I Hunted a Man for His Blood and Discovered He Was the Boy I Used to Love

The rain had started again, a thin mist that clung to the streetlights like breath on glass. Penny stood across from the pub, her back pressed to the brick wall of a closed bakery, watching the door. She had been there for forty-three minutes. She knew because she had counted them, the way she counted everything now—heartbeats she didn’t have, steps she didn’t need to take, time she couldn’t feel passing.

The city moved around her like a living thing, slow and wet and unaware. A couple stumbled out of the pub, laughing too loud. A man in a navy coat lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. A woman in heels clicked past, her perfume lingering like a bruise. Penny watched them all with the same flat attention, the same hollow curiosity she’d felt for years. She didn’t hunger anymore, not in the way she had at first. Feeding was just something she did, like breathing had been once—automatic, necessary, and entirely without joy.

Then he came out.

He was alone. No umbrella. His hair was dark and plastered to his forehead, and he paused just outside the door to pull the collar of his coat up, as if that would help. He didn’t look at anyone. He didn’t check his phone. He just started walking, not fast, not slow—like someone who didn’t care if he got wet, or if he got anywhere at all.

Penny followed.

She didn’t know why. Not really. There were easier targets. A man farther back, drunker, slower. A woman arguing on her phone, distracted. But something in the way this one moved—shoulders drawn in, hands in pockets, head down like he was walking through a memory—made her step off the curb and trail him across the street.

He turned into an alley. Not a smart thing to do, but not stupid either. Just quiet. The kind of place people went when they didn’t want to be seen crying or puking or calling someone they shouldn’t. Penny slipped into the shadows behind him, silent. She could hear his heartbeat—steady, not racing. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t anything.

She moved fast. Not a blur, not like in movies. Just faster than he could react. One hand over his mouth, the other gripping the back of his neck. He stiffened, but didn’t struggle. She pressed him against the wall, her body cold against his warmth, and sank her teeth into the soft skin just below his jaw.

The first taste was always a shock. But this—this was something else. His blood hit her tongue like a match struck in a dark room. Salt and copper and something underneath it, something that made her close her eyes and see a boy’s hand moving across paper, sketching wings. She drank deeper, not meaning to, not caring. His pulse thudded against her mouth, and she felt it between her legs, a slow, involuntary clench, like her body remembering what it was to want.

She pulled back too late. He sagged slightly, dazed, his eyes unfocused. She should have left him there. She should have wiped his memory, or at least his neck. But she didn’t. She stepped away, her lips wet, her breath unnecessary but fast anyway, and walked backwards into the dark, watching him slide down the wall until he sat on the wet pavement, staring at nothing.

Back in her apartment, she stood in the shower until the water ran cold, though she couldn’t feel it. She looked at her reflection in the fogged mirror and saw nothing. But she could still taste him. Still feel the echo of his heartbeat between her thighs. She pressed her hand there, through the towel, not to finish anything—just to feel the pressure, the ghost of warmth.

She didn’t sleep. She never did. But that night, she lay on the bed with the lights off and let the memory play over and over: his throat under her mouth, his blood on her tongue, the way he hadn’t fought. The way he hadn’t been afraid.

The way she hadn’t wanted to stop.

She hadn’t meant to take so much. Just enough to quiet the ache, to fill the hollow space that never stayed full. But the moment her teeth broke skin, something shifted. The blood wasn’t just blood. It was a flood. A rush of heat and color and sound. She saw things—no, felt them. Not visions, not exactly. Sensations. Impressions. The scratch of charcoal on paper. The smell of turpentine and rain. A boy’s knees scraped on dock wood. A girl’s laugh, high and sharp, carried off by wind.

She saw his hand, small once, holding a pencil. A bird taking shape on a page. Not a perfect bird. A clumsy one. But he kept drawing. Over and over. The same wings. The same beak. The same eye. She felt the paper soften under the pressure of his hand. She felt the frustration. The want. The need to get it right.

