huntsman
While you work in your room, riding a boost due to Trixie’s generosity, let’s revisit another episode from our history.
I’ve been thinking about what I would sacrifice for you—what I have sacrificed for you. I manipulated ten people to give you their blood as part of a diet, some of whom have now given all. I encouraged a child to jump into waters so you could drown him in your undertow. I have led a pregnant woman into your clutches and convinced her to trust you, so that you can suck down her unborn child in one throatful and then drain her by evisceration. An abduction of a child from her courtyard playspace is now almost routine, done as a light snack to make you smile. So many sins I sometimes thank God I know what my ultimate fate is.
And I still love it. I could sing for gratitude that you accept these gifts, and by accepting them, consecrate them.
I wasn’t always this way. I did balk. Let’s remember a time you had to teach me. I will recount it as it happened.
We are comfortable with one another. I have seen you kill with a bite and have dealt with the body when you were too bloated and ecstatic to move. I have seen you kill with your stomach, but I have not dealt with that body yet. You have drunk from me, confided in me, and heard my own confessions. I think you trust me even if you don’t understand me.
Tonight is a late autumn night. The long evenings are behind us and the wind turns cold when the sun disappears behind tall buildings. The long, straight streets channel wind in thin streams that cut like a knife.
We don’t feel the cold as we emerge, laughing, from a speakeasy. You wouldn’t feel the cold anyway. We danced and drank Hurricanes to up-beat blues and swing music, making up our own steps and spilling drinks.
A young couple follows us out, laughing at the same joke. Alesha runs around you, hiding behind your body from her beau. “Carl, I swear to God, if you try to get me to go to bed one more time… I’m not done having fun!”
Carl tries to get around you, making a game of grabbing Alesha. He wears smart a smart white Superdry sweater and black jeans. I’d accused him of dressing for a rapper’s funeral and that’s how we’d become friends. “Uh, hello, exams tomorrow! We should not be half cut right now!”
“Guys,” you say, holding up a hand towards both of them and looking between them. Your gaze tends to linger most on Alesha, dressed in form-fitting purple with her braided hair tied up in a loose knot. She is astonishingly dark. When you danced with one another your paleness made her look like a wrought-iron statue; her blackness made you look like a spirit conjured by the music. “What if you could both get your way?”
Alesha gets your meaning from the way you’re staring at her, but Carl takes a moment. I shrug and smile when he looks my way. “Fun. Bed.”
“Oh.” Carl looks from me to you and makes a passable impression of a man discovering treasure in his sock drawer. “Ohhhh!” Both he and I are remembering how you and Alesha did more than just dance on the dance floor.
Looking back, I probably thought you had laid on weight from when I first met you and was beginning to realise how much this stirred me. But knowing your body now, I would call you emaciated. Your cheekbones are prominent, giving your eyes a more haunted, haunting look. Your figure is rake thin, almost not there at all. Your hands and wrists look fragile where you hold Alesha and Carl at bay.
You keep Alesha’s gaze. It’s hard to tell but in the street lighting I think I see her blush.
I break the stalemate. “So… Where’s home?”
There’s a large park near the middle of town separating the student area from city centre. Campus is very clear that people streaming home after a night out should stick to the well-lit, moderately busy roads either side of it, and under no circumstances tempt fate by cutting through it.
“What could possibly go wrong?” asks Alesha, as we cut through the park.
Light are few and far between. Merry, flirty chatter drops off and the darkness feels thicker. Alesha shivers in the cold and pulls closer to Carl. I have her other arm linked in mine and pull closer with her.
You’re looking at me from the other side of Carl. You haven’t blinked in ages. The hairs rise on the back of my neck: when you forget to blink your eyes look dull and inhuman.
“Relax,” says Carl with forced joviality. “We’re the most dangerous things in this—”
The attack is unprompted and startling in its violence. With strength whose existence is not even hinted at by your waifish form you whip Carl’s arm towards the ground, unbalancing him to fall towards you. I can hear the crack as his shoulder joint destroys itself under the sudden forces. He begins to step aside by reflex to arrest fall but you kick at the knee. When his weight falls on it there is a grinding, sickening crack and it buckles. You catch him with a loop of arms around the shoulders as he drops, and before his back even hits the ground his first heartbeat has burst free of the two surgical wounds at his neck. The arterial spray is captured by wet pink walls and channeled into a throat gulping so urgently you swallow a tumult of air alongside the hot red feed.
Alesha is kept upright by my hand on her linked elbow. Revealing her character she instantly tries to jump at you to help Carl but I restrain her, arms under armpits. She kicks.
The only sounds on our benighted tarmac path between the moment you bit down and the moment she screams are the regular, frantic sounds of gulping. If I were to be indelicate I would say you sound like a plunger on a sink. It’s like you cannot wait for him to bleed for you: as much air as blood is consigned to your stomach, though only the air will reappear.
