THTDG | Chapter 2: The Predator of Predators 

I watched from the shadows of the mezzanine as Vince exited the laboratory, looking every bit the pristine, untouchable schoolboy. He straightened his collar with a clinical detachment that turned my stomach. Inside that room, a girl was losing years of her life, her vitality harvested to fuel his vanity.

He thought he was a god. He thought he was the only one.

When I bumped into him in the hallway, the contact was electric, not with passion, but with the sudden, violent rush of his stolen power surging into my veins. For five centuries, he had been the apex siphon, but in that split second, I tasted his essence. It was heavy, ancient, and rancid with the souls of a thousand victims.

He felt the drain. I saw the flash of confusion in his eyes, the momentary graying of his skin. It’s a terrifying thing, isn’t it? To feel the hunger you’ve inflicted on others suddenly turned against you.

I retreated into the crowd, my heart hammering a rhythm of pure, cold adrenaline. My skin felt like it was humming. The energy I took from him didn’t just nourish me; it sang. It was the purest “meal” I’ve had since I crossed the ocean.

I followed him to the hotel. I watched him play his games with the receptionist and the model. He’s predictable, a creature of habit who relies on a face he didn’t earn to lure in hearts he doesn’t value.

He thinks he’s clever, renting out the underground pool for the Senator’s daughter. He thinks the water is his ally. He doesn’t realize that while he was busy “saving” Anne to set his trap, I was standing in the darkness of the observation gallery, watching the way he manipulated the currents.

He’s powerful, certainly. But he’s also arrogant. He believes his secret is a fortress. He doesn’t know that I am the crack in the wall.

As I watch the lights of the hotel flicker from my balcony across the street, I can still taste him on my skin. He siphons life to stay young; I siphon life to stay even. He is a parasite. I am the cure.

Tomorrow, he will look for me. He’ll scan the faces in the hallway, searching for the one person who made him feel vulnerable for the first time in five hundred years. He’ll look for a monster.

He won’t find one. He’ll find a girl who looks even more “puro” than the victims he seeks. He’ll be drawn to me like a moth to a blowtorch, thinking he’s found a legendary feast.

He thinks he’s the one who “devours.”

He has no idea what it feels like to be truly hollowed out. But I’m going to teach him. I’m going to take back every year, every breath, and every spark of energy he stole from those girls, until there’s nothing left of “Vince” but the dust his father tried to hide five centuries ago.

The hunt has changed. And for the first time in his long, wretched life, the monster is the one being stalked.

Before she was a hunter, she was a tragedy. Her name is Elara, though she has buried that name under a dozen aliases over the centuries.

While Vince was buried in the earth by a protective father, Elara was kept in a gilded cage, not as a daughter, but as a living battery.

In the late 1500s, Elara belonged to a rival faction of the same ancient kin as Vince. However, her lineage possessed a rare mutation. While others had to touch or seduce to siphon energy, Elara was a “Passive Well.” She didn’t just take energy; she magnified it and bled it out to those around her.

Her own clan,her uncles, her cousins, kept her chained in a cellar beneath a cathedral in Spain. They used her to sustain their immortality, taking turns draining her until she was a translucent husk, only to feed her just enough human “essence” to keep her heart beating so they could drain her again.

She wasn’t a monster yet. She was a feast.

The night Vince’s clan was being burned, Elara’s captors were distracted by the purge. They were terrified that the humans’ holy fire would find them next. In their panic, they tried to drain Elara one last time to gain the strength to flee.

But something snapped.

The years of being a “Well” had inverted her nature. Instead of bleeding energy out, her body developed a violent, instinctive vacuum. When her eldest uncle placed his hand on her throat to feed, she didn’t just give, she imploded.

She didn’t just take his energy; she took his memories, his age, and his very soul. Within seconds, he turned to fine white ash. She did the same to every guard in the cellar. By the time she walked out of the cathedral, she wasn’t just Elara anymore. She was a composite of everyone she had ever consumed.

For centuries, Elara lived in the shadows of the “Great Purge,” watching as the last of her kind were hunted down. She realized that the monsters weren’t just the humans; it was the siphons themselves. They were addicts, and their drug was the human spirit.

She made a choice: She would not be a parasite. She would be a predator of predators.

Unlike Vince, who enjoys the “flavor” of his victims, Elara hates the act of siphoning. Every soul she takes stays with her, a choir of screaming voices in the back of her mind.

She spent the 1800s in London, the 1900s in Paris, and the 2000s in Asia, refining her ability to sense “leaks” in the atmosphere, the telltale ripple in the air when a siphon is feeding.

