Leeches

Four pure demon families walk this world, rubbing shoulders with you in supermarkets and schools. Sharing a desk in the office or fixing your hot water heater.

Lineage matters to all of them. But to Leeches, it matters most. 

There’s no nobility in an origin tale where a primordial swamp is your mother. They craved power and history even as they crawled from the slime and asserted seniority – a pure line to creation, they say. I’m not arguing. 

But it was hunger that drove them from the swamp. A hunger they cannot escape, even now.

They all feed.

Vampires are the ones people have heard of, which makes them both famous and misreported. They only eat human blood. The depth is a choice: enough, and the human lives — maybe with a headache and a story they can’t tell; everything, and the human doesn’t. 

If you hear of a vampire that feeds on another vampire, or on a certain fallen angel, it isn’t feeding. It’s pleasure. And pleasure, for vampires doesn’t reproduce. 

The how of their making others is the old lore: a chosen human, drained to the edge, soul gone, and turned. 

Mostly, Blood Suckers are bad. 

Mostly, doesn’t mean all. 

Animavores are next. To Tazia, Soul Suckers. One in particular runs Turin now, and would like her to be his bride. I have no words…

To the rest of us, the nickname sounds almost coy. Do not be deceived, they are pure, living grotesquery. 

They take the human soul entire — there is no part-drain, and victims don’t survive it. After they’ve eaten enough souls, over years, over centuries, the body purges what’s accumulated and a new one comes into existence, whole and voracious. 

A small consolation is that some offspring hunt their sires. That is a family argument I will not referee.

Both these Leech sub-types have appeared in in the books. The other two? I’ll tell you what I told the author recently. 

There is a Leech that is special – all female – the only demon type that is. Cogitivors. Thought Suckers or Thinkers in parlance.

Proximity is important. Contact better. They feed on thought — your daughter’s name, recognition of you best friend’s face, the reason you came. Why you shouldn’t leave. 

Take a thought and it does not come back, unless they allow it. They don’t often allow it.

Victims aren’t universally human, but other demons are usually too aware to let them get near. 

Most feedings are partial and the victim lives, with blank places where something used to be. Enough feedings and the victim is left breathing but the ability to retain thought has faded to nothing. Their lives exist around a single moment. 

The ones with talent find a rare, well-shaped thought and baby it — years, decades — until it stands alone and becomes another Cogitivor. They’re the most patient of the four and the easiest to underestimate. That is by their design.

Dominex are rarest, and they prefer it that way. 

They can feed on any entity — Soldier, Trickster, Umbrae, even another Leech. Humans are safe – how much power do humans really have? A serious question. 

They draw the power from the bearer and hold it. Watch the victim flail over time or be hunted, because no family tolerates the loss of power for long. 

There have been no cases of a Power Muncher feeding on an angel. Not saying never. 

They reproduce by shedding a fraction of what’s gathered, and the shed always resents the shedding and slinks away to mature alone. A slow process. 

Like I said, rare. 

Leeches increase. All of them, by building a new one of themselves. How raw the material is — blood, souls, a thought, a fragment of power — is the difference. And in all four, the raw material goes in as someone else’s.

The Author got that gleam in her eye when I told her about the Dominex, especially. 

Oh dear.