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He is free because of his mother's blood. What more could he ask from her?
His mother never told him to leave her side. Eric doesn't even think she'd have minded if he'd stayed. But at the same time, he was sure she wouldn't mind if he left. Sometimes they went days without talking or touching. She was pregnant again. Soon, she was going to have to focus on the new baby; prepare it to be free, too.
So, one winter's morning, he told his mother. "I think I'm going to go exploring. Maybe see the other ocean."
Belinda smiled at him, "Be safe and strong, blood of my blood."
She didn't tell him where her travels would be taking her. If Eric wanted to see her again, he'd have to find her himself.
It's been... Eric isn't sure how long exactly. It was cold when he left his mother, it got warm, then cold, and now it's warm again. To be honest, he's enjoyed himself. Belinda preferred silence, but running across snowy fields screaming at the top of his lungs is fun as hell. He spent a week in a dragon's cave. It was funny how much they cared about shiny things. He's swum with mermaids, haunting grottos and playing shark with them off white-sanded beaches. He ran into a mating party some wolves and his sort was having. There'd been a lot of kids his size to play with.
He spends a lot of time watching the humans. They get everywhere. Some of his kind really didn't like humans, but Eric doesn't mind them. The kids are fun to play with if they or their grown-ups don't mind his lack of clothing. You just have to be careful not to break them. Eric was getting good at that.
That's why Eric likes dreams. Human children tend not to care when they dream about a naked boy. In their dreams, they could be as strong and as fast as any son of Lilith and Abel. They could fly, or climb tidal waves like mountains. The shackles of sin do not weigh them down.
Mostly, he feels sorry for them. They hurt so easily. They have to wrap up just to keep themselves from getting cut, bruised, or frozen. Sometimes, their hurts never ever get better. Even if they avoid all that, just living long enough makes them ugly and weak till they die. They can't even have babies without it hurting. One day, Eric hopes everyone has the blood of Lilith, so nobody has to hurt like that ever again. Until then, when Eric hunts, he mostly devours the already broken and malformed. Old people. Ugly children. The mean and the stupid.
They are interesting, though. Eric's father had been a son of Eve, his mother tells him. A singer she devoured after making his seed immortal with her womb. That'd worried Eric the first time she'd told him. He thought he might grow old like they did. A silly fear, Belinda assured him. The blood of Lilith was stronger than that whore Eve's.
Once, she stole a human music player and showed Eric some of his father's songs. It'd sounded like magic.
Fathers (or maybe "dads") are a strange concept in general to Eric. He rarely saw his uncles, and his mother had no regular mate. Human children, meanwhile, mostly lived in the same house as their sires. Belinda had said once it had something to do with how human men enslaved their mates, keeping them to themselves till they died. Some of the couples Eric saw bore this out. Others seemed... happy, somehow. He finds human mothers tend to hug their spawn more than Belinda is wont to. Sometimes, he crawls into bed beside them for an hour or two.
That's not weird, is it?
One night, he decides to curl asleep under a shiny new sedan in a suburban garage. Unfortunately, sometimes he shifts in his sleep.
