Because LiveJournal is all about the pimping.
This post isn't actually my work - it's a few original stories that belong to one of my best friends. She asked me if I would mind posting it for her to see if she could get some feedback, and I said 'Sure! (See Post Subject)' Which I blame entirely on Challon86, since she started it by pimping me first. ^_~
In the meantime, I'm waiting for a response from pr_au100, which I finally forced myself to join because I realized Bright Skies already works under that challenge and I haven't done one before. I said I'd do thirty for sure, and then ended up planning out the whole one hundred anyway. x.x My roommate said she'll never see me again.
Anywho, here is the illustrious work of my 'nee-chan (Japanese for 'older sister'), who coincidentally, also drew the original picure my Akume icon comes from. (I'm her biggest fan, I swear.) Please give her lots of love and feedback at aetherialdrake@gmail.com. And possibly help con her into a LiveJournal account to post more of this, so I can pester her further. -Evil grin-
Warning: these are not for the squeamish.
It was an ill-fated camping trip from the start.
None of them were entirely sure who came up with the ever-so-brilliant plan of going camping in the mountains in the middle of winter, but they had gone along with it all the same. It was done on a lark, spur-of-the-moment style, and no sooner had they arrived at the ice- and snow-choked campsite than they realized the error of their frivolous ways.
They numbered five, an auspicious number by all accounts; three males, two females, and just enough common sense among the lot of them to bring warm clothes, food, and plenty of booze. The fact that they’d chosen a site with cabins was merely a point in their favor by fickle fate. A single cabin was all they’d need - it was spacious and sufficiently furnished for their purposes. It was appointed with simple, efficient elegance and that was all any of them could have ever asked for.
Avery glumly observed the full moon through an ice-rimed window that cast a dreamlike haze over the world outside. He muttered of werewolves and vampires and all things that go bump in the night, giving an unwanted voice to the thoughts that occupied all their minds. Darla told him he was full of shit and needed to stop being a superstitious lout. The others laughed, of course, but that laughter turned nervous after the low howl of a wolf arose in the distance. Laughter gave way to silence as they started settling in for a long, cold night ahead of them.
Only a night, they decided; they would only stay there one night, then they’d go back to civilization and pretend this thing never happened. Ennis tried to call a hotel he’d seen a few miles back, but his cell-phone mockingly refused to work. Blame was squarely placed on the ornery bit of technology and it was shoved into the bottom of a bag as penance. Dale poured himself a stiff drink and tried futilely to get the heater to work.
Despite its efficient appearance, the cabin as a whole was the very model of inefficiency as far as its wiring went. The electric heater refused to cooperate, forcing them to consider the wood stove as a viable alternative. By a draw of straws, it was decided that Avery would be the one to venture outside in search of wood. He did not accept his fate willingly or eagerly; he complained bitterly the whole time he bundled himself up and trudged out the door.
He was not surprised by the lack of wood on the ground near the cabin … or even a few paces away; his inner cynic told him he’d have to go to the nastiest part of the ominously dark forest that loomed behind the campground to find what he needed. While his common sense dictated that going into the dark woods alone was a bad idea, his need to prove himself - however infantile that need was - was enough to send his feet unrelentingly in that direction.
He grumped, he growled, he bemoaned his poor fortune … all while fate was staring him down, unbeknownst to him.
A patch of darkness pulled away from the forest, a shaggy monstrosity that was less wolf and more some kind of nightmare monster. He didn’t get a good look at it, nor at the others that peeled themselves out of their element to circle him. Some part of the primordial predator in him was in awe of their speed and primal efficiency; the rest of him was really wishing he could scream or do more than just lie on the ground in a bloody mess.
They numbered five, an inauspicious number by all accounts; three male, two female, and their hunger was tangibly insatiable.
One of the smaller ones - and compared to that first, they were all small - had laid claim to Avery’s throat and was happily crunching on it as he towered over the young man. Spatters of his own blood dripped on Avery’s face and he could do little more than cringe in horror and try to turn away.
An approving grunt was given by the largest and the one settled into dining properly on his meal. Avery felt only a brief pang of self-righteousness at his previous worry, accompanied by a distinct thought of ‘it serves you bastards right, fucking doubting thomases’ directed to the oblivious quartet just a few yards away, before he felt neither pain nor cold. There was only a queer sense of emptiness … and then nothing at all.
***
"Where is that fucking pansy?" Dale wondered aloud, his mood soured considerably by each successive drink. He was three drinks in and Janice knew he would be totally insufferable by his fifth. If they were lucky, consciousness would be lost by the sixth, but she’d learned long ago not to believe in luck.
