March from Darkness | ✓ (to be edited)

TEN

     It's been days since I last made contact with Phrer. I'd been retired to my room, and he stopped coming to check on me. I wasn't angry about his leaving me alone; in fact, I was rather grateful for it since it gave me time to think about what the hell happened.

     I didn't remember a whole lot of what happened that night. Most of what I remembered was what happened afterwards. My brain had turned online again to find myself sticky, breathless, and my dick overly sensitive while I sat on top of Phrer with my hand in his pants while he was staring at me like I was the eighth wonder of the world.

     "What are you, Demitri?"

     To be honest, I didn't know how to answer that question at the time, and I still didn't. I remembered coming the first time and then wanting to taste his blood, but I had no recollection of what happened between then and having my hand in his pants while his release cooled on my fingers. I could only guessed what happened if the taste of... something in my mouth was anything. I really, really hoped that I didn't do what I thought I did, but I hadn't had the courage to seek him out and ask him or apologize. I felt utterly guilty and kind of weirded out by the fact that anything at all had transpired, and by the new development I had discovered during it. I decided to keep that small tidbit of information to myself, but to say I was happy about it would have been an understatement.

     "What are you, Demitri?"

     It was that same kind of lustfulness that made me wonder what his blood would taste like when he had smeared it across his lip the other day. Thinking about that beautiful red liquid smeared across his skin was... stop it.

     I clutched my head in my hands as a wave of dizziness washed over me. I collapsed into one of the chairs at the kitchen island, causing Soria to look up at me with a concern that I could only describe as motherly. She'd been taking care of me and had been keeping a closer eye on me after what happened, and while I would have found it utterly annoying and probably would have killed any other person that did this, I found it endearing and kind. She truly cared about me, at least to some capacity; granted, I still didn't understand why she cared, but she did.

     "Are you okay?" she asked, her Scottish accent more understandable now that I had gotten to talking with her on a regular basis. I nodded slightly before I froze so the movement didn't cause me to vomit again. She tsked slightly and walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a few herbs before grinding them into powder and putting them in water. She set the glass in front of me with her arms crossed, waiting for something. When I just stared at it, she huffed and grabbed my right hand and placed the cup in it before she grabbed the left one and placed an apple in it. "You're gonna drink that and then you're gonna eat that," she ordered, pointing to each of the objects as she did so. "Am I clear?"

     "Yes, sir!" I jeered, earning a chuckle from her before she shook her head and went back to cooking some food for just the two of us since Sri had gone to the market to get more food, Docri and Marshall were otherwise occupied, and Phrer and Talia were not here for one reason or another. Don't ask me how I knew that they weren't here, it was something I could only explain as not feeling their presence, and even then, that was still confusing to me. I quickly downed the glass of whatever concoction she made, almost hacking something up when some of the herbs got stuck to the inside of my throat and almost went into my lungs. She just shook her head as her shoulders shook from trying to contain her laughter. 

     I'd learned more about Soria in the time we had spent together since she stuck around a lot. For example, I learned that she and Talia were not originally from Scotland; they had been born and raised in what some people in the normal world would call the Shadow Realm. She explained that it didn't have an origin in any specific culture or place, it just was, and it was a large mixture of people and entities rolled into one giant land that reminded me of San Francisco from the way she described it; it was just eternally twilight, or dawn, depending on someone's viewpoint on life.