Chapter 17

Ken's second feeding took place two hours before sunrise the next morning. It was considerably less ceremonial than the first feeding. It was also not as well attended. Harold was there because he'd gone out and gotten the human woman for Ken to feed from (she was a fairly well-built twenty-six year old unattached night shift factory worker who had stopped in at a convenience store for a pack of smokes on her way home from work). Jo was there because she was Ken's mother (something Meghan was still a long way from getting used to) and it was her job to instruct him. Meghan was there because there was no way in hell she was going to let her husband "suck on some bimbo's neck" without her watching. Ryan, the cognate cop on duty at the time, was in the office doing some work on the computer. Dick and Gertie were still out doing a little hunting of their own.

Everything started off well with the feeding. As before, Ken was shirtless when the woman—her name was Leslie—entered the house. She was immediately and thoroughly overcome by the power of Ken's pheromones and submitted to his embrace. She tilted her head back when he pulled gently on her forehead and exposed the Sweet Spot on her neck for him. The problem started when he put his mouth in position and made the actual bite.

"Owww!" she squealed, jerking backward. His teeth ripped into the artery and were then pulled out of her neck, leaving an open arterial wound. Hot blood shot out of the hole with considerable force, spurting more than eight inches through the air with each beat of Leslie's heart, splattering all over Ken's neck and chest.

"What the ... owww!" Ken yelled as, in his surprise, he let his tongue move across his fangs again, slicing the tongue open and sending hideous pain through it.

"I'm ... bleeding," Leslie said numbly, more in wonder than alarm. She instinctively reached up to touch the spurting wound. When she did, she changed the angle of the opening, pushing it upwards. She couldn't have aimed it better if she'd tried. Ken took two shots in the eyes, blinding him, and two shots in the nose, causing him to choke.

"Get her!" Jo yelled as loud as her weakened state allowed. "Get your mouth back on her or she'll bleed out!"

"I can't see!" Ken responded with a gag as blood was sucked down into his airway through his nasal passages. His tongue hit his teeth again, opening yet another painful wound. He spit a large glob of his and Leslie's blood out of his mouth. It landed on Leslie's shirt.

"What's happening here?" Leslie enquired blandly. "Why is everyone bleeding?"

Ken felt a strong hand on the back of his head. It pushed him forward. Vaguely, through the haze of blood obscuring his vision, he saw Leslie's head being pushed forward, toward him. He felt a few more shots of blood hitting him—one in the neck, one in the chin—and then his mouth was back on her neck. A shot of blood fired into his open mouth. Instinctively, he swallowed it.

"Don't drink now," barked Harold's voice in his ear. "Get your teeth back in the wound! Hurry!"

Another shot filled his mouth. He didn't swallow this time. Instead, he let it dribble out and moved his mouth around against her skin, letting the nerves in his lips find the heat of the carotid and the spurting hole in it. This took three more spurts—three of Leslie's heartbeats. He forced his razor sharp teeth back down into the hole.

"Owwww!" Leslie moaned, a cry in her voice this time. She tried to pull away from him again. This time, however, Harold's hands kept them together.

"Now ... drink," Harold said. "Drink and let the protein into her."

Ken, trembling now, filled with fight or flight adrenaline, started drinking. It took him two swallows just to clear the blood that had shot into his mouth. Finally, there was some room and he was able to drink directly from the wound. One swallow ... two swallows ... three ... four. As he started the fifth swallow he felt Leslie relax, felt her hands drop away from him. By the tenth swallow, his stomach was starting to feel bloated and his teeth retracted. He kept his mouth in place and within a few seconds the wound started to close.

"Keep your tongue against the wound until the bleeding completely stops," Harold told him, his voice a little less urgent now.

Ken did this. He could feel the stitching and re-knitting of his tongue as it healed itself. He could feel the hole in Leslie's neck closing up. For a moment he wondered if his wound and hers might fuse together, if he might end up with his tongue stuck to her neck, fused to her flesh. But, of course, this didn't happen. Within thirty seconds both his tongue and Leslie's neck were healed. Slowly, embarrassed, ashamed, he pulled his mouth away. He brought his hand up and wiped her cooling, sticky blood out of his eyes, getting his first good look at the mess he had made. "Jesus Christ," he said.

