Free The Risen (Book 2): Margaret by Marie F Crow Page A

her flesh in my mouth with the hate that I have for her now. She thinks she can not only escape, but destroy us. The prey does not become the hunter. Hunters just become better killers.
    The “shadows” are the first to sense the change. I can feel them bringing their focus to her without having to look for her. The noise behind me fades as each becomes aware, finally, of the threat. They are the frozen moments of time when our minds switch modes, but I know it will be a short pause. We are too hungry for our minds to let more time than is needed to slip past us.
    Her hand grasps what I know will be something used to harm me if I allow her and the noise it makes when she claims it snaps her into the center of their thoughts. I cannot wait for them to catch up to me if I am to stop her. If she is to be prevented from escaping again, if we are to feed, I must face her on my own with hopes that they will join in shortly.
    The beast is taking over fully. My face is no longer mine. It now belongs to the beast that stalks inside me. I feel my lips pull back into the glare and rage it knows how to wear. All thought process is removed with its presence inside me. I am nothing now but the simple needs of one that must feed. Her body is the key to my salvation and survival. There is nothing to debate. There is nothing to rationalize. I must feed. She must die. It is so simple that it is almost freeing.
    There is a moment when our eyes lock and I know she is seeing something different than that of what I am. I know that she is comparing me to the one that screams for her behind the door. The one that she sought to save from us, but her tears hint at a failing to do so. It was just a moment. A mere flash of regrets before she gathers herself. Her scent changes with it. She is no longer the prey in her mind. I am.
    She screams with her attack upon me. The knife reflects the lights in the room, seeming to glow as she plunges it into my body. There is a flutter of panic with a thought to the damage it should cause me, but there is nothing.
    The blade is not cold or burning pain. It is nothing more than air. There is no pain, no obvious answer yielded by its mutilation. Without the pain, my beast never retreats. It rides my surface, seeking any opening to harm her and it finds one.
    Her arm is so close to my face that I can almost see her pulse at her wrist beating in the deep blue veins. They are straws that I may sip on, pulling the hot, sweet syrup that I crave into my mouth. I want them.
    I turn my head, seeking those straws with my teeth. Teeth that feel like days ago were just sinking into soft flesh, allowing me to reach the bliss. A bliss that I am denied with her continued fighting me. I didn’t feel her knock me down, but I am falling away from her just the same. Falling to the ground in a similar state that I started all of this in.
    I am not a monster. I am just so hungry! Why won’t you help me? My mind pleads with her to understand my need of her, but it is only anger I feel staring up at her.
    I stand slower than normal. Something is pouring from me, from the place that she attacked me. With no pain to trigger any of what was once a way to know when I am in danger, I head towards her again, but I won’t reach her. I will never satisfy this hunger, but my pain will end just the same.
    I’m not a monster. I just want the pain to stop. She may not have saved those she came with, but she saves me. She ends my suffering.

CHAPTER 15
    S he cries for me as she takes my life. If this is a life? The beast retreats, knowing it is beaten, leaving me to face these moments alone. With that part of me silent, the whispers take over. The part of me that has fought so hard against being kept in the dark corners of my consciousness now is here to help me understand everything that the beast has kept hidden.
    I fall, broken and doomed at her feet. I watch, just as I watched once before in my final moments, my once friends destroyed by