Malcolm stared down at the same spot the skinny human had knelt down on before him all those hours ago and continued to ponder about all that he had seen in its fragile mind.

While listening to Freddie's smooth voice through the walls as he and the human conversed over what the television called Chinese food, Malcolm thought about the memory of the human with its human mother.

The way the mother had looked at it when it broke down in front of the mother's friends confused Malcolm. It wasn't anything like the mothers from the television that looked at their children with warmth and the kind of protectiveness the sire demons have for the ones they turned and favored.

The human's mother looked...angry? Shamed? Annoyed. That was it. That emotion, he understood. One of the things that lingered after his time as a human. His sire demon said it was like ghost wounds, not really there but it was almost like they were.

He had nothing else to do but watch the human's memories in his mind like those movies Freddie had gotten him into. Being trapped meant having nothing better to do.

All because of that shaman that couldn't mind her business.

He blinked his eyes rapidly after hearing a loud rip sound, looking down to see that he had ripped the couch cushions with his claws.

"Hmm," he hummed, feeling a burning pain at the back of his throat as he stared down at his involuntary action. He wasn't sure why he did that.

"I hope he lets you die this time."

The annoyance came back full force. Malcolm's thin lips pulled up in a sneer before looking up at the dead child.

"I hope when you leave this time, you stay dead. Nobody likes a girl that overstays her welcome," he said, sneer falling immediately. He never was able to keep it up for long.

"I wouldn't be here if it weren't for you," it said, repeating the same words it had been telling Malcolm for decades. A good while before Freddie showed up.

"I'm not the little humans that beat you with iron rods and slit your throat. You being here isn't my fault," Malcolm said like he always said, wondering if the lack of a physical brain made it stupid.

It glowered down at him, young looking, light blue and glowing face always looking like that whenever it was around him. Its balled up fists beside the tattered, ripped Sunday dress it died in let him know that he was going to feel more of that annoyance again.

"You were there," the dead child said, sounding close to tears and things around his cluttered room began to tremble.

He remained still and quiet, eyes on the dead child floating in front of him. He was ready for whatever it was going to throw at him. Malcolm was used to it by then. It complained, it lamented, it screamed, broke a few things, then left to moan around the dormitory, crying without having tears to shed.

"You were there and you did nothing!" The force of its scream made one of the many bookshelves fall on the ground but Malcolm remained impassive. It was a process and he was not all that interested in it for it had nothing to do with him.

"You just sat there!" it screamed, the force of it pushing Malcolm back into his seat and unable to move forward. "You just sat there on the road and watched as they beat me! Humiliated me! Then ripped my throat open! And you just watched!"

Malcolm slowly glanced to his right when the pile of books on that side of the couch fell on the old rug on the floor, looking back at the dead child. Every time it did what it was doing, it made Malcolm wonder the same thing again and again. What exactly was it expecting from him?

"Then you violated me!" Its voice had gotten quiet there, face contorted in what he had seen many humans do when they were crying. It was rather odd and he wished that they stopped but it went on for centuries.

"You were close and your body was lifeless," he said.

It was very obvious why he drained its tiny body of its blood. It had been right in the vicinity of his cell, he hadn't had blood in ages, and he had wanted to try and find a loophole, like he could drink the blood of a dead human. The extra hundred years after that proved that that was not the case.

"You could've helped," it said, floating down to the ground until it was on its knees. "You could've helped."

Malcolm tilted his head to his left, his black hair falling to the side with him as he eyed it.

"I could have, but it had nothing to do with me or my survival. I don't get why you expected me to," he said, not really seeing the dead girl but going back to the human's memories, confused with the human's instant liking of animals. Weren't they just food?

Not moving as the dead child let out a ghostly shriek before leaving to scare the human children in the building, he hummed curiously when he saw the human in a bed covered with fangs patterns and it snuggled up under the sheets, an old female telling it about zombies and their need for brains.

He scoffed, rolling his eyes at that ridiculous myth. That type of the undead did not need brains and they wouldn't even have been useful as an army. They were just rotten corpses that broke apart just from a simple breeze. Useless and definitely not terrifying.

Humans and their stupidity. Makes it hard to believe that I was one of them, but that was a time long gone, he thought, going back, back, back into his memories, remembering his days as the son of a merchant's cook.

He remembered serving that merchant and its family his human father's cooking, watching with such human greed, wanting all that those humans had and wanting to bring them down for how they treated him and his groveling father.

Malcolm sighed, closing his eyes and stopping his path down memory lane.

Tilting his head back, he thought about his curse, the weakening seals, and a small grin appeared on his face.

The shaman was dying, and all her tricks were to die with her. Malcolm would be free and then? Then he'd feast like a king.