Chapter 1
At precisely 11:43 p.m., the first lights blinked out.
It started at the Threllfall Tower, a black ziggurat to securities and futures spotted with late-night office lights. Little squares of stale yellow blinked out as if they’d never been there. The darkness spread across Ashland’s districts like ripples across a neon pond, until even the famous candy-pink lights of the Riviera went black.
No panic, only mild cursing in the face of this planned blackout. People stood on their decks with cameras, telescopes and phones pointed toward the sky to record the comet’s passing.
C/202X, known as the Li-Caul Comet in media outlets, cut the sky like a pale grimace. Its ionic tail grew brighter as it drew near the sun.
Like the Moon, it glowed white as clean cotton.
Also like the Moon, it carried a terrible Curse.
Mortals who saw the comet couldn’t sense the Curse, and they simply wondered at the celestial visitor in their part of the sky. For some, it was a brief distraction from the banal rhythm of the workplace awaiting them in the morning. Others were inspired by the sight, fingers laced with a lover’s, sharing in its remote wonder.
A solitary figure looked up from the brackish puddle she drank from; the Comet caught her black eyes, and she saw nothing.
Not true…the void behind her eyes felt the light. It shivered beneath the Curse, but these things had nothing to do with the emptiness clawing at her stomach, so she ignored them.
Her stomach twisted with hunger that made her forget the bitterness of the water. Her gums ached with pressure above the sharp canine teeth.
That brutish, red need became a desperate screaming NOW! that drowned out her exhaustion, her sticky filth.
Down to her bare knees, on all fours, scraping calloused skin against concrete. She pressed her nose to the asphalt, tonguing the sour faintness of a sick animal’s trail.
Fast, fast as can be because the hunger was EVERYTHING.
The twisting trail of scent through the salt-spiked air dragged her between warehouses. Her tongue slid out across her teeth; she cut it across a spade-sharp canine, a whine escaping her throat on reflex.
Coppery red in her mouth, three heartbeats’ worth, then the cut sealed.
In a tangle of dumpsters, bloated with trash, the trail became HERE NOW SEARCH KILL TEAR. She threw herself into the garbage. Clawed fingers ripped through the squelching rot until they closed around something fat. Furry. Screeching.
She dragged the tiny thing out, its red eyes beady with terror. It bit her thumb with mean teeth, ripping deep.
Beast and rat stared at each other before she opened her mouth.
Inside.
BITE.
The red NOW of her teeth in its brains.
The tiny splintering of its ribs.
Its fur, coating her tongue.
Swallow it down.
After, she stared up at the Comet, lying on a pile of broken concrete at the shoreline.
The sight of it brought that ringing lowness, the grief she didn’t have words to name.
Tears dragged through the bloody mess on her cheeks. She couldn’t name those either, and they irritated her so she tore them away with her claws.
Her eyes tracked the Moon across the sky. They twitched to follow the path of airplanes, satellites, and the Comet.
Only moments ago, the wound-space had been a mayhem of starvation and discomfort. Now, the space rumbled like a far-off thunderhead. Sometimes it flashed with lightning-thoughts.
For now, that space had settled.
Discomfort.
Frustration.
Shame.
When the sky was clear, it was the safest thing she had; familiar, always there. Unknowable. Distant enough so that it didn’t matter. The Comet, for all its unfamiliarity, filled her with vertigo.
Gazing at it long enough awakened another appetite: lights.
Red. Blue. Pink. Green. Yellow. Flashing in writhing shapes that looked like guts, for eating with her eyes, not her teeth.
She craned her head to follow the swollen Red Rock River. A few blocks upstream, those lights bred and nested, bursting from the Riviera’s edges.
Her head tingled with desire to see them, and she rose from the concrete-and-rebar mess. She stalked toward the lights, which were also familiar yet unknowable.
There were too many Mortals here, and their gazes made her shiver. They’d point and bleat meaningless sounds her way, sometimes throwing little metal discs at her feet when she stared long enough. Useless things.
Something about that made the wound-space quake with shame, so she stopped under a palm tree and forced herself to Change.
Her face pushed outward with a grinding crunch of bone; human teeth fell out one by one with bloody tacks on the concrete, replaced by yellowed fangs. Sallow skin, once glossy and tan, grew rough, covered by gray fur. Her legs broke and reformed, heels wrenched upwards, toenails bursting bloody from nailbeds into claws.
Agonizing, but quick, and gone soon.
It was easier to hide this way. Mortals looked at her from a distance, saw something like a sickly dog, and stayed away.
She ventured into that strange, familiar place on four legs, keeping to the darkness beneath cars and between rows of virginia willow.
