Under the cover of the night, a short, suited man stood in a darkened alley, his arms crossed, one foot against the bricks behind him. His eyes were narrow and focused, watching as a young, copper haired woman milled about her apartment.
"Mmmmm, stalking again, Levi?"
Gaze broken, he turned his attention to the chainlink fence to his left where a spectacled brunette had just perched herself atop, her unruly hair pulled up into a messy pony tail. She grinned, exposing two fangs, tinged pink. So she had just eaten.
"Tonight is the night, Hanji" he replied, returning his attention to the sheer curtains of the apartment. The woman had put on a dress, a cute vintage number if his memory of the decades served him correctly. Which, of course, it did.
Hanji Zoe hopped down from the fence, coming to stand next to him and looked up into the home. "Why tonight?" she asked, "she's getting married tomorrow. Why not wait until then?"
Levi didn't look at her, but furrowed his eyebrows slightly. "Because I don't want to take that night away from her."
"That's awfully sentimental of you, Levi." She nudged his shoulder with her elbow, throwing him a suggestive look, "don't tell me you've fallen for her."
"No," he said as he watched her don a string of oversized pearls, "we both know that is not possible."
Hanji remained silent for a moment, joining him in his stakeout. Of course she knew it wasn't possible. Neither of them felt a damn thing anymore. There was nothing but hunger, an insatiable force and their only means of survival.
Modern culture had romanticized their condition, suggesting that even they, the bloodthirsty undead that they were, could come to see 'reason', 'affection', and 'love'. It was trendy now to suggest there were alternative sources of nutrients—animals, manufactured tablets, or reserves donated to hospitals, but that information was all false. Every vampire needed its food direct from the source.
This was because vampires themselves, though ravenous and to some extent uncontrollable, were picky eaters. As it turned out, a person's character flavoured the blood, providing an assortment of dishes roaming freely across the earth.
Hanji favored the learned, and the brilliant. It was her great fortune that they were, for the time, residing in a city with one of the country's most esteemed universities. It was a veritable buffet for her and she was taking full advantage.
Levi's tastes, however, were far more rare. It was love that he craved, and only the blood of someone who loved as fiercely as he once had could quell the pains of his appetite.
"Will you turn her?"
Levi shook his head, his eyes following the petite beauty as she searched the room for her purse. She'd be leaving soon.
"I just want to eat."
"It doesn't have to be like this," Hanji pointed out, resting her elbow on his shoulder, leaning into him casually, "you could eat every day if you really tried. If you put a little extra thought into it."
When he didn't reply, she leaned in, whispering into his ear, "if you stopped punishing yourself."
He slapped her away and she feigned fear before a smile broke out across her features. "Levi, after three hundred and seventy-two years it's time to let it go. Your tastes should be better suited to your own persona. Cynicism, physical strength, or cleanliness. You won't have to do this anymore."
"I loved you," came his soft reply, "above everything else in this world, I loved you. And I let you die."
"Is that guilt I hear?" she teased, wrinkling her nose playfully.
"It is not guilt," he snapped, "it's fact. And when you became—" he gave a small wave of his hand, "—this, I did too. Because I couldn't live without you."
He let out a short breath of air from his nose, a gesture in sardonic humor, "what a romantic fool I was."
"We are immortal, Levi," she pouted, "how can you be unsatisfied with that outcome?"
Immortal though he may have been, he didn't understand the sense in not dying if he was simultaneously not living. When they had been alive, they had been so to its very deepest definition. They were members of the royal court, he an officer of the king's guard, and she, a doctor. They had been wealthy, esteemed, but above all, and despite everyone's expectations, they had been madly, wildly, and oh-so-passionately in love.
They had been set to marry, and when the vampires had uprooted their lives, taking with them his beloved, he had fought and followed. Knowing there was no reversal for her state, he had offered up his own soul to stand by her side, not quite dead, and not quite alive. What he hadn't known, was that death would rob him of each human emotion he had ever felt, and every memory of.
When he had awoken as this new creature he had done so hungry. When he laid eyes upon the woman who would have been his wife, he acknowledged her as nonthreatening and nothing more.
For nearly four centuries they traveled together out of familiarity, using each other's strengths to their advantages and eating their fill at every chance they got. Sometimes they latched onto humans, the particularly delicious ones, erasing their memories and ensuring they were always available for more. Then they would die, whether it be from the vampiric parasite or life taking its toll, and the two would move on.
"I want to feel something," Levi sighed, tilting his head back to rest up against the cool bricks, staring up into the night sky. The moon would be full soon. Who knew what other things would go bump in the night then.
"Anything."
"You know that won't happen," Hanji pointed out, mimicking his stance, "and even if it could, do you really believe it would be anything but despair?"
"I used to dream that I could steal it from them," he told her, "that while I ate I could feel it again, even for a short time."
"You should forget you ever loved me," she said, pushing off the wall and hopping back up to the fence. She'd let him dine in peace. "then it wouldn't haunt you and you could eat more regularly."
Levi closed his eyes, allowing a pleasurable shudder to run through his body at the thought of his next meal. "It's so fucking good," he groaned, "no matter how hard it is to find, I'd never give up that taste."
Hanji gave a quick shrug. "We'll stay close then. You can keep her for a while."
