Dalindme didn't need ears to hear the promise Melinda made him as she played her fingertips along his neck, touching him as no one ever had before. Being that he had no mother or father, no one to watch over him, too comfort him or to even care of he took another breath.  Melinda was precious to him because of the generous way she was concerned about him and the fact that she let him matter so much to her.<br/><br/>Laying there with Melinda, cuddling up close and smiling, enamored him even more of her. The play of her skin on his skin, her breath mingling with his and the growing heat in their little hideaway from the world stirred other feelings, still possessive and protective but somehow more intimate and thrilling. He didn't understand them, and as Melinda drifted off into sleep he just luxuriated in the feel and scent of her as she left him for the place where her dreams lived. Their link allowed him to follow her there somewhat, and he basked in the warmth of the sun shining through beautiful purple flowers and along white, sandy shores. Even in sleep she was sharing her world and the loveliness it contained.<br/><br/>It took Dalindme a while to build up the resolve that enabled him to contemplate disentangling himself from Melinda and leaving to sleep alone. In that time he'd gently been stroking Melinda's back and sides. The play of his fingers was at once tender and exploratory, he was careful not to cause her pain or to wake but he needed to learn the nature of her other injuries to direct his studies. He felt a raggedness across her ribs where Thomas broke them. As he decided that would be focus of tonight's lesson, he wormed his way out of the blankets and then the bed. He cast Melinda one last lingering look before heading down the corridor the opposite way he'd traveled with Melinda to the bath.<br/><br/>A woman, roughly Melinda's age, height, and weight hung bound by her wrists from the rafters, swinging like the pendulum in a grandfather clock. She'd been stripped naked revealing a series of cuts all over her body in different of states of being healed. She shuddered as she heard the clicking of Dalindme's claws on the stone floor and whimpered with fear. She'd long ago learned that screams for help would be of no avail.<br/><br/>"Please, please let me go, I won't tell no one," she begged, hoping against hope the creature world let her go. Dalindme staked over to her and placed a finger on her lips and said, "shhhh." She went white as a sheet as she silenced herself, praying soundlessly  that her acquiescence to his request would spare her further torture. Moved by the promise he made Melinda He struck fast and surely, driving a claw into her throat punching a hole in itso she could breadth but no longer speak, or more importantly, scream. She wailed a soft, raspy wail that even he barely heard as the pain and horror of what he'd just fine to get sunk in. Only then did he begin his work.<br/><br/>Dalindme thought back to the attack he'd interrupted, trying to remember what Thomas had done to Melinda to break her ribs. A moment later he stepped away from the girl and began lashing out at her sides with high kicks. He varied the force behind the blows so that he did differing amongst of damage to her. Every once in a while he stopped, played his fingertips over het sides to see if he'd made the right kind of wound on her. The girl's eyes were wide and pain filled, and after a few of this they just begged for release from the agony he'd inflicted upon her.<br/><br/>Only when he found what he sought did he stop hurting her. Unfortunately, after the many tortures she experienced, the girl expired. Dalindme watched add the light finally faded from her eyes and her breathing stopped. Undaunted, the fiend slashed his claws down her torso and peeled away her skin. The dead girl's internal flopped wetly down onto the ground by his feet. She bled out, splattering red all his legs and belly, not that it bothered him. He then inspected her ribs learning all he could about them. Only then did he kneel and lick at the bones he'd broken, tying different combinations of sigils until found the one that had then knit themselves whole again. His focus was entirely devoted to his work and he lost all track of time and his surroundings.