Diego left Selma's house in a state of agitated thought. Last thing he needed was a Sabbatical "he" in town, with enough weight and sadism behind him to warrant a foreboding and prophetic "he is coming".
Revana was gone. Looking for her would be a dumb snipe hunt, of little use and plain unlikely to succeed. A much more pressing matter was his hunger and his wounds.
The gunrunner looked around the street Selma's house was in. It was deep into the night, all of the windows were dark. City sounds were somewhere far away, all but the bark of some dog beyond sight.
- Not too bad of an idea, - Diego thought to himself and started walking down the street, clinging to the shadows.
He took his time picking the houses. Simpler locks, open windows to fend off the resident heat, no dogs, no spacious family cars for kids. Nothing that would overburden his body.
It took him some time to find the first candidate. A simple climb onto the roof of the garage, an ajar window, a mosquito net, like the wrapping on a candy.
There was but one person in this house, but it was a start. Like the sleep demon, Diego pressed the sleeper into the bed, biting in.
It was hard, dangerously hard not to take more than he needed, but he wasn't going to start being greedy.
He left this person alive, to live out his troubled dreams and his lonely life. He did the same for the newlyweds next door, leaving barely any traces of his presence.
Not before long, the hemorrhages and bruising had healed, leaving him with the shriveled, numb, slow parts of his body. The flesh had suffered to the point where it was hard to direct Vitae to it. How could he hope to heal it like that? Diego had had bad trauma in the past and it felt similar to this, but psychologically it had a very different effect. (edited)
