Page 16 of Loved to Death

Polly darted forward and bit the woman’s neck just as Thomas grabbed the man.

The wife screamed as Thomas sank his teeth into the man’s neck. Liquid euphoria flowed down Thomas’ throat, and everything else in the world ceased to matter. The pain that had been a living entity in his stomach for the past week disappeared. Intense pleasure coursed down his throat, into his stomach, and out to his extremities, until his entire being was thrumming with it. The sensation built and built, and he drank faster and faster in response, trying to reach the peak. But just as he thought he might reach the pinnacle, the liquid slowed. A rumbling growl came from his throat as he sucked harder. The liquid stopped altogether and the bliss he was savoring started to fade.

Suddenly a pair of hands were shoving him, dislodging his teeth from the man’s soft flesh. Thomas fell to the ground landing on his back. Before he realized what was happening, Polly was on top of him. Her hands ripped the button off his trousers and reached for his member. He hadn’t realized his feeding frenzy had aroused him until she guided him inside her. Gasping at the sudden sensation, his body involuntarily thrust upward to penetrate deeper inside.Wasn’t she wearing undergarments?

That thought was pushed aside when she pressed her wrist against his mouth and commanded, “Drink.”

He tried to ask what she meant, but his words were muffled by her arm. When he opened his mouth, she pressed her wrist against his sharp teeth which punctured her skin. When her blood trickled down his throat, that euphoria returned, and he barely noticed when her teeth sank into his neck. He bit down harder on her wrist and started sucking in earnest. His hips moved in time to his swallows, pumping himself into her as hard as he could with each thrust. Their bodies moved in unison and with each swallow, the pleasure built to the point where Thomas thought he might pass out. She cried out as her body clenched rhythmically around him. Her body’s response pushed him over the edge in an explosion of wave after wave of ecstasy that was so intense, he saw stars.

It took a few moments for Thomas to come back to his senses. His eyes slowly focused on Polly’s shoulder. She was licking his neck. His eyebrows furrowed as logic and reason started coming back to him.What in God’s name did they just do?

She sat up and started licking her own wrist. His eyes darted to the dead couple next to them on the floor. Disgust bubbled up from his guts. He shoved Polly off of him, jumped to his feet, and tried to close his pants over his rapidly deflating cock only to find the button missing.

A second later, Polly was up and standing in front of him. She pressed both hands against his face, forcibly directing his attention to her.

“Don’t look back. Keep your eyes on me and listen. The need for human blood is inescapable and the lust you feel while feeding is also inescapable. The only way to satiate that lust is to fornicate directly after feeding. And that lust is intensified tenfold through sharing blood with another of our kind while lying together as man and wife.”

He tried to shake his head but her hands were still holding his face. “That can’t be true.” His voice wavered, practically begging her to admit there was another way.

“I’m sorry, but it is.”

His eyebrows furrowed in anger. “If it’s true, then we never satiate our lust! We are not rabid animals lacking forethought! If you knew this would happen, you should have warned me. I don’t want to become more of a monster than I already am.”

“Monster?” Her eyes narrowed. “You’reundead, Thomas. Youarea monster. The sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be.”

“I’ll never accept it! All the thoughts and feelings that made me human are still intact. I still feel guilt, fear, anger, and love. I still have my memories, my logic, and my morality. Do you?”

She grabbed the front of his neck with one hand while kicking his legs out from under him with her foot. She slammed him down onto his back with enough force to rattle the furniture in the farmhouse while keeping a vice grip on his throat.

If he’d needed air to survive, he wouldn’t have been able to get any. He automatically tried to pry her hand off his neck even though experience told him it was futile. Glaring, she shook him back and forth a couple of times against the floor, the way a dog might shake a rabbit in its mouth to kill it. Pain shot up and down his spine. Fearing a broken neck, he put his hands down at his sides and forced himself to lie passively. After his first escape attempt, she’d broken the bones in his lower arm, and after the second, she’d broken several of the bones in his right foot. Both times, he’d healed a few minutes after feeding the following day. But he wasn’t sure if he could recover from a broken neck.

She leaned down so their faces were less than a foot apart and said through clenched teeth, “Don’t you dare speak to me of guilt and morality. My father led his entire congregation with sermon after sermon about guilt and morality. Endless hours of preaching and countless whippings filled me with enough guilt and morality to last several lifetimes. He could speak for hours about the way a dutiful wife should behave with obedience and respect for her husband. Then he wed me to amonsterfor a hunk of meat.”

Her fingernails dug into his skin.

“Obeying and respecting my husband turned me into atruemonster for eleven long years. Joseph taught me his version of morality through starvation and countless beatings, and his morality was in direct opposition to my father’s. Joseph wanted me to enjoy killing.”

She broke eye contact for the first time since slamming Thomas to the floor, and her fingers on his neck loosened as she continued. “He forced me to do unspeakable things. Things I can’t…” Her eyes snapped back to his. “The blood of children before the age of maturity is the most exquisite thing I’ve ever tasted. You’ll never be forced to endure the guilt of tasting it.”

Eyes wide with horror, Thomas shook his head.

She gave him a much lighter shake than the previous one. “Neverspeak to me of guilt and morality as if I have none. I am teaching you how to survive in a manner that won’t make you want to step into the sunlight. Yes, we have to kill to survive, but we kill as little as possible and we choose our victims carefully.”

Pity, guilt, gratitude, and anger all swirled inside Thomas’ chest. Knowing how much she’d suffered and knowing that she’d treated him with less cruelty than she’d endured made her behavioralmostforgivable.

He tried to speak the words “I’m sorry,” but nothing intelligible came out of his constricted throat.

After nodding curtly, she let go of his neck and stood up. She held a hand out to help him up and he knew better than to refuse. Once he was standing, he put a hand on his throat to assess the damage. His windpipe was intact. He was able to turn his head from side to side even though the movement caused jolts of pain to travel down his neck, and he was able to pull some unnecessary air into his lungs. Since he’d just fed, he knew he’d be fully healed in less than five minutes.

She pointed to his pants that had fallen to his ankles when he stood. “Either find a belt, or see if the man has a pair of pants that will fit you while I search the house for valuables.”

His mind racing, Thomas kicked his pants all the way off and searched the dead man’s closet. Even if Polly was treated horribly in life, that didn’t excuse the way she was treating him. If Thomas had accidentally turned Jeffrey into one of the undead instead of killing him, he wouldn’t have been cruel. Thomas would have treated him with love and given him comfort. He would have guided the younger man to learn how to survive through kindness and compassion instead of anger and pain. Or at least he hoped that would be the case. But then he remembered the way he’d treated Jeffrey the one time the younger man had dared to challenge him by bringing up their future. Wincing at the painful memory, Thomas pulled out the only decent pair of trousers he could find and tried them on. They were a tad big, but they would stay up.

Polly was digging through the dead woman’s hope chest across the room. Thomas took a moment to watch her. Maybe he’d been going about things the wrong way. As long as he didn’t challenge her authority, she had shown him kindness and comfort. When Jeffrey or Sarah wanted something from him, they’d begged, teased, bribed, and cajoled him until he gave in. And though it made his stomach turn, he guessed that the same behavior from him would go a lot further toward getting him what he wanted from Polly than arguing or trying to escape had. There had to be a way to drink human blood without killing, and if he played the part Polly wanted him to play, he was certain he could eventually cajole her into letting him try.

Taking a deep breath, he croaked out her name through his sore throat.

She turned to him with narrowed eyes.

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