Ennis glanced out the window but his breath fogged it too much to be useful. "I don’t know. I do know I’m not going out there. Fuck that."
"Fucking pansy." Dale downed the rest of his drink and stood with only a hint of unsteadiness. "Fine. I’ll fucking go. Like hell if I’m gonna freeze to death because the lot of you are fucking lazy douchebags."
The girls stayed silent. Ennis bit his lower lip.
Dale left.
He was greeted by Avery, naked and covered in blood. To his booze besotted mind, he didn’t notice anything immediately amiss - aside from the lack of clothing, at any rate - and commented only on the obvious. His tone was irritated rather than curious, his gestures equally annoyed as he motioned at the other young man.
"What the hell happened to your clothes?"
Avery cocked his head to a side, the gesture curiously dog-like. His tongue lolled out.
"What? Don’t speak English all of a sudden, you retard? Why the hell are you naked?"
Avery just smiled. Four dark shapes emerged from the silver-touched folds of night’s cloak, two to either side of their oblivious victim, and it was the largest of them that claimed Dale. The alpha descended ruthlessly, excising Dale’s throat first, and then working methodically from there. Eyes. Tongue. Heart. Fingers. And as he set about consuming the last part, the other three continued inside, their howling laughter growing more maddening.
Outside, the wind screamed and tried to hide the deeds to come by drawing down a blanket of white atop the cloak of darkness. Its efforts were in vain. Inside the house, the girls screamed in unison as the wolf-femmes launched themselves at them. Darla was strewn all over the cabin, her intestines flung about festively like grotesque garland.
Janice was kept confined to the bathroom, although her last moments were spent halfway in the tub and halfway out, one eye briefly catching a glimpse of the naked, bloodied figures of Dale and Avery in the doorway, watching the slaughter with happily shit-eating grins on their gore-streaked faces. Dimly, she wondered why Avery had dark hair when he was blonde, why his eyes were silver and not brown, and then her thoughts turned to her demise and the revelation that she was beyond feeling anything.
Ennis fumbled with the bag, screaming apologies to his cell-phone and swearing he would never bury it again in a bag if it would just work this one time. He no sooner got it out than it was slapped from his hand by the last wolf, his silver eyes glittering with unspeakable malice. His hunger went deeper than mere flesh and bone, Ennis realized; the beast wanted his soul. Unable to resist, the human gave it all up in a single, shuddering sigh. He and this monster would be as one until the rite came around again.
The rest of the night was spent with the human-formed creatures going about the task of cleaning, erasing any sign of their presence from the cabin. And even if there were a few hints, the cabin’s owner would be sure to remove the rest; he was reliable, if nothing else.
Dawn sent peaches-and-cream fingers into the sky and all that remained were the wolves in their victims’ shed skins. After no small amount of joint-cracking and stretching to get accustomed to their temporary human bodies, ‘Dale’ led the group back into the unnatural darkness of the woods.
Another year.
Another rite.
And, as they say, life goes on.
The girl and the dragon
Christmas in the Paxton household was never a jolly affair. Their family was small, consisting only of Lenora and her husband Daniel and the twins, Mathilda and Matthew. His family lived too far away to visit and she refused to speak with hers since high school. While one might think that would mean that they have a lot of money to spend on their children, that one wouldn’t know the first thing about the family as a whole.
Lenora had never held a job, not since graduating from an art college; she spent the bulk of her time painting and trying to sell clothing designs to upscale clothing manufacturers. She failed miserably on both counts - much like she should have failed out of college, but didn’t by virtue of having wealthy parents. Being a wife and mother wasn’t something she’d ever wanted or planned, but they happened all the same and she was resentful for it.
Daniel was a teacher, which paid enough to cover the house bills. His son’s medical bills, however, drove him to dip a toe in illegal smuggling. He often used their brick townhouse as a meeting point and storage for those goods while they were in transit. His wife was too sparse in the mental sense to understand what was going on and his son spent too much time wavering between consciousness and unconsciousness to terribly care. Daniel had always wanted a family, but not like this; not ever like this. And, so, he was resentful for it.
Mathilda, on the other hand, was quite savvy for a young girl and knew her father was up to something shifty. She also understood it was for the good of the family, which is why she didn’t say anything. Being the savvy lass that she was, however, she knew her parents were resentful - either of each other or of their son’s illness and she was resentful toward both of them for it.
