Chapter Text
"I'm terribly sorry about this."
The demon ran his hands carefully along the human's tense, bound arm, mentally marking the best place to cut. It would be no good, to make a mess. No good to waste.
"Terribly sorry... But it's the only way to keep down the hunger, I'm sure you understand."
Legless now, bound tight regardless, the human was so terrified that it permeated the air, a thick, sour smell. It never seemed to fade from this room- his kitchen- sinking into the walls and leaking out like the warm smell of a home cooked dinner whenever he opened the door. Carefully, so carefully, ignoring the way the smell made his mouth water, he cut with claws sharper than any blade, clean through. He always shrieked, this human, every time the demon needed to take a bite. It ended quicker this time, it usually did with humans. There was hardly anything left to cut off now. Nothing left at all to save. Same as every human, despair had well and truly set in and the demon hoped he wouldn't struggle too much when the time came to take what little remained. He hated it when they struggled...
He bound the wound quickly, tightly, staunched the bleeding. He stayed until the slow drip of blood through the wet bandages stopped.
"There you go. Right as rain. Thank you again, my friend."
How silly, he was getting emotional again, it seemed. As caught up as ever in the relief of faded hunger pains, a gratefulness towards this human blooming in his chest, as it always seemed to do. The human was prey, he always tried to rationalize it, nothing more than the cattle that the humans themselves kept for their own food. And yet. And yet every time he got to this point, so soon to having to say goodbye, he couldn't seem to stop himself from tearing up... The pain had already put the human to sleep and the demon reached out to lay a hand on his head, smoothing back the hair that had stuck to his pain-sweat dampened face. Soon, he would have to take his head, his heart, lay them in a small casket, and lay him to rest with the others, in the graveyard that he had steadily built over the decades. He didn't like imagining how large it would grow as those decades slid into centuries.
Hunger gnawed. Shaking off the bout of sentimentality, he took a deep breath of that warm, kitchen smell and he took the first bite.