Now, she presents herself as a quiet, unassuming transfer student. She wears high-collared shirts to hide the faint, glowing veins that pulse when she is “full.”

She didn’t find Vince by accident. She followed the trail of “withered” women: victims like Jen and Anne who were suddenly becoming “more beautiful” while their eyes grew hollow and their hearts grew weak.

To Elara, Vince is a relic of a barbaric past. He represents the gluttony that led to their race’s near extinction. She doesn’t just want to kill him; she wants to reclaim the energy he has stolen and, if possible, find a way to return the “years” to his victims before they fade away.

Vince was a creature of habit. He loved the theater of the hunt, and the hotel lobby was his favorite stage.

Elara stood by the grand piano in the lounge, a glass of untouched sparkling water in her hand. She had traded her school uniform for a silk slip dress the color of a bruised plum. To Vince’s eyes, she looked like the ultimate prize, delicate, expensive, and radiating a vitality so bright it practically hummed in the dim light.

She felt him before she saw him. The air grew heavy, charged with that familiar, predatory static. 

Vince stepped out of the elevator, his ego restored after his “meal” with Anne. He scanned the room, his eyes skipping over the regulars until they landed on her. He paused. Elara felt his gaze like a physical touch, cold, calculating, and hungry.

She didn’t look away. Instead, she tilted her head and let a small, mysterious smile play on her lips.

Come on, little monster, she thought. Come and see what real hunger looks like.

Vince adjusted his jacket and glided toward her. He moved with the practiced grace of someone who had spent five centuries perfecting the art of the “chance” encounter.

“You look like you’re waiting for someone who doesn’t deserve the wait,” Vince said, his voice a smooth, baritone honey. He stood just close enough to invade her personal space, letting his “aura” do the heavy lifting.

Elara let out a soft, melodic laugh. “I was beginning to think the same thing. But then, the scenery just improved.”

Vince’s smile widened, revealing teeth that were just a fraction too white, too perfect. He reached out, his fingers ghosting toward her arm, the opening move of his siphon. “I’m Vince. I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before.”

“I’m new to the city,” Elara lied, her voice a breathy whisper. She moved her arm, seemingly by accident, so that his fingers brushed against her bare skin.

The moment their skin met, the air between them seemed to thrum.

Vince’s eyes flared. He expected the usual: the soft, easy draw of energy, the immediate pliability of a human victim. Instead, he hit a wall of pure, vibrating power. It wasn’t a leak; it was a pressurized chamber.

He didn’t pull away. He couldn’t. His instinct, honed by centuries of gluttony, told him that if he could just break through the surface of this girl, he would never have to feed again. He would be a god.

“You’re… different,” Vince murmured, his pupils dilating until his eyes were almost entirely black. He stepped closer, his hand firmly gripping her forearm now. He began to pull, his siphoning reflex kicking into overdrive.

Elara felt the tug. It felt like a mosquito trying to drain an ocean. She leaned into him, her lips inches from his ear.

“Am I?” she whispered.

She opened the “Well.”

For a split second, she stopped the vacuum and pushed back. She flooded him with a surge of raw, unrefined energy, a tidal wave of every soul she had ever reclaimed. It was too much, too fast.

Vince gasped, his knees buckling for a fraction of a second. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. It was the ultimate high, a rush so intense it bordered on agony.

“What are you?” he hissed, his voice trembling with a mix of lust and sudden, piercing terror.

Elara pulled back, her eyes shimmering with a faint, iridescent light that wasn’t reflected from the chandeliers.

“I’m the check you forgot to pay, Vince,” she said, her voice dropping the act, becoming cold and ancient. “And I’ve come to collect the interest.”

She pulled her arm away, leaving a faint, glowing bruise in the shape of her fingers on his skin. Before he could react, she turned and walked toward the elevators, the sway of her hips a deliberate taunt.

She knew he would follow. A monster like Vince couldn’t resist a feast that bit back.

He approached me with the weary confidence of a king entering a familiar court, oblivious to the fact that the throne was already rigged with wire. When his fingers finally met my skin, I felt his hunger, a shallow, grasping thing, pathetic in its greed. He tried to drink from me, a parasite mistaking a storm for a puddle. I let him taste a fraction of what I carried; I flooded his narrow veins with the roar of a thousand stolen suns until I saw the terror bloom in his pupils. For the first time in half a millennium, the predator felt the hook in his own throat, and as I walked away, I could feel his gaze stapled to my back: the desperate, doomed longing of a moth that had finally realized the moon was a flame.

Vince was shaken, but his ego was a fortress built over five hundred years. He didn’t see Elara as a threat yet; he saw her as a challenge. To him, that surge of energy she’d flashed wasn’t a warning; it was an invitation to the greatest feast of his life.