Alesha’s scream strangles off as I transition to the good old Rear Naked Choke. I don’t quite hit the sweet spot so she is still awake when you push Carl away and look up, eyes rolling back in your head. Through your bloody, wide-open lips you give birth to an eruption easily the equal of her screech. ~GwoOUuuuuurg-braaAAAauP~
I can see where he’s stretching your dress. Tension lines radiate towards your stomach, beneath your breasts. Still he’s breathing, so there must be plenty more for you to take.
“Raven Roberts,” you say, breathing hard. And then you list information about yourself. Current address. Who you bank with. Aliases I knew. Aliases I didn’t. Where you studied. You follow it all with: “I won’t kill you if you run. Andrew, let her go. Yes, now. Okay, Alesha: Run!”
She pushes off from me, stands awkwardly between us, then blindly picks a direction and runs. Gibbering crying trails after her.
You bow your head to lap up the precious stream still flowing from Carl, who is so profoundly in haemodynamic shock that he cannot move his jaw to shape words.
“Raven,” I say, “what are you—”
“If someone finds her, she knows everything. Enough that I’ll have to disappear. You’ll never see me again.”
I stiffen like you’ve tasered me. You allow yourself a small smile. The wide-eyed horror on my face is a compliment that is hard to fake. “Why?”
“You know what I am? That won’t be enough. You’re prey, you’re my prey, but if you are to be useful to me I need you to understand how to hunt.”
I stand stupidly, mouth open. You don’t elaborate. Just look back.
Wasting time. Playing chicken.
I realise what you’re doing. The look that crosses my face mixes panic with betrayal. But you can see that as soon as I realise what must be done I’m scanning to see what direction Alesha ran, and listening for clues.
You smirk and lower your head to Carl’s bubbling throat. Now that you have a little privacy you chew more holes in his carotid. You can take your time, now.
I pelt my way along a path that terminates in a little rose garden. Three other paths radiate away, not quite on the Cardinal directions. I can’t see her. I can’t see her.
Panic poisons the blood in my chest. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to lose you.
One deep breath gives me enough calm to let me have one thought. Listen.
I hold my breath. Over the beating of my heart, I hear distant sobbing, receding into the distance.
The fuck she’s getting away from me.
She must hear me running after her because her sobbing strangles into just heavy breathing. Slapping footsteps carry her among allotments bordering the bowling green. Lots of little alleyways.
I let out a little scream of frustration. I have to have her. Everything depends on it.
I’ve lost her. She got away. God knows how. She’s nowhere to be seen. She must have cleared the field to the tree bank and then once on the road she’ll find someone and tell them what she’s seen, the information that will drive you—what, out of the fucking country?
You have to be nearby. Surely you won’t let that happen. Fuck, if I’ve failed your test, maybe you’ll kill her then me.
“Raven!” I call to the empty air. “Raven, she got… I’m so sorry, she got away! Please stop her and— do as you need!”
Nothing. You’re not here? You’re not here.
Fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck. I cast another despairing look across the field. Maybe there’s been no traffic, and I can grab her in full view of those dozens of occupied houses, drag her back into the park…
Panic, so I breathe. Close eyes. One deep breath.
Perfume.
I open my eyes. Alesha’s perfume is on the air. Something spicy. My senses narrow to a laser focus. What’s upstream?
One particular allotment, overgrown. A single shed, ramshackle but hey, she was expecting me to run straight by. I almost did.
I look at my feet and try to remain perfectly silent as I approach. Please, please be there. Don’t have got away. I don’t think I could bear it, to know someone who makes the world make sense, then to lose you.
When I’m standing by one side of the shed I can hear her. Teeth chattering. What a wonderful sound! She is thinking of escape, imagining threats she can’t see—and I’m it! A wave of power hits me. I can do this. I can get her, control her, put her where she needs to be.
I can feed her to you.
She happens to be peeking on the same side I approach from. She lets out a strangled cry and runs for her life. I run for mine.
Half way across the field I reach her and bear her to the ground.
This part, I have reflexes and training for. I chicken-wing an arm behind her back and press her face into the grass, muffling her cries. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say.
“Please let me go.” The warble in her voice catches inside my chest. I hesitate. Then resolve myself.
“I can’t do that. I’m so sorry. We’re going to have to find Raven.”
Alesha let’s out a moan of dread and kicks underneath me, but my weight has her pinned and she’s going nowhere.
“If you don’t stand up quietly and come with me I’ll do this.”
I push the trapped arm up her back until the ligaments stretch and she screams.
When I back off I continue. “Even if I break your shoulder I’ll still be causing you so much pain you won’t be able to think. There’s no escape. Please believe me. Come with me and… And I’ll ask her to make it quick.”
