The Devil Next Door

88

Angie closed in on the Baron.

It was not difficult. After the warfare broke between her tribe and the Baron’s pack, he had few followers. His pack was mostly killed, wounded, or driven off into the night. It was only a matter then of following his blood trail.

That he had come this far was testament to his strength.

His vitality.

Angie had tracked his blood spoor for nearly three blocks until it ended here, at the athletic field behind the high school where the Greenlawn High Wildcats strutted their stuff on the gridiron come September.

Angie was ignorant of all that, of course.

She followed his blood trail to the fence, circling it quietly, looking for some means of egress. But even the gate was locked. She lost the Baron’s spoor for a moment, but then caught his scent where he’d urinated on a tree. Angie sniffed this for telltale signs of his condition. The urine had a weak smell. She could scent the blood in it and the waning trace odors of the hormones usually associated with a healthy, fighting animal.

The Baron was dying.

She found where he’d gone over the fence. Shouldering her bow, she climbed up and over, dropping silently on all fours into the grass.

The spoor was simple to track now on the freshly-shorn grass. He was bleeding badly and it was splashed in copious amounts everywhere. Yes, she could see him now. He was staggering, moving for a few feet, falling, then rising, pushing himself on through willpower and little else. There were woods beyond the field and this is where he was going: he wanted to die in the forest where his kind had always been born.

His darkened shape was simple to pick out on the flat field in the moonlight.

Angie put an arrow in her bow, stretched it, sighted in on the feeble shape in the distance. Clenching her teeth with a slow exhalation of air, she let it fly. He let out a garbled cry as it struck him in the back.

He pitched forward, limbs jerking.

Now! Take your kill! Make it yours!

Angie rushed out and he heard her coming, tried to crawl away from her. But it did no good. She stood above him, a painted and bloody tribal warrior maiden, breathing deeply, smelling the death of her pray and reveling in it as only the hunter can.

Menstrual blood ran down the inside of one leg.

She leaped on him, landing hard, his breath coming out in a whooshing gasp. She grabbed the arrow in his back and yanked it out. He moaned and tried to crawl away. She let him. When he made it a few feet, she blocked his path and stabbed him lightly with the arrow until he turned. And when he crawled in a different direction, she stabbed him again. She toyed with him a bit as she liked to with her kills. It amused her. To toy with prey was the world’s oldest form of foreplay.

He stopped crawling, looking up at her with fixed hatred.

He made a grunting, puffing noise. He coughed out ribbons of blood. His fur pelt was shiny and wet with it. Still, even weakened, he was huge and vicious. His tongue lolled from his bloody mouth, his nose sniffing.

Angie dropped to her knees to watch his death throes.

He closed his eyes… then, with a final burst of strength and a terrible muffled roar deep in the chimney of his throat, he leaped at her.

She was caught by surprise, knocked into the grass.

He pinned her down, his eyes filled with a deadly intensity

Angie slid her knife from its sheath.

She did not fight.

This stopped the Baron momentarily. He cocked his head sideways.

She slashed him in the face, slicing a strip of meat from his temple to jawbone. He tightened his grip on her throat and she buried the knife in his eyesocket.

He made a drawn-out growling sound… and attacked again, filled with a hideous, primal rage. Streamers of vile-smelling saliva oozed from his jaws. Blood and tissue dripped from his ruined eye. Then as his jaws came at her, she buried the blade of the butcher’s knife into his belly right to the hilt.

The Baron released her with a squealing, miserable sound like a run-down puppy… then he went crazy, snapping and biting and clawing.

Angie was howling herself: an atavistic war cry pulled up from the forgotten, shuttered basement of human history.

And as she did so, as the Baron’s fangs nipped at her face, tearing a hurting channel into her cheek, she drew the knife up from his belly to his sternum. His viscera, hot and steaming and slimy, spilled over her and its reek was raw, horrible… and delicious, ultimately invigorating.

Angie threw him to the ground and began to slash and hack his corpse. The knife rose and fell and blood splashed and flesh was bisected and she kept going until she’d thoroughly mutilated his hide, his head nearly severed from its neck.

Hurting, but alive because of it, her veins surging with electricity, Angie let out a deafening shriek and buried the knife in her kill. Then she broke open his ribs and carved his heart free. It was hot and pulsing in her hands. She brought it to her mouth, licking it, tasting it, coveting the muscled, marbled mass. Then bit into it with a shuddering carnal moan.

She tore it apart with a violent feeding frenzy until her face was covered in blood, tissue, and hot juices.

She fell back into the grass, sated, fulfilled, feeling the Baron’s strength and cunning becoming her own. Beneath the waning eye of the moon, the night was made complete…