It looked like something out of a cheap horror movie—a vampire movie perhaps. Leslie was covered in her own blood. It was smeared all over her face and neck. It had saturated the shoulder and chest of her blouse. It had splattered on her jeans and her tennis shoes. It was puddled on the floor at her feet. There were even a few spurts over near the couch were Meghan and Jo were sitting.

Ken, however, was by far the bloodiest. His eyes and nose were full of blood. It was running in rivers down his shoulder, his back, his chest. It was soaked into his hair, his jeans, his socks and shoes. It was smeared on his upper arms and was even running down the back of his pants.

"Oh ... my God," Meghan whispered as she took this all in as well.

"Right," said Jo. "I've ... uh ... never seen anything like that before."

"He bit down on her too soon," Harold said. "He didn't move his lips over the Sweet Spot in order to engage her erogenous submission. She was not fully ready to be bitten and so she pulled back." He looked at his daughter. "Josephine, hon, didn't you teach Kenneth about the erogenous submission of his prey?"

"Of course," Jo said, a little defensively. "I told him he needed to move his lips over the Sweet Spot before the bite. I didn't really ... oh ... explain it in detail though. He did it at his first feeding just like I told him. I thought he understood." She looked at Ken. "I thought you understood that, Kenneth."

Ken swallowed, his embarrassment and shame growing, but also his anger—anger directed at Meghan. "I ... I did understand your directions," he said. "But ... uh ... well ... I guess I didn't understand how important it was. I ... I didn't know that something like..." He waved his hand at the mess. "Something like this would happen."

"But why?" Jo asked. "Why wouldn't you rub your lips on her neck first? It only takes a second or two to get your prey to submit. Were you that hungry? Or were you that impatient?"

"Uh..." Ken started, angry, embarrassed, but not wanting to say why he'd really forgone that particular step. He cast his eyes down at the carpet.

But Meghan knew. She was looking down at the carpet as well. She sighed. "Ken," she said slowly. "You ... you did it because of me ... didn't you?"

Harold and Jo looked at Meghan. "Because of you?" Jo asked.

"I ... I was mad at him earlier," she said. "I told him ... I told him I thought he kissed that first bimbo's neck longer than he needed to, that he let her kiss him when he promised he wouldn't."

Jo was aghast. She looked over at Ken. "Is that the reason you bit so quickly?" she asked. "Because you didn't want Meghan to think you were kissing her neck?"

Ken blinked slowly and wiped some more blood from his eyes. He blinked a few more times. "Well..." A sigh. "Uh ... yeah, I guess that's what I was doing."

Harold was shaking his head in wonder. "Nestlings," he muttered. "Why don't they bring their human common sense to the other side with them?"

Jo, as weak as she was, still managed to look very motherly at this moment. She managed to act like it too. "We'll discuss this in detail in a little bit," she said, "but first there is a rather large mess to clean up and we have only another hour or so to get Meghan fed. Kenneth, take Leslie into that bathroom, strip both of your clothes off, and get into the shower with her."

"What?" Meghan protested, almost before Jo was done speaking. "You want him to take a shower with her? Are you insane?"

"No, I'm not," Jo said. She looked back at Ken. "Get moving! Now! The longer that blood has to dry the longer it'll take to remove it. Keep..."

"Now wait a minute!" Meghan said. "There is no way Ken is going to get naked in the shower with that woman! I'll clean her up!"

Jo turned her angry mother look toward Meghan. "Excellent idea, my dear," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "And what happens when Leslie recovers from the effects of Kenneth's amnesiac protein and finds herself naked in a strange shower with a woman she's never met before? Do you think that perhaps she might be a tiny bit alarmed by that?"

"Ummm ... well..." Meghan stammered. "Okay. I guess that makes sense. But can't Harold..."

"No, he cannot," Jo said. "In the first place, Dad needs to stay dressed and ready to go so he can get her out of here once she's clean. In the second place, Dad did not make this mess. Why should he have to clean it up?"

"But..."

"No buts," Jo said. "Kenneth, get moving."