And then—older. A room with no windows. A lamp burning low. The same hand, now long-fingered and stained, moving faster. Not birds anymore. Streets. Faces. Her face. Not her face now, but the one she had before. The one she’d forgotten. The one with freckles and a crooked front tooth and eyes that squinted when she laughed. She hadn’t laughed in twenty years.

She pulled back, gasping. Her mouth was full of him. Her body was alive with him. She could feel his pulse in her gums, her throat, her cunt. She was wet. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. She felt it, slick and warm between her legs, like her body had remembered how to respond to something other than hunger. She pressed her thighs together, involuntary, and a low sound escaped her—half moan, half sob.

He was still against the wall. Not limp, not yet. His eyes were open, but not seeing. His mouth parted slightly. His breath came slow. She could still hear his heart. It wasn’t racing. It was steady. Like he was dreaming. Like he wanted her to stay.

She should have stopped sooner. She knew that. She’d taken too much. Not enough to kill, but enough to leave a mark. Enough to leave him dizzy. Enough to make him remember. She never did that. Never. She was careful. Clean. She took what she needed and left no trace. But this—this was different. This was a mess. This was a mistake.

She stepped back. Her legs felt strange. Heavy. Like they belonged to someone else. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and saw the smear of red. His blood. Her lipstick. She couldn’t tell the difference.

He slid down the wall slowly, his coat scraping brick. He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at her. He just sat there, knees up, head tilted back, eyes on the sky like he was waiting for something. For her to come back. For her to finish. For her to explain.

She didn’t. She turned and walked. Not fast. Not slow. Just away. Her boots were quiet on the wet pavement. The rain had stopped. The alley smelled like iron and piss and something else—something warm and human and alive. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. She could still feel him inside her. Not just the blood. The rest. The boy with the pencil. The man with the cut on his neck. The one who hadn’t flinched.

The one she hadn’t wanted to stop.

She didn’t bother with the lights. The apartment was always dark, the windows covered with heavy curtains she never opened. She dropped her coat on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, still tasting him. Still feeling the ghost of his pulse in her mouth, her throat, her cunt. She pressed her thighs together again, slower this time, deliberate. The pressure sent a shiver up her spine, not from cold—she didn’t feel that anymore—but from memory. From need.

She lay back, fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling. The memory came without invitation. His throat under her mouth. The way his skin had given way, soft and warm, like paper tearing under too much pressure. The way he had exhaled—not a gasp, not a scream, just a breath, like surrender. Like he had been waiting for it. Like he wanted it.

She closed her eyes and let it play again. The taste of him. Not just blood. Something underneath it. Something older. Charcoal and rain. The way his pulse had fluttered against her tongue, fast and then slower, like he was sinking into something. Like he was letting go. She had felt it in her whole body. Not just the feeding. The wanting. The way her hips had pressed forward without thinking, the way her thighs had tightened, the way her fingers had dug into his coat like she was holding on to something she hadn’t known she’d lost.

She sat up and pulled her shirt off, then her bra. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, the blue of veins visible beneath. She touched her breast, not gently. Her fingers were cold, but her nipple hardened anyway. She pinched it, hard, and felt the echo of it between her legs. She wasn’t pretending he was doing it. She didn’t need to. He was already there, in her mouth, in her blood, in the way her body had responded like it remembered what it was to be alive.

She unbuttoned her jeans and slid her hand inside. No underwear. She never wore it anymore. Her fingers found her clit immediately, already swollen, already wet. She didn’t take her time. She didn’t want to. She rubbed in tight, fast circles, her hips lifting off the bed, her breath coming in short, useless gasps. She came fast, her back arching, her mouth open, a sound caught in her throat that might have been his name.

After, she didn’t move. Her hand stayed where it was, fingers slick, body twitching. She stared at the dark and thought of his eyes. Not the way they’d looked in the alley—dazed, unfocused—but the way they’d looked before. Quiet. Watching. Like he saw something in her she hadn’t wanted anyone to see.

She needed to know who he was. Not just the boy with the pencil. Not just the man with the cut on his neck. She needed to know what he had done to her. Why she couldn’t stop tasting him. Why she wanted to go back. Why she wanted more.

