Chapter 1: The Unexpected Warning
“No! Please, please leave us alone!”
The voice of a child. Small, weak, fragile. So precious but so… delicious.
“Come on, little girl, I just wanna see how far you run.”
I gripped her ankle and watched her claw at the dirt, as if it would save her. Her little fingers were splitting and bleeding against the ground, desperately grabbing at nothing. I crouched down, barely trying, barely even present in the way someone is when something stops being a challenge. The smirk came on its own. It always did. God, I love doing this.
The parents were screaming already. That part usually came later, but these were loud, emotional, the kind that made the whole thing so much better. I could hear the mother’s voice cracking completely, the father saying things that weren’t even words anymore, just noise that grief makes when it runs out of language. I didn’t look at them. The little girl was more interesting right now.
Her dress was torn, brown, worn down like it had belonged to someone else first and someone else before that. Her hair was matted and tangled, but underneath all of that, it was gold, pretty gold, the same as her mother’s. She took more after her father, though. Some kind of nocturnal creature- I couldn’t place exactly which one, but it was there in the shape of her face, the way her eyes caught the low light. We didn’t get many noc’s in the city, a rare thing. Interesting thing.
It would be a shame to just waste her.
Maybe I’d make her a slave. It would be a better life than whatever she had now, which, judging by the state of that dress, wasn’t much of one.
“Please… mister… please let me go—”
Her voice had gone small and broken, the kind of crying that happens when a child realises begging isn’t working, and they don’t know what else to do. Her whole body was shaking underneath my grip. I could feel it through her ankle, this tiny, desperate trembling that she couldn’t stop even if she tried.
I let her go.
She didn’t move immediately. They never do at first; the body takes a second to believe it. I watched her process it, watched the confusion flicker across her tear-soaked face before survival instinct kicked in and overrode everything else.
“You have four minutes.”
I said it quietly. That was the part that tended to land the worst, the quiet. Loud was something people could brace against. Quiet got inside them differently.
“Run.”
The smile came slow and easy, spread all the way across my face as she stared up at me with those wide, glassy, absolutely terrified eyes, just for a second. Then something broke open in her expression, and she was scrambling, sobbing, clawing herself upright and running as fast as her small legs would carry her, crying so hard she could barely see where she was going.
Mmm.
Wonderful.
I stood up slowly, unhurried, and turned toward the parents for the first time. Really looked at them. The mother had both hands pressed over her mouth, her whole body shaking, her eyes following her daughter until the tree line swallowed her up. The father was already moving forward before he caught my expression and stopped. Smart.
I looked at them both. No anger, no satisfaction, nothing they could read or hold onto. Just the intention sitting right underneath the surface of my face like water under ice.
“Watch them.”
I said it to my people without breaking eye contact with the father.
“They try anything—”
I held his gaze for just one more second. Let him see exactly what was behind it. Let him understand that the thing running after his daughter was the more merciful option compared to what was standing in front of him right now.
“Kill them.”
I turned and walked into the trees to the sound of the mother’s scream splitting open behind me, raw and animal and devastating.
I didn’t hurry. I had four minutes, and I only needed two.
There is nothing quite like a hunt. People think it’s about the catch, but they’re wrong; it’s the in-between that does it for me. The silence of the forest with something scary moving through it. The way everything gets sharper, sounds cleaner, like the whole world narrows down to just this. My pulse was steady, but there was something warm sitting underneath it, low and thrumming, the specific kind of excitement that only this produced. I had tried to explain it once. I hadn’t bothered since.
I walked. No rushing, no crashing through undergrowth the way something desperate would. I moved through the trees as I belonged to them, unhurried, quiet, letting the forest tell me what I needed to know. A broken branch here. A small shoe print pressed into the soft earth there. A streak of disturbed moss on a root where small hands had grabbed for balance and slipped.
I pulled out the little stick and let the clock project from it, pale light floating in the dark between the trees.
One minute and thirty seconds.
I smiled at it. I’d had this thing for years, picked it up from some strange magic user who clearly hadn’t thought carefully about who they were selling to. Best purchase I’d ever made.
I tucked it away and brushed my blue hair back from my face.
I chuckled to myself, low and quiet, the sound swallowed up almost immediately by the trees.
But something was off.
I stopped walking.
The forest had gone still. Not the natural kind of still, the kind that settles when nothing is disturbing it, this was the held kind. The kind that happens when something small and frightened has run out of options and made a decision. No movement, no snapping twigs, no small desperate footsteps slapping against wet earth.
She’d stopped running.
“Oh?” I tilted my head slowly, eyes dragging across the dark between the trees. “Is the baby hiding?”
The grin that formed on my face was not a kind one. I was past pretending it was anything other than what it was, and there was nobody out here to perform for anyway. Just me and the dark and whatever was tucked inside it, trying to make itself small enough to disappear.
I knew I should take her back whole. I knew that. A slave was worth more intact, and the practical part of my mind that handled those kinds of calculations was still running somewhere in the background, quiet and efficient.
