Chapter 88

A light touch to my forehead wiped away the beads of perspiration that patterned my skin, drifting into my hair and tenderly stroked away my nightmares. For a moment, I was home again; another place, another person. It was a brief blissful grasp of a time that no longer existed, if it had ever existed at all. My slumber had been fathoms deep as if ghostly arms had dragged me under and held me there, far, far away from the surface and I simply did not have the energy to fight them. The blood that should have satiated my hunger had, in fact, exhausted me, my body decimated by four nights of incessant gorging on my victims, never feeling satisfied, never feeling that it was enough to make me finally stop. I could have gone on and on and the knowledge of that nestled uncomfortably in the back of my mind, like the growing, pulsating egg sack of a spider that you might find tucked away in the darkest recesses of your attic. I had, during brief interludes, been able to scratch at the upper li