Everything was hazy at first. The straw mattress he lay on - or was it the ground? - was soft one moment and rough the next. The noises he heard, of a soft voice and the occassional creaking of a door, he could not tell if he was simply imagining them. He did not dare open his eyes. Perhaps he felt he shouldn't waste a single bit of energy in case the pain never left his body. His mind conjured splashes and streaks of colors, mostly deep reds and calm blues, on the backs of his eyelids. His nerves felt so sensitive he went numb for a while. Sometimes, when the pain returned, there was a comforting weight on his arm that seemed to lessen the hurt. Time and time went by, and he couldn't tell if it was day or night, let alone find the time from a clock.

One by one, along with his sanity, his senses returned to him. The world stopped churning beneath him, and he knew he was lying on a mattress. He listened to the door creak, now a familiar sound, and his ears picked up soft footsteps to his bedside and the strain of a chair near him. And then the murmuring began, also a familiar sound. The stranger in the chair beside his bed continued, as always, by humming a soft tune and picked up one of his arms, slowly massaging it. The pain, which had given him back his senses, retreated into a small ball on the left side of his chest.

But it was this moment that he bacame aware of the burn throughout his entire body, the fire in his veins. At every beat of his heart, every couple minutes, the flames flared hotter. In his increasing state of desperation, his nose informed him that there was a great quantity of liquid near him - in fact, it was still warm. He knew from the way his tongue checked the keeness of his newfound much sharper canines that this liquid, stored in the singing stranger still massaging his arm, would quench his fire and sate his thirst.

Without a moment of hesitation, he jolted upright and grabbed the stranger's arm in a vice-like grip. He took a second to look at the handsome face of the slightly familiar stranger, who had no time to react before he instinctively sunk his long canines into the man's wrist. As he drank, the pain diminished and the flames turned into mere tingles. He looked into the man's eyes, not unlike his own, for a short while. It look only five large gulps until the man's eyes slid shut and he slumped onto the ground.

He left the body by the bed, creaked open the door, and fled into the darkness of the night, following a course his feet remembered but his mind would not.