Jelissa was no longer capable of coherent thoughts. Torn away from her mates, she was thrust into a room full of humans. Her captor had feasted upon all the energy Jelissa had inadvertently stolen from her mates, leaving them beyond weak and with no way to feed themselves. And leaving Jelissa herself ravenous.
The moment she was over the threshold of this new room that was even more enormous than the last and with not one stick of furniture, a smell hit her so hard and fast it woke yet another dormant part of her she had no idea lay in wait. The only physical change when this side arose was to her eyes. Turning into a black so deep to look inside them would make one feel as though they were falling into a never-ending abyss; there were no visible retinas nor pupils, just complete and utter darkness that reflected back at her through the eyes of her soon to be victims. An abyss that was about to swallow each one of those humans’ sin damned souls as her sin eater side came fully online. And it had awoken to a smorgasbord.
Closing her eyes, Jelissa inhaled deeply, savoring all the different flavors she could almost taste upon her tongue. She shuddered as she exhaled all the delectable aromas and rolled her head on her shoulders, cracking her neck in the process. She licked her lips, then opened her eyes as they latched on to her first victim of choice. Once the human female’s eyes locked with Jelissa’s, the woman was lost.
As though she were a marionette on strings, the small, terrified, frail human walked directly to Jelissa. When she stood before her and became completely lost in those endless depths that were Jelissa’s eyes, her every sin came to the forefront of her mind; from the tiniest of infractions to the ones that had ruined not only her own life but others as well.
But Jelissa didn’t see any of that. She wasn’t there to judge. She was there to feast. And that was the thing about sins, they truly were something judged by the eye of the beholder, not something etched in stone. Humans rated their own sins; whichever actions they deemed were sins, and which weren’t. It was why sin eaters only feasted on humans and no other species. Humans could see jaywalking or wanting to kiss their neighbor of the same sex as a sin. The factions in Underlayes didn’t waste time or energy on such nonsense; they did whatever it was they felt was right. They didn’t play by the human rule book; a book that seemed to rewrite itself on a daily basis.
So, when the woman opened her mouth, Jelissa began sucking all those sins out of her before she had a chance to make so much as a squeal as the other humans looked on in sheer and abject horror. And as Jelissa sucked, she didn’t see what those sins were—she sucked out what emerged looking like a black essence that the human had allowed to taint her soul. It could have been something so simple as to have stepped on an ant—however the human viewed a sin determined how potent that sin was. Humans always judged themselves more harshly than anyone else ever did, most anyway. Some plain didn’t give a shit, but none of those were in the room.
Jelissa’s captor had made sure to choose those who judged themselves the harshest of all. Unlike Jelissa’s grandfather, the Vampire King, she didn’t a flying fuck who she had sentenced to their deaths so long as the end results were what worked out best for her. As she continued to feed on them one by one, discarding each one in turn like empty bubble gum wrappers, Jelissa had no idea the majority of her prey were college students, school teachers, nuns, virgins; innocents who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She didn’t know that, and she was way beyond caring anyway; all she knew was the delectable taste of all the so-called sins they had allowed to weigh down their souls.
And she was loving every last bit of it. Jelissa was no longer there, no coherent thought, no care for anything or anyone, just the need to feed this newly found insatiable hunger.
After tossing aside her seventh victim, something tugged at Jelissa’s neck, some type of device that seemed to be attempting to steal the meal she had feasted upon. The beast that was Jelissa did not like that one bit. She reached up and snatched the offending piece of steel off her neck like it was nothing more than a scarf, practically shredding it with her claws, paying no heed to the gashes it left behind nor the blood that began to run down and soak the shirt and sweatpants someone had put on her before bringing her to this room to feed. Those gashes closed almost as quickly as they had appeared as she feasted upon the few remaining humans. But she was still hungry.
Taking off that atrocious piece of metal must have set off some sort of alarm, because a group of beings came swarming in as she threw her last human aside. At first Jelissa’s mouth spread into a malevolent grin, thinking they were more delicious snacks, but they smelled wrong. That marvelous tang that came with sins wasn’t there with them. That meant they were nothing more than a bunch of obstacles in her way, because she needed to find more food.
So, like any other obstacle, Jelissa began knocking them out of her way; shoving a few into walls, throwing others more than halfway across the room. One had the audacity to make a grab for her arm. Jelissa took a look down at the offending appendage, clamped down on it, and ripped it clean off right from the rotary cuff with the same amount of effort it took to rip off a hangnail. The
