Part 10

I walked.

Not the way I had walked before, not with purpose or hunger or the thrill of a predator moving through his hunting ground. I just… walked. Slow. Deliberate. The way a man walks when he doesn’t particularly care where he ends up, because wherever he ends up will still be the same place. With himself.

The forest swallowed me whole. It was winter, or close enough to it that the trees had given up pretending they had anything left to offer. Bare branches overhead like the fingers of something dead reaching for a sky it would never touch. The ground was hard, half-frozen, and every step I took crunched loud enough to make me wince. I had gotten so used to silence, to moving through the world without leaving a mark, that the sound of my own footsteps felt like an accusation.

I kept hearing it. The sound. Not the screaming, not the guards, not the wet tearing of limbs being separated from bodies. Those sounds I could bury. I’d buried worse. No, it was the other one. The one her body made when it hit the wall. That dull, wet thud. Like something that was never meant to be thrown being thrown anyway. It followed me through the trees like a heartbeat I couldn’t outrun.

You would think that centuries of unlife would teach a man how to stop thinking about things he didn’t want to think about. They do not. If anything, the kindred mind gets worse at it. The human mind forgets. That’s its great mercy. Mine does not. Every kill, every scream, every wet thud against a stone wall, filed away in perfect clarity, waiting for a quiet moment to resurface. And out here, in the empty forest with nothing but bare trees and frozen earth for company… every moment was quiet.

But enough of that. I’m dwelling again. You know what I did. You were there for it, or as close to “there” as reading these pages will get you. The point is that I walked, and I kept walking, and I didn’t stop.

The first night passed without incident. I didn’t feed. Not because I made some grand decision, some noble declaration that I was done with blood. Nothing so dramatic. I simply… didn’t. There was nothing out here worth hunting, and I wasn’t hungry enough to care. The princess’s blood was still in me, still humming through whatever passed for my veins, and it made everything feel sharp and vivid and terrible.

The second night, the same. I walked. The forest went on forever, or felt like it did. No roads, no villages, no smoke on the horizon. I had chosen my direction well, or poorly, depending on how you looked at it. I was heading away from everything. From London, from the soldiers and their torches, from the whispering kine and their stories about devils. From myself, if such a thing were possible. (It is not.)

By the third night, the hunger started. Not the desperate, maddening thirst I’d felt in the cave all those years ago, when I was newly made and didn’t understand what was happening to me. This was slower. More patient. A dull ache behind my teeth, a tightness in my throat, like swallowing sand. I recognized it for what it was, and I made a decision.

I would not feed.

Not on humans. Not on animals. Not on anything. I wanted to know what would happen. If the Beast was me, as I had begun to suspect, then perhaps starving it would starve the worst parts of myself. Perhaps, if I denied it long enough, it would weaken, shrink, become something I could manage. An experiment, you might call it. A test of the theory I’d been turning over in my mind since London. If the Beast was just the part of me I refused to look at, then maybe I could look at it, and in looking, diminish it.

I know. Foolish. But I had just fled a city where I’d murdered a child and torn apart her guards with my bare hands. Foolish was something of a theme.

The fourth night, my senses began to dull. It happened gradually, the way a candle dims before it goes out. The sounds of the forest, which had been crisp and layered (every snapping twig, every owl’s wingbeat, every mouse burrowing under frozen leaves), started to flatten. Compress. By the fifth night, I was hearing the forest the way I used to hear it, back when I was alive. Just… noise. Undifferentiated, ordinary noise.

And the shadows stopped listening.

I noticed it when I tried to pull the darkness around me out of habit, the way you might pull a coat tighter against the cold. Nothing happened. I focused harder. The shadows trembled, barely, like a dog that wanted to obey but was too tired to stand. Then they settled back into place, indifferent to me. Obtenebration, the discipline I had discovered in that cave, the one gift of my wretched clan that had felt truly mine… gone. Or not gone, exactly. Sleeping. Waiting for blood I wasn’t going to give it.

Youu’re qui-iet tonight.

I stopped walking. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, the way it always did. From inside the walls of my own skull.

Go away.

Ca-an’t. Youu know tha-at.

I kept walking.

Youu think thi-is will work? Sta-arving mee?

I said nothing.

I’ve been herrrre since the begi-inning. Since the ca-ave. Since the wo-oman with the butter.

