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I'm doing writing prompts on Tumblr. This one's for the prompt War.
WAR.
I was born to this.
To rend, to shred, to spill blood, to rip the hearts of my enemies from their chests and feel them beating as they slide down my throat. I am a monster and they know it. They can see it in my eyes: they’re the windows to the soul and nobody’s home.
I let him call himself soulless and I don’t know why. He doesn’t know a fucking thing about it. He doesn’t know that emptiness and if I have it my way he never will. He’s empty for other reasons: the darkness gapes in him, and I’m inextricably drawn to it, but when he dies there’ll be no one waiting to collect a toll.
My fists and claws are black with her guts. She’s told me everything, I’ve taken everything, and now she’ll slake my hunger til I find the rest of them - Brothers, they call themselves, putrid stray dogs cowering in the cities where they think my master can’t follow.
He’s mad and we four are mad to follow him but we do. He’s a storm in battle, slighter than most of our kind and easily underestimated, the way it’s hard to gauge the distance of a tornado until you’re caught up in the wind.
They scatter before me. All their power and false humanity amounts to nothing when I drag them screaming from their beds, when I eat their children, when I squeeze the trigger from a thousand yards and their alpha’s head pops like a grape.
He leads us in and we follow without question. His rage fuels ours; his hunger burns in our veins. Sometimes, though. Sometimes he loses himself in the sheer joy of killing and someone has to remind him that we’re here for a purpose beyond causing others pain.
My walking question mark, my hammer, my incubus, my dowsing rod: my pack is part squadron, part toolbox, all family. Bones crunch beneath our paws and it makes me laugh to hear these traitors call themselves a brotherhood when all they really are is a nest of pups, blind and mewling and helpless in the face of a warrior - much less five.
His fingers slip through the ring of my collar (his collar) and his mouth tastes like blood and bile and he smells of gunpowder and death and God yes my head is swimming with the rush of killing so many of our own kind, and there’s time enough to give him what he wants before sirens blare down the streets because I’ve TOLD him guns and screaming always brings the cops.
MINE. My pack’s flesh is mine to control. The enemy’s flesh is mine to devour. I could drink him in, my right-hand man, fill myself with him til dawn amid the gore while the rest look on and feed.
I let him use me til there’s nothing left to give and I don’t know why. He’s high on victory, fuck, we all are, full bellies and quenched throats, but he’s empty inside in ways I’ll never understand - so he’ll use me up again in the safety of the den or in some cheap motel where we’ll wash away the blood and sleep it off - no, the other three will sleep. Not me. Because there’s a gaping hole inside him where something else should be, and it’s different from my sold-off soul, and he chooses to try to fill that void with warfare and with me.
And he is no one to tell me no.