The start of a nightmare - or maybe something good? - Cecil

These past weeks had been... Rough, to say the least. So may things Remington suddenly had to get accustomed to, which he had never thought about. He'd had decent senses when he was a fairy, but the vampire senses... They were really out of this world. Even when he fled to something as relatively desolate at this forest lake, deep in the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night, his senses lit up with everything that went on around him. It was almost as if the silence just enhanced it... The calm sounds of the flowing water... Some frogs croaking on the opposite shore of the lake... The leaves rustling in the wind... The subtle sounds of a fox's paws threading over grass in the underbrush... A bat climbing in a tree nearby... The heartbeats of those animals... Not to mention his sight, too. When he'd used to look up at the sky, he was lucky to spot stars, just the same as a human. But with a vampire's eyes? He saw the tiny specks of light his eyes wouldn't have recognized before, giving him the full spectrum of the night sky above him, and it was goddamn beautiful.

But with all of this came the gnawing hunger, too. His band mates had done what they could for him, given him the blood they could do without, but... It wasn't enough for the thirst, no, not anymore. The past day or two he'd caught himself openly staring at people's necks, zeroing in on the jugular veins in pure reflex, something he hadn't been able to stop... He'd only been able to stop himself when he was about to take a step closer and had stopped himself, so he'd decided it was about damn time that he kept away from people. Rather do that than risking killing someone - he'd rather starve, even with this almost stabbing pain in his stomach, than he'd want to hurt somebody just so he could eat. What a pathetic vampire he was... But then again, he hadn't ever wanted this life, he'd felt perfectly fine being a fairy, of course he couldn't even stand the thought of harming someone on purpose!

So here he was, sitting at the bank of the forest lake, legs pulled up, chin resting on his knees and arms wrapped around his legs, gently rocking back and forth and trying to focus on all his sensory inputs to make sure he could ignore the hunger as best as possible. But just as he closed his eyes to concentrate on the sounds around him, he picked up the faint noises of some bigger animal moving through the forest - bigger than the deer sleeping at the edge of the forest, on the other side of the lake. And then came the heartbeat. And a wind carrying the smell - no, not an animal, someone was coming. He had no clue who, but he knew it wasn't a human, at least - the smell had given that away. He couldn't differentiate the different supernatural species yet, none of them, but humans... He'd smelled enough of those to know that whoever was coming this way, wasn't one. Slowly, he turned his head to look in the direction the noises and smells were coming from, but didn't move out of his spot, even as his stomach gently rumbled at the scent.