Succulent Prey
: Part 2 – Chapter 27

Damon Trent stared out the barred window and tried to tune out the pandemonium of the other patients as they fought over the TV remote. The television flipped back and forth between Tyra Banks and Sesame Street. He tried to quiet the cacophony in his mind as his own lusts spoke to him, seducing him with images of blood and flesh. Damon’s mind swirled as the cocktail of antipsychotics and antidepressents in his bloodstream mired his thoughts. He could barely feel the lives he’d consumed over the narcotics. Their whispering echoes were indecipherable to him now. They had faded like yellowed photographs worn away by time. He barely noticed them anymore and with the drugs he could no longer feel their warmth.

At times he imagined that they had never been there at all, that he’d never slaughtered and bled them dry, never drank their blood until it sloshed in his distended stomach, pregnant with life force. At times he imagined that that their blood and souls had finally worked their way through his system and passed through his bowels.

But he knew they were still there. Their blood was forever bound to his. He felt like Renfield, Dracula’s little acolyte, only the souls that Damon had devoured were not those of spiders and flies or even rats and birds. He was in many ways much more like Dracula himself than Renfield. Damon had fed on human lives. Uncorrupted innocent lives, too young to have been sullied by the world, too young to have acquired the taint of lust and hatred. Years ago he had gorged himself on them, on their water pure essences, until his own blood had burned like molten lava in his veins, searing with their memories and emotions. He had felt like a force of nature then, like a walking, breathing world, like a god. But that was long ago. They were old lives now, withered and decayed. They no longer burned in his blood like electricity as they had when he’d first drunk their souls through the holes he’d cut and gouged in their flesh. They were dead now. Ghosts. They fluttered listlessly in his empty stomach like butterflies, or rather the protoplasmic phantoms of dead butterflies. Their voices were a tepid draft that raised goose bumps on the back of his neck.

Only one life still warmed him as it traveled his circulatory system. It was only a tiny spark, yet compared to the ghosts it was as radiant as a star and growing stronger. It was from the one he’d only taken a tiny piece of. The one he hadn’t killed. The one who was still out there becoming just like him, acquiring lives just as Damon had done himself before they had locked him up and chemically castrated him. He could feel his last living victim drawing closer like a minnow lured by the glow of a luminescent lure right into the jaws of an anglerfish. Only this was no minnow. It was another predator and it wanted to consume him. He knew. But he would consume it first. He needed it to warm his stale blood.

He stuck out his tongue and tasted the air.

‘So close,’ he whispered. He could sense the man drawing nearer, dragging other souls with him. More souls to warm Damon’s blood.