~~Mia~~
Twilight came. Night wouldn’t be far behind, and the amber veins pulsed gently, announcing its imminent arrival. Mia, naked and alone save for her broken bodyguard, held a sharp bone in hand, for emergency self-defense stabbing.
A sharp bone wasn’t going to do shit.
Vinicius had found enough strength to sit up and move, but it’d been a struggle. She tried to help, but she might as well have been trying to push a truck with the emergency brake on. After some time, he’d managed to move away from the statues, the piles of bones, the torture devices, the corpses, and into the back of the giant cavern where there weren’t so many amber veins. Enough shadow that, as long as he didn’t move, he didn’t immediately stand out.
“I need… to eat something,” she said, wiping the sweat from her brow with the one of the few unbloodied parts of her arm.
Vinicius, arms now limp at his sides and wounds healed over enough he wasn’t leaking blood like holes poked in a water balloon, did not turn his head. Turning probably hurt. It might even tear the wound. He did rumble, though.
“It’s weird, right?” she said. “I shouldn’t be hungry yet, but I am. Humans take a while to get hungry, down here in Hell.”
“You’re not human.”
She stood up and glared at him. But, before she could go on a rant explaining how unfair that statement was, reality ripped the wind from her lungs. She wasn’t human. But still, that didn’t give the biggest asshole in the world the right to be a jerk about it.
Sighing, she looked back toward the corpses. Guts, blood, and bones. The hungrier she got, the less the absolutely disgusting, visceral, gory nature of Hell bothered her. The more the aching sensation in her stomach and limbs grew, the more she didn’t care about the skeletons in the torture machines, and the smell of fire and iron that permeated everything.
“Do you hear anything nearby?” she asked. “Anyone?” She held her breath, held perfectly still, and waited.
Vinicius did, too, and after thirty seconds of nothing, he clicked once. Must have been a no.
“I’m… going to get something to eat.”
“How?”
“Same way I fed you.”
Vinicius, head aimed down at her, said nothing, but the tiniest raise of his demon dragon eyebrows spoke volumes. Little her was going to cut up a wholly intact vrat body, save for the squashed head, so she could get another heart. Yes, she was, asshole. No need to say it, but she glared her words at him, anyway.
She marched back toward the mounds of bones near the more well lit section of the cave, grabbed the ridiculously heavy sword by the hilt, and dragged it toward her next victim.
The problem was the noise. Twilight hours meant hellbeasts on the prowl, and even though Death’s Grip was all messed up and hellbeasts were out hunting at unusual times, there was probably a good chance hellbeasts would still prioritize hunting at twilight. Unfortunately, she had no way of avoiding making noise.
So the tiny naked ginger girl swung the sword over her shoulder using every muscle in her body, earned a big splat of blood that hit her bare skin, and she made no sound. No grunts or groans, or screams of frustration, or sighs of disgust. She chopped and chopped, and quickly earned a new layer of blood and sweat.
At least this time, she didn’t have to literally yank the heart free. She had time to get surgical. Panting as quietly as she could, she got on her knees, and used her bone’s sharp edge to scrap away at the binding veins and arteries. It was a big heart, and filled both her palms, heavy and meaty and bloody and gross and all the things that made her very much not want to hold it. But the hunger wiped the feelings away.
As she walked back toward Vinicius, stepping around and over bones like a cat, she watched the huge hunk of meat in her palm, half expecting it to suddenly beat and jump for freedom. It did not. She reached Vin, stood in front of him, and held the huge meal with both hands as she watched the blood drip down her wrists.
“I won’t be able to eat all this… I think. I’ll give you half.”
Vin said nothing. His eyes weren’t even on the heart. They were on her.
She caught his strange, curious glance, gulped, and looked back down at the heart. The last time she’d done this, memories had knocked her on her ass, memories she did not want or need. But she was tired, her body ached, little scratches on her skin had only barely healed enough to stop bleeding, and the journey was only going to get harder. She couldn’t afford to be picky. Next time Vin killed a hellbeast, she’d eat it. And right now, she was going to eat this demon heart.
She sat beside Vinicius, deep in the shadows of the cave, and bit into the meat.
She hated how good it tasted. She hated how natural it felt to push her incisors into it until the meat split around the sharpness of her teeth. She hated how the flesh, unnaturally warm for a corpse several hours dead, flooded her mouth with deliciousness as she ground the meat with her molars. She hated it hated it hated it.