Adriana shivered in the cold. Icy rain pelted her from the cruel sky above. She needed this dark to live, but she was dreadfully woe for the sun now. She missed that brightly burning orb so much, but that could not be helped now. The thirst was upon her and she needed to drink of another's blood before she was driven mad by her own lust. She carefully checked the road for traffic before daring to take a step onto it

She was about half way across it when she was struck by the headlights of a car that had just turned on to the road. Blinded, her instincts screaming at her, Adriana was unable to move, frozen in fear and anticipation.The car crashed into her, brakes squealing on the wet road. She was sent flying into the windshield, bouncing off and over the top of the car and onto the road behind, her bones popping and cracking under force. Adriana screeched in pain, writhing on the ground. Bones poked out of her skin and blood ever flowed from and to her injuries.

A car door was slammed in haste and a man's voice called shakily to her, asking if she was ok, followed by the beam of a flashlight. "Oh my God...what have I done..."

Adriana turned her bruised and battered face away, sheilding her sensitive eyes from the bright light. Already she could feel her blood clotting; feel her bones begining to reset. But the horrid pain would not leave her until she was completly healed, and that would not come to her in time for her to seek shelter from the abbhorred sun. So instead she must ploy this man to aid her.

"Help..me.." she cried, keeping her voice soft and full of the angst she knew would move his heart.

"Let me call an ambulance." the man said in a paniced voice, fumbling at his waist for his cell phone.

"No!" Adriana said with sudden fury. "Don't!"

The woman's voice startled the man badly, causing his poor grip on the mobile phone to be lost. It plunged quickly to the ground, shattering. There was a swift curse from above and the scuff of his foot knocking the cellphone across the street and into a puddle.

"Then what do you want me to do?" His voice cut across the wet night, clear yet despairing. He was clearly distressed about the situation he now found himself in.

Adriana lifted herself up on her crooked arms and turned her bloodied face to him. "Take me to your house."

"But I.." As his eyes fell on her legs, both twisted into unnatural directions and positions and her grotesquely malformed arms, he began to protest, but for her eyes. He looked deeply into her sea colored eyes, the exact color of the waves that broke upon the beach each time he closed his eyes. The color of his ever lasting passion. "O....ook...if...if you insist" his voice seemed drab suddenly, less full of the vibrancy of the human soul.

He stooped, scooping her slight frame into his arms and stood, wobbling dangerously. Light she may have been, but he was no muscular gentleman. He staggered with her to his car, laying her gently across the passenger seat.

In a void of silence, the man shifted into drive and began to calmly roll down the road, making several turns before halting in the driveway of a small house. He again lifted the woman and entered his abode. He set her comfortably on his couch, ignoring it, seemed, the leaking bodily fluids that began instantaneously to stain the soft fabric.

"Telll me your name.." the woman finally spoke, her voice a soft purr.

"It is Blake." the man replied numbly as he seated himself on the floor across from her.

Adriana examined him with one of her optics, taking in everything from his frail, thin body, to his flaming red hair, his pale, freckled skin, to his rich, green eyes. She blinked, turning her face upwards. "Are you afraid, Blake?"

Blake shook himself as if clearing his head of some phantom. "Yes." he answered, his body begining to tremble.

"Good..." Adriana turned her cold eyes on him again and his trembling stopped, taken in by the crashing of the breakers in his ears.

She squirmed uncomfortably as she felt one of her arms popping back into joint with a satisfying click. She was almost in a whole enough piece to be done with this mortal, but she needed to borrow his resources a little longer. She continued to question the poor man, brushing her blood encrusted black hair from her face, wincing as her torn finger tips pulsed in pain.

"So..why were you moving so fast on a rainy night down a slick road?"

Blake shifted uneasily, "I was...anxious to be home..." he finally answered after a time.

"Anxious..?" Adirana curiously inquired further, "Why so?"

"I felt...like something bad was happening...or going to happen in it...something awful and of consequence.." he shuddered, horrified at the very remembrance of the what he was speaking of.