A parade of familiar and unnameable things passed before her eyes through the red leaves. The images scattered against her mind.
A sleek man in a turquoise suit rose from a long car, sweeping a young woman with sunlight-bright hair off her feet. The Beast could practically taste her sweet joy.
Three figures in shimmering colors sang under a statue of a bull; the small metal discs clinked in jars at their feet.
It was a brightly colored puzzle.
Had she once been a piece?
It didn’t matter; she was mutilated and could only see how she didn’t fit.
Still, she watched, compelled to float beneath it all.
The humans paid her no mind; she was the same gray as the roads and the dirt.
She haunted the darkness, a specter between Porsches and Buicks.
She wandered the alleys between brothels and bars, and stooped to drink from a puddle, gagging on grit and oil.
Her stomach twisted in protest.
The Beast’s dark eyes bored through a brothel window, watching a group of figures entangled in rut. The salty mingling of sweat, the slap of hips driving into a pelvis, the sticky sucking sound of lips...need throbbed in her loins, centered on that hard prominence. Heat bloomed in her lower belly.
The sound of a man’s grunting climax and the rich scent of seed made her pelvic muscles clench.
Hunger rose screeching from her depths. Its broken-glass edge sharpened her arousal.
Hunt.
She tore her gaze from the window, nostrils flaring to pick apart the million scent-threads of the city. She dropped to the concrete, and from bitter asphalt and cloying grease, she drew forth the scent trail of something like her...something terrible and mercurial. Felid in flavor.
The Beast pursued it.
She prowled through sweating brick alleys, pressing her nose, the tip of her tongue against the wet asphalt to read the scent-script:
An underground space, filled with Mortals sweating adrenaline.
Blood shed in competition.
The Prey, huffing-hot with rage.
The alleyway opened into a square plaza shared by rundown tenement blocks and dens that stank of acrid chemicals. She huddled behind an algae-choked fountain when voices cut through the rainstorm.
“—isn’t like anything would have turned out differently if I’d disobeyed, asshole.” A young man’s tenor...raspy around the edges.
“Doesn’t change who you are to him, though, and that’s why this has to happen to you.” Another man, a few years older; she could pick out the leonine undertone of his words. This close, she smelled his ammonia-musk, poorly covered by coconut scent.
Her eyes gleamed, reflecting a street lamp as she peeked out from behind the fountain.
The young man was Mortal, unlike the Prey who was merely disguised as one.
The slender Mortal carried a duffel bag that reeked of another man’s sweaty clothes. He stood with his back against the trunk of a palm tree, but didn’t act cornered. He smelled like the underground place.
Her attention was fixed on the Prey; broad and sinewy, tawny hair hanging down to his neck, slick with cat-reek sweat. Whatever his pinstripe shirt and black slacks meant was lost to her; the cloth was another layer of skin between her and the meat.
He circled the Boy, shoulders hunched, head forward. “You got a pretty mouth, kid...sure you’re just Kashyk’s gofer, and not his little strawberry—”
She and the Prey were caught off guard when the Boy lunged. He moved with mantis-speed, sending them tumbling into the dust. The Beast drew closer to watch as they wrestled.
Night-attuned eyes feasted on every thrashing move the Boy made. His flailing fists and knobby elbows made uneven thuds as he pounded the bigger man’s face. A hook snapped his head to the side.
“You cocky little freak—AGH!”
Her Prey weathered the Boy’s assault, a hand snapping out for his ankle and pulling him down. The Boy struck the concrete heavily and the spill of blood from his cut scalp flavored the air.
The Prey’s canines burst saber-sharp and curved from his gums, his fingertips split as his claws ripped forth.
The Boy’s brown eyes flickered silver-bright with Bedlam, mouth wide in a soundless scream.
When the Prey’s jaws unhinged wide enough to drive those fangs into the Boy’s skull, she struck.
Altruism wasn’t the point; there was no point.
There was only the hell-screech of her empty belly.
The mangy animal shape became two meters tall with bone-white talons and grime-crusted fur. Her claws were blunt and brittle, but strong enough to hook into the Felid’s chest and pull him back into her desperate embrace.
His tusks tore through the Boy’s cheek.
The Prey screamed.
His own talons flayed her back and withers in vain.
She wrestled him against the fountain and bent him to expose him to the Moon.
The ache in her gums gave way as she bit.
His belly popped under her yellowed fangs like a bile-filled fruit.
PULL. RIP. TEAR.
The Beast held him there against the fountain’s edge.
The Comet gleamed in the Prey’s eyes.
