The taste hit her all at once. Rotten flesh and foul fluid and black blood flooded her senses in a single wave, coating her tongue in something so wholly vile it obliterated every other thought. At the very same instant, a shriek tore from the creature's throat, a sound so deeply wrong, so utterly aberrant, that no living thing should ever have been capable of producing it from its vocal cords. The pitch of it made Celestina's ears bleed. She did not stop. She bit down harder, her fangs sinking deeper, and the arm around her responded by constricting with crushing and immediate force, squeezing the air from her lungs in a single brutal compression as more tears streamed freely down her face.
She held on.
