I little later than intended but I have it where I think I want it.
I hope you enjoy.
I linger beneath the loam and the interminable baleful sol, its reverberations fading by inches as night takes its throne. I ascend once more, drawn by the siren’s call of their beating essence coursing through their veins, warring with the anticipation of the feeding and the unsettling events of the previous night.
I drift beneath the floor, pressing through the insulation and against the wooden planks. He is happily bashing a toy car into a stuffed alligator while she struggles to stay awake, reading a book on the couch.
Soon.
It isn’t the first time I’ve gone a night without feeding, but that did not mean it made the urges easier to suppress, to have the control to submit to patience.
But wait I must.
Her head bobs, and the book tumbles from her fingers with a thud. She snaps back to wakefulness, sighing deeply and rubbing her eyes. She watches him for a moment, leaning on her knees with her face held in her palms. He crawls to the edge of his playpen and hoists himself to his feet. She waves at him and coos as he burbles and claps.
She stands slowly and stretches. She reaches out her arms to him and lifts him over the pen, setting him on unsteady feet while keeping hold of one small hand. She walks him gently down the hall, letting him choose the pace with his wobbling steps.
I slither along beneath them step for step, my prize mere inches, mere moments away now.
She walks him to the nursery, nudging a path through the scattered toys with her foot. She checks his diaper and settles him in his crib, tucking him beneath his blanket and stroking his head.
She turns on the monitor and adjusts its angle before leaning in, kissing his hair, then slipping toward the door and down the hall to her bedroom.
Her slumber cannot come soon enough. Her watchful eye must be shut and twitching before I begin. The wait is achingly punishing, but the nectar of devoured possibility, their capacity for joy and love, will be worth every moment.
I have almost forgotten my curiosity as I linger and list in the drafts flowing beneath their floors, waiting for her breath to slow.
At last, with a soft moan and a sigh, she sleeps.
It must be now.
I do not pause. I do not look. In the beat of his tiny heart I rise into the shadow and take form once more. As my eyes coalesce and find shape, I stop. The child is awake, standing at the bars of his crib. Looking into my corner. Waiting.
His eyes meet mine. The pacifier drops from his mouth. His face alights with a snaggle toothed smile and a squeal, his arms reaching toward me, fingers opening and closing, stamping with excitement from foot to foot.
“Dah!”
There is no confusion, no fear, no cracks for my tethers to slip through and take hold. Only his strange and morbid glee at the sight of me. I retreat back into the corner. I do not know what to do.
As I pull further from his reaching grasp, his face pinches and his lip trembles. He reaches again, insistent and pleading.
There. A gap. One of sadness and yearning. Slower and less satisfying than fear, but I have made do with less. My tethers attach.
When I do not surrender to his pleading, he drops to his bottom, his eyes scrunching shut as tears spill and he begins to cry.
The first tiny drips of his essence flow into me. My hunger swells.
He wails. Too loud. His mother will come, and I will have to wait another day. Wait or… finish with this small broken family and move on.
I step forward, raising a finger to my fanged lips. He coughs and grunts, watching. He reaches up again with another pleading cry.
The drips stop.
It is not enough. Not after a day of starvation. To have only a taste. The hunger rises. My control thins to nothing.
I step forward and reach for the plump morsel, happily reaching for me as well, completely unaware of what I am about to do to him.
A shrill scream and a thud from the other room surprise me, giving me a moment of pause. Footsteps thunder down the hall.
The monitor.
My attention turned, I do not notice that as I am about to lunge for the child, he now lunges for me. His tiny fingers wrap around my wrist with both hands.
Thump. Thump.
Pain.
Fire. Lightning.
And then…
My chest spasms and I inhale with a desperate, choking gasp. The first breath I have ever taken. Icy razors shred through my throat and lungs.
Thump. Thump.
I collapse to my knees, unable to pull away from the child. Unable to discorporate and descend.
The door slams open. She sees me. The horns. The fangs. The claws. The fur, the feather, the scale. She shrieks in terror. If I were not incapacitated with pain and whatever hold this child has on me, I would be feeding on her, both her terror and her blood.
Thump. Thump.
Another scream joins hers. Mine. A terrible, bestial, primal roar.
Time stops.
And then I remember.
The grass. The clouds. The sun. The face.
Her name. Clara.
My daughter. Smiling at me with open arms, held in the embrace of a woman. Mira. Her mother. My wife.
Then shouting. The sound of metal striking metal.
We run.
Now it is night. We have run for hours, far from our home, deep into the forest.
The shouting is nearly upon us.
We can run no further.
I am tackled to the floor. The boy’s mother has thrown herself upon me, beating at me with her fists, wrenching my hand from the boy’s grip.
