The thing crawled across the dirt of the ally floor, her eyes pleading whilst she moaned and begged with the man stood opposite her.

How? How have I become this? He thought.

As he looked down at the pathetic thing that had once been a human, he couldn't think of a reason. I'm a monster, a monster without a soul.

He raised his arm, pointed the tip of the dagger at the things throat, and carefully slit it. Her eyes snapped wide, the look of surprise in her face almost comic. Had the circumstances been different, he would have laughed. Blood poured out, warm, wet, sweet, he was surprised the thing had this much blood left, after so long. It splashed along his arm, splattering the pavement and ruining his shirt. It was always like this, swift, but violent and messy, yet it held a strange thrill.

As the creature trembled violently as its life poured out of it, he stood, wiped the blade, and sheathed it.

I said I would never become this, never be the monster, He thought, this is HIS fault. I never asked for this. If I had never met him I wouldn't be doing this.

And yet, a piece of him did enjoy this, the blood, the violence. It revelled in it. He thought back to before that fateful night, before the man known as Konstantin had stripped his world from him in one violent move. And he remembered hunting game, and letting it die slowly, dis-emboweling it or slowly choking it. He had always had a love of violence. But not even this pathetic thing, here in this alley, deserved as horrible a fate as he had handed to it.

He looked at the corpse, for it only had seconds of life left, for one last time. It lay there, in a pool of its own blood, wasted and with a scream contorting its dying features as it tried to make a noise through its ruined larynx.

"You were young and beautiful; I have no right to take that away from you. But I need to do this to survive," he murmured, "I'm sorry"

As the body shook one last time, it looked him in the eyes, and a look of relief spread across its face. In that moment, the beauty that his treatment had removed from the things features. He turned, put on his jacket and walked down the alley. At its mouth he looked up at the night sky. He let out a sigh, turned and stared at the corpse one last time. He thought I can still taste you. Sweet, innocent, delicious.

Then he walked off, blending with the usual night traffic, leaving behind the ruined, starved body of his human captive, alone in a dark spread of blood, wearing a once fine dress, now stained and torn, and a necklace bearing the legend "Victoria Helsing."