The desire in him was equal parts hunger and thirst, but nothing like he’d experienced as a mortal. It curled and writhed in his chest like a caged animal, snarling for the sustenance he denied it. It had been days since his last feeding, and his body was beginning to burn with need. The thrumming of heartbeats from the nearby humans was almost overwhelming. The sound made his stomach clench and his throat drier than the air of the desert city.

He’d put it off far too long and he could feel his self-control slowly slipping into the abyss of madness. The feeding frenzy that came from abstinence, whether willing or forced, was never pretty. All logic and rationale fled before the ravening hunger within, devolving into a furious drive to find the nearest source of blood, and drain it dry. There was no control or compassion; just the mindless need to feed.

A soft scuff of a shoe drew his attention further down the alley he was lurking in. His friend, Seamus, stood only a few feet away from him. Seamus wasn’t looking at him; instead, he was staring down the alley, out to the streets where people strode by going about their business. Seamus must have walked the length of the alleyway behind him, but he had done it without making a sound.

“Still skulking in the shadows like a creep, I see,” Azrael finally said.

Seamus looked unimpressed. “Still punishing yourself in the shadows like an idiot, I see.”

“I’m not punishing anyone,” Azrael argued, knowing it wasn’t the full truth.

Seamus adjusted the collar of his shirt. “Azrael, you’ve been one of us for a few years now. It’s time you got over your hang-ups. You’re a vampire; drinking blood from humans is just a fact of our lives. We leave the world of the sun behind us, get a few extra abilities, we drink blood to survive. It’s who we are, what we are.”

Azrael snorted. “I know that. Thanks.”

“Do you? Because for quite some time now you’ve been doing an awfully good impression of someone who doesn’t know,” Seamus said coolly.

Azrael didn’t say anything, knowing his friend was right but not wanting to admit it. It had been nearly five years since Azrael had been turned. The transformation had been hastily done, in a moment of panic and fear, but it had been done. His body no longer bore the frailties that came with mortality. Age would no longer touch him, and neither would disease. Blades and bullets still hurt, but unless they somehow removed his head from his shoulders, he would survive and heal. It was supposed to be a pretty good deal, near invulnerability coupled with immortality.

The problem came with the fact that, to keep his immortality and his sanity, he needed to regularly feed on human blood. With vampirism came the thirst, which Azrael had come to think of as a foreign sentience within his own mind. If the thirst had its way, it would have him feeding on blood every night, probably several times throughout the course of the night. The others told him his thirst would eventually wane in strength the longer he was a vampire. He would always need human blood to survive, but at least he could look forward to the day when the thirst wouldn’t be so strong.

Azrael shrugged. “You know me. I like to test myself.”

Seamus eyed him in disbelief. “Is that the latest excuse you’re going with?”

“Are you going to say it doesn’t sound exactly like me?” Azrael asked.

Seamus hesitated, and Azrael could see his point had been made. The past five years of being a vampire had been filled with one test of his abilities after another. As time went on, he thought up different tests for different reasons. Just last week, Azrael tried to leap across increasingly larger gaps in differing scenarios. The week before that, he tested how fast he could run, again with different factors in play. Ever since the moment he’d recovered from the shock of what he’d become, he’d driven himself to test the limits of every new ability.

It was common knowledge in the vampire world that the transformation affected each new vampire differently. Coming into the blood, as it was commonly referred to, could make one vampire insane, while another came through it with a greater grip on reality than they had when they were mortal. Some vampires were born with greater abilities than the one who made them would ever have, while others were weaker than when they were human. No one quite knew what created the variations among vampires, but it was always a roll of the dice to see if a new child would come through as a genius, or stunted in some way.

“So this time, the test is to see how long you can go before the thirst drives you past the point of self-control then?” Seamus asked dryly.

Azrael grinned. “If I don’t know my limits, how can I ever know myself?”

Seamus rolled his eyes. “Don’t play it off like you’re doing it for some philosophical reason. You just do it because it’s fun.”

“I mean, yeah. But if I learn a lot about myself in the process of having fun, isn’t that a win all around?” Azrael asked.

Seamus sighed. “So how long have you gone so far?”