He followed her to the 12th floor, his heart still thundering from the “hit” she had given him. He waited exactly three minutes before he knocked on her door. He didn’t pound; he used a soft, rhythmic tap that suggested intimacy rather than intrusion.

When the door opened, Elara was standing there, the plum silk dress discarded. She was wrapped in a white hotel robe, her damp hair clinging to her neck. She looked vulnerable, the perfect lie.

“You’re persistent,” she said, leaning against the doorframe.

“I’m a creature of appetite,” Vince replied, his voice dropping into that velvet register that had broken a thousand hearts. “And you… you’re the most intoxicating thing I’ve ever tasted. I couldn’t just let you walk away.”

He didn’t wait for an invite. He stepped into the room, closing the door behind him with a soft click. The suite was dimly lit, the only light coming from the city skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Vince walked toward her, his presence filling the space. He wanted to regain the upper hand, to remind her and himself that he was the master of the hunt.

“That little trick in the lobby,” he murmured, reaching out to stroke the line of her jaw. His touch was light, but he was already preparing his siphoning reflex. “You have power. More than I’ve ever felt. But power is a heavy burden to carry alone.”

He backed her up toward the bed, his eyes locked on hers. He was using every ounce of his charm, his “glamour” radiating from him like heat. He wanted her to feel small, to feel overwhelmed by the sheer force of his five centuries of existence.

“I can teach you how to handle it,” he whispered, his lips grazing her ear. “How to use it. We aren’t like the humans, Elara. We don’t have to play by their rules. Why starve yourself when you could rule with me?”

Elara sat on the edge of the bed, letting him tower over her. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, seemingly caught in his spell.

“Rule with you?” she asked, her voice trembling. “And what happens when I run dry, Vince? Do I end up like Jen? Or Anne? A hollow shell while you look for someone ‘fresher’?”

Vince froze. The mention of the names sent a jolt of ice through his veins. He realized then that she hadn’t just “bumped” into him. She had been hunting him.

But he was too far gone in his own arrogance. He laughed, a low, dangerous sound. “They were just snacks. You… you would be a partner. A queen.”

He knelt between her knees, his hands sliding up her thighs, parting the robe. He wanted to claim her right then, to sink into her and take back the dominance he had lost. He leaned in for a kiss, his mouth hungry and desperate for that electric rush.

The moment their lips touched, Elara didn’t pull away. She grabbed his hair, pulling him closer, her mouth opening to his. 

Vince felt a jolt of static leap from her tongue to his, a spark that tasted of ozone and ancient copper. He expected her to wilt under the force of his kiss, but instead, she anchored him, her hands winding through his locks with a grip of iron. The air in the room seemed to vanish, replaced by a thick, suffocating heat that radiated from the point where their mouths met.

He moved to pin her down, his weight pressing her into the mattress, but as he did, the sensation of his own skin changed. It felt as though his pores were opening, not to sweat, but to breathe in the very essence of the woman beneath him. A low, rhythmic thrumming began to echo between their chests, a dual heartbeat that slowly synced into a single, violent pulse. The silk of her robe and the cotton of his clothes felt like sandpaper against the hypersensitivity of their nerves, leading them to tear the fabric away until there was nothing left but the raw, electric friction of skin.

As their bodies fused, the boundary between where his skin ended and hers began seemed to dissolve. It wasn’t merely a joining of limbs; it was a grafting of two ancient, predatory essences.

When Vince entered her, the friction felt like glass and lightning. His flesh was searing, a vessel swollen with five hundred years of stolen vitality, while hers felt like a cool, bottomless velvet that threatened to swallow him whole. Every time their hips collided, a shockwave of indigo sparks rippled across their skin, illuminating the dark room in staccato flashes.

He gripped her thighs, his fingers sinking deep into her muscles as if trying to anchor himself to her very bone. Beneath his touch, her skin hummed: a rhythmic, predatory vibration that synchronized with the frantic beating of his heart. They weren’t just moving in rhythm; they were vibrating at the same lethal frequency.

Elara arched her back, her chest heaving against his, their sweat mingling into a slick, electric lubricant that tasted of ozone. She could feel the “Well” of his life-force throbbing within him, a heavy, golden heat that pressed against her internal walls. It was a sensory overload, the feeling of his raw, masculine power trying to colonize her, while her own void-like nature began to wrap around him like a shroud.

Their sweat-slicked bodies became a single, thrashing machine of lust and hunger. The heat was so intense that the smell of singed silk filled the air. In the height of their union, the physical sensation was so sharp it felt like being unmade, as if their very cells were being torn apart and reassembled in the heat of their shared friction.

