He found his prey here.
In the woods, alone, he had opened his senses, let his mind escape his body and flit over the land, searching for the whisper of a sentient mind.
In the city, he was deafened by the swarm of them.
Like a hive, all tangled and muddy, glinting light and shadows all at once.
He did not seek out an elder human, this time. Purposefully.
The girl in the shadows of the hotel was young and smooth and warm, and she smoked too much and drank too much and ate too little and would die before she was thirty-five.
He knew this, not with a banshee's instinct for death, but because he could hear the irregularities of rhythm in her heart, the tell-tale rasp in her lungs. But she looked him over and gestured to him and smiled and said, I'm Rachel.
She led him into the hotel, trailing smoke behind her, and she didn't bother to move seductively within the tight leather sheath that was her dress, laced in the back--she didn't have to. It came naturally.
And she spoke, idly, about the string of events that had led her to the hotel. A rich boyfriend, too old for her, the parents that had driven her away. The pills in her drawer. The drugs in her suitcase. The boyfriend who had stormed out earlier this evening, had left her alone in this strange city.
She laughed and smiled and wove through the corridors in those high stiletto heels, and unlocked her door and pulled him in with her and kissed him, tasting like gin.
He could taste the unhappiness in that kiss. Like the salt from her tears had somehow left traces of sorrow on her tongue.
And Rachel, kissing him, his hands tangled in her stick-straight, wren-brown hair, wept until her tears ran black with mascara, because she was afraid.
And it was cruel, he knew, to soothe her to sleep with gentle words, and leave the imprints of blood upon her throat, to stain her pillow in the morning. Cruel to leave her to the life she had thrown herself into, the life that would kill her.
But vampires were cruel by nature. And he might fake it well enough to leave her comforted, secure, but in truth? He did not care.
He left her sleeping, a little paler than before, the cream silk sheets drawn up to her chest, and returned to the forest.