Where Dark Things Wait: Night Creatures Book One

Chapter Two - A Bite To Eat

"How's she doing back there?" Maloney asked, although she remained focussed on the road ahead.

"Honestly? I have no clue how she's still alive. Her heart's racing, but she has no breath sounds on the left, and reduced on the right. She's deteriorating fast. She should be dead, Charani. She smells human... mostly human... but she should have expired already," Eorl announced, his strange luminescent eyes still locked on Kalyna.

For her part, Kalyna barely understood what he meant. The pain in her chest had gone from burn to incapacitating agony. Barely a breath passed her lips, and copper coated her tongue. She felt weak, her body trembling, tingling, but lacking the strength to move. She couldn't so much as lift a finger.

Was this what dying felt like? Was this what her husband and children had felt? She suspected their ends had come faster. It took vampires mere minutes to drain a body to the point of death, much faster than this slow suffocation.

"We're nearly there," Maloney promised, but paused, hesitant, before asking, "What do you mean by 'she smells mostly human'?"

Eorl shook his head, dark brows pinched as he admitted, "I don't know. It's hard to place. It's mostly homo sapiens, but there's something... familiar... and something not. I would've said homo mordax, but that's almost impossible. Then there's something... wet dog like too... canis persona or homo lupus, maybe, but even that's such a subtle undercurrent that it's barely there. I don't think it's the full picture. She also smells... like... the rain during a storm... and like sea spray... fresh and yet charged... I've never experienced anything like it."

His voice rumbled, a low growl, and the hungry look returned again as he murmured, "It's tempting. I can't explain it. It makes me..."

He shook his head, but his fangs cut into his lower lip, extending at whatever thought passed through his head.

"It makes you what, Dunstan?" Maloney prompted, her dark eyes flicking from the road towards her partner.

"Ravenous," the Sergeant admitted hesitantly, shifting in the passenger seat as if uncomfortable with his own body's reaction. "It's like... a siren song woven into her blood. It entices, calling to me, begging me to drown myself in her..."

Charani Maloney tensed, her gaze flicking to Eorl again, the crease between her brow deepening, "I've never heard you talk like that. Not even that time the Sí took us prisoner for a month and had the Fear Gorta get in your head. They literally set famine on you, and you still didn't talk like that. Are you safe?"

He cast her a censoring look, snapping, "Of course I'm safe. I didn't survive a one and a half thousand years by indiscriminately chomping down on any throat that took my fancy."

"Good. Just checking," the dark eyed woman offered, then pulled off the road and through an opening in a rusted metal fence.

For a while, the BMW bumped over a poorly maintained and pothole marked track, but the more distance they put between themselves and the public highway, the better maintained the road seemed to be. The ride smoothed out, and Kalyna might have felt grateful if she could feel anything but panicked and pained. By the time the car rolled to a stop outside a ten-foot fence - a barrier topped with barbed wire, and punctured by a large steel gate - her vision had dimmed to almost blindness, and even sound reached her ears as though through water, garbled and indistinguishable.

Only sensation remained after that. The car lurched forward and her body rocked with it. Mere minutes passed before it stopped again, and something or someone lifted Kalyna from the back seat of the BMW. She couldn't see, couldn't hear, yet her nose went into overdrive as some delicious spiced musk flavoured each shallow, laboured inhale.