I gasped, but it was done before I could stop her, and the blood was pouring down her cheek, the eye gone, plucked out and fallen to the floor, and only the empty bleeding socket was there and then her fingers—the first two fingers—once more jabbed, jabbed into the blood and broke the tender bones, the tender occipital bones, at the back of the eye socket. I heard the little cone of bones snap and shatter.

I understood.

She reached out to me, imploring me, and out of her there came a low desperate sigh.

I took her head in my hands and closed my lips on the bleeding eye socket. I felt her powerful hands caressing my head. I sucked with all my strength, drawing as strongly as ever I’d drawn blood in my life, and I felt the brain coming into my mouth, flowing viscous and sweet as the blood, flowing out of her and coming into me. I felt it fill my mouth, a great gusher of tissue against all the tender flesh inside my mouth, and then filling my throat as it passed down into me.

The world went dark. Black.

And then it exploded with light. All I could see was this light. Galaxies exploded in this light, whole sweeping pathways of innumerable stars pulsed and disintegrated as the light grew brighter and brighter. I heard my own distant cry.

Her body had gone limp in my arms, but I wouldn’t let it go. I held fast, drawing on the blood, drawing on the gusher of tissue, drawing and drawing and hearing the beat of her heart swell to deafening volume and then stop. I swallowed again and again until nothing but blood was in my mouth. My own heart exploded.

I felt her body fall to the floor but I saw nothing. Blackness again. Blackness. Disaster. And then the light, the blinding light.

I lay on the floor my arms and legs outstretched, and a great searing current was moving through my limbs, through my organs, through the chambers of my heart. It pervaded every cell of my skin, all over my body, my arms, my legs, my face, my head. Like electricity it burned through every circuit of my being. The light flashed and brightened. My arms and legs were flopping and I couldn’t control them but the sensations were orgasmic and they had become my body, all heavy tissue and bone suddenly gathered up into this weightless yet glorious thing that I was.