Grey wasn’t actually sure which was worse.
Was it better for every bone in your body to shatter at once, like ripping a bandaid off? Or was it better for it all to slowly crack away, every echo of your bone crunching and twisting and separating echoing in your ears over and over again?
The answer should have obviously been the latter, but honestly Grey didn’t even know anymore. His mind wasn’t exactly working as it should in the first place.
Right this moment, he was currently experiencing the latter. And the fact Amunet had to continue holding onto him so that his aura didn’t alert half the city into a mass genocidal hunt for him only made things worse.
Usually he would have loved having such a cute girl hold onto him like this. But one, he wasn’t much of a little spoon. And two, even the slightest touch felt like a scalding hot iron right now.
Yet, Grey didn’t move. If not for the slight trembling of his body, one would have thought that he wasn’t experiencing any pain in this moment at all.
He contained it all within himself. And as the pain of his bone deteriorated into the rotting of his tendons and flesh, and then parlayed themselves into the itching feeling of bugs and ants crawling through the crevices they formed, his lips remained tightly sealed.
By the time it all came to a stop, Grey was a pale, quivering mess. The pain of this time was far worse than the last, and it was just the third moon phase. He hadn’t even managed to make it to the fourth.
But worst yet, he didn’t have any blood of Old Ones this time.
"Grey?"
The words might have been a shout, but honestly Grey couldn’t hear them very well at all. They echoed like a harsh whisper he wanted to ignore, and was doing his best to ignore, but Amunet was still standing over him.
He had somehow managed to find a way to a couch, what was left of his body looking like a mummified carcass compared to what it once was.
Pale, silvery light tried and failed to form around him, and Grey could guess why that was. In the faint corners of his mind that still worked, he understood.
The Call of the Silver Moon was supposed to work as a test of bloodline, but Grey was using comprehension to try and forcefully bridge that gap.
The backlash this time was even worse as a result. He had managed to make it through, but the gap between him and a Dark Kin that could make it through the third phase was even larger than it had been for the second phase.
"Grey!"
The voice seemed more insistent this time and Grey felt an ear press to his heart as though to check if he was still alive.
He was. Barely.
He wasn’t exactly sure how much longer he could continue to say that, though. It seemed he had pushed this loop a bit too far. It was time to restart, probably...
Grey could feel his consciousness fading away, and just as he was on the verge of blacking out entirely, the faintest twist of a nerve shook in his nose. It was so very faint as every other part of his brain had shut down, every nerve being fried to the greatest extent.
But that bestial part of his mind, his brainstem, was still active.
And it acted.
He grabbed the head resting an ear to his chest and before Amunet could react or even begin to break free from his strength, his canines grew in size and he bit into her neck.
A surge of warm blood flowed into his veins and he groaned out in relief.
The weakness of his body vanished so swiftly it felt like everything else had been a dream. The purest blood he had ever tasted graced his tongue, the soft flesh around the vein pressed into his lips with such enticement he couldn’t help but to press just a little bit more gently, a little more sensually, a little more—.
Grey’s focus returned. His mind lit up like lights lining evening streets, one step at a time until all his faculties were back online.
The echo of a moan filled his ears and he immediately reacted, but then he caught himself before he did anything even more perfunctory and slowly pulled his fangs out from Amunet’s neck.
She collapsed on top of him, breathing weakly.
As for Grey himself, he had never felt better.
Grey cleared his throat. "We really have to stop meeting like this, Amunet."
Amunet was too weak to even give a snarky reply. This bastard hadn’t even waited a full day before he took advantage of her like this again. It was infuriating.
Luckily, Grey seemed to know not to push things too far. He used his newfound strength to sit up, pluck Amunet off of him, and let her rest on the couch herself.
"Well, that went splendidly."
Seeing Mauve and Brad both giving him odd looks, Grey raised his hands up.
"I really didn’t plan for this, but this is actually very convenient. I need pure Old One blood to boost my strength properly, and Amunet has that. So when we use Call of the Silver Moon, she can be our cute little blood bank."
"Fuck... you..." Amunet wheezed out slowly.
But Mauve and Brad heard something else entirely.
"We?" they raised an eyebrow and then looked toward one another.
"Yes. We." Grey nodded. "Amunet will recover a lot quicker than I did, she just needs a boost of Stamina and some nutrients. Then, with her bloodline, she should be able to pass quite a few levels of the moon phases on her own.
"The problem is you two. You don’t have any connection with the Dark Kin at all, and you also don’t have the blood drinking and processing abilities that I do.
"But I can fix that."