C3V Wave 15 Teaser Week#4

"My family. I have to warn my family!" Even as he felt the life being drained from him, his thoughts were of his wife and children, out there somewhere in the night. However, in the grip of this vampiric beast, he knew he would never see them again.

He landed hard on the cold ground. The vampire had stopped short of completely draining him. He looked up. The monster was standing over him, glowering with a sadistic smile on its face. He rolled over and pushed himself up. He began staggering toward the village, oblivious to the carnage being wrought around him.

"I have to get to the… aaaagh!" His back arched and he crumpled to the ground as searing agony convulsed his body.

Through the haze of pain he saw his friend Jordan fighting off two of the creatures.

"Jordan! He needs help," he thought. "He is my ... my ... FEED!" He felt a wave of nausea wash over him as the thought of feasting on his friend wormed into his mind.

He staggered to his feet. He began a slow shuffling gait to help Jordan.

As he made his way to his friend one thought kept pressing at his fevered mind: "FEED!"

"No!" He fought against the foreign thought. No, it was more than a thought--it was a primal instinct gnawing at his gut. "I will not ... surrender!" With single-minded determination he clamped down on the urge ...

Motion to his right caught his attention. Some of the creatures had wrestled a woman down to the ground and wounded her. Blood gleamed in the moonlight. He felt a supernatural adrenaline course through his limbs. Before he realized what was happening, his slow stagger had become a blood-crazed lurching run towards the hapless woman. To his horror, he knew that he was not running to help her, he was running to consume her.

The last coherent thought of Haldon, beloved husband and father, before the haze of thralldom took him forever, was "No, please no. She is my wife!"

Then he began to feed.


Nicholas Esenwein looked on as his latest creation began to gorge. He didn’t know what caused different victims to become different kinds of thralls. Nor did he care.

He looked down at the woman held in his crushing grip, gently caressing the side of her face.

"I wonder what kind of thrall you will become, my dear. Shall we find out?"

The look of stark terror in her eyes as he lowered his mouth to her throat gave him the closest thing to joy that could be felt by the cold heart that lay, lifeless, in his chest.