Ken did not even glance at Meghan. "Right, Mom," he said, nodding. He took Leslie by the arm and began to lead her toward the bathroom. "Come on, Leslie," he told her. "We need to get you cleaned up."

"Okayyyy," Leslie said dreamily, allowing herself to be led.

"Rinse the blood off your body, but don't clean your armpits until after Leslie's gone," Jo told him. "That will keep her under control and keep her from remembering any of this."

"Okay, Mom," Ken said, turning down the hall toward the downstairs bathroom.

"Ken!" Meghan called after him. He ignored her. He heard her tell Jo she was going to follow him.

"No you are not, young lady," Jo responded. "You are going to go in the kitchen and get some cleaning supplies and some rags and get this bloody mess in here cleaned up before it dries."

"But..." Meghan started.

"Now, Meghan," Jo said. "Now!"

There was no further conversation between the two of them. Meghan did not follow him.

He brought Leslie into the bathroom and told her to stand still next to the toilet tank. She agreed to do so. He reached up and turned on the shower water, turning the hot and cold handles to approximate positions since he was unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of the plumbing in this room. While the water warmed up, he turned to Leslie and began unbuttoning the bloody mess that was her blouse. He pulled it open, revealing a plain white underwire bra restraining her apple-sized breasts. The bra was blood stained as well.

He heard footsteps approaching the bathroom. It was Harold. He could tell by the smell and by the way his stride vibrated the floor. He could smell that Harold had an empty garbage bag in his hands. Great. He was just wondering what to do with Leslie's clothes. Dropping them to the floor would have made an additional mess.

"Put her clothes in here," Harold said as he stepped into the room. "They're beyond cleaning so we'll have to burn them somewhere."

"Everything?" Ken asked.

"Everything," Harold confirmed. "Her knickers are probably still clean but you'll bloody them with your hands when you take them off. I'll put one of Gertie's old bathrobes on her for the trip home."

"What about the stuff in her pockets?" Ken asked.

"She has nothing in her pockets," Harold replied. "Her purse is out in my car."

"Oh ... okay," Ken said. He went back to work. He pulled Leslie's blouse off and dropped it into the bag that Harold was holding open. He reached around behind her and, after a few seconds of fumbling, managed to unhook her bra. He removed it, leaving her bare-breasted before him. Other than noting her nipples were disproportionately large, he paid no attention to the sight. He started to bend down to untie her shoes but Harold stopped him.

"She's coming around a little bit," he said. "See if she'll just kick them off for you."

"Okay," Ken said. "Leslie, hon ... could you kick your shoes off for me?"

"Surrrrre," she said thickly. She raised one foot off the ground, almost fell over, but managed to complete the maneuver without too much problem. While the foot was still elevated, Ken reached down and pulled off her white tube sock. They then repeated the procedure for the other foot.

Next came the pants. Ken unbuttoned her and then slid the zipper down. He pushed her jeans and panties down to her ankles and told her to step out of them. The smell of her sexual arousal became very powerful once the pants went down. Ken saw that she was not a proponent of aesthetic grooming practices. Her pubic bush was thick, black, and quite unruly.

"Heyyyy, cutie," Leslie said, her eyes gleaming, her lips forming an aroused smile. "This is a dream, right? A really good dream?"

Ken was unsure how to respond. He looked up at Harold who only shrugged, an amused smirk on his face. He looked back at Leslie. "It's whatever you want it to be," he finally answered.

"Wowww," Leslie said, giggling.

Ken smelled the shower water. He could tell it was a little on the cool side but well within the range of human comfort. "Come on, Leslie," he told her. "Let's get into the shower."

"Oooooh, a shower," Leslie said. "That's my favorite."

"Glad to hear it," he told her, pulling back the curtain. "Hop on in there and I'll be in shortly."

Leslie did as she was told. Ken quickly removed his clothing and dropped it into the bag atop Leslie's.

"Clean her up quickly," Harold advised. "But be sure to get all the blood and to keep her under the influence of your pheromones."

