I should tell them to zip up, walk them outside.
I wonder if Paul’s cock looks like that.
I grab the girl’s shoulder and roughly pull her off him, baring her seeping cunt. She tries to break away and stumbles backwards, hitting the brick wall. I let her fall and she lies spread-eagled, blood trickling down her face. I stare at its darkness. Everything shuts down.
Then I’m grabbing her by the throat, leaning in. She smells like metal, copper. Life.
Something on the edge of vision: the guy fumbling for something in his jacket. I swivel as he lunges at me and something wet slices my face, like a spray of cum, like he has opened my face with his cock. I touch the blood on my cheek and the guy stares at me in shock, as if surprised he has cut me, virgin knife held before him like a talisman. I tense and spring and he instinctively arcs the knife back to defend himself. But he is too slow. I grab his wrist then slam the heel of my other hand into the crook of his elbow. His arm jackknifes into his skull and he falls back onto the couch. There’s a moment of silence before the girl slumped at my feet wakes up and starts screaming. The guy sits completely still, arms hanging by his side; dripping, alien cock pointing up from his open zipper. The knife is buried to the hilt in his right eye. The socket leaks blood and a clear viscous fluid.
I stare at him, shaking my head in disbelief, in horror.
A figure by my side. Lucs, taking my arm. My muscles burn at his touch and I try to pull away but his grip is iron. Behind him, Raph and Gabe close the area, moving in on the witnesses, silencing the girl. One of the patrons tries to run and Gabe chases him up the stairs, slamming him into the ground.
“You are ready now,” Lucs says.
He leads me with his steel grip past the upstairs bar and downstairs. Patrons jump out of the way when they see the blood dripping down my face, staring after us dumbfounded. We head for the stage doors. The club sinks away as the doors close behind. Down the barely-lit corridor and towards the back door.
The outside air is cool on my face. But I don’t get a chance to savor it because there’s movement in the darkness of the alley. Figures emerging from an alcove: Mikhaels holding a blond-haired girl by the throat, one hand over her mouth. She is dressed in blue silk pyjamas and shivers in the night air.
I look at her face.
Oh God. It’s Lisa. She stares at me with terror-filled eyes.
I try to pull away, to run for the street beyond, but Lucs’ fingers dig into me like claws. “You know what to do,” he says, something wrong with his voice. “Become one of us. Finish the Change.” I turn and his eyes have become black holes in his face, dilating with darkness. His teeth fill his mouth.
I thrash against him in horror, feeling his fingers sink into my skin like needles of fire, but I have to get away from him, have to escape what he’s—
And then the other figures appear: hunched shadows in the darkness of the alley. Gabe, Raph, Danteis, Pēteris, all grinning. Waiting.
I can’t look at Lisa, forcing my eyes away from her, searching for a gap in their numbers, some way to escape this. Lucs senses my resistance still in the face of the inevitable. His voice like gravel in my ear: “Then if you will not kill her, if you can still resist … ”
Pēteris reaches back into the alcove, drinking in my despair, and pulls out a struggling man dressed only in tracksuit pants—dragged out of bed also; thin but muscular, like a skinned rabbit, impossibly-defined abs a downward-V.
So this is what she wanted. This is who she chose instead of me.
I feel the hatred hit.
“You are a god now,” Lucs says. “Take what is yours.”
My anger surges beyond control. As I stare at Paul the darkness kept deep inside me opens out like spreading wings and a searing pain suddenly runs in rivulets down my arms and across my neck and up my face. Agony floods my throat and I throw my head back to cry out and my jaw dislocates with a wet clicking sound and I can only manage a strangled guttural croak. I feel my nerve-endings fry as my hands and arms and chest ripple and bubble like melting plastic, my back pop and break and fill out impossibly, my fingers lengthen into claws and brow form over and become stretched and lupine and teeth distend my mouth. Then my vision goes black and suddenly all-encompassing as my eyes dilate, the weak moonlight from above sending shards into my brain.
I see the shallows of blood pumping beneath Paul’s skin. Can smell its hot, sweet scent. Can smell my girlfriend beyond.
I look at Lisa in Mikhaels’ arms and inexplicably a part of me senses I have started crying. Burning tears that score my face. I wish I could tell her I’m sorry, that part of me will be forever destroyed by this. That I loved her.
But when I see her weak, pleading eyes, like an animal at the slaughter, the realization eclipses everything.
She deserves this. They all do. They are only prey.
The growl sounds deep in my throat and is joined by the growls of my Brothers. The man before me pisses himself in fear, the acrid stain blossoming across his track pants. Once I have tasted his flesh, once I have drunk my fill of his life I will kill the woman behind him also.
This is the way it should begin for me. Ending the life I once had. Embracing my rightful place in this world.
Her blood takes me.
AND NEITHER HAVE I WINGS TO FLY
by Carrie Laben
“I’m sorry,” Faith says. A lie, but the satellite phone connection is too expensive to argue across. “The only safe thing to do is to stay put. We’re well supplied, we’re on the sheltered side of the island.”
Vivian sighs. It’s one with the wind against the porthole. “I wish you hadn’t gone. Dad is worried to death.”
I hope so. “This is my job. If I only went out when there couldn’t possibly be a storm, I wouldn’t go out at all.”
“Yeah, but … ”
“I have to go, Viv. Don’t call again unless it’s a real emergency, okay? I’ll let you know as soon as we get back, promise.”
“Okay.” Faith has the phone halfway back to the cradle when she hears her sister’s voice add, “One more thing!” She doesn’t hang up.
“What?”
“You’ll never guess who I ran into the other day.”
“No, I won’t.” The satellite phone is also too expensive to gossip across, but if she lets Viv have this one moment maybe she’ll save in the long run.
“Marika Mendel! Can you believe that? She came into the store, we had a nice chat.” Viv pretends to catch herself. Or maybe it’s honest, Faith can’t know for sure. “But I know you can’t talk long. I’ll tell you all about it when you come home. Bye!”
Outside, the rain is just getting started, and most of the passengers—five grad students, one professor, two amateur filmmakers, and three die-hard birdwatchers—are still on deck, sucking up as much fresh air as they can, as though it’ll last them. One of the filmmakers and one of the grad students have been seasick since they set out from San Diego, and the chop they’re likely to get riding this out will be hard on everyone, even the crew. Even Faith.
At night she writes blog posts, even though they can’t actually be uploaded until she reaches shore. The blog is her best free advertising, and lots of good you-are-there material is the key to its appeal.
But tonight, even though she should be thinking of adjectives to make the storm sound like a glorious adventure that people would pay for, she’s writing about gannets.