A Bloodless Heart

A Story by N E. Chase

How can I feel this ache when there is no blood in my heart

How can this heart ache if there is no blood pumping through it to give it life? How is it that I feel such hot searing pain, where there should be a cold numbness in my chest? There is no blood, only poison pulsing of it's own volition. Icy, evil, morbid, poison.

My blood was taken from me at the young age of 37. To most, 37 would seem anything but young, but when you've existed for longer than two centuries, 37 is a ripe, supple age. A fine wine. Young enough that beauty has not aged fully to silver, and the spirit has not yet slowed to a crawl. Yet aged enough to have shed the innocence and naivety of childhood, to have experienced both love and loss, to have knowledge enough of this ache to realize it shouldn't be a possibility for my still heart to feel. But it is there.

I wonder if the creature who took that life from me, so long ago, felt this same ache in his veins. But how could he have? How could he have felt such a burning, overcoming fire, and then left it to fizzle out? Is that why he went? To rid himself of that pain? But it is real... So very real. More than the emptiness that consumes those of us who were made to be damned. Wouldn't pain be preferable to that nothingness inside?

I look at this man's face, so similar to my creator, and I wonder how I could ever leave his side, with no word, no knowledge of what I had made him to become. How could I abandon his lifeless form as the blood, which only moments before, rushed through his veins with lustful passion, transformed to the poisoned ice that would take him through the rest of his existence?

I mourn for him, even as his life force now flows through me, vibrant as the brightest star, yet temporary as a crashing wave. I mourn for the blue light of his eyes, for the heated glow of his reddened cheeks, the plump pink of his kiss swollen lips, smiling blissfully as I took him with me.

He felt no pain but the pinch of my teeth, no more than a love bite against his throat. He will never again feel the pain of the living, just as I believed I never again would. Yet I do. And when the time comes that he bow down to this tyrant which enslaves all damned souls; when that day comes, perhaps he too will remember.