“Just shy of a week,” Azrael answered.

“And how long do you think you have left before you lose control?” Seamus asked.

Azrael hesitated, then shrugged. “Not sure, and to be honest, I don’t really want to find out either.”

“Don’t want to be responsible for a torn out throat?” Seamus asked with a smirk.

That risk was his main motivation for finding out what his limit was. Azrael didn’t want to be responsible for killing someone. The bite of a vampire didn’t cause the change itself. For that to happen, a considerable amount of blood had to be exchanged between a blood-drained mortal and a vampire. It meant vampires could freely feed on humans in safe, measured doses. There were, of course, vampires who didn’t care one bit about their victims, and fed as much as they wanted. Sometimes, that meant a human ended up dangerously ill but unsure as to how they’d lost so much blood. Other times, it meant they never walked away, and the vampire in question had to find a way to dispose of the blood-drained corpse.

When he could finally bring himself to feed, Azrael preferred to feed in small doses. He knew he was no longer human, but he still couldn’t stomach the idea of some poor bastard dying simply because he was hungry. He was playing with fire by not feeding for so long, and he risked the thirst inside him taking over when he next sank his teeth into human flesh. The first spurt of blood could drive his hunger to such a point that he might lose control and drain the human dry, rather than take only a safe amount.

“Then you’d better find someone now before you lose your shit,” Seamus said simply.

Azrael grunted in agreement as he listened to the noise of the street only a few feet away. He hadn’t been waiting in the alley simply to try and test his thirst against the sound of nearby humans. When he’d woken up, he realized just how powerful the thirst had become. There was a real chance he might lose control on his first human victim after his stretch of self-imposed abstinence, and if that happened, he didn’t want to risk being seen. If he lost control in a public place, he would have to contend not only with his own conscience, but also the backlash of having been discovered. Secrecy, alongside their abilities, was what kept vampires both alive and powerful.

Azrael glanced at Seamus. “Are you going to stand around and watch me then?”

Seamus rolled his eyes. “Stage fright?”

“Voyeur,” Azrael muttered, as he heard the sound of heavy footsteps approaching.

The man who rounded the corner looked like he’d seen better days. He wasn’t one of the multitude of homeless people who littered the city streets, but he certainly looked like he’d led a rough life. Azrael didn’t think the human was more than thirty years old, but he looked more like forty-five. The smell of alcohol was strong, and the way he staggered and stumbled down the alley showed just how drunk the man was. The human was looking around with a hazy cast to his eyes, searching for what Azrael assumed was a safe place to quietly piss.

Azrael thought it was only polite to let the drunken man do his business before he swooped down on him. The mortal never even noticed Azrael and Seamus in the shadows as he moved further into the alley and unzipped his pants. There were a few things about being human that Azrael missed, but the constant need to relieve yourself wasn’t one of them. He would happily take the far milder pangs of hunger and thirst for human blood, but God, if he didn’t miss the taste of chocolate sometimes!

There wasn’t much about the later years of his human life that he missed. He’d been slowly sinking into a pit from which he hadn’t tried too hard to escape. It wasn’t like his childhood had been all that wonderful either. The only shining memory of his younger years was of a friend. That friendship had stopped Azrael from just being a poor kid sliding into gang territory during his teenage years. Nothing good ever lasted in Azrael’s life, though, and his friend had been dragged away with his family to places unknown. After that, Azrael’s life had resumed its slow descent into the dark recesses of humanity. He didn’t often miss being human, but there were small, bright moments that he missed intensely.

The sound of a zipper being jerked back up brought Azrael’s attention back to the present. He didn’t need Seamus shifting behind him to tell him his moment had come. Azrael pushed away from the wall and stalked toward the drunken man, who was still struggling with his pants. He could remember how he’d thought it would be difficult to feed from his first victim after his transformation. As he’d been instructed to do then, he allowed the instinctual hunger within him to rise up and take over his conscious mind.

