Page 27 of Taken By Touch and Torment

I knew I was in trouble when she only smiled right back.

“Come on in, dear,” Sadie said.

When a small human woman entered the room, an unconscious growl escaped my throat. Her cheeks were rosy, her copper hair long and straight. She wore a short white dress in the style of some quaint farming village.

“Cindy is going to free you and lead you upstairs,” Sadie said.

I stared at her in horror, already writhing against the magickal bindings, my fangs aching so badly they were like knife wounds in my gums.

I had never been more starved. Physically, magickally, sexually, emotionally… for weeks now, I had known nothing but deprivation.

“You don’t want to hurt Cindy, do you, Rune?” she asked, backing away as the human stepped forward.

“Get the fuck away from me!” I roared.

The girl trembled, pausing to glance back at Sadie. When Sadie nodded, she proceeded.

No. She had to stay away. I wasn’t in control right now. The familiar tide of bloodlust arose, a wave of uncontrollable desire blurring my vision, rooting in my limbs, clouding my mind.

“Fight it, Rune,” Sadie said. “I told you to think about the day you found your sisters.”

My gaze snagged on the human’s pulse. The scent of her fear filled the air, and I could do nothing but groan and shut my eyes.

“Open,” Sadie snapped.

I obeyed, prying my eyes open. My breathing was short and shallow. I wrestled with the impending bloodlust—the disgusting side-effect of vampirism that I needed to eradicate, at all costs. Sadie had started her work right away.

I’d entered bloodlust every single day since she’d turned me.

It had been sixty-two.

I’d fed only in small amounts since my first feed, enough to sustain me and keep me from mummifying. But never enough—and never straight from the tap. The memory of drinking human blood for the first time was all I could think about some days. It had been so warm, so sweet, so beautifully powerful. I’d never felt stronger. I’d never felt more alive.

Sadie had been working meticulously, in ways I hardly understood in my delirious daze, to drain every last drop of uncontrolled desire from my veins. She dangled humans in front of me regularly, preying on my fear of hurting them.

She carved into my mind far more often than she carved into my flesh. She dug out truths I hadn’t admitted to anyone. Desires dark, unfathomable, and depraved. Fears I’d buried and had never wanted to face. She yanked them all out of me and rubbed my face in each and every one.

“What did they look like, when you found them?”

The human paused right in front of me. I’d halted the process, my vision only half darkened, my body only partially outside of my control. I was so tired of entering into the mindless craze of hunger, only to wind up with scraps. I held onto myself harder than I’d ever clutched anything before.

For the first couple weeks, I’d done nothing but fight Sadie at every turn. I’d succumbed to bloodlust at the drop of a dime. I’d been the worst brat of her entire career, in her words.

I’d taken pride in that.

At first.

Now, I was finally beginning to recognize the cold, unappetizing truth that Sadie’s methods were working. Sometimes slowly, always painfully, but gods above they were working. But only when I let them.

“They were bruised and bitten all over,” I said, caught in the excruciating, shameful middle-ground between lust and denial, hunger and disgust. “They were only children.”

The human before me was close enough to reach if my hands weren’t bound above my head. She watched me with wide, pale green eyes. I recognized the pain in their depths. Empathy.

“The born didn’t care. They’d…” I described details I’d never spoken before, and as I spoke, the human woman’s eyes welled with tears.

A fat tear slid down her cheek. “You aren’t like them,” she said, a hardness to her tone that I didn’t expect. “Mistress says you’re hungry. I don’t know what that feels like to you, but I remember when I was a child, that gnawing emptiness was frequent in my home.”

She smelled of wildflowers and rain. I knew that her blood would feel like silk as it cascaded down my throat.

---