Ken did his best. He was hampered a bit by the fact that his pheromones were causing Leslie to become naturally sexually aroused and taking a shower with a man was apparently one of her sexual fetishes. She kept running her hands over his body, touching him anywhere and everywhere she could. She squeezed his buttock cheeks. She tweaked his nipples. She stuck her finger in his mouth and invited him to suck on it. She grabbed his penis and tried to stroke it whenever it came into her reach. At one point, while he was leaning down to run the soapy washcloth over her legs, she grabbed the back of his head and pulled him to her breast, forcing her large nipple into his mouth. He pulled back and squirmed his way out of each embrace as quickly as he could but all of this contact with a wet, naked, aroused female covered with warm soapy water had a predictable effect on him. Blood filled his manhood and it strained to be put somewhere soft and wet and warm.

"Are we almost done?" asked Harold, who was still standing outside the shower curtain. "I still have to feed myself, you know."

"Just about," Ken said as he forced Leslie to put her head under the water so he could shampoo her.

By the time the sun rose on the 8^th of May, the mess in the living room had been cleaned up, Leslie's and Ken's clothes were nothing more than ashes in a hospital incinerator, Leslie herself was sound asleep in her own bed (she would wake up six hours later, dizzy, thirsty, and with the vague sensation that she'd had a dream that was both disturbing and erotic), and Jo was in the upstairs bedroom, weak, out of breath and pale after feeding Meghan twenty-five minutes earlier, but determined to establish her parental authority.

"Don't try to tell me you weren't turned on showering with that bimbo," Meghan was saying angrily to Ken. "Are you forgetting that I have cognate smell now? You had a fuckin' boner while you were in there with her! I could smell it! And I could smell how fuckin' wet that bitch was getting while you were rubbing all over her! She damn near came right there!"

"Meghan," Jo said softly.

"Where do you get off smelling what goes on in my shower?" Ken demanded. "Isn't that some kind of invasion of privacy?"

"Kenneth," Jo said softly.

"You were in the shower with some bimbo!" Meghan yelled. "You have no fucking right for me not to smell what's going on in there when there's some slut in there with you!"

"I was washing the blood off of her!"

"You had a fuckin' hard-on! I smelled it!"

"Shut up, both of you!" Jo managed to yell, although it took a good portion of her strength.

They both looked at her, both making guilty note of how tired and weak she looked, both remembering that there was a possibility—how much or how little open to debate—that she would not survive the next week. They shut up, as instructed.

"Do either one of you have any idea," Jo asked, "how fucking ridiculous this argument you're having is?"

"But..." started Meghan.

"She..." started Ken.

Both shut up when Jo held up her hand. She looked from one to the other, as if deciding how to proceed. Finally, she looked at Ken. "Kenneth," she said. "Did you get a hard-on while you were washing Leslie in the shower?"

"Yes," he said, almost defiantly. "I was in the shower with an attractive, naked woman who was doing everything she could to give me a hard-on. I can't help my biological response."

"No, you really can't," Jo said. She looked at Meghan. "Meghan," she said. "Why are you so concerned that Kenneth had a hard-on while he was in the shower with an attractive woman?"

"What kind of a question is that?" Meghan asked. "He's my husband! He's not supposed to be naked in the shower with another woman and getting a hard-on!"

"She kept grabbing it!" Ken protested, and then immediately realized that this was not the right thing to say.

"She grabbed it?" Meghan yelled. "She fucking grabbed it?"

"You try taking a shower with a horny woman with a shower fetish and not get grabbed!" Ken responded.

"Kenneth ... Meghan ... please?" Jo pleaded. "You two are quite literally killing me here."

That shut them up again.

Jo cast her gaze on Meghan. "Meghan, did you or did you not tell Kenneth that you thought kissing his prey's neck was unreasonable?"

"Uh ... well ... I did," she admitted. "I didn't know about the whole ... you know ... erotic submission thing. Nobody told me about it! I thought you could just get her to submit and then bite."

"Well ... you were wrong," Jo said. "Perhaps I was a bit lacking in my explanation to you both about the mechanics of feeding. Perhaps I should have had you in the room when I told Kenneth how to feed, Meghan. Let me clarify things for both of you right now. When you feed, you first overwhelm your prey with your pheromones and then you embrace them as if you are going to kiss them. You then go to the neck and you softly, sensuously move your lips over the Sweet Spot. This helps you locate the artery and, perhaps even more important, makes your prey think you're simply nuzzling and kissing their neck. This causes them to fully submit to you. As we just found out, if you do not achieve erotic submission prior to biting, the bite will hurt and they will try to pull away from you."