I walked faster, as if that would help. As if I could outpace something that lived inside my own chest.

Since youu ripped tha-at man’s head off and felt… what was it youu felt?

I said nothing, because I remembered exactly what I had felt, and it wasn’t horror. I remembered the twist, the snap, the way the head came away easier than I’d expected. And the feeling that followed, the one I’d buried under guilt and self-loathing and the convenient fiction that I’d been angry, that I’d lost control. I hadn’t lost control. I’d never been more in control in my life.

Therrre it isss. Youu rememberrr.

The Beast, if that’s what it was (if that’s what I was), did not follow. It didn’t need to. It was already there.

The strange thing, the truly unsettling thing, was that it wasn’t raging. In the castle, with the princess, it had been a storm. All fury and hunger and stuttering, hissing demand. But out here, in the quiet of the forest with my body slowly eating itself from the inside, it was… calm. Patient. Like it knew something I didn’t. Like it had seen this before.

Youu think youu’re the fi-irst kindred to try thi-is?

I don’t care.

Youu wi-ill.

And then it went quiet. Not the angry silence of something being ignored, but the comfortable silence of something that could afford to wait.

By the fifth night (or was it the sixth? They were starting to blur together, which was a bad sign), I could barely run. Not at the speeds I’d discovered in the forest after leaving my village, when I’d tested my body and found it capable of things that would have made my human self weep with joy. No. I could run like a man. A tired man, at that. My legs felt heavy. My vision, which had been sharp enough to count the hairs on a mouse at fifty paces, was becoming… ordinary. The night was dark again, truly dark, the way it had been before the embrace, and I stumbled over roots and stones like the clumsy mortal I had once been.

There was something almost funny about it, in the darkest possible way. I had spent months learning to manipulate shadows, to wrap myself in darkness, to become invisible. And now, starving in a frozen forest, I was getting exactly what I had wanted since the night I woke up standing over that massacred family. I was becoming human again. Slow, deaf, blind, ordinary, vulnerable, human.

It was terrifying.

I should have been relieved. I should have felt something like peace, or at least the absence of the constant, gnawing awareness of what I could do to anything that crossed my path. Instead I felt naked. Exposed. Every snap of a branch made me flinch. Every rustle in the undergrowth sent my heart (which doesn’t beat, but you understand the expression) into my throat.

Therrre’s the fea-ar.

I stopped.

Youu know wha-at’s funny? Youu spe-ent all those nights in London scaring kine, fee-eeding on their terror. And now look at youu. Jumping at twi-igs.

I said nothing. There was nothing to say, because it was right.

Youu want to kno-ow the rea-al joke? Youu’re not sta-arving mee. Youu’re starving youu. I’ll be he-ere when youu’re done pla-aying at being mortal. I wa-as here before youu knew my na-ame, and I’ll be herrrre long after youu’ve forgotten yourrrs.

I don’t have an answer for you, is what I wanted to say. I don’t have some clever rebuttal, some philosophical argument that proves I’m right and you’re wrong and this wretched experiment will work. What I said instead was:

You’re me. I know that. So if I starve, you starve.

Am I? Then wh-y are youu talking to yourrrself in a fore-est?

Honestly? Fair point.

Youu enjoyed the pri-incess. Youu enjoyed the gua-ards. Youu enjoyed every la-ast one of them, and youu know it, and thi-is… thi-is walking, this sta-arving… it’s not guilt. It’s shame. Youu’re not punishing yourrself because youu did something wro-ong. Youu’re punishing yourrself because youu li-iked it.

That one I couldn’t walk away from. Couldn’t walk faster to escape, couldn’t ignore, couldn’t bury under clever reasoning about the nature of the Beast and the philosophy of monstrousness. Because it was true. I had liked it. The power, the speed, the feeling of tearing through those guards like they were made of wet parchment. The princess’s blood hitting my tongue and the whole world opening up, every shadow bending to my will, every sense sharpened to a razor’s edge. I had liked it the way you like breathing, the way you like your own heartbeat. It wasn’t something I chose to enjoy. It was something I was built to enjoy, and the only thing worse than knowing that was knowing that I would feel it again.

The Beast went quiet after that. Not because I’d won the argument. There was no argument to win. It went quiet because it had said what it needed to say, and now it could wait.