He reflected inwardly at the odd premonition he had recieved at his workplace. It was like a cold breath of something rotten and foul touching his mind and trailing its slimy dead fingers through his conciousness, leaving behind broken words spat out from an unseen maw. The mutilated idioms slowly formed into sentences that could be understood to be refrences to his home and words of warning such as death, decay, and suffering. He shivered at the memory.

"A moment of foresight perhaps.." she suggested to the young man. "However, it is none of my concern." she waved her hand dismissively, turning onto her side so that her back was to him. She winced as her legs twisted themselves around, rebuilding the fractured bones in seconds. In just a few more minutes, she wouldn't need this creatures hospitality any longer....

A loud growl eminated from Blake's stomache causing him to pink in embarressment. "Ma'am...may I go and have some dinner? I wasn't able to get dinner before I had to come home and so..." he watched her timidly as a rabbit might eye a resting hound, waiting for her answer, though not sure why he was asking her if he could eat in his own house.

"You may go.." she announced, not bothering to grace him with her face.

He quickly took advantage of her hospitality and retreated to the kitchen, making a scene of opening and digging through the refrigerator for the vampire to hear that he was being truthful to his word. Secretly, however, he lifted the phone from its reciever and dialed the hospital, asking them to send an ambulance to his house; that he had an injured woman there that needed help. Carefully he replaced the phone and proceeded to consume his sandwich he had made himself.

Their was a breif crackling from the couch when Adriana's spine realigned itself and mended, leaving her alomst completly free of critcal wounds. There only remained a single arm to rebuild. She smirked then, as only she could, at the thought of what would happen. Oh the pure thrill of the hunt that would soothe her ache for what ran through that human's veins.

She fidgeted impatiently, knowing that she needed her other arm to hold him down properly if he came out of her control, but she was tired of waiting. She stood abrubtly to her feet, the tails of her once beautiful black coat swirling outwards as she turned to advance swiftly on her prey.

"Can I hel..?" the polite inquisition fell from Blake's mouth when he saw the hungry, compelling power burning in the converging creature's eyes.

All thoughts of his meal left him and he twisted away from Adriana's blistering gaze only to find that he was now face to face with her.

"H-how did you.." he stuttered, stepping backwards and pivoting to run the other way, but she was there again, slowly drifting towards him, a mocking leer stretched across her mouth, revealing her sharpened canines that extended lengthily from both the top and bottom of her jaw.

Adriana extended her right arm towards the terrified youth, her white palm shining in the bright flouresent lights that hung above. "Do not run from me, child...You can not escape me. So come here like a good little boy. It will not hurt for long...."

Blake quivered fearfully, but did not move. The slapping of water had quelled his thoughts so that all he could sense was a numb feeling of disease that he quickly pushed aside for the contentment he felt in the cool aqueous material.

"That's right..." Adriana cooed, close enough now to brush her lips against his own. "Do not fight me..." She slipped her arm under his and leaned him downwards as a dancer would their partner; deep into a sensuous dip of the body, their curves pressed together like lovers. "Surrender to me. Become mine." her voice acquired an alluring, soothing tone; a mothering tone of one whom is singing a tender lullaby to her tiny fledgling.

She watched, satisfied when Blake's head lolled to the side, exposing the soft flesh of his neck. Adriana dipped her head, taking in his rich scent and softly carressed his skin with the tip of her tongue, leaving a wet trail just along his throbbing vein.

Blake panted heavily in her close embrace, his lungs crushed under his ecstasy at her libidinous touch, yet it was not without the fear of such lavish contingence from someone he didn't even know. He weakly willed himself to push her away, but he couldn't manage anything more than a slight shift of his arm. His mind felt contained in a glass bowl that was slowly filling with liquid, reaching upwards with dripping, beryl hands to flood his lungs and nose, stealing his breath away along with his life.