Meghan was chewing her lip again. "I ... I didn't know," she said. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize that something like ... you know... that might happen."

Jo nodded. "It's over now," she said. "It was messy and a little bit exciting for a moment or two, but it's over. I do want both of you to know, however, that that could have turned out very badly. If Dad wouldn't have got your mouth back on her neck, Kenneth, she might very well have bled to death right there in the living room. She is an innocent human. Causing the death of an innocent human goes against everything we believe in as cognate."

"I'm ... I'm sorry," he said, ashamed. "I won't do anything like that again."

Jo nodded. She looked at Meghan again. "I'm hoping that this unreasonable jealousy you've been displaying will fade away once you yourself have your first feeding."

"We had an agreement," Meghan said stubbornly. "Back when we first decided to become cognate, Ken and I agreed that we would not have sex with our prey!"

"Yes, I understand that," Jo said. "I think it's a naïve agreement to make prior to experiencing the cognate lifestyle, but that's for the two of you to work out on your own. The problem were having now is that you are equating Kenneth's normal feeding behaviors with sex. You are putting too many activities under the sex umbrella. Am I correct?"

Meghan kept her stubborn look on her face for a moment, but slowly it softened. Finally, she nodded. "I suppose," she said.

"Again, you'll understand in a week or so when you have your own first feeding, but he has to embrace his prey and he has to move his lips on her neck as a necessary part of the process. He may also be groped or squeezed or kissed by his prey. As I told you before, you kind of have to accept those things when you're using a human's sexual attraction to get them to submit."

Meghan nodded.

"Remember," Jo said, "Kenneth is going to have to watch you kiss on some young man's neck in a few days. He's going to have to watch you get your ass felt up or your tits squeezed. It goes with the territory."

Meghan nodded again. "Okay," she said softly. "I understand."

"Very good," Jo told her. She leaned in and gave her a kiss on the forehead. She reached over and caressed Ken's cheek. "Now then ... I'm really tired. Could you two perhaps let me sleep for a bit?"

Three more nights went by. Meghan continued to have Jo bite at her neck during the height of orgasm and then to feed from her twice every night. Meghan grew steadily stronger. She developed cognate hearing and cognate touch. She began to exhibit cognate physical strength.

Jo grew weaker. She did nothing but sleep during the daylight hours and was awake only long enough to complete her propagation tasks with Meghan during the night hours. She dropped another four pounds, putting her below ninety and well into what Dick considered the danger zone.

"I'm very worried about her," Dick confided to Ken and Meghan after the sunset feeding on May 10^th. "I've never seen anyone become that emaciated and dehydrated during propagation before. If this doesn't end soon ... well ... I'm not sure what might happen ... to both of you."

Perhaps it was because of Jo's talk with her or perhaps it was because Jo and Meghan's precarious position of late seemed to make it unimportant, but Meghan did not try to interfere with Ken's feeding anymore. She still watched each time Harold brought a woman to him—and he did this after every sunset and before every sunrise—but she kept her comments to herself, before, during, and after.

As for the feeding itself, there were no more debacles like the 'Leslie Incident', as they'd taken to calling it, but his technique was still a work in progress. With Mindy, the young, single party girl picked up from a nearby club, he ripped the artery a little too much again, overfilling his mouth and making a mess of them both. With Roseanna, the off-duty paramedic nabbed while leaving work, he didn't rip it quite enough, causing her wound to close up before he was able to drink as much as he really wanted. And with Cindy, the ditzy real estate agent who had stopped in for a mocha at Starbucks on her way home from work, he accidentally stabbed into the jugular vein instead of the carotid artery, filling his mouth with horrible, flat-tasting blood that made him sick to his stomach and did absolutely nothing to slake his hunger.

"You'll get the hang of it," Jo told him with as much encouragement as she could muster. "We all go through this. It's really not a skill that your human life prepared you to have to do."

And that was something else that Ken was having trouble wrapping his mind around: the fact that he was no longer human. When one has spent forty-two years of one's life being a member of a species, it was hard to just adjust your thinking and accept that you were now quite literally a member of a different species. Even the cravings for blood, even the biting of necks and drinking that blood, didn't seem to quite drive it home for him at times.

