Halloween

In honour of the holiday, I’m offering you all an exclusive look at my newest story, Blood Lovers. Happy Hallowe’en, everyone, and happy NaNoEve!

*

Sharp pain spiked up his arm.

The darkness of the city below him travelled up, the storm still howling around him. The boy’s dripping black hair blew in his face, obscuring his view of his forearm.

Blood dripped down from his hand, lost in the rain as it splattered on the pavement a dozen storeys below. He watched the blood in the flash of lightning that streaked through the sky. Water poured down his face, drenching his black clothes, making them stick to his skin. The black-haired boy raised the blade again, sticking the corner of it into his pale skin.

He pulled it slowly down his arm, closing his eyes and moaning in pain and pleasure as the feeling tore up his arm, making the skin between his shoulder blades clammy as the muscles cramped. He shivered as he pulled the blade from his skin, looking at the clear line joining the others working their ways down his arm and leaking black blood in the darkness.

“You’re worthless, Tamir,” his memory called, forcing tears from his eyes as he licked at the blood, willing the rain to make him bleed out, to make his life end. His head started to spin. “You’ll never be anything. You should just go jump off a building and put us all out of our misery.”

“You’re a pathetic excuse for a human,” the memory of his mother’s words crawled into his mind as another slit appeared in his arm, deeper than the others. “I should have had that abortion, like my mother wanted me to.”

Pain reached his brain again, and he realised that he’d cut even deeper again; he could feel the blade scraping against the bone.

“What are you doing?” a voice, kinder than the others asked, creeping into his mind as the thunder grew quieter, the wind silently plucking at his clothes, sending chills up his back. “You silly boy. Come with me.”

“No,” he murmured, holding the blade in his suddenly weak left hand, trying to slice into his right arm again. “No, let me die, please… let me die…”

Darkness crowded in on him, making him fall from the railing. There was nothing but open air between him and the ground now. Twelve storeys of open air, and the blood and rain streaking over his body, the blade slicing deep into his thigh as he fell…

There was a sound like flapping, dragging his body back, back to the safety of the building. He collapsed, lying, dying, on the floor. The older man, silver-haired and serious-looking, licked at the blood on the boy’s bleeding arm, moaning in pleasure as the younger boy’s taste danced on his tongue. A gel-like substance from his lips soothed the cuts and stopped the bleeding.

But blood still pooled with the rain on the dry floor. After a second, the older man noticed the gash in the boy’s thigh.

“You silly boy,” the old man murmured again, then hesitated. Slowly, watching the boy’s unconscious face, he licked the blood from the gash.

Forgetting about the blood the boy had already lost, the silver-haired man licked at the wound, drawing still more blood from him. After a few minutes, he pressed his lips to the gash. What had been an open sore was now sealed shut with the gel from his skin, holding what remained of the boy’s blood in his body.