I Thirst for You

Two things pain can do for you: sharpen you up or dull you down. It never does anything for your mood. He'd been in pain for over a week, and the crystal clarity he'd run on was dulling down to shards of scoured glass. He'd been running on adrenaline, when he needed blood. That had to change -- soon -- if he was going to survive. Blood was survival.

If he survived long enough out here, once he was free he could start thinking about revenge. He yearned to think about what he'd do to those who'd imprisoned him -- but letting those thoughts surface could easily lead to hallucinations, a sure way to get himself caught again.

"Not going to happen," he growled, the sound a rumble of thunder in the desert night. The name of the game was survival, and survival meant paring himself down to pure animal instinct.

Blood.

That was the only order of business.

He crouched on the ground, where scorpions scurried to get out of his way, rested his hands on the thick base of a saguaro cactus, and concentrated on finding blood. Animal blood wouldn't do; it had to be human. Preferably female.

He could hear the soft breathing of doves nesting in the cactus. Bats fluttered and flitted overhead, and he could hear their sonar squeaks piercing the air. Hearts beat all around him, so many small living things going about their nocturnal business. He was surrounded by life, but had never been so alone.

He blocked out everything else and searched for the one heartbeat that had to be out there. Had to be waiting for him. When the need was the greatest, that was when you found The One. Wasn't that how the old myth went

Eventually his head came up, then turned, nostrils flaring.

"Son of a bitch," he muttered.

A slow smile creased his pain-ravaged features. He rose, gave a quick look up at the full moon, and whispered an ancient word of thanks.

Then he turned south and ran, spending all his remaining energy in a burst of desperate speed.


The stars were huge overhead, and the moon rode high in the sky. Stevie Nicks's voice was in her ears, singing about sorcerers and sapphires. Maybe she should have been enjoying the deep silence of the desert night, but she preferred the music coming through the headphones of her Discman as she lay on a sleeping bag outside her tent and drank in the vast emptiness.

She'd always liked being alone, but since the plane crash she craved privacy more than ever. She'd been called brave and heroic, and she hated that. She'd been the pilot, and she survived -- which seemed so wrong to her. The admiration made her cringe; so did the sympathy. She hoped the solitude would be healing.

She'd always absorbed other people's emotions too easily, and it was worse now, since her head injury when the plane hit the ground. The physical wound had closed, but her mind was still open. Things poured into it, thoughts and emotions, things that had nothing to do with her. She used to be able to control it most of the time. "Empath," a witchy friend had called her once, a Sensitive.