I can fight it off. I hear it slam shut again, but there are no cries or movement, and that is what has my head jerking up and then the smell hits me.
The fragrance, goodness, I could bathe in it. Wrap it around myself like armour and wear it into war. It smells like blood, sex, and the fields where I grew up. I suck in lungfuls of it and it settles that thirst, covering it for a moment so I can have some form of rational thought, but just for a moment. A stolen moment of sanity, all because of how she smells.
Then I see her. The red fades from my vision and my eyes work again, resting on the goddess, the general of war lying before me. A face that men would race into battle for, that they would follow to the ends of the gallows, to death itself. A beauty like I have never seen through any of the ages I have lived. One that sends a punch straight through me and restarts my shrivelled, hungry heart.
Her hair, long and blonde and the colour of wheat in harvest, is wrapped around her like a coiled snake. Her face is pressed to the cool cement and I’m jealous of it for touching her. Her skin is pale, covered in specks of blood, and I inhale again, noting it’s not hers. Her eyes are shut, black lashes resting along her cheek, her body curvy and slightly short, but oh so tempting. I can scent her blood, though, recent as well, and as I watch her body stitches itself back together from many, many wounds. What did they do to her?
A flash of hate and rage surges through me and I wrench on the chains.
Who is she? Another prisoner, a monster like me they are trying to break? What is she? I have never smelled something so delicious in all my life, and just like that my hunger roars to the forefront of my mind again. It makes me yank on the chains, my fangs snapping down as I try to reach her, to sink my incisors into her and taste that delicious blood, drain her dry and bathe in it.
She stirs for a moment, her head turning the other way as if to escape me. I glance at the guard they left in here, the one I injured, to see him still pale and asleep, but alive for now. A noise has my eyes dragging back to her, but she is no longer lying down.
She is staring right back at me, her black eyes peeking through golden hair as she crouches on the tiles like an animal, staring straight at my hunger with one of her own. What does she hunger for? I have the insane urge to ask and give her whatever it is.
Scratching sounds, and I glance down to see her long, black nails dragging along the floor as she watches me like prey, waiting to pounce for any wrong move I make. I stare right back, noticing the jumping pulse in her throat, feeling it calling to me, imagining the noise she would make as her blood squirted into my mouth.
I jerk forward, automatically reaching for it, and she pounces. Her body flies through the air like a blur and I fall backwards with the impact, still swinging from the chains that hold me. I snap forward, trying to bite her, but she grabs my head in her hands, her small, delicate fingers spread across my cheeks as her red, rosy mouth slants and comes down on mine. It’s enough to make me freeze, and then suddenly I’m opening wide, like an old habit, an instinct I didn’t know I had and she’s there…I taste her, her need, her hunger.
I feed her.
She pulls, not physically, but her kiss tugs at my energy, the very essence that animates me, sucking it from my mouth like a drink through a straw, again and again, drawing it from deep inside me and absorbing it into herself. Her claws cut into my face slightly, and the scent of my blood only makes her wilder. A whimper comes from her throat as she tries to get closer, to find a better angle on me.
It’s like she is draining the madness, the thirst from me with each pull of her lips on mine, taking it into herself and making it hers with a hungry sounding moan. Her hands splay on my face