Blood. The smell of salt and iron. She has cut herself upon my tooth and horn.
In fear. In anger. In pain… In hunger…
My mouth opens unbidden and closes over her throat.
Hot, flowing, soothing life pours past my lips and caresses my raw and torn throat, sinking into the endless void within. I drink with ravenous, desperate pulls from her torn vessels. My tethers shred into her soul through her terror and rage, devouring her essence from within.
In the tangled fray of our bodies, I do not notice that the wall of the crib has been knocked loose.
That terrible child. Using his mother’s sleeve to steady himself, stands. Inches away, he locks his eyes with mine.
He falls into her back, embracing her with one arm, grasping my horn with the other, and he kisses my blood wet lips.
Thump. Thump.
I whisper quickly for them to stay quiet. Stay hidden.
I draw the sword at my waist and walk toward the shouting men.
I pray. I pray to whoever or whatever will listen.
Give me the strength to save my family.
They have found me.
I take the first by surprise. The second by sheer luck.
I do not see the third. Or the fourth.
I lay upon the dirt. My body refuses to move. It is getting cold.
I hear Mira’s distant scream.
A voice drifts into my ear like silk across bare skin.
An offer. A bargain. Strength for a price.
I accept.
The boy releases his hold. He turns and waddles in the other direction.
I release the woman and lower her unmoving body to the floor as I slide back into the wall, trembling.
Clara. Mira. I had a family. I was a man. A flesh and blood man.
I look at my crimson stained hands, my soul filled with loathing as much as hunger.
“Dah!”
The boy returns, holding the plush alligator, and offers it to me.
Slowly, I reach out and accept it.
As I take it, the sudden lifting of the weight he was supporting causes him to tilt forward with a giggle as he wraps his arms around my arm.
Thump. Thump.
I rise from the damp loam filled with panic, with rage, and with hunger. A deep and angry hunger.
Mira screams.
In the space between heartbeats, I race toward the sound. I run with footsteps so light it feels as though I barely touch the ground.
With inhuman speed, I am there. One man has my daughter in his arms, kicking and biting and screaming.
The other has a sword buried in Mira’s middle.
I feel the bones of my jaw crack and contort as I lunge.
With strength asked, and terrible strength given, I sunder the men to their meat and bones before they even notice my presence. Clara seems to hang in midair as I tear them limb from limb until there is barely anything solid enough to grasp.
Silence.
I look at my work scattered across the forest floor, then down at my gore covered body.
What have I done?
I turn and see Clara, her arms wrapped around her mother’s still form, her eyes wide with grief and terror.
I step forward.
“Stay away!” she shouts at me.
I double over, falling to my hands and knees upon my own abattoir. Every bone and muscle begins to break and tear. My stomach clenches, a burning fist of hunger gripping my middle.
I seize and scream upon the stained leaves as my clothes tear and my body remakes itself.
At some point it stops, and my eyes focus. I can see through even the pitch dark shadows as if it were day.
Salt and iron. The smell tightens the fist in my stomach, and I begin to grab at the blood soaked leaves and dirt, shoving them into my mouth. There are no thoughts in my mind. No memory of the man I was.
Only the hunger.
It is not enough. It is not enough!
Thump. Thump.
I hear my salvation from this hunger, from this agony.
I scramble on hands and hoof toward it.
And I devour it.
And now I remember.
I remember the taste.
I remember the flood of stillness, the sudden hush in the ache. That single moment of relief. That single moment of clarity.
The boy releases his grip and sits upon the floor, quiet babbling at me.
I do something I can’t remember ever doing.
I weep.
Heavy, heaving, body wracking sobs.
I have done exactly what I set out to do to this child. To tear away his innocence, his potential, his future.
What I did to Clara.
The boy eventually falls asleep, cuddled beneath his mother’s cold arm.
I just stare and watch him as burning tears stream from my eyes. I watch until I notice the shadows slowly moving across the floor and I hear the sound of the morning approaching.
I sit and I wait, watching this terrible, beautiful child.
The shadows slowly retreat, growing short as the sun ascends above the horizon.
I quietly wipe the tears from my eyes and look once more at the boy. I lean down and kiss him upon his head.
Thump. Thump.
And I rise and turn to face the window, the morning, the sun.
Its blazing eye finds me, and I hear it.
The sound.
It is not the sound of screams.
It is singing.
I turn one last time to look at the boy.
And I let the song consume me.
The last thing I hear as the sun takes me is the sound of his heart.
Thump. Thump.
And I do one final thing that I now remember having done before, long long ago.
I smile.
And the song takes me.
Mason Beck Fiction 
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