blood would take time to invigorate him, time which his prey could easily use to fight him off. The man must die and die quickly. Iuda bit again, and pulled his mouth away, bringing with it a mess of artery and sinew. Blood cascaded over Iuda’s face – an appalling waste, but the job was done.
The man fell limp, collapsing on top of Iuda and forcing his weakened body back to the ground. It had been a quick death – a sudden, catastrophic loss of blood pressure to the brain. But Iuda had a better purpose for the blood. He rolled the man’s lifeless corpse off him. The two of them lay side by side, like exhausted lovers who did not care to embrace one another after the act.
The urge to remain there in silence, resting, was powerful, but Iuda knew he had work to do. They would not be alone for long. He crawled over and placed his lips to the ragged wound in the man’s throat, almost mimicking the posture of the man when he had been listening to Iuda. Drinking blood this way was neither pleasant nor easy. The blood of the dead was stale. Nutritionally it had only a little less value than living blood – Iuda had established that by experiment years before. But it tasted like a cold, thin, flavourless soup.
Worse than that, it had to be drawn from the body. To drink from a living victim one had only to pierce the artery and let the beating heart force gush after gush of blood into the mouth, weakening in strength as it gradually deprived itself of that which it most needed in order to live. With this lifeless slab of flesh, Iuda had to suck the blood for himself – harder still in his starved condition. If he’d had the time and the strength he would have imitated a butcher and hauled the cadaver up on a rope to let it hang upside down, allowing gravity to do the work that the heart was no longer capable of. But he had no strength. In the end he resorted to lapping at what had spilled on the floor, like a cat. It was degrading, but no one would see, and it would give him the strength for better things soon.
It was only a few minutes before the dead man’s workmate returned, racing down the steps two at a time and clutching a bottle in his hand. Iuda was seated in his chair – the same chair that had been there when the room had been his office – in a dark corner where he would not be seen by someone coming in from the daylight. Even after so little time and so little blood, he felt renewed. He was not quite his old self, but he was strong enough to take his next meal in a more dignified manner.
He’d placed the corpse in the position where he himself had been lying. The differences between his cold, dormant body and the bloody remains that now took its place would be quickly noticed, but not quickly enough. From the bottom of the stairs, the returning man took only a glance at it, not realizing who it was.
‘Sergei?’ he shouted, looking around. ‘Sergei?’
There was, unsurprisingly, no reply. He didn’t seem too concerned. He went over to the body, uncorking the bottle as he went. He began to kneel.
‘Here you are, old fella. We’ll soon have you feeling—’
He leapt upright and took a step back, staring down at what remained of his workmate, saying nothing, his face showing bewilderment rather than fear. That would change.
‘I have to say I’m already feeling much better, thank you.’ As Iuda spoke he felt stiffness in the skin of his face, where the splattered blood had begun to congeal.
The man turned in the direction of Iuda’s voice, peering into the darkness to make out its source.
‘Your friend, however,’ Iuda continued, ‘is beyond all hope.’
He stood and began to walk, not straight towards the man, but on a path that would put himself between him and the stairs. The man’s head followed him as he moved, realization dawning on his face.
‘You. But …’
Iuda would not have been easy to recognize. In a few short minutes the effect of new blood must have taken twenty, perhaps thirty years off him. With only a little more, he would be fully restored.