She didn’t sleep, but she hunted. Not for blood—she fed from a woman in a parking garage two nights later, quick and clean, no memories taken, no names learned. It tasted like nothing. Like water. Like ash. She did it because she had to, not because she wanted to. What she wanted was him. The taste of him. The way his blood had sat in her mouth like a secret she hadn’t known she was keeping.

She started with the alley. She went back during the day, which she never did. The sun was weak, filtered through clouds, and she wore a hood pulled low, her skin itching beneath the fabric like it remembered what it was to burn. She found the wall where he’d sat. No blood. No sign. Just a smear of charcoal on the brick, low down, near the ground. A bird. Crude. Wing tips smudged. She stared at it until her eyes watered, though they didn’t anymore. Not really.

She walked. She didn’t know what she was looking for. A face in a crowd. A pulse that matched the one still echoing in her mouth. She passed cafés with windows fogged by steam, bookshops with shelves pressed against glass. She didn’t go in. She just looked. She looked for days. She looked until the city felt smaller, like it had folded in on itself, like it was hiding him from her.

Then she saw it. A gallery. Not a real one. Just a narrow storefront between a laundromat and a place that sold crystals and incense. The window was dusty, the lights inside dim. But the drawing was there. Charcoal on paper. A street at night. The perspective was low, like the artist had been sitting on the ground. The lines were sharp, then soft, like they’d been smudged with a thumb. There was a figure in the distance. Small. Hooded. Standing under a streetlamp that didn’t reach her face.

She knew it was the alley. Not because it looked like it, but because it felt like it. The same weight. The same silence. The same sense of something about to happen, already happening, already gone.

A card was taped to the glass. Elliott Vance. New Work. Opening Thursday.

She stared at the name until the letters stopped making sense. Elliott. She said it out loud, barely a sound. The air around her felt thinner. Her fingers twitched at her sides. She hadn’t said a name like that in years. Not a real one. Not one that belonged to someone she might have known before.

She didn’t go in. Not yet. She stood across the street, in the shadow of a bus stop, and waited. She didn’t know what for. Maybe for him to walk past the window. Maybe for the feeling in her chest to go away. It didn’t. It sat there, heavy and unfamiliar, like a second heart she didn’t know she’d grown.

She came back the next night. And the one after. She never crossed the street. She just watched. She watched until the name stopped feeling like a coincidence. Until the bird in the alley and the boy with the pencil and the man with the cut on his neck all became the same person. Until she couldn’t pretend she didn’t remember.

She did. Not everything. Just a flash. A summer. A dock. A boy with charcoal on his fingers, drawing her face in a notebook she wasn’t supposed to see. She’d laughed. He’d blushed. She’d kissed him anyway.

The bell above the door gave a thin, metallic cough when she pushed it. She had waited until the street was empty, until the sky had gone that bruised shade just before full dark. The gallery smelled like turpentine and old paper, the kind of scent that clings to the back of the throat. She stepped inside anyway.

He was there.

Not in the center of the room, not posed or waiting—just there, half-turned toward the back wall, talking to a woman with a clipboard and a red silk scarf knotted at her throat. Elliott. Same shoulders. Same way of holding his head, like he was listening to something underneath the words. He wore a dark shirt, sleeves rolled. The collar gaped just enough.

She saw the cut.

A nick, low on the left side, half-healed and pink against the tendon. Her tongue went to the roof of her mouth, automatic. She remembered the give of skin, the moment it parted, the first warm push of blood. She looked away too fast and pretended to study the nearest frame.

It was the alley again. Not the same drawing from the window—this one was closer, tighter. The view from the ground. A single shoe, a spilled bottle, the blurred edge of a coat. Her coat. She stared at it until the lines stopped being lines and became the night itself, the brick at her back, the weight of him under her mouth.

“Interested in the process?”

She turned. He was closer now. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that she could smell soap, maybe cedar, maybe just the memory of rain. His eyes were gray. Not the flat gray of overcast skies, but the kind that holds light like water in stone. He smiled—small, professional, already moving on.

