HUNGER

• CW for rape, murder, general deathiness •

The woman was spent, but he still fucked her. She’d stopped fighting him. He was stronger than a man and though he was lean, he was impossibly heavy, as though his bones were made of lead.

“Not yet,” he whispered as he clung to her, biting her earlobe.

She moaned, twisting her head weakly away from him.

She’d invited him in. That handsome, sorry traveler out in the frosty twilight had seemed kind enough. He’d felt her lust, timid and frail, but still throbbing. An invitation was all he needed. Now her husband lay dead on the floor, and she’d soon follow, victim to a monster’s appetites.

Her fear had waned; now he just felt her fatigued resignation. She’d feared death in the beginning—now she wished for it.

Heavy hands slid up her body, reawakening her fear for just a moment as his long fingers curled around her neck. Resigned or not, she still feared the moment of death, the dying itself.

And well she should, he thought, running a thumb over her throat, her pulse flighty under skin he could tear like tissue paper. He’d ripped into her husband that way, torn him open like a gift, and what a gift he’d been to the hungry old traveler.

“He wasn’t supposed to come home,” the woman kept whispering.

She let out a little cry of protest, terror flashing in her eyes as he turned his attention back to her, his soft brown gaze full of disdain and hunger.

“I’m going to kill you now,” he said, stoking her fear like a fire. “It’s going to hurt. And it’s going to take a long time.” He tightened his grip on her neck, digging his thumbs into the soft flesh of her throat.

Her hands flew up to his wrists, but she was tired, and he grew stronger and heavier with every stolen breath of hers. She spasmed and kicked and writhed beneath him, but nothing could move him now. Her fight was the same vain struggle of the mouse in the snake’s jaws. It only made him hungrier.

He waited for her to lose consciousness before he let go. Give her a few moments. Let her breathe. Then he slapped her awake. He watched with glee as emotion dawned on her face: confusion, disorientation, then dread and fear and disappointment. Why was she not yet dead? Had she not suffered enough?

“It’s not your fault,” he crooned gently, even as his fingers dug into her flesh again. He wasn’t sure she was listening through her terror, but he explained anyway. “Good meals are hard to come by. People used to see me and know. I could taste their fear. I would walk through a crowded village square and feed on nothing but their fright. Now? They don’t believe. They don’t know what I am. But I still must satisfy my hunger.”

Her throat crunched in his hands, and her weak flailing stopped abruptly.

“Damn it.”

Irritation flashed across his face, pulling back the veil for a moment, revealing the purple, rotting creature beneath the handsome façade. What fear the woman might yet have felt was gone. She’d died, face frozen in terror, now an empty husk.

He pulled out and spent himself in his own hand with a disgusted scoff, wiping it on her nightdress.

“Should have waited longer. That won’t last.” Already he could feel the hunger clawing at his edges.

He rose and dressed himself, throwing on a coat against the cold. He didn’t need it, but it was a nice coat, taken from an old soldier whose war memories were still one of the better meals he’d had.

Now he starved. This—and he glanced around the room as he thought it—this could sustain him no longer. He’d kill a whole village before he could sate his appetite. Fear had grown old, cheap, fast food that filled but never satisfied.

He needed something different, something new, and he knew he’d never find it here in this poor, war-torn place. He stepped out into the cold and dark and let the human façade fall completely. Death rolled off of him in putrid waves. His feet left gory prints in the snow.

Time, he thought, to leave. The hunting will be better elsewhere.