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There is something else, something he never tells Charles. As the years pass him by for the second time, he endeavors to cast it into the mists of his memory. Still, sometimes on nights when he hasn’t recently fed, and the gnawing cold begins to creep once more into his limbs, images of that night replay themselves across his mind. On these nights, he clutches Charles a little more tightly, praying to the warmth and life of his friend to banish the memory of cold, charred bones.
It is night. The moon is nearly new, and the shadows fill the forests around Bannerworth Hall like seawater flooding the hull of a sinking ship. Tonight, he sits in the living room. Self-imposed starvation has drained his strength away to nearly nothing; now, he rises only with the moon. Tomorrow night its light will be gone, and he will lay dead, or nearly dead, for the next twenty-four hours.
Hunger hollows him out from inside. He has always been thin, but now he is little more than skin stretched over bone, shrunken and frail. He is always cold now, always cognizant of the slow creep of death that climbs his limbs like the November frosts. The reaper has gathered him into its arms more times than he can count, but it never keeps him for long.
He doesn’t remember rising from his seat and walking into the woods, not bothering with shoes or hat. He doesn’t remember picking his way down an old familiar path, now overgrown with brush and brambles, moving as though in a trance, slowly but with undeniable purpose.
He remembers the crumbling shapes of the old ruin, blackened by fire and nearly hidden by the undergrowth which has sprung up in the hundred and fifty years since last he passed this spot. Monk’s Hall. Many and mixed are his memories of this place; but it is not as he knew it. The secret chambers he once used are long collapsed. What he is looking for is well hidden, but he relies on no natural sense to find it. Calmly, woodenly, he begins to dig.
At last, he finds what he is after. It, too, is ash-blackened, but surprisingly intact after rockfall and fire and a century and a half of neglect. Foxes should have taken these bones, trees should have swallowed them, wind and rain should have ground them to dust; but here they are. The bones of a man who died an ignoble death, imprisoned in this ruin and crushed by a collapsing roof. Once, he knew this man; but he does not think about Marchdale on this night. He keeps digging, unearths more bones.
It is the most natural thing in the world to crack the femur between his long canine teeth, to splinter the bone and scrape the marrow from within. He tastes bone and ash and dirt on his tongue; the flavor is horrific, but he doesn’t care. One by one, he digs up the bones; he cracks them open; he feeds.
There is no life to be found in these old dead bones, no warmth to drive off the cold that wraps its claws around his heart. This is no renewal, only a staving off of that deepest of slumbers. Still, it takes the edge off of his hunger. The terrible urgency of need eases some of its pressure from his mind, and rational thought stretches, relieved, to fill the space.
This, then, is how he finds himself: barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, crouched over the unearthed remains of a man never properly buried, dirt caked under his nails and bone fragments between his teeth. A monster, feeding on the dead. Marchdale’s empty eye sockets glare accusingly up at him.
He doesn’t run. He doesn’t have the energy to run.
It takes him more than an hour to find his way home. It is dark, and the way is unfamiliar, and he is, as always, dizzy from hunger and shivering from cold. His feet are cut, but not bleeding; it has been a long time since he was able to bleed.
He runs a bath for himself, grateful to the previous owners of Bannerworth Hall for installing modern plumbing. The water runs as hot as he can make it; it is not hot enough. He scrubs his skin raw; still he feels the dust and ash and grime clinging to it. The taste of bone and ash will not leave his mouth.
Still, it has taken the edge off of his hunger. Enough to not attack Charles outright, when the young man finds him a couple of months later. Perhaps it saved his life—saved both of their lives.
But on the nights when his mind returns to the old ruin in the woods, he has a vision in his mind’s eye of what the future might have been. In it, he stalks the graveyard of the old church, sleeping in the crypt and gnawing on the bones of the Bannerworth clan. The cold and the exhaustion never go away, but every bite takes the edge off his hunger, keeping him on the very knife’s edge of life, until he is indistinguishable from the corpses he feeds on. He is a wasted thing, and his mind retreats further and further from sanity, until at last the only coherent thought left in his head is the relief that at least this way he harms no living souls.
He shudders at the vision, and presses his face to the soft skin of Charles’ neck, feeling the warmth and the pulse of life that beats within. Tomorrow night its veins will open to him, sharing with him that warmth and life, and he will sleep the restful sleep of the living, side by side with the man he loves more than life itself. Once, he ran away, believing his love could only bring destruction. He is learning, now, how to stand his ground and let himself be loved. And on nights like these, when a darkness fills his head that no moonlight can penetrate, he reminds himself that after all, there are worse things one can be than a vampyre.