The rest of me wasn’t really listening to it anymore.
I could feel it building the longer the silence stretched, something hot and restless moving through my blood, the specific hunger that a hunt produces when it gets to this part, when the gap between me and the thing I was chasing collapsed down to just a matter of seconds. I had a feeling about this one. Something that sat in my chest like anticipation, like the moment before something breaks.
I think this might be my favourite hunt.
Then I heard it.
Breathing.
Small and ragged and trying desperately to be neither. Tiny lungs that had run until they had nothing left and were now betraying her, whether she wanted them to or not. Each inhale was sharp and shallow, each exhale bitten down as hard as a child could manage, which wasn’t hard enough.
I turned toward the sound.
Slow. Deliberate. The way something moves when it already knows it has won and wants to feel every last second of that knowledge before the ending arrives.
I crept closer.
The thrill ran all the way up through me, electric and alive, and I let it. There was no point holding it back now. We were well past that.
Almost there.
I was so close I could see the gold of her hair in the dark. She had tucked herself into the base of a large tree, knees pulled to her chest, face buried in her arms, as if she couldn’t see me. I wouldn’t be real. Her breathing was ragged and loud now, past the point where she could control it, each small inhale shuddering on the way in and out.
I took one more step.
Then my ear twitched.
It was the only warning I got, and it lasted less than a second, some deep instinct firing off a signal that my body didn’t have nearly enough time to act on. A shift in the air. A presence that hadn’t been there a breath ago suddenly enormous and immediate and right behind me.
Then nothing.
Not darkness. No pain. Just nothing, clean and absolute, like a candle snuffed between two fingers.
My eyes were open. I could see the trees around me, the dark trunks, the tangled undergrowth, the patches of weak light struggling through the branches. But the angle was wrong. Everything was wrong. The ground was somehow both beneath me and far away and—
Then I found my body.
It was standing exactly where I had been standing a moment ago. Same posture, same position, like someone had pressed a button and simply removed me from it while leaving everything else perfectly in place. It stood there for one long, horrible second, upright and still and empty, before the blood came.
It came fast. Faster than I had ever seen it happen to anything else, and I had seen it happen to a great many things. Black in the low light of the woods, pouring rather than dripping, soaking down through the soil and the dead leaves and the dirt in every direction with a completeness that left no question about what had just been decided. My body swayed once, slowly, like a tree that has just taken its final cut at the base, and then it dropped. Knees first into the earth with a sound that landed somewhere between heavy and hollow, and then the rest of it pitching forward and then stillness. Just stillness and the dark and the sound of blood that hadn’t finished yet.
My mouth was open.
“W-wha—”
The word came out of something that no longer had the architecture to properly produce words. Thin and shapeless and small. The sound of a thing that had spent a very long time being certain it was the most dangerous presence in any given space, suddenly discovering at the very last possible moment that it had been wrong the entire time.
I found them in the corner of what remained of my vision.
A tall man standing between the trees, broad and completely still, one large hand cradling the back of the little girl’s head and pressing her face gently into his chest so she wouldn’t have to see any of this. Her small fingers were twisted into the fabric of his clothes, knuckles pale, holding on with everything she had left. He didn’t look at me. He looked down at her with an expression so steady it made the whole thing worse. This was not a difficult moment for him. This was just a thing he had done and finished, and that was all it was.
And then there was she.
The winged one.
She was the reason I was standing on the wrong side of my own body,y and I understood that immediately and completely. Her wings were enormous and grey and absolutely drenched, soaked through with red that gathered heavy at the feather tips and fell in slow, thick drops to the ground below her. Her face was painted with it, a fine dark mist across the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones and the sharp line of her jaw. Her hair had come loose around her face. She looked like something the woods had made specifically for moments like this one, something that had always been here between the trees waiting for exactly this.
She was looking at me.
Not with anger. Not with satisfaction or disgust or any of the things that might have made sense. She was looking at me the way someone looks at a fire that has just gone out, present for it, watching it happen, completely unbothered by what it took to put it out.
And she was smiling.
Between her teeth, her double row of sharp, blood-dark teeth, was a piece of me. I recognised it in the dim, distant, rapidly fading way that a mind in the process of shutting down can still sometimes manage to recognise things. She held it there without ceremony, the way someone holds something they picked up without thinking. Then she tilted her head at me, just slightly, watching the last of the understanding move across whatever remained of my face, and the smile widened into something with too many teeth and not enough anything else.
“H-ho—”
The word came apart before it finished. My vision was closing in from every direction now, the trees pressing closer and darker, the tall man and the little girl getting smaller and further away all at once, no matter how close they actually were.
The last thing I heard was her. The little girl. Muffled and small against the tall man’s chest, still crying, still shaking, but breathing. Alive in a way she wouldn’t have been in another thirty seconds if things had gone the direction I had intended them to.
They hadn’t.
Nothing came back.
Deeper this time. Finally, in a way, the first hadn’t quite managed to be.
It didn’t leave.