I'm a vampire, he would try to tell himself. A vampire! I drink human blood to survive. I don't age. I can see and smell and hear and touch better than a human. I am not a human! He would repeat these things in his mind over and over and intellectually, he accepted the fact. Emotionally, however, he was still not grasping it. There are no such things as vampires! his emotional mind would scoff. Even when you were a child, you never seriously believed in them. This is all some kind of an illusion, or a dream, or an elaborate practical joke.

There were a few things, however, that finally managed to fully convince his mind just what he had become. One was the fact that the daytime hours now seemed unnatural to him. He was sleepy during the day now—the later the day got, the sleepier he became. His stomach seemed to tighten up during the day and he seemed to lose the craving for blood that was a constant part of him at night. And the one time he walked outside during the day ... that, if nothing else, had served to show him he really was a creature of the night now.

The trip outside had been at Harold's suggestion, just a small foray into the daylight for the simple chore of taking the garbage out to the can near the back gate.

"Sure," Ken replied when he was asked. In truth, he wanted to get out of the house, if even for a minute or two. He had been cooped up inside since the night they'd arrived from Hobart and the idea of some fresh air and blue sky was kind of refreshing.

He picked up the trash bag and opened the back door to take it out. The moment the sunlight hit him, his vision became overwhelmed. He could still see, but everything was full of afterimages and blurry lines and weak contrast. Everything was so bright. And then he felt the pinpricks on his skin. Everywhere the sunlight was touching him, it hurt. It wasn't agonizing pain by any means, it was something that could be tolerated, but it was unpleasant on an instinctive level. It made his mind preternaturally, almost superstitiously scared, as if his body was warning him there was unseen danger out here ... monsters ... death ... destruction. It was the way a small child felt when confronted with the blackness of night. The trip around the house to the garbage can was the equivalent of that small child being asked to retrieve something in the wee hours of the morning from a dark, dank, shadowy basement full of cobwebs and skittering rats.

He endured the experience, forcing himself forward and finding that his instinct compelled him to stay in the shadows as much as practical and to not turn his face toward the big bright orb that was the sun. By the time he got back into the house, his heart was hammering in his chest and his blood was flooded with nervous adrenaline.

"Kind of unsettling, isn't it?" asked Harold, who had waited at the door for him.

"That's ... that's not really the word," Ken replied. "It was terrifying."

"You did well. A lot of nestlings panic when confronted with the daylight for the first time. They lock up and become completely dysfunctional. You were at least able to complete the mission I sent you on."

"I didn't want to," Ken told him. "I wanted nothing more than to dive back into the house. The sunlight actually hurt me. I ... I couldn't see very well. Even my sense of smell and hearing seemed like it had been dampened."

"Your eyes are now designed for lower light conditions," Harold told him. "Bright sunlight will always overwhelm them to some degree. Wearing dark glasses helps considerably. And as for your hearing and smell, they weren't really degraded by the sunlight, but the loss of your vision and the instinctive fear of the light will make it seem so. With time, you will get used to operating in daylight and even be able to function normally. Take Josephine for instance. She actually learned to fly aircraft during the day. But you will never be completely comfortable and your vision will never be what it is at night."

"And the pain?"

"The pain will always be there whenever direct sunlight touches your exposed skin," Harold confirmed. "It doesn't do damage, but it isn't fun either."

"No," Ken said, shaking his head. "It really isn't."

Later, after the sun had gone down and night had conquered the landscape, Harold invited Ken to step out into the backyard yet again and experience the difference. Ken did so and was astounded. It was a dark, moonless night. Only starlight and the ambient light from the nearby houses provided illumination. But Ken was able to see everything in exacting detail. He could see the water burbling in the small pond out near the back of the lot, could even see the forms of the koi swimming around in it, and could tell not just that they were gold in color but what particular shade of gold. He could see every brick in the retaining wall along Gertrude's garden, every leaf on every plant. He could hear every insect moving around, could smell that there was a male toad hidden in a recess just beneath the pond and that there were two rats prowling just beyond the back fence.