Matthew was too frail and drugged up to be resentful of anything but of whatever uncaring god made him so brutally, inexplicably ill.
Christmas, then, was typically a horrid ordeal for all of them. They put on false, tooth-rottingly saccharine faces of glee at gifts that they never wanted, but were the only ones they could afford. That’s assuming they could afford gifts at all that year. Dinner was usually leftover Chinese or cold pizza from two days previous; not terribly different from Thanksgiving, really, except that booze was more likely to be involved later on.
After the forced get-together dispersed, Mathilda went to medicate her brother, Daniel went to grade papers in the kitchen, and Lenora went to paint in her make-shift studio - a room that, by all rights, should have been Mathilda’s room, but which Lenora’s sense of entitlement had claimed as her own.
When Matty finished giving her brother his medicine, she kissed his too-cold forehead and murmured a soft and bitter "Merry Christmas" to him before heading upstairs to her parents’ room. That’s where all her books were kept, since Lenora had claimed the only other available room, and that’s also where she often sought solace since her parents were so rarely in the room at all.
She knew her father often kept strange things in the closet, but her curiosity was generally quashed by a propriety that she surely got from her father. This time, however, something seemed to beckon her, to summon her with honeyed whispers. She couldn’t make out the words, but words weren’t really necessary in the end. It was merely the feeling of being needed by something in there that compelled her to stand and reach for the handle.
The handle was cool, cooler than usual, and she pressed it down with nary a sound. The door swung soundlessly open and all she saw, at first, were clothes hanging up (her father’s) or heaps just flung about at the bottom (her mother’s) and a few brown paper-wrapped packages.
One in particular drew her eye, one that was nearly as tall as she - not that she was a terribly tall girl - and that seemed to be moving just a bit. The paper rustled and she reached over to gently touch it. Something moved under it. Something was alive under it. And that something felt curiously hard, not soft like a puppy or kitten.
Much as she wanted to cry out, Matty bit her tongue and touched it again. This time, she was met with a metallic hum of pleasure. She offered a tentative smile and then started to gently remove the paper, occasionally glancing out of the closet to make sure that no one was coming up the stairs. Of course, that was unnecessary; the stairs squeaked, no matter how many times Daniel tried to repair them, and it would be plenty loud to alert her to any interlopers.
She almost didn’t want to look at what was underneath, but she had to. She had no choice but to look. And what she saw took her breath away.
It was a dragon.
A real dragon, just like in her storybooks.
And it was beautiful.
Butter-colored talons were the first thing she saw, deceptively cruel and sharp. Its scales were a rich blend of goldenrod and mustard, with a slight metallic sheen. The colors darkened to charred bronze along its underbelly and created a most unusual mask on its delicately pointed muzzle. Its belly scales were like those of a snake, but the rest were smooth and round and probably quite sharp. Its wings were improbable constructions of goldenrod spars and diaphanous veils of gold that were as sheets of refined sunlight. A ridge of spikes ran from the back of its head to the tip of its wickedly hooked tail, a tail that was coiled around its forelegs in a quaint, catlike posture. The color was nearly translucent, reducing it to a vision of glass and fantasy.
Its eyes were the most fascinating part, however. Those were clear and blue-grey, the shade of a winter’s sky without threat of storm or snow. Its pupils were quicksilver and catlike, narrowing to slits, then widening a bit as it studied her.
She dared to touch the spike-studded jaw, and winced when she inevitably cut her hand upon it. The creature reacted by tilting its sleek wedge of a head and extending its black tongue to lap at the wound. It stung at first, but the pain receded into a warm tingle that had Matty looking at her hand as soon as the dragon was finished with its ministrations.
The wound might as well have not been there in the first place.
Her eyes widened.
It simply smiled (or seemed to, at any rate), its serpentine tongue slithering back into its pointed maw. His color seemed a bit more tangible, but some part of her mind figured it must merely have been a shifting of the light.
"Can you help my brother?" Mathilda breathed.
It answered with a yawn that sounded like tinkling golden bells.
She looked at it expectantly, but when it made no further response, her expression soured. She reached for the paper and prepared to wrap it up when a curious tingling grabbed the base of her spine and shot straight up to the back of her head.
I can help, if you ask the right question.
"What is the right question?"
If I told you, then you’d just be a parrot. It cocked its head to a side to study her with its inscrutable gaze. You don’t look like a parrot to me. Are you?
She shook her head. The voice lapsed into silence, which suited her just fine; it was uncomfortable and strange to have that presence in her mind. She was already getting a bit of a headache from it, in fact.
