As a Death Warden, Ava Longbane is well acquainted with corpses. She collects the dead, checking for the sinister and untoward before adding them to the body cart. But she deals with the human dead, not the Whym. Never them. As creatures of innate m...
Waking: a scream into fathomless black. For a second—a day, a year—she knew only pain, was nothing but pain. Empty. Always empty. Always hollow. Always...
Hungry.
She uncoiled, ragged ribbons of need whipping out to taste the emptiness, to reach past it to find—
Heat. Warm blood, a siren's call. So close. Life, its pulsing rush, surrounded her. Breath pushed and pulled against the dark, inviting her to join its quick, shuddering ebb and flow.
Her prey had come to her. No need to lure, to scavenge, to hunt.
On the next inward pull of air, she slid inside; felt her entry point choke off—too late. Blood and flesh convulsed as she wrapped herself around their beating centre, her prey fighting her embrace.
A battle it would not win.
With need her claws and hunger her teeth, she bit.
Within her grasp, flesh jolted, heartbeats stuttered—pounded hard at first, then... Release, a sweet flood. Water on parched ground. Light rolling back the black. Ecstasy.
To feed was to exist.
As life drained into the chasm inside her, pain stretched into mist. The cold nothingness shimmered gold.
Sunlight.
For a moment, she remembered the feel of it, warmth that sunk beyond the skin into the soul.
Then it was gone.
Darkness engulfed her again as her eyes closed.
And another creature opened hers.
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