She released his intestines onto the concrete. The tension in her jaws gave way as she grunted in relief, but...through the gore she smelled him.
The Mortal Boy.
The Beast stared at his exposed collarbone...the edge of his jawline, wet with his own blood...the shape and scent of his manhood, hidden behind loose denim.
So pretty.
The Prey’s blood dripped down her patchy fur. It painted her loins red, made her thumb-thick pearl tingle with heat.
The Boy’s jaw quivered; his cheek was torn by the Felid’s bite, the white of his teeth reflected in the street lights. With a gasping choke, he turned and ran into the dark.
Impulse flashed through the wound-space in her skull, and rather than feast, she gave chase.
Her stride was somewhere between a carnivore’s lope and a gorilla’s charge; the Boy’s was the full-limb sprint of absolute survival. She matched his speed and soon began to close; she could already feel it in her fingertips, the phantom sensation of his clothes tearing away, of terror hardening him for the rut.
She flung herself forward.
He jinked to the side, startlingly swift, vaulting atop a parked car and jumping onto a raised veranda jutting from a tenement.
She dug her claws into the ground to slow herself, watching his panicked grace.
He was Prey, a submissive mate…but he displayed for her.
She was Predator, the dominant mate...but she watched.
Instinct took hold, and she followed his fear-musk up the side of the veranda. He ran, full bore, to the other end toward... a brick wall, separating the apartments from the noisy street.
The Beast chased, her talons throwing up masonry as she closed the distance.
Almost there; dwindling inches.
He reached the end of the veranda, looked over his shoulder. They locked eyes.
He glimpsed her desperation, the broken brightness of her fever-stare.
Fear catapulted him over the veranda’s edge, her claws lashing out to clutch him as he slipped through her grasp. His flight took him to the edge of the wall, and he scrambled over and out of her sight.
The Beast’s talons were wet with his blood. She leapt after him, but paused, balanced atop the brick wall’s shadowy edge. The street stretched below, prowled by cars and dense with Mortals. Her instinctive fear of crowds of humans made her freeze, and she watched him as he threw himself behind the glass of a bus stop. As if that would somehow protect him.
She stared at him; he stared back, covering his shredded cheek with a palm.
After he left on a bus, his afterimage remained in the wound-space.
The Beast returned to the killing grounds, only to find that the Prey had crawled off. A vermilion smear on the asphalt marked his trail. Normally she could think of nothing more tempting.
But the Boy stayed hooked to her thoughts, distracting as if he was still there in spite of his escape.
She found the Felid beast, panting wetly against a graffiti-stained transformer. Breathing hoarsely, holding his guts in his lap, but those details hardly mattered to her.
Beast and Cat stared at each other.
She opened her mouth.
The Prey’s dying screams did little to quiet her inner tumult.
She stared along the scent path left by the Boy; he was gone, but the trace of his physical presence made him feel still immediate.
The blood-rich density of the Prey’s liver, the rhythm of the Boy’s panicked breaths
The rupture-pop of lion eyes, the cords of youthful sinew shifting as he ran
She lowered the body in her hands. Her Prey choked and pushed a clawed hand against her chest; she bit down on his skull.
Twist. Pull. SNAP.
But there was no peace to be had.
Around 5:20 a.m., the sun crawled up the horizon. A local trash collector found the Prey’s headless human corpse, several organs torn free. Cops chalked it up to one of many ‘gang-related animal attacks’.
The killer, now full and lethargic, returned to the gray world of the docks. In a corner of a warehouse, where shipping containers had languished for years, she lay down with the spiders in the dry dust.
Hot. The ground was uncomfortable and hard, and the spiders nested in her fur. It was a miserable little corner that was safe from curious humans and the feral beasts that broke her.
Sleep would come. Dreams would scream through the crater of her mind. She would forget them when she woke.
The day rose. It baked the city in its own sweat and threatened it with night-storms.
She awoke, and his fang-torn face was still there. The Beast snarled and scattered the vermin attending to her sleeping form.
She growled. Paced. Gnawed at her right paw out of habit.
Wait. Something there, between her second and third claws.
Her teeth plucked forth a scrap of bloody denim she hadn’t noticed. It was the same color as the Boy’s pants, and...there was a tiny dot of his blood soaked into the fabric.
Her belly tightened.
The Beast brought the scrap to her tongue, touching the bloody dot to it and—
That way.
An invisible thread tightened between them. No way he could hide from her now; whether across a city or a continent, or all the way to the Comet, the blood would guide her.
She set out to find her Boy.
Hers to taste.
Hers to fuck.
Hers to Hunt.