Carl is cooling next to you when I walk back to the path with my quarry. You smile a smile that doesn’t reach your eyes and stand.
“I caught her.”
“Good. Hold her there.”
Alesha shies away from you as you come closer, standing in front of us. Blood dries all around your lips and down your chin. There’s a feral look in your eyes. You can see that same look mirrored in mine.
A silence, textured by Alesha’s whimpering.
“Please let me go. I’ll do anything. Forget I ever met you. Please.”
“I said I won’t kill you if you run. You ran.” You turn your gaze on me. “What now, my hunter-prey?”
God, sweat is running down my forehead. I pray you don’t expect me to try and eat her or anything. “Stop her from talking. Make it so she can’t tell secrets.”
You incline your head, demure as a Geisha but for the knowing smirk, and pace towards us. Alesha shrinks against me and I have to twist her arm to get her to stand still. I wonder if that’ll stop working when you begin whatever it is you’re about to do.
She can shy away no further by the time your lips press hers. Her eyes are tightly shut and she tries to shake her head to avoid your kiss, but I’ve got her head trapped in the crook of my shoulder. You stroke her neck with gentle fingertips.
“Come on,” I say, voice gentle. “Just like in the speakeasy. Theeere you go. You’re okay.”
She relents and allows you to kiss her, allows soft lips to be parted by the gentle exploration of yours. You’re tender, overwhelming. There’s no way she’ll relax wholly into an erotic kiss but she does not rebuke your tongue teasing her bottom lip. When it slips within her mouth she meets it timidly with her own.
Your teeth click when you pierce her tongue tip with your fang. She would scream but the fingertip at her throat crushes her larynx rendering her incapable of making a sound.
You make little unconscious moaning noises as you angle your head side to side, walking her tongue out of her mouth by piercing alternate sides bite by horrible bite. Tears stream down her face.
When her tongue can be drawn out no further you bite, slowly and sensually. Your teeth sink through muscle like she were a steak. A side-to-side flex of your jaw helps server the last remaining shreds of flesh connecting her tongue to its root, then a slight tug, and then a swallow. Her tongue squeezes effortlessly down your throat as Alesha delivers the deepest kiss she ever will.
You take the liberty of extending the one-sided kiss as blood pours into her mouth from revealed arteries. Two thumbs digging into her cheeks keep her own teeth from harming you. She gurgles miserably in blood you lap away, a grotesque mirror of the kiss you shared on the dancefloor.
Your eyes flicker open and search mine. A clear question.
My mouth opens and closes a few times. I can’t believe what I’m about to say, but the desire rises in me like sap.
“She can still read and write.”
Your eyes widened in surprise, and then focused on Alesha’s. You straightened to bring your lips before her eyelashes, squeezed tightly shut.
I don’t see clearly what you do. I have to fight quite hard to keep Alesha still. But your mouth is attended by the sharp claws of your subtly altered left hand. Small ligaments are severed. I know your teeth server the nerve. Her living eyes must have nestled in turn within the pink cleft of your tongue before you jaws snapped shut…
You let out an airy belch and seize one of her hands.
After that torture, your methodical snipping-off of fingers must be straightforward to endure. Lacking much meat or fat there is nevertheless a brutal thrill in swallowing up each digit. Bone will fizz away in your stomach acids and Alesha will never hold a pen again.
You lick your lips of a spot of fallen blood and look at me again, clear eyes a question.
“Drink her.”
“I said I wouldn’t kill.”
“Leave that to me.”
You lean past her and give me a kiss that, though brief and metallic, sets my heart pounding with its fierce intensity and hunger.
Alesha’s ears are not ruined so she heard everything but she does not fight when you nuzzle into her neck. Perhaps this is why you linger, kissing the sensitive skin rather than biting.
Your bite does come. Her life’s blood wells up into your mouth and drains away into the same pit that dissolves her lover and the hallmarks of her humanity. She barely struggles.
You do, though. Your dress bulges out to an absurd degree, filled as you are with one and a half people. You disengage to belch wetly and massage your tummy, desperately trying to make space rather than pass up the meal.
It takes two more burp breaks but you drink her to the threshold of death.
I don’t know why at the time but you insist on kissing her full on her forehead as I strangle the life out of her.
I drop the corpse to the ground and you drop to your knees, squealing in pain and delight. “So… fucking… stuffed.”
I don’t answer, looking at eyeless, tongueless Alesha. You dig your fingers into your middle but watch me, measuring.
“Raven.”
“Mm?”
“I think I can be what you need me to be.”
You smiled, then burst into laughter.
“Mmhmm, awwh, pet.” You beckon me over with a finger. When I stand in front of you you stroke me through my jeans. I’m as hard as you’ve ever felt. “Prey is always what I need it to be, one way or the other.”