"Let us out of here!"
"Wh-why have they brought us here? What do they want with us?!"
I awoke inside a sealed room hours later with what seemed to be a family of three desperately clamouring for help. Their panicked screams loudly vibrated through my ears, as my sight gradually returned to me. I was starved. Reduced to a ravenous beast with nothing on my mind but my crippling desire for a blood.
I groaned while weakly attempting to get up.
"Who is this man? Is he sleeping?"
I heard the voice of an innocent child who tried to reach out to me as if I were nothing more than a wounded animal. Part of me would have appreciated the gesture had the circumstance been any different but at the moment, I saw her as nothing more than a delicious morsel. While my mind was momentarily preoccupied with my bloodlust, my body yearned, no…rather, it screamed for release as it began shaking about it uncontrolled spasms. This scared the child who quickly ran behind her father as he dutifully tried to protect his family like any sane man would. He yelled something almost inaudible as he motioned for me to back away. I could not understand what he was saying nor did I care. All I wanted was a taste of their crimson vital fluids. Taking one quick step forward, the man lunged ahead and swung an arm with all his might. Though such a blow would have incapacitated any lesser creature, the only thing it managed to accomplish was further infuriate me in my most bestial of moods. The next swing would be his undoing, as I adeptly caught his arm and tore it right off its socket. It took a split second for the man's senses to register before his screams of pain flooded my ears and compelled me to inflict more once I had finished having my fill. I latched on to his severed arm and hungrily sucked out the blood that spurted out of it, slowly regaining my strength in the process. The man's screams were unbearable at this point, and were only slightly muffled by the sheer terror in his wife and daughter.
I admit that feasting upon the man's arm was lowly of me, but I was in no position to be dignified. And so I did the next thing that came naturally to me, which was to rip out the man's throat and drink from the fountain of blood that would come gushing out of his severed arteries. I put no drop to waste as I bit, sucked, and licked the fluid out of his mangled corpse as greedily as I possibly could. I could feel the streams of blood and scraps of lacerated flesh on my chest as I rapaciously tried to satiate centuries of hunger. At this very moment I was no different from that pale horned beast that had nearly sent me back to yet another century of sleep just hours ago. In fact, I was probably much worse. To be honest, I really did not care.
Wiping the man's remains off my body, I could feel the sinews of my bones restoring themselves and my hunger being silenced all the while. I could feel my veins filling up with the satiating crimson life force that empowered me for many centuries. Most prominently, I could feel my youth returning to me as my pale flesh rebuilt itself muscle after muscle, restoring the chiselled frame that had led many men to their deaths and allowed me to tear their bodies limb after bloody limb without the slightest effort. As a result, the gauntness of my previous frame had vanished, giving way to a younger, more capable body that resembled my appearance prior to being turned into an unholy creature of the night. I could see that my frail white hair had been restored to a deep shade of black, and that my eyes had changed from possessing jet black scleras with orange irises back to their regular form. My glowing red eyes pierced through the flashing darkness, silencing the mother and child who were clinging onto each other, cowering in debilitating amounts of shock and fear. They had just witnessed a husband and father massacred before them, and could now do nothing but shake for their voices had betrayed them. I felt small pangs of remorse clawing at me, and so I opted to quickly finish them off.
I grabbed the woman by the neck and drank from it, draining her of all her blood within a matter of seconds. Moments after I started, I felt her flesh shrivel up from its soft youthful form to something resembling a rough aged prune. I quickly tossed her lanky cadaver aside and briefly stared at the child, seeing the distorted reflection of my red glowing eyes through hers. As I picked her up, I noted the innocence that would never see its natural end at the world's hands, and justified my act in the thought that she would at least join her parents soon. I was sending them all to a better place anyway. I saw her tears reflecting the terror that befell her as my sense of smell detected the foul stench of urine that soaked the fabric of her dress. She squirmed and seized in a desperate bid for escape, not knowing that death would be a much more merciful end than living with the memory of what had just transpired. I bit, attempting to end her suffering in as swift a manner as I possibly could.
Satisfied, I tossed her body aside and walked towards the door. Though the room was pitch black, I could see small cracks near an adjacent wall leading to an outside complex. The cracks were small, but large enough for me to fit myself into once I transformed my body into mist. Strangely, I could not access many of my abilities despite my hardest attempts. This was strange indeed. This was not my first resurrection and yet for some reason, I was unable to use any of the abilities that had been available to me every single other time. Before I knew it, the door's lock had unlatched and I was hit with such force that it sent me reeling back into unconsciousness.