Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“Kyle?” calls Elias from the bed, confused.
“Sorry.” His gaze lingers in the backyard for a while longer before turning back to the bed. “Thought I saw—”
He stops.
Someone stands at the bedroom door.
Something.
Very tall, maybe eight feet. Completely naked, with skin that is absolutely, alarmingly white, smooth in places, chalky and rough in others, like white clay and porcelain, with only the slightest reprieve from the whiteness at his thin, pale, pinkish lips. Long, straight, jet black hair running down either side of his gaunt face, over his broad shoulders, to his slender waist, the texture appearing more like wire than human hair. His eyes are needles of smoky grey, eyelashes barely visible, eyebrows thin and straight. There is very little muscular definition to his body, chest flat, nearly concave, his arms reedy and long.
He stands there perfectly motionless, as if painted against the bedroom door at his back, which is still closed. Did it ever open? Did he teleport in here, or enter so quietly, neither Elias nor Kyle noticed?
“Uh, Kyle?” asks Elias again, still bound to the bed, limbs stretched as far as limbs go, clueless.
“Elias, don’t move.”
Elias turns his head to the left, to the right. “That a joke?”
The very second Kyle makes a move for the bed, the figure appears at the end of it without seeming to have taken a single step. With a cold, detached expression, he stares down at Elias’s completely exposed body.
And his nipple, which still bleeds.
“Who are you?” demands Kyle, though for as confident as he tries to be, his voice is swallowed in a pool of dread.
It’s only now Elias stirs. “Wait, what? Someone’s there?”
From the figure, Kyle senses absolutely nothing at all with his Reach, as if he doesn’t exist, made of literally nothing, not even air, a complete vacuum. “Who are you?” Kyle repeats, harder.
It is with clarity and an unexpectedly deep, masculine tone that the figure answers: “Lazarus.”
Kyle watches Lazarus stare at the beads of blood gleaming where Elias was bitten. Lazarus doesn’t seem the least concerned with the human on the bed, only the blood, nothing else in the room existing, not even the air within it.
Kyle can’t help the panic bubbling up inside of him. It’s compounded now with Elias’s, who starts tugging with distress on his restraints, shouting, “Kyle?? The fuck’s going on? Who’s there? C’mon, you’re freaking me out.” But the restraints still have no give—just as he so helpfully requested when he was in the mood. It’s safe to say he is no longer in that mood.
If Lazarus is what Kyle suspects him to be, and if not being able to sense anything with his Reach is any indication, Lazarus cannot be reasoned with like a human. He is far from human.
So it’s with wild courage that Kyle shouts, “He is mine!”
Lazarus turns his grey, needle eyes upon Kyle. “That so?”
Kyle is taken aback by his surprisingly human, casual tone. It causes Kyle to respond similarly. “Well, yeah. He’s mine.”
Lazarus frowns, then turns to the bed again, to the sight of blood, as if it exists by itself without the accompaniment of the human—of Elias, who has grown entirely still himself, breath held, listening. Lazarus moves his head, and all his hair shifts like a curtain of razor-thin cables, not a single tangle in them.
“You don’t plan to drink it all?” asks Lazarus. “There is so much left in its veins. I can still hear its heart pumping.”
“K-Kyle …” whimpers Elias.
Before Kyle can mutter a word, Lazarus is at the other side of the bed, stretched over it, his mouth latched upon Elias. The room fills with Elias’s shouts, a mixture of pain and terror. The next second, Lazarus is on top of Elias, creating a new wound at his chest, biting with such an opened mouth, Kyle literally sees his teeth coated in blood. Then Lazarus swoops to Elias’s neck, blood still running from the nipple, the chest, and now from the creature’s thin, greedy lips as he laps up blood.
It happens so fast, the moment Kyle shouts out and lunges at Elias, Lazarus has flown from the bed and now stands nearly face-to-face with a completely stunned Kyle, towering over him with shocking strength and unsettling focus, his odd, grey needle eyes bearing down, streaks of red on his lips and chin. “You’re wasting time playing games with your dinner. His blood is good quality.”
“K-Kyle, untie me, please,” begs Elias, “untie—”
“He’s … not just my … d-dinner.” Kyle’s back is against the window and its curtains. “I keep him alive. He lives with me.”
“So it’s your pet?” asks Lazarus, sounding annoyed.
“I’m no fucking pet!” cries Elias over the rattling noise of pulling against his overly tight binds again, barely budging, as if he has any hope of overpowering them.
“You’re starving yourself needlessly,” states Lazarus as he drinks in the sight of Kyle from head to toe. “Look at you. As squishy as a centipede. Weak. Frail. Slow. You can’t even fight me off properly. Why do you do this to yourself?”