I kept walking. What else was there to do?

The irony was not lost on me. You want to be human again? Here. Have it. Have the fear, the weakness, the vulnerability. Have the knowledge that anything with teeth and claws could end you, and you wouldn’t be fast enough to stop it. Enjoy.

On the seventh night (or perhaps the eighth, I had stopped counting with any precision), I found the deer.

Or rather, the deer found me. I was sitting against a tree, too weak to walk much further, my body screaming for blood the way a drowning man’s lungs scream for air. The thirst was beyond anything I can describe to you. It wasn’t hunger. Hunger is something you feel in your stomach, something that can be distracted or postponed. This was in my teeth, my throat, my fingers, my eyes. Every part of me was a mouth, and every mouth was open, and every mouth was empty.

The deer stepped into the clearing like it had been placed there by God himself, assuming God still concerned himself with the damned. A doe, thin from winter, her ribs showing under her dull coat. She looked at me with those large, stupid, beautiful eyes, and she didn’t run. Perhaps she didn’t recognize what I was. Perhaps she was too cold and hungry herself to care.

The Beast said nothing. It didn’t need to. It just waited, the way it had been waiting for days, patient and certain and quiet.

And I want to be very clear about what happened next, because it matters. The Beast did not take over. There was no slip, no loss of control, no waking up standing over a body with no memory of what I’d done. I looked at the deer. I felt the thirst. And I made a choice.

I was on her before she could flinch. My teeth found her neck (gently, this time, I had learned something from the old woman and her butter), and the blood came, and it was…

Terrible.

Not terrible in the way you’re thinking. Not poison, not painful. Just… thin. Weak. Like watered ale after you’ve tasted the real thing. The wolf I’d fed on years ago, back when animal blood was a curiosity and not a moral compromise, had tasted better than this. Or maybe it hadn’t, and I was just remembering it through the lens of a time when everything was new and I hadn’t yet learned what I was capable of.

So much for the refined palate. You remember what I told you, back at the beginning? The background checks, the careful selection, the whole ritual of choosing the right victim with the right blood? The connoisseur of fear, the scholar who treated feeding like a bloody art form? Well. Here I was, crouched over a half-starved doe in a frozen clearing, drinking blood that tasted like muddy water, with dirt under my fingernails and twigs in my hair. If my future self could see me now, he’d laugh. Or weep. Probably both.

I drank until the doe stopped moving. I laid her down carefully, and I sat there in the clearing with her blood in me and I felt… something. Not satisfaction. Not the electric, godlike surge I’d felt after the princess. Not even the simple fullness of a good feeding. I felt like a man who had been drowning and had managed to get his mouth above water just long enough to take one breath. Alive. Barely. But alive.

The thirst receded. The Beast went quiet, truly quiet this time, not the patient waiting of before but something closer to resignation. Like a dog that had been offered scraps when it wanted the whole roast, and had accepted them because scraps were better than nothing.

I tried the shadows again. They responded, but barely. A faint trembling, a slight darkening of the air around my hand. Nothing like the cloak I’d wrapped around myself in London, nothing like the figures I’d thrown on the princess’s walls. The obtenebration was there, but it was a whisper where it had been a shout.

My hearing had sharpened, but only slightly. I could hear the forest again, the individual sounds separating themselves from the noise, but it was muted. Distant. Like listening through a wall.

I was fed. I was functional. And I was weaker than I had been at any point since the first week of my unlife.

This was the trade, then. This was what it cost to keep the worst of myself leashed. Not a grand battle, not a triumphant victory over the darkness within. Just this: deer blood and dulled senses and shadows that barely listened. Humanity, purchased at the price of power, in a world that did not reward the weak or the merciful.

I buried the doe. Took my time about it, the way I had with the wolf all those nights ago. Then I stood, brushed the frozen dirt from my knees, and kept walking.

The forest stretched on ahead of me, vast and empty and indifferent to my suffering, my choices, my pitiful little experiment in self-denial. Somewhere behind me, London was still burning with torches and fear. Somewhere ahead of me… I didn’t know. Another city, another cave, another chapter of this endless, wretched, beautiful unlife.

The Beast stirred, just once, just enough to let me know it was still there. Still waiting. Still patient.

But quieter now. And that, for the moment, was enough.