I waited
Even after the scent of human blood vanished on the wind, I did not move. I did not rise, nor scream again. I simply sat—curled against the stone, as if proximity to the earth might anchor me to it.
Hunger was no longer a dull throb. It had become a structure—a scaffolding inside my body, replacing bone and marrow with want. It was impossible to distinguish myself from it.
I wasn't Sylvain, I wasn't anything. I was thirst, shaped like a man.
But I had not fed.
And for that, I was still here.
---
Time passed, though I could not tell how much. The sun must have risen and fallen, and perhaps risen again. I could not see it, but I felt its rhythms in the soft creaks of the vineyard above—the slow stretch and settle of root and wood and stone. Life continued, and I remained buried beneath it.
Then I heard it.
A sound—brief, sharp.
Not imagined.
The soft shuffle of leaves. The tremble of something small moving across the vineyard floor.
I opened my eyes.
The scent was different this time. No sweetness. No memory of human warmth. It was wilder, gamier, less refined—but unmistakably blood. Real, present, near.
It did not ignite me as before. It stirred me like the memory of a candle's heat—familiar, faint, almost tolerable.
I moved...carefully.....
My limbs ached from stillness, though they could not decay. I climbed the steps with unnatural silence, slid the cellar hatch open just enough to peer through.
Light filtered in between vines, dappled and golden. The air was thick with early summer—warm stone, leaves, something ripening. And just beneath it, threading everything together like a hidden melody: the scent of wounded animal blood.
I emerged without thought. My body moved as if remembering a dance I had never learned.
It didn't take long to find it.
A fox, small and lean, had caught its foreleg in one of the old iron traps buried near the vineyard's edge. Rusted steel teeth clamped cruelly around the limb, blood seeping into the grass below. Its fur, once flame-colored, was matted with dust and red.
It was trying not to scream.
But its eyes saw me.
And in them, no comprehension—only fear. The instinctual, ancestral terror of a predator's presence.
I froze.
It wasn't human.
That mattered, didn't it?
But it was alive, the blood inside it moved. It called to me in pulses, a muted echo of the temptation I had endured days before.
I knelt.
The fox whimpered.
I hesitated—not because I feared what I would do, but because I feared how easily I might do it.
One moment. One decision. I could drink.
Just enough. Just to silence the noise in my throat, in my skull. Just to quiet the fire before it consumed me.
I reached forward.
My fingers grazed the fox's side, and it shivered beneath them.
And then, with a precision that made me sick, I bit.
Its death was swift. Its blood, hot and bright, poured into my mouth like truth. And with it came a stunning silence. Not peace—never that—but a lessening of the storm. My thoughts unknotted, my vision cleared.
The thirst did not vanish.
But it stepped back.
My hands trembled as I pulled away. My mouth—so recently a weapon—felt foreign again.
The fox lay still in my lap.
Its weight was almost nothing.
I pressed my forehead to the top of its head and whispered, "Je suis désolé."
The apology felt hollow. What comfort was language to the dead?
I sat there for a long while, cradling the lifeless thing. The sun passed above in slow arcs, glancing off the leaves and pressing warm fingers onto the back of my neck. For the first time since waking in this new skin, I did not feel on the verge of ruin. I felt dulled, muted—but no longer monstrous.
Or perhaps I had simply crossed the threshold, and this—this numbness—was the shape of the monster's peace.
Eventually, I stood.
The trap had rusted into the soil. I pried it loose and hurled it down the slope with more force than I intended. It hit stone with a vicious clang, then vanished into underbrush.
I dug a shallow grave with my hands. The earth was warm and fragrant. I placed the fox inside, smoothing its fur once before covering it.
When I finished, I sat beside the mound and watched the breeze play through the vines.
I had fed.
Not as they wanted me to. Not as the hunger screamed for.
But I had fed—and survived.
It was not redemption.
It was a beginning.
---
That night, I returned to the cellar. I did not shut the hatch. I left it ajar, letting the air drift in. I could hear insects in the vineyard. A lizard skittering under stone. The world still moved.
And for the first time, I did not feel entirely cut off from it.
I curled in the corner.
Sleep, or something like it, took me.
But even in that silence, I knew: the fox's blood had bought me time, not salvation. The thirst would return. And next time, it might not be a fox that crossed my path.
But I would remember this.
That restraint was possible.
That mercy, however thin, could still exist in a body like mine.
Even if it cost me everything.