She nodded. Said something. She wasn’t sure what. Her voice sounded like someone else’s, thinner, higher. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t pause. No flicker of recognition. Not even a hesitation in the way he shifted his weight, the way he tucked his hands into his pockets.

It should have been a victory. She had left no mark on him, not in the way that counted. She had taken and walked away and he had no reason to remember. That was the rule. That was the point. But the absence stung, sharp and sudden, like pressing on a bruise you didn’t know you had.

He gestured toward the back. “There’s more in the office if you want to see studies. Some of the earlier pieces are rough, but they’ve got… I don’t know. Pulse.”

She followed the direction of his hand, not because she wanted to see the studies, but because it meant he would walk ahead of her. She watched the way his hair curled against the collar of his shirt. The way the skin stretched over the knob of his spine when he turned. The cut moved with him, a tiny scab that had no idea it had been made by something not human.

He glanced back once, polite, waiting. She met his eyes and felt the phantom thud again—lower, deeper, somewhere behind the sternum. A rhythm that wasn’t hers, that hadn’t been hers in twenty years. She smiled back. Not too wide. Not too long.

He didn’t remember.

She would make him.

He leads her past a partition into a narrow corridor lined with unframed sheets. The paper is cheap, edges curling, but the marks are confident: the same alley from higher up, then from eye-level, then so close the bricks become abstract.
“Why this street?” she asks.
He shrugs, fingers tucking into pockets. “I woke up there one morning. Didn’t know how I’d got home. Sketchbook was in my coat. I drew what I could remember before it vanished.”
She stops in front of the last sheet: a drain, a cigarette butt, a single shoe. “You remember the shoe?”
“Not the shoe. The feeling of waking up with the pavement printed on my cheek. Like the city had pressed its face to mine.” He laughs, embarrassed. “Sounds dramatic.”
She hears the echo of her own teeth in his skin, the moment his pulse staggered. “It sounds honest.”
He glances at her, curiosity sharpening. “Most people ask how long charcoal takes to fix.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” he says, softer, “you’re not.”
They stand close enough that his exhale brushes her temple. She wants to lick the air he just warmed. Instead she points to a smudge shaped like a wing. “Bird?”
“Seagull. I grew up on the coast. Little harbour town—salt in the windows, boats coughing at dawn. You couldn’t not draw them.”
Her throat closes. “Name of the town?”
“Saltmere.”
The word lands like a fist to the sternum. She turns to the wall so he won’t see her fangs itch. Saltmere: the pier, the arcade shuttered every September, the boy with charcoal on his knuckles who once drew her portrait on the back of a bus ticket.
“I knew someone from there,” she manages.
He tilts his head. “We might have overlapped. What year did you leave?”
She lies automatically. “Ninety-eight.”
“Same summer I turned fifteen. I was always sketching tourists. There was this girl—” He stops, colour rising. “She had this impossible haircut, like she’d done it herself with fishing wire. She laughed at my seagulls.”
Penny remembers the blunt scissors, the mirror propped on a lobster crate, the way he’d blushed when she kissed the graphite smudge on his cheek.
He shakes off the memory. “Anyway. The alley pieces are four hundred each. The smaller studies are two.”
“I’ll take the window drawing,” she says before she can question the need. “The original.”
Surprise flickers across his face, then relief. “I’ll wrap it.”
While he disappears into the back she presses her palm to the wall, steadying herself. The paper under her fingers smells fixative and dust, but beneath that she catches the ghost of sea rot and teenage sunscreen.
He returns with the sheet slid into a cardboard sleeve. “Delivery address?”
“I’ll carry it.”
Their hands overlap on the edge. His skin is fever-warm; hers must feel like glass fresh from the freezer. He doesn’t flinch, but his pupils widen, recognition trying to surface.
“Did we—” he starts.
“No,” she says quickly, sliding a credit card between them. The name on it is fake; the numbers still work.
He runs the machine, tore the receipt, hesitates. “I’m hanging new work next week. Larger pieces. If you want—”
“I’ll come back,” she promises, voice low, already tasting the next time.
Outside, the night is full of salt and diesel. She walks until the gallery light is a postage stamp behind her, then unwraps the drawing just enough to press her thumb to the charcoal bird. It smears, transfers to her skin: a wing beat printed on a body that no longer has a heartbeat. She licks the mark, half expecting it to taste of him. It does—iron, rain, the faint metallic echo of his blood. She closes her eyes, and for a moment the pier is under her feet again, the boy’s mouth warm against hers, the future still unwritten.