The heat in the room rose until the windows began to fog, the very air thick with the scent of ozone and ancient magic. Vince felt himself reaching a precipice, a peak so high it promised either godhood or annihilation. He surged into her, his fingers bruising her hips, his entire being focused on the singular point where they were one.

And then, at the moment of his greatest release, the moment his soul was most exposed, Elara smiled.

The pleasure turned to a scream. The flow reversed. The trap snapped shut.

It wasn’t a push. It was a pull.

Elara began to drain him.

Vince tried to break away, but his body wouldn’t obey. It was as if his very molecules were being dragged through a needle’s eye. The five hundred years of stolen life began to leak out of him. He felt his muscles wither, his skin tighten over his bones, and his vision blur.

“You wanted a partner?” Elara whispered against his lips, her voice cold and resonant. “I don’t need a partner.”

Elara felt the pulse of his five centuries, a heavy, bloated river of stolen moments, surging into her. It was a dark, intoxicating vintage, but she didn’t swallow it. She channeled it, holding the energy in the “Well” of her soul, intended for a much better use than her own vanity.

As the last of the supernatural glow faded from Vince’s eyes, she broke the kiss.

Vince collapsed onto the plush carpet. He didn’t turn to ash, but the transformation was more agonizing. His skin, once marble-smooth and radiant, became sallow and thin. The “Vince” who stood six feet tall with the physique of an athlete seemed to shrink, his muscles softening into the frame of an ordinary, frail human boy.

He gasped, clawing at his throat. For the first time in five hundred years, he felt the true weight of gravity. He felt the chill of the air conditioner. He felt the terrifying, rhythmic ticking of a heart that was no longer sustained by magic, but by mere biology.

“What… what did you do?” his voice was no longer a velvet baritone. It was thin, cracking with the puberty of the sixteen-year-old body he was now trapped in.

Elara stood over him. She looked radiant, her skin glowing with the stolen light she had just stripped from him.

“I didn’t kill you, Vince. That would be too quick. Too merciful,” she said, looking down at him with a cold, detached pity. 

Vince tried to stand, but his legs felt like lead. He looked at his hands; they weren’t blackening anymore, but they were trembling. The eternal hunger was gone, replaced by a mundane, gnawing emptiness in his stomach.

“You can’t leave me like this,” he whimpered. “I don’t know how to be… this.”

“You’ll learn,” Elara replied, walking toward the window. “You’ll learn what it’s like to grow old. You’ll learn the indignity of a body that aches.”

She turned back to him, her eyes flashing one last time. “And if you ever try to hurt a girl again, even with just your human hands, I’ll know. I’ve left a tether in your soul. I’ll be the shadow in the corner of your eye for the rest of your very short, very mortal life.”

Elara closed her eyes and raised her hands. The energy she had taken from him began to flow out of her fingertips, shimmering like gold dust. It drifted through the walls, through the floors, seeking out the “hollowed” victims.

Miles away, in a darkened bedroom, Jen’s eyes fluttered open, the crushing fatigue suddenly lifting as her youth rushed back into her marrow. In the hotel’s infirmary, Anne’s pale cheeks flushed with a sudden, healthy pink, her heart beating with a strength she thought she had lost.

The years were being returned.

Vince lay on the floor, his breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches. He remained frozen, his eyes wide and vacant as he stared at his own hands. They were the hands of a boy: pale, thin, and devoid of the golden hum of power. He looked disoriented, his mind struggling to process the sudden weight of his own bones and the terrifying realization that he was now invisible to the world he once ruled. He tried to speak, to curse her, but his throat felt tight and dry, a mortal frailty he had long forgotten.

Elara stood over him, her skin still shimmering with the residual glow of the energy she had harvested. She didn’t rush. With a slow, predatory grace, she walked to the chair where her clothes lay. She let the white hotel robe fall to the floor, standing unashamed in the moonlight, her body a masterpiece of reclaimed vitality.

She dressed with deliberate, quiet efficiency; the silk slip dress sliding over her skin like a second shadow. She smoothed the fabric over her hips and fastened her heels, the sharp click of the stilettos echoing like a countdown in the silent room.

She reached for her bag, slinging it over her shoulder. Only then did she look down at him one last time.

“The world is very loud when you can’t silence it with a thought, isn’t it, Vince?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She walked to the door, her silhouette tall and imposing against the city lights. She didn’t look back as she stepped out into the hallway, leaving the boy who used to be a god to figure out how to survive his first night as a ghost.

She had a long night ahead of her, and a world full of other parasites to find.

THE END