The lights in the apartment went off and she gave him a quick salute before darting off into the night. Levi left the alley, turning to meet the woman at the entrance to the building. The streets were empty at the moment. It was a perfect opportunity.
He moved with ease, a perfect, agile finesse he had perfected over the centuries. With one hand clamped over her mouth, he whisked her back into the alley. She screamed into his cold hand, jerking against his hold, but even as feisty a woman as she, she was no match for a creature of the night.
Levi could smell her fear, a taste that almost always accompanied the romance flowing through the veins of his victim and the contrasting flavors paired beautifully on his tongue.
She stopped squirming and he felt her lips move against his palm when he pressed his mouth to her thrashing pulse. Out of nothing more than curiosity, he removed his hand.
"What is it, Petra Ral?" he asked, his voice low and husky in her ear.
"Please," she whispered, "let me go."
"I can't," he replied, wrapping one arm around her waist, keeping her firmly in place, "I'm too hungry."
"I'm getting married tomorrow," she told him, her voice quivering. Still, he recognized her efforts to calm herself. She was trying to take control of her fear, and thus, the situation. How interesting.
"I know that," Levi replied, running his tongue over his fangs. It was so close. It was right there, the meal he'd been waiting nearly a month to enjoy, "that's why it has to be now."
His hand came to cover her mouth again and he grinned, pressing his lips against her warm flesh, so soft and inviting. He wasn't the sort of man she thought him to be, and when he squeezed her jaw to steel himself, his fangs sunk into her skin with a satisfying ease.
She screamed. He could hear the muffled sound over the rushing of blood that splashed against his tongue, flowing into his mouth in waves but he didn't care. She was every bit as wonderful as he'd been imagining. Sweet, yet spicy, smooth, with a kick of resistance. If he had to place a human food to it, he might choose cinnamon.
He moaned against her, a low, guttural sound that once may have indicated his arousal. This pleasure, however, paled in comparison to any physical human interaction. It was liquid gold, a drinkable orgasm, metallic nirvana. It didn't matter what it was called; he was addicted to it.
A new sound and a new scent floated to his senses through his feast. People. There were people walking on the street nearby. Petra must have heard it too because her cries were backed with more force, and the blood pumped out of her puncture holes with more gusto.
Intent on keeping her silent, Levi moved his hand upward, and pressed her more closely against him. Her breath came out in desperate spurts through her nose and he tightened his grip, eyes closed, focused on devouring everything he could.
He would keep her around, he decided. After he was through, he'd rearrange her memory. They would walk the stairs to her apartment and she would invite him in. He would patch up her wounds and when he left, she would assume there had been a spider in her home. She would go to her rehearsal dinner, marry the next day, and carry on as she intended.
Levi, however, would never be far from her. So long as she lived and loved, he would be there in the shadows, hungry and waiting.
Her fingernails were scratching at his knuckles now, urgent and fierce. She slapped his hand, clawed at his fingers, and shook her head, trying to worm her way from his hold, but to no avail. He heard her heart racing twice its normal speed, then twice and a half. She was panicking.
Almost done, he thought, just a bit more my precious little chicken.
Just as he was about to break away, a surge of flavor hit him, a taste so strong and so rich he wondered if she were falling in love right at that moment. She was thinking of her fianceé. There was nothing else that could produce such an exquisite taste, a delicacy all its own.
She stopped her clawing then, her hands falling limp at her sides and her screams silent in his palm. Just as quickly as it had come, the flavor left, and as it dissipated, something bitter and rotten hit the back of his throat. He jerked back, spitting out the offensive liquid and looked to the woman in his arms.
Her frame lay listless over his elbow, her once soft and gentle honey eyes wide, bulging, and glassed over, yet devoid of any light.
Had he eaten too much?
No. He pulled back the hand he had used to silence her. Secured over both her mouth and her nose in his desperate measure not to be discovered, he had forgotten about her need to breathe.
Damnit.
He wiped his chin and sighed, hoisting her back into his arms, closing her mouth and eyes with a gentle sweep of his fingers.
Her dying thoughts. He'd eaten them. The last feeling she had experienced was a reminder of how much she loved the man who would be waiting for her tonight. Levi had never tasted that before, nor had he realized its power.
Looking to the dead woman again, he tried to conjure up some semblance of emotion. Disappointment, perhaps? He had intended to use her for at least another fifteen, perhaps twenty years. With her flavor, this turn of events was unfavorable indeed.
Or maybe he wanted to feel sympathy. He'd observed the fianceé enough to know he was a good man. A bit harsh on the eyes, clumsy, and ungainly, but the way Levi had seen him look at this Petra Ral was enough. He didn't deserve to lose her.
Mostly, he wanted to grieve. He had felt her life slip away from her. She had fought for it, struggled, and pleaded with him. She was young, twenty-two if he remembered correctly, with a pretty smile that radiated joy. She was a hard worker, a friendly stranger, and a woman with more love in her heart than he could contain in just his stomach.
But as he laid her on the front stoop of her fashionable city apartment building and wiped the blood from her neck, he felt none of those things.
He pulled the diamond ring from her finger, sliding it into her purse to keep away any thieves that might happen upon her body. He brushed some of her beautiful golden hair from her eyes, smoothing it with his ghastly fingers.
Hanji was right.
He felt nothing at all.