Pearl has no idea what she was thinking, if she was ever thinking at all. She had no plan, no set course of action -- only the burning in her bones to get away, and the one resounding thought: I can't do this anymore.
She couldn't keep feeding on the blood of the living. The guilt had climbed higher and higher up, until at its peak it eclipsed the need for survival -- and so she ran, without a thought as to where or how she would end up.
The answer being: clutching her stomach on the cold cement sidewalk, consumed by a vertigo too intense to even keep her eyes open.
A week since she's last fed, and the symptoms are startlingly human: dizzy, muscles weak, stomach caving into itself in an anguished plea for help. What was she thinking? She doesn't know what she was thinking. Of course she couldn't go forever without feeding. Maybe at the time it seemed a worthy sacrifice -- her life, if it can be called that, for those of the innocence. Direct sunlight, a stake to the heart, sure, but can vampires die of starvation? You never see it in movies or books, but then, it would make for less than enthralling fiction. Utterly anticlimactic. Meaningless. Pitiful.
Pearl has no idea what she was thinking.
She's terrified. That same cold fear that creeps through her body like a thousand spider-legs, like this is a month ago and she's lying in a pool of her own blood in the middle of the road. Her eyelids are too heavy to fight against, and every time they close she is helpless to do a thing beyond praying it won't be the last. You can't even call this living, but she doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to die. She doesn't want--
"Are you okay?"
All at once Pearl's eyes fly open, vision too blurry to make out the figure in the dark -- but that doesn't matter, not one bit, because God, she can smell her. Her stomach lurches so violently it threatens to leap through her throat, and she swallows against the wave of saliva flooding her mouth. This is her chance, this has to be destiny, just like that joke-- that stupid joke her father would always tell where God sends the drowning man a helicopter and then asks him, you unbelievable imbecile, why didn't you climb inside.
She has to feed. She has to she has to.
But she can't move a muscle.
A strangled, anguished wail falls from her lips, as Pearl's nails dig helplessly into her hollowed stomach.
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Pearl has no idea what she was thinking, if she was ever thinking at all. She had no plan, no set course of action -- only the burning in her bones to get away, and the one resounding thought: I can't do this anymore.
She couldn't keep feeding on the blood of the living. The guilt had climbed higher and higher up, until at its peak it eclipsed the need for survival -- and so she ran, without a thought as to where or how she would end up.
The answer being: clutching her stomach on the cold cement sidewalk, consumed by a vertigo too intense to even keep her eyes open.
A week since she's last fed, and the symptoms are startlingly human: dizzy, muscles weak, stomach caving into itself in an anguished plea for help. What was she thinking? She doesn't know what she was thinking. Of course she couldn't go forever without feeding. Maybe at the time it seemed a worthy sacrifice -- her life, if it can be called that, for those of the innocence. Direct sunlight, a stake to the heart, sure, but can vampires die of starvation? You never see it in movies or books, but then, it would make for less than enthralling fiction. Utterly anticlimactic. Meaningless. Pitiful.
Pearl has no idea what she was thinking.
She's terrified. That same cold fear that creeps through her body like a thousand spider-legs, like this is a month ago and she's lying in a pool of her own blood in the middle of the road. Her eyelids are too heavy to fight against, and every time they close she is helpless to do a thing beyond praying it won't be the last. You can't even call this living, but she doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to die. She doesn't want--
"Are you okay?"
All at once Pearl's eyes fly open, vision too blurry to make out the figure in the dark -- but that doesn't matter, not one bit, because God, she can smell her. Her stomach lurches so violently it threatens to leap through her throat, and she swallows against the wave of saliva flooding her mouth. This is her chance, this has to be destiny, just like that joke-- that stupid joke her father would always tell where God sends the drowning man a helicopter and then asks him, you unbelievable imbecile, why didn't you climb inside.
She has to feed. She has to she has to.
But she can't move a muscle.
A strangled, anguished wail falls from her lips, as Pearl's nails dig helplessly into her hollowed stomach.