The intercom buzzes at nine-thirty. She has been standing in the kitchen since dusk, counting heartbeats she doesn’t have.
“Fourth floor,” she says into the plastic speaker, and releases the door without waiting for an answer.

When it opens he’s holding the wrapped rectangle against his chest, rain freckling the kraft paper. His hair is wet at the temples; one drop clings to the cut on his neck, pink now, almost healed.
She steps aside. “You could have couriered it.”
“I was passing,” he lies. The paper crinkles as he leans it against the wall. His eyes travel the length of the corridor: white walls, no photographs, no coats on the hooks. A place no one really lives.

“Drink?” she asks.
“Sure.”

In the kitchen she pours whiskey she bought this afternoon for the smell—peat, grain, the memory of being able to get drunk. She hands him the glass; their fingers overlap again. The warmth shoots up her arm like a drug. She watches the small tendon in his wrist shift when he lifts it to his mouth, the artery fluttering just beneath the skin. Thump-thump, a tempo she could set a watch to. She grips the counter so the granite edge bites.

He swirls the liquor. “I haven’t painted in three weeks,” he says. “I open my sketchbook and it’s… static. Like the graphite’s heavier than my hand.” He laughs, but it’s thin. “Maybe I’m just tired.”
She knows the taste of that fatigue: iron-depleted, dream-slow, the after-effect of her feeding. She should apologize, but the words would sound like confession.

Instead she asks, “What used to start you?”
“Walking. Rain. Sometimes a voice I half-recognize.” His gaze flicks to her, then away. “Lately I keep dreaming of birds trapped inside the flat. I wake up with feathers in my mouth.”

She imagines the hollow bones, the downy softness, the way his pulse would stutter if she pressed her tongue there now. Her fangs itch, a microscopic extension she clamps back.
He sets the glass down, unfinished. “I should go.”
“Stay,” she hears herself say. The word hangs, naked.

Silence thickens. She can hear the whiskey sliding back down the sides of the tumbler, the wet click of his swallow. He shifts his weight; the floorboard sighs. Every ordinary sound is amplified, unbearable.

He rubs his thumb across his opposite wrist, unconscious. “Do you ever meet someone and feel like you’ve already inhaled them?” he asks. “Not remembered—recognised in your blood.”
She steadies her breath, useless reflex. “Yes.”

He takes one step toward her. The space closes until she can count the darker flecks in his irises, smell cedar and the faint copper beneath. His pulse is a drum against the inside of her skull. She doesn’t move. If she moves she will be on him, teeth or mouth, she isn’t sure which hunger will win.

“Your eyes,” he murmurs. “They look like they’ve seen me before.”
She lifts her hand—slow, human slow—and places it over the beat in his wrist. The jump of it kicks against her palm.
“I have,” she says.

He doesn’t pull away. The pulse under her thumb keeps kicking, faster now, and she feels the heat of it travel up her own arm like a transfusion she isn’t qualified to receive. His fingers curl, just enough to trap hers. The whiskey glass rocks on the counter, forgotten.

“I should go,” he says again, but his body stays. The words are a formality, something he’s already dismantling in his head. She can almost hear the gears turning: the gallery, the street, the rain—none of it as real as the cold hand in his.

She lets the silence answer. When she finally moves, it’s only to tilt her wrist so the pad of her index finger grazes the inside of his palm, a slow drag from lifeline to heart line. The skin there is thin, almost translucent. She imagines the blood underneath, how it would rise to the surface if she pressed her nail.

His breath catches. She feels it on her face, warm, smelling of peat and something metallic, like pennies held too long in a pocket. His gaze drops to her mouth, lingers. The polite angles of his face loosen, something hungrier sliding underneath.

