Stefan’s Diaries: The Craving Chapter 1

I picked out a nerve centrebeat, a single tone, in the go on blank.The other noises of the city faded into the background as this one called to me. She had wandered absent from her sponsors and left the well-worn paths.The sun had just set all over interchange Park, where Id exiled myself since arriving in New York City fourteen long days ago. The colours in this expanse of wilderness were softening, sliding toward one another, shadows blurring with the involvements that made them. The oranges and trench blues of the sky morphed into an inky black, while the muddy ground faint to a velvety sienna.Around me, most of the world was compose, paused in the lead that comes at the end of day when the guards change Humans and their daylight companions charter their doors and creatures of the night like myself come out to hunt.With the ring Katherine gave me I abide walk in the daylight like whatever normal, living human. plainly as its been since the beginning of time, its ea sier for vampires to hunt during the uncertain hours when day slowly becomes night. evenfall confuses those who arent equipped with the eyes and ears of a nocturnal predator.The heartbeat I forthwith pursued began to sound quieter . . . its owner was getting away. Desperate, I took off, forcing my body to unravel quickly, my feet to push off from the ground. I was weak from lack of feeding, and it was affecting my susceptibility to hunt. Added to that, these woods werent familiar to me. The plants and vines were as alien as the people on the cobbled streets a quarter mile away.But a hunter transplanted is still a hunter. I leaped over a twiggy, stunted bush and avoided an glacial stream, devoid of the lazy catfish I used to watch as a child, until my foot slipped on mossy stone and I crashed finished the underbrush, my chase growing far louder than I intended.The bearer of the heart I followed heard and knew her death was close. Now that she was alone and aware of her plight, she began to run in earnest.What a spectacle I must have made dark hairsbreadth askew, skin as pale as a corpse, eyes get-go to redden as the vampire in me came out. Running and leaping through and through the woods like a wild man, dressed in the finery Lexi, my friend in New Orleans, had given me, the white silk shirt now snap at the sleeves.She picked up upper berth. But I wasnt going to lose her.My fatality for blood became an ache so strong that I couldnt contain myself any longer. A sweet pain bloomed along my jaw and my fangs came out. The blood in my face grew hot as I underwent the change. My senses expanded as my forcefulness took over, sapping my last bit of vampiric strength.I leaped, moving at a speed beyond human and animal. With that instinct all living creatures have, the unfortunate thing felt death closing in and began to panic, scrambling for safety under the trees. Her heart pounded out of control lumber thump thump thump thump thump.The tiny human part o f me might have regretted what I was virtually to do, but the vampire in me needed the blood.With a final jump, I caught my prey a large, greedy squirrel whod left her pack to scavenge for redundant food. Time slowed as I descended, ripped her neck aside, and sank my teeth into her flesh, draining her life into me one drop at a time.Id eaten squirrels as a human, which lessen my guilt marginally. Back home in Mystic Falls, my brother and I would hunt in the tangled woods that surrounded our estate. Though squirrels were poor eating for most of the year, they were fat and tasted like nuts in the fall. Squirrel blood, however, was no such feast it was rank and unpleasant. It was nourishment, nothing more and barely that. I forced myself to keep drinking. It was a tease, a reminder of the intoxicating gas that runs in a humans veins.But from the moment Damon ended Callies life, I had blaspheme off humans forever. I would neer kill, never feed from, and never love another human . I could only bring them pain and death, even if I didnt mean to. Thats what life as a vampire meant. Thats what life with this new, vengeful Damon as my brother meant.An owl hooted in the elm that towered over my head. A chipmunk skittered past my feet. My shoulders slumped as I laid the poor squirrel overthrow on the ground. So little blood remained in its body that the suffer didnt leak, the animals legs already growing stiff with rigor mortis. I wiped the traces of blood and fur from my face and headed deeper into the park, alone with my thoughts while a city of nearly a million people buzzed close to me.Since Id sneaked off the train two weeks earlier, Id been sleeping in the middle of the park in what was essentially a cave. Id interpreted to marking a concrete slab with the passing of each day. Otherwise moments immingle together, meaningless, and empty. Next to the cave was a fenced-in area where construction men had self-possessed the useful remains of a village they had razed to make key Park, as well as the architectural bric-a-brac they intended to barge in carved fountains, baseless statues, lintels, thresholds, and even gravestones.I pushed past a blunt branch Novembers chill had robbed nearly every tree of its leaves and sniffed the air. It would rain soon. I knew that both from living in plantation country and from the monster senses that ever gave me a thousand different pieces of information about the world around me.And then the breeze changed direction, and brought with it the teasing, cloying scent of rust. there it was again. A painful, tinny tang.The smell of blood. Human blood.I stepped into the clearing, my breath coming rapidly. The thick foetor of iron was everywhere, filling the hollow with an almost palpable fog. I scanned the area.There was the cave where I spent my tortured nights, tossing and turning and waiting for dawn. sound outside it was a jumble of beams and doors stolen from knocked-down houses and desec rated graves. Farther in the distance there were the glowing white statues and fountains installed around the park.And then I apothegm it. At the base of a statue of a regal prince was the body of a young woman, her white ball gown slowly turning a bloody red.