The man was probably too drunk to realize what was happening before Azrael had hold of him, turning him around to push him back against the wall. The lessons from his first feeding came easily to him, and his fangs extended as he lowered his mouth to the man’s chest. When he’d been newly turned, he’d thought the old stories of vampires feeding from the jugular vein in the neck were true and he’d fed that way. The foul taste of used-up blood that the vein carried to the heart for filtering had been an immediate lesson for him. Instead, his fangs sank through the thick walls of the carotid artery, his mouth flooding with oxygenated blood, halting its flow to the brain.

When the first spurt of blood hit his tongue, he sighed audibly, pressing tight against the drunk. It bore the sour tang of too much alcohol, but he drank deeply of it all the same. His earlier, fleeting desire for chocolate was washed away by the taste of human blood pulsing into his mouth. It was everything chocolate wished it could be. It was a delicious meal for a starving man, the purest water for a desert wanderer, and the best sex he’d ever had, all tied up in the flow of crimson liquid. It was all those things and so much more. He could feel the blood pumping through his body, renewing his strength and invigorating his senses.

Power and ecstasy filled him in equal measures as the human grew limp against him. The kiss, as he had been told to call it, could be pleasurable for humans, so long as the vampire chose to make it so. Azrael couldn’t remember the night he was made a vampire. That night had been a blur, and he couldn’t remember whether he’d enjoyed the feeling of his body being drained of its mortal blood or not. However, every human he’d drunk from since, seemed to enjoy it. A few even seemed about to orgasm when he drank from them, but most simply fell into a placid stupor.

The pulse in his mouth fluttered, suddenly weakening at an alarming rate. The conscious part of his mind rioted in a sudden bid for self-control. It was the man’s heart he was feeling, the pump of blood into his mouth slowing considerably. It was a sign he’d already taken too much. The drunk went even more limp, as his body was steadily drained of life-sustaining blood.

Azrael’s mind rebelled, desperate to grab control of his body against the ravenous thirst he’d allowed to overwhelm him. He didn’t know how long it took, but by the time his vision cleared, and he knew he was in full control again, he also knew it was too late. The man was no longer standing, only held against the wall by the sheer strength of Azrael’s arms. When Azrael released the human, he slid to the ground, slumping to one side. Azrael watched in silent horror as the human took a last, pathetic breath and the life bled from his eyes.

Seamus appeared beside him silently. “At least you didn’t drink until the last breath.”

Azrael felt like he had the last time he’d drained a human victim to that point and the mortal had died as he fed. The alley spun around him, the air seeming to consist of a weak vapor that pulled in every direction. His limbs felt heavy and his stomach churned unhappily as he gazed down at the dead human. He didn’t begin vomiting to the point of agony, as he had the first time he’d drunk for too long, but he certainly felt ill.

“I guess I held myself off for too long,” Azrael said, his voice sounding distant in his own ears.

“And that’s what happens when you experiment,” Seamus told him.

Azrael could have happily strangled his friend at that moment. It wouldn’t have done any good though. As a vampire, Seamus had no need to breathe, but at least it would’ve made him feel better, since he didn’t appreciate his friend making him feel worse than he already did. In an effort to push his limits, and perhaps feel a little better about himself, he’d allowed himself to go too far.

He’d thought he had control of himself, and he could abstain from going too far. The moment the blood had filled his mouth, however, he knew all hope had been lost for the poor man. Azrael’s need to prove himself and gain a sense of control over his life had cost the mortal his.

“He looked like he’d already had a shitty enough life as it was,” Azrael whispered.

“If that’s true, then you probably did him a favor,” Seamus said.

Azrael said nothing, not once looking at his friend as he bent to pick the man’s corpse up off the dirty pavement. He didn’t know if he’d done this man any favors by taking his life, and he would never know. Sure, he could pick through the man’s pockets, find his wallet, and get information he could use to look into the human’s life. Either he would find a good home life that he’d ripped the man away from, or perhaps he would find out that this unnamed mortal could have improved his life.

He’d once tried to learn about the victims he accidentally killed. It didn’t matter what he discovered; he always found himself mourning the loss of the mortal. He’d been told that, in time, his guilt for the deaths of his victims would begin to fade and one day, he would be capable of taking a human life without feeling the pangs of regret and self-hatred.

“For I am Azrael, the Angel of Death,” he whispered gravely, hoping that day never came.