Alice Henderson - Voracious

“Stefan,” she said, watching him closely. “Those men you killed near the cabins. Did you do that so you could be the one to kill me?”

He didn’t answer right away, looking up and down the path. The breeze blew his hair across his face, and he moved it aside with his hand. Then he met her gaze, the red flash gone from his eyes as they returned to green. “No.”

She waited for him to expand. The burbling song of the river filled the silence between them. “Why did you then?”

He exhaled. “I killed them because they were pathetic swine,” he answered, his tone so abrupt it surprised her. He was angry. The muscle in his jaw clenched. “People like that kill and break things because they’re stupid, bored, and impotent. They have no concept of the power, the wonder of life. They seek only to take it away because they themselves can’t feel it. They seek to destroy people from the inside out but don’t even have the consciousness to understand why.” He fisted his hand. “I killed them because the world was no more the poorer for it. And those who enliven the world would be freer for it.”

She stared, unable to find words. “It’s terrible, and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’m glad you were there that night.” She stepped forward and took his hand. His skin was hot under her touch.

“Let me tell you something about death,” he said. “Humans have shaped this world to revolve around them. They talk of the tragedy of earthquakes or floods. But natural forces aren’t tragedies. What humans forget is that they are just another animal that can drown, or freeze to death, or yes, even be eaten.

“They’ve hunted all of their natural predators nearly to extinction. They’d like to believe they’re invulnerable, on top of the food chain. And what has this mentality done for them? Disease, overpopulation, war. Humans aren’t separate from nature; they’re a part of it. Everything they do impacts the very natural processes they’d like to ignore.

“Humans are meat for the predator as surely as cows are meat for them. Without natural predators, overpopulation is inevitable. Thousands of years have shown me this. I’ve seen the world grow from a few pockets of people to cities, to civilizations, to one continuous stream of concrete and roads, towering buildings, and mass destruction wreaked with the push of a button-nature plowed under and destroyed in humanity’s wake.

“I am not the monster. My prey is the monster.”

She stood silently, his words striking her. He gripped her hand tightly when she tried to back away. The scariest part was that he made sense to her.

He looked down at their hands, then brought hers to his lips. “My name,” he said, lips brushing her fingers, “is not Stefan.”

She gazed back, puzzled.

“That’s just the name Noah knew me by in Vienna.”

“What is it then?” she asked, forcing herself to talk, to crawl up out of the tumble of thoughts his words had left her with, struggle to act through the veil of delicious energy between them.

He laughed. “Practically unpronounceable. But it’s not Stefan.”

She thought again of the sheer sense of ancient she’d felt that night on the road and wondered what the name could be, what culture he was from-if he was ever human, as Noah had speculated, sometime long, long ago.

They stood there together in silence for several minutes, and Madeline’s mind raced over everything that had led up to this moment. Her escape into the backcountry from her tiny town of gossip and ostracism. The creature stalking her in the wilderness. Noah begging her to help him. This very moment next to the river. She frowned. Everything hinged on her psychic ability. If she wasn’t psychometric, she wouldn’t be out here in the first place. The creature wouldn’t be stalking her. Noah wouldn’t have enlisted her help. The creature wouldn’t be trying now to seduce her.

Her whole life she’d been measured by her psychic prowess. Either she was too weird to have friends, or people wanted her close in order to take advantage of her ability. This moment was no different. The creature was no different. And now he was telling her that if she didn’t use her ability, he’d alleviate her of it at the expense of her life.

A long-simmering anger that had been building since childhood reached boiling point. Wasn’t she worth knowing without her ability? Who would ever bother to find out? She was so much more than psychometric. Her soul itself had been crying out for twenty-one years, and no one had heard it. And now this creature threatened to squelch that soul in order to get at the very thing that had made her life miserable. Her ability. Her “gift.” Her soul, personality, vibrancy, and life would fall to the wayside so this shape-shifting thing could get another advantage.

The anger flared into rage, which threatened to overflow. The creature stood before her, still holding on to her hand, clawed fingers laced in her own.

A seething, bubbling primal force of fury welled up within her, and she brought her other hand up, shoving the creature away violently. Quickly she raised her foot high, connecting with his stomach with a sickening thunk . She kicked hard, shoving him back, where he stumbled over the exposed root, this time too quickly to right himself. Careening backward, he crashed into a ten-foot granite boulder, head connecting with a sharp corner. He cried out in surprise and pain as it bit into his skull with an audible crack.

She ran forward as his body jelled, and he fell limply to the ground. Grabbing his hand, she pulled him up, adrenaline flooding through her veins, rage straining in her neck. She could feel the muscles standing out there and uttered a low, angry roar as she dragged him to his feet and shoved him back again, where he stumbled onto the path.

Groggy from the blow to his head, he brought his hands up ineffectually, and she knocked them away, landing another solid kick to his gut.

“You can go to hell!” she screamed, spittle raining from her mouth. “I’ll kill you!”

The world fell away, narrowing to a tiny beam of focus before her. The creature. The roaring river behind him. There teal waves crashed over huge granite boulders slick with algae. Stefan brought his hands to his head, disoriented, as blood streamed down his forehead, dripping from his hair. She kicked him hard in the head, then shoved his chest with her hands, knocking him back inexorably toward the water.

To her horror, he grabbed onto her arms with the last shove, trying to take her with him. But she brought her hands up lightning fast, connecting with the underside of his chin. His hands came free, releasing her as his head snapped back.

She dropped low, kicking her leg out, and delivered two shattering blows to his knees. He staggered back, stumbled, and fell, arms windmilling in the air, until he hit the water hard.

His body disappeared in the foaming white water. She ran to the edge of the river, eyes searching. She saw him bob up limply a few feet away, swiftly borne on the current, his head connecting sharply with the edge of a slimy rock. Blood frothed in the water, and he cried out in surprise.

She thought of his long fingers pulling her under in the flash flood. He’d been scared then, a creature not at home in the frigid, tumbling water.

She’d just put him back in that unforgiving place, and turning, ran away as his body flopped helplessly downstream.

MADELINElooked at her watch. Five p.m. George would be there in just a few minutes. Once the creature crawled out of the river, though she hoped he’d be swept far downstream by then, the cabin was one of the places he knew he could find her.

If she was going to get her wallet and keep the creature from knowing her future address, this was her only chance.