"Do not struggle. You will not have to bear it long." Adriana soothed, stroking his cheek tenderly with one finger.

"Wha...t..are you..doing..to..me..?" Blake forced himself to ask, articulating his mouth with special care to make sure that none of the sloshing material below him managed to claw its way past his lips as he spoke.

"My...You are a strong willed one." she lay her smooth face against his and whispered into his ear. "But it will not save you now..." She traced her lips down so that they rested lightly upon his judglar and kissed it tenderly. "Good night.."

Blake arched his back in a pained scream as her four sharp inscizors pierced his flesh, the water in his glass aquarium flooding out of the top, but he could not reach it, for his body was chained to the bottom by her fangs. His hands slapped at Adriana's face and body, pushing against her shoulders, anything to detach the incubus so that he may gasp for air.

Adriana ignored his protests, struggling to retain control of the situation. She tore at his throat, swallowing flesh and blood in equal amounts in her fight to fill her uncontrolable need, her lust for nurishment.

Blake's scream was smothered as he choked on his blood. The crimson leaked from his mouth in a fountain of bereavement, mingling with his stained tears of desolation and unquestionable terror. Was he to be consigned to die on the threshhold of his own house? He wept all the more to know that this was so.

Ring! The loud and mouthy call of the doorbell interrupted the deadly dance of death.

Hearing a savior at last, Blake let his heart vociferate for his lungs, already too full of an alloy of blood and water that they were unable to carry the air he needed to produce sound.

Adriana snarled as the sound of splintering wood came to her ears. She tossed away her prey as only so much air, sneering even when he whimpered piously as he slammed into the hard, sharp-cornered cabinets. She watched, amused, when several cops entered the house, guns raised. They could not kill her with such tools, foolish beings. She was a vampire. She could not be killed by ordinary means...

"Don't move!" one of the mortal beings called to her. When she didn't move, he continued, "Lay down on the ground and spread you arms and legs!"

Adriana laughed quietly, but it steadily grew in volume until it was ringing in the ears of everyone present, freezing the stream of time into a temporary stupor.

"Qu-quiet!" one of the men ordered. "And get down, or we will shoot."

Adriana opened her arms, inviting a bullet to lodge itself in her chest. "Then shoot me..."

They stood no chance.

Even as the first bullet's compression wave was released to send itself hurling through space, Adriana was already on them. She reached out and took hold of the hand that held the gun that had first shot at her and wrenched the entire limb from the man's ownership, spinning to whip it like an axe at the next and taking his head clean from the shoulders. She dropped the arm and grasped the front of another's shirt, flinging him into the others and knocking them into the wooden counters, leaving them pinned under their own weight. She nimbly leapt atop the pile and, in a few quick, deft strokes of a knife withdrawn from the butcher block on the counter above, gutted and dismembered the lot.

She cleaned the blade on the edge of her shirt, not wishing to soil her pallet with such vitiated claret and placed it back in the block. She turned back to face her former victim whom was now huddled patheticly in the corner she had dropped him, his blood woefully being wasted as it spilt down his gore stained clothes.

"Tsk tsk." Adriana reproved. "Come here and stop that sniveling at once." She stamped her foot impatiently, but he did not move. "Oh yes, I had forgotten how i had torn you. You're probably dying."

She took two quick strides and wrenched him into the air by his shirt collar. His pupils, dialated to the extent to where his iris almost disappeared, stared terrified up at her.

"Good bye, Blake."

It was not long before the soulless body of the young man fell to the floor again, but there was no getting up this time. Adriana wiped her red lips clean upon her sleeve and gazed with detached intrest at her victim. Just another food source. She turned away and withdrew her presence from the property to seekout her nightly residence to find refuge from the sun away from the crime scene that was sure to be swarming with more criminal investigation officials when the police men come up missing.

"And the ambulence that reported the screams form within never arrives back at base..." she continued outloud, changing her directional path to the front of the house. Oh, how the red dawn reined with the silence of Death after twilight's noisy crown of screams.