in front of him like a shield, but he doesn’t seem to know how to use them to protect himself in any way.
Daniel looks down at him.
At his button-up, his slacks, his ridiculous posh little peacoat.
His dark hair in matted curls, splayed over half of his face like a raven’s wing upon its child. Daniel can smell him from here, and he smells just like everyone else. Bitter and sharp, like pure iron. He doesn’t know why he would expect it to be akin to some other food. Like honey, or pineapple, or citrus, or something equally pungent in its natural existence. He has slowly forgotten what either of those things smells like, tastes like.
Getting full, or trying to, has become a whole new chore. He feeds himself as if he can never find another blood bag, and drains them dry like he’s bereft. The worst part is, they barely feel like an oasis. They seem to make him hungrier for more. Sometimes he seeks it out; he gnaws away at the flesh until bits are torn crude, stuck behind his gums like food he hasn't chewed. Food he tries to swallow too much, too fast. The man lays limp on the ground, his curls turning straight when the puddle of blood reaches the back of his skull. Daniel wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand like it’s another day of seafood boil. He almost spits the blood out.
They all taste the same, save for the addicts and the party girls.
Something inside of him burns. A labyrinth that sends him straight to the black-hole of absolution. His limbs ache for the warmth of tan granite, the smell of sandalwood and flowers beneath the lowered kiss of daybreak. His tongue rests upon the uncertainty of when and why—limbs adjacent to the withering branches as the air simmers into cold metal loneliness. Sticky red-apple toffee trickles down the corners of his lips, down to his neck and seeping into the frayed collar of his t-shirt. He grips on to thin air.
A groan rips itself away from him and it sounds like that of a stray animal. He does not feel like himself anymore… but it seems as if he was born for this. This life and all of the headaches that follow. Is it a headache? Would it remain the same when the pain resides a little lower? Admitting it feels like self betrayal.
His chest constricts, as if his ribcage has morphed itself and unfurled, rotten petals that make way for hatred. He looks around at the emptiness that has become more salient than ever. The absence of life that has been, nowadays, his non-existence. He can taste every pulse, hear every hitch of breath. He can remember blood beneath his tongue, but there is not a single moment of envy that engulfs his body, nothing in comparison to the tidal wave that emerges at the thought of gilded pearls.
The world has never sounded so silent. When there is no one around you, are you minuscule, or are you God?
His heart aches. He wants to claw it out; surely there is no more use to it now. But there is not a part of him that understands the flurried cave within him, the longing for something he barely knows. The desire for someone who does not even bother to show a sliver of care. He grows heady with hunger.
Daniel feels it, feels him, everywhere.
He bares his fangs at the void skies and glares at the golden moon that stares him down like the gaunt ghost of his nightmares. Every second passes by like torture. Every part of the world is a corner within the perpetual, sick, lucid labyrinth. Everything leads to the same exact place.
I’ll find you.