regret escape him, he switched off the lamp. He stood for a while in
the darkness, enveloped by the gent aroma of blood.
When his eyes had readjusted to the gloom, he returned to the hall, not
bothering to close the girl’s door behind him.
He entered the room across from hers and found it unoccupied But in the
room next to that one, Candy smelled stale sweat, and heard snoring.
This one was a boy, seven or eighteen, not a big kid but not small
either, and he put up more of a struggle than his sister. However, he
was sleeping on his stomach, and when Candy threw back the covers fell
upon him, the boy’s face was jammed hard into the pit of the mattress,
smothering him and making it difficult for him to shout a warning. The
fight was violent but brief. The boy passed out from lack of oxygen,
and Candy flopped him over When he went for the throat, Candy let out a
low eager cry that was louder than any sound the boy had made. Later,
when he opened the door to the fourth bedroom, first pewter light of
dawn had pierced the windows. shadows still huddled in the corners, but
the deeper darkness had been chased off. The early light was too thin
to elicit color from objects, and everything in the room seemed to be
one shadow of gray or another.
An attractive blonde in her late thirties was asleep on her side of a
king-size bed. The sheets and blanket on the other half of the bed were
hardly disturbed, so he figured the woman’s husband and had either moved
out or was away on business. He noted a half-full glass of water and a
plastic bottle of prescription drugs on the night stand. He picked up
the pharmacy bottle and saw that it was two-thirds full of small pills.
A sedative, according to the label. From the label, he learned her
name: Roseanne Lofton.
Candy stood for a while, staring down at her face, an old longing for
maternal solace stirred in him. Need continued to drive him, but he did
not want to take her violently, not want to rip her open and drain her
in a few minutes.
He wanted this one to last.
He had the urge to suckle on this woman as he had suckled on his
mother’s blood when she would permit him that grace. Occasionally, when
he was in her favor, his mother would make a shallow cut in the palm of
her hand or puncture one of her fingers, then allow him to curl up
against her and be nursed on her blood for an hour or longer. During
that time a great peace stole over him, a bliss so profound that the
world and all its pain ceased to be real to him, because his mother’s
blood was like no other, untainted, pure as the tears of a saint.
Through such small wounds, of course, he was able to drink no more than
an ounce or two of her, but that meager dribble was more precious and
more nourishing to him than the gallons he might have drained from a
score of other people. The woman before him would not have such
ambrosia within her veins, but if he closed his eyes while he suckled on
her, and if he let his mind reel backward to memories of the days before
his mother’s death, he might recapture at least some of the exquisite
serenity he had known then… and experience a faint echo of that old
thrill.
At last, without casting the covers aside, Candy gently lowered himself
to the bed and stretched out beside the woman, watching as her
heavy-lidded eyes fluttered and then opened. She blinked at him as he
cuddled next to her, and for a moment she seemed to think that she was
still dreaming, for no expression tightened the muscles of her slack
face.
“All I want is your blood,” he said softly.
Abruptly she cast off the lingering effects of the sedative, and her
eyes filled with alarm.
Before she could spoil the beauty of the moment by screaming or