The Stolen Heartbeat

For centuries, that bloodthirsty creature dwelt in visual darkness, navigating by the sound of living arteries, that thermal vibration capable of quelling his hunger for not being completely extinguished.
Upon locating the lady with the silent chest, he thought he would finally discover the calm of absolute repose; however, as he pressed his ear against her central bone of fine ceramic, he perceived the repetitive rhythm of a machine marking the precise moment of his personal end, neglected two hundred years before.

She opened her irisless eyes and murmured: I have waited for you to return the heartbeat I stole before becoming a watchmaker. The vampire, as his cheek brushed against hers, felt the cold of the glass and understood that he was not the hunter, but the illusion a disgruntled craftsman had erected to avenge himself on his daughter.

His desire for blood was not hunger, but the memory of an organ that had never throbbed within him, but rather in his own, which now offered it to him as a gift of rust and the past. Upon taking it, its dark form shattered into gravel, and she, for the first time, released drops of liquid metal.