“Penny,” he says, trying the name out loud for the first time. It sounds different in his voice—weighted, like it belongs to someone who can still be hurt.

She steps in. Not forward, not quite—just a lean, enough that her chest almost brushes his. The space between them compresses, thick with shared heat and the faint ozone smell of rain drying on cotton. She can hear his heart again, a frantic triplet against his ribs. It matches the phantom rhythm in her ears, the one that starts every time she remembers his blood in her mouth: the swallow, the salt, the way he’d sighed like he was giving something away.

His free hand lifts, hesitates, then settles on her waist. The shirt is silk, thin; his thumb finds the ridge of her hip bone through it and stops there, like he’s measuring the distance between skin and bone and finding it smaller than expected.

“I don’t know what this is,” he says, voice low, almost apologetic.

She answers by turning her hand palm-up under his, interlacing their fingers. The warmth is obscene, a bright animal thing against her stillness. She can feel the sweat starting in the crease of his knuckles, the tiny tremor that says his body has already decided.

He leans first. Just a fraction, but it’s enough. The distance collapses; his forehead touches hers, noses brushing, mouths not quite. She can taste the air he’s exhaling—hot, human, alive. It floods the hollows behind her teeth with want.

Outside, a siren dopplers past the window. Neither of them flinches. The room has shrunk to the inch of space their lips refuse to cross, the heat pooling in their joined hands, the shared heartbeat that isn’t shared at all.

His thumb moves first, a slow drag across her lower lip that parts it slightly, exposing the edge of her teeth. The pad of his finger is rough from charcoal, leaving a faint gray smudge she can taste—graphite and skin, the residue of every drawing he’s touched. She doesn’t breathe, but her chest rises anyway, an old reflex that fools no one.

“You feel like a memory I can’t place,” he whispers, the words brushing her mouth. “Like I already had you in a dream and woke up missing the shape of it.”

She closes her eyes. The darkness behind them is full of him: the alley, the rain, the way his blood had tasted of copper and something sweeter, like overripe figs left too long in the sun. She swallows, and it’s his pulse she feels sliding down her throat, not her own.

Then his mouth is on hers—soft at first, testing. Human. The heat of it is a shock, a bright flare against the cold that’s lived in her for twenty years. She opens to him without thinking, and he makes a sound, low in his chest, that vibrates through her ribs. His tongue finds hers, tentative, then surer, and she realizes she’s gripping the counter so hard the granite is cracking, a hairline fracture spidering under her fingers.

He tastes like whiskey and the inside of a sketchbook—paper fibers, ink, the faint bitterness of an eraser worn down to nothing. She wants more. She wants to bite, to tear, to drink until the taste of him is all that’s left of her. Instead she kisses him back, harder, her hand sliding up his chest to the hollow at the base of his throat where the pulse beats fastest. The skin there is thin, delicate. She can feel the blood rushing just beneath it, calling.

He pulls her closer, fingers threading through her hair, tilting her head back to take the kiss deeper. The angle exposes her neck, and for a moment she imagines him biting her—impossible, but the thought sends a jolt straight to her core, a clench of hunger that has nothing to do with feeding. His hips press against hers, the length of him unmistakable now, and she can feel the heat of him even through their clothes, a living furnace she wants to crawl inside.

She breaks the kiss first, just enough to speak against his mouth. “You should go,” she says, but her hands are already fisted in his shirt, pulling him closer, the lie tasting like his tongue.

He answers by kissing her again, rougher this time, teeth catching her lip hard enough to draw blood—hers, not his, a tiny bead that wells up and is gone before he can taste it. She licks the spot, savoring the sting, the way it makes her fangs ache to descend. Not yet. Not here. But soon.

His hand slides down her spine, pressing her flush against him, and she can feel the frantic beat of his heart through his chest, through her own dead skin, like it’s trying to restart something that’s been still for decades. She arches into him, and the sound he makes is half groan, half surrender, the last of his hesitation burning away between them.

Outside, the rain starts again, a soft hiss against the windows. Inside, they don’t notice.