Chapter 4: An Unholy Communion

Chapter 4: An Unholy Communion

Mateo’s words echoed in the suffocating silence long after he’d hung up. The quickening is upon us. She is waking up. The phone call had offered no comfort, only a terrifying validation of his nightmare. Leo was left alone in the dusty hallway, the scratching inside his ribs a constant, maddening rhythm, a metronome counting down to some unseen horror.

He didn't sleep. He couldn't. He paced the creaking floors of the house, a prisoner in his grandfather's tomb and his own body. With every passing hour, the cold knot in his gut began to change. It was no longer a passive weight. It began to writhe, a slow, grinding torment that started deep in his abdomen and radiated outwards, setting every nerve ending on fire.

By midday, the pain was a constant, gnawing presence. By sunset, it had become an unbearable, all-consuming agony. It felt as though the creature inside him was starving, and in its desperation, had begun to devour him from within. The scratching intensified, a frantic, desperate scraping against bone. It was trying to get out. Or maybe, it was trying to hollow him out to make more room.

He doubled over the kitchen table, sweat pasting his shirt to his back, a low groan caught in his throat. The thawed venison on the counter, which had seemed so appealing the night before, now mocked him with its deadness. He knew, with a certainty that defied logic, that it wasn't what the creature wanted. Eating it would be like trying to quench a raging fire with a mouthful of sand.

His desperation finally overpowered his pride and fear. He stumbled back to the phone, his fingers fumbling with the rotary dial, the plastic cool against his feverish skin. He prayed his great-uncle would answer.

The phone crackled to life after two rings. "What?" Mateo's voice was sharp, impatient.

"It's Leo," he gasped, his voice strained. "The pain… it's… I think it's killing me."

"It is," Mateo said, his tone devoid of sympathy. "She's hungry. The Old Blood demands its due."

"I tried… meat," Leo choked out, gesturing vaguely at the steak. "It's not working."

A dry, weary sigh whispered through the receiver. "Of course not, you city fool. It's not the flesh it craves. A snake can eat a rat. A wolf can eat a deer. She is not a creature of this earth. She doesn't eat, boy. She drinks."

"Drinks what?" Leo pleaded, his knuckles white as he gripped the phone. "Water? Blood?"

"No," Mateo rasped, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that made the hair on Leo's arms stand up. "She drinks the spark. The light. The thing that separates a living heart from a cold stone. La esencia. The life essence."

The words hung in the air, nonsensical and horrifying. Life essence. It was the stuff of fantasy novels and cheap horror movies. But the grinding pain in his gut, the feeling of being eaten alive, told him it was true.

"What do I do?" Leo's voice was a bare whisper. "What do you want me to do?"

"It's not what I want. It's what she needs," Mateo corrected him sharply. "Go outside. The desert is full of life. Small lives, but life nonetheless. Find something that still has a pulse. Something warm. The rest… she will teach you. She will guide your hands."

The line went dead.

Leo stood frozen, the receiver still pressed to his ear. The command was monstrous. A violation of everything he was. He was an architect, a creator of shelters, not a destroyer of life. Disgust and rebellion warred with the tidal wave of agony racking his body. He wouldn't do it. He would rather die.

But the pain answered for him. It spiked, a white-hot poker twisting in his intestines, and he collapsed to the floor, a scream tearing from his throat. The world dissolved into a red-tinged haze of pure torment. He was dying. This was it. The creature would kill him and then starve in his corpse.

Through the agony, a new sensation pushed its way into his consciousness. A pull. It was a faint but insistent tug, originating from the knot in his stomach, leading him, guiding him. It was the creature's will, a desperate, silent command. Outside. Find it. Now.

His body, no longer his own, began to move. He crawled on his hands and knees, his vision swimming, every movement an ordeal. He pushed open the back door and dragged himself out into the overgrown yard.

Night had fallen. The moon, now gibbous and fat, bathed the yard in a sickly, silver light. Weeds grew waist-high, and the skeletal remains of his grandmother’s rose bushes clawed at his clothes. The air was cool, but he was burning from the inside out. The pulling sensation grew stronger, drawing him toward the dilapidated fence line at the edge of the property.

And then he heard it. A faint, high-pitched squeal of distress.

Guided by the sound and the creature’s urgent pull, he crawled through the weeds until he found the source. A desert cottontail, its leg hopelessly tangled in a forgotten length of rusty baling wire. It was exhausted from its struggle, its dark eyes wide with terror and pain. Its chest heaved with shallow, frantic breaths, its tiny heart hammering away the last few moments of its life. It was dying.

Leo stared at it, his human mind recoiling in pity and horror. His passenger, however, pulsed with a triumphant, ravenous joy.

This one, it seemed to whisper in a language made of pure instinct. Warm. Alive. Drink.

The pain in his gut reached a crescendo, a final, unbearable ultimatum. It was a choice between his own life and this small, suffering creature’s. And in that moment, wracked with an agony that obliterated all morality, it was no choice at all.

Sobbing, his body trembling uncontrollably, he reached out a shaking hand. "I'm sorry," he whispered, the words catching in his throat.

The moment his fingers brushed against the rabbit's soft fur, a connection was forged. It was like closing a circuit. A jolt, powerful and electric, shot up his arm. He felt the rabbit’s terror, its pain, its frantic, desperate will to live. He felt its life force as a tangible thing—a warm, vibrating energy.

And then, he felt the siphon open.

The warmth began to drain from the rabbit, flowing out of it and into his hand, a current of pure vitality that traveled up his arm and poured directly into the screaming void in his stomach. The creature within him drank it in, a parched thing finding an oasis. The rabbit’s struggles weakened, its panicked squeals fading to a faint whimper. Its body went limp, its terrified eyes glazing over with a dull finality.

The instant the rabbit’s life was extinguished, the pain inside Leo vanished.

It didn't just fade. It was annihilated, erased in a single, explosive moment. In its place, a wave of sublime, ecstatic pleasure crashed over him. It was a golden, shimmering warmth that flooded every cell of his being, a symphony of sensation that lit up every nerve. It was more intense than any drug, more profound than any orgasm, a feeling of pure, unadulterated bliss. The universe contracted to a single point of absolute satisfaction.

He collapsed backward into the dirt, gasping. The dead rabbit lay by the fence, a small, still sacrifice. The moonlight seemed brighter, the air tasted sweeter. The weight in his gut was still there, but it was no longer a cold, agonizing knot. It was a warm, purring, sated thing, curled up contentedly in the depths of his being.

Leo looked at his own hand, half-expecting it to be glowing. It was just a hand, covered in dirt and trembling slightly. But it was not the same hand that had reached out in desperation. It was the hand of a killer. A conduit.

He had crossed a line. He had fed the monster inside him, and it had rewarded him with a taste of heaven. And the most terrifying part, the secret he would carry in the silence of his soul, was that he had loved it.