It waited and she began to puzzle over the question she should ask. Matty finally blurted out, "Will you help him? If you can, then I want to know if you will do it or if you won’t do it at all. Because if you won’t, I’ll just wrap you up again."
A quaint threat. But you have to wonder if I could have escaped on my own or if I was biding my time for this moment. I am not quite as frail as I appear.
She glared at it and it heaved a thin, tremulous sigh.
I can help. I will help. But there is something I need from you, first.
"Okay."
What would you give up to help him?
And she, being a child, had no concept of the things that grown-ups think about when given such a question. Her thoughts were not entirely focused on material things like money or toys or any such nonsense, but she also had her wits about her enough not to offer up anything important. Not so flippantly to a beast she scarcely knew. She did not spend long in her thoughts before her savvy side popped out with a single question that made more sense than the beast’s.
"What do you want?"
That isn’t the question.
"You want me to pay something for your help. If you don’t know what you want, then I don’t know if I can pay it."
A terrible shame. It clucked like an admonishing mother hen. Well, then, you might as well wrap me up, then.
"That’s not very fair."
Life is not fair. This thing you call a ‘life’ here is far from fair. But it is what it is. Fairness is an illusion, an illusion that I do not cater to; I am here only to bring the reality of life to the surface. So, I ask one more time, what would you give up to help your brother? Its narrow muzzle pulled into one of those queer smiles again. If it helps, just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. That, I find, is the most honest answer.
Mathilda choked on the suggestion, her mouth gaping, closing, and gaping again before snapping audibly shut.
Nothing, then? I see. Then wrap me up. Our business is done here.
"No."
No?
"I’d give anything to help him."
Would you? It sounded too eager, its mental voice latching on fiercely with a hunger that horrified her.
"I …" Her thoughts stalled a moment, confused.
Your intent is pure, even if your answer is misguided, it remarked idly, glancing at her, then craning its head around to preen a bit. Regardless. Under my other wing is a parcel, a paper-wrapped package and a vial. The package contains a powder that must go into every meal. Just one pinch should do. The vial contains a clear liquid that must be given with every dose of his medicine. He will complain that it is bitter, it may make him sick, but he must take it every time. Is that understood?
She nodded numbly, her mind working double-time to commit it all to memory.
Every day that you do that, you will bring food up here to me. I will also need blood from you and him if this is to work.
More nodding.
In a week, he will be cured and I will extract payment.
"What will you take?"
But it did not answer and she shuddered. She took the parcel, wrapped the dragon up, and ghosted down the stairs to her room to examine the things.
The vial was small, the packet equally so, and both were odorless. She dared not taste them, but she truly had no other recourse but to trust it.
Or did she?
Desperation dictated that she did not and, so, it went. For a week, she did as prescribed; doctoring her brother’s food and medicine, feeding the dragon its regular meals and a smaller supper of blood. Her brother was too incoherent to care that she was bleeding him little by little; her parents were too busy arguing or ignoring each other to care that their daughter was sneaking about more than usual.
After every meal, the dragon seemed stronger and more richly colored; after every dose of medicine, her brother grew more pale and rigid. He found it harder and harder to move … and, when he did move, his skin would crack and break in ways that she had never seen before. The first time it did that, she stormed up to the room and flung open the closet door … only to be met by a beast that was easily twice as large as it was mere days before.
It was a blazing sun of gold and light, its eyes grown dark and darker still, like pools of midnight shot through with quicksilver lightning.
"What have you done?!" she hissed angrily.
Precisely what I said I would. You must trust in me, child.
"Why should I? You’re just killing him!"
Am I? Is he still coughing? Is he still wracked with terrible spasms?
"N- no."
Then he is getting better.
"But his skin- ! He’s breaking, like a china doll!"
There are always side-effects. I’m saddened to think you are surprised by this.
"But you didn’t tell me …"
Nor did you ask. He has two more days left and all will be well. It lowered its head, its darkling eyes catching hers and holding them fast. Trust me.
And she fled, horrified by the visions she saw in those flatly gleaming eyes.
She went through the motions with an empty heart, fearing the repercussions of not doing it more than what might happen when it was all done. Mathilda cried herself to sleep before that last day, knowing that it was her doing that caused her brother’s eyes to glaze over and his skin to become even more chalky pale and weirdly translucent. The last time she dribbled a bit of medicine on his lower lip and his tongue snaked out to lap it up, but the tongue was not human - it was dark blue and forked and unnaturally quick. His eyes were sealed, covered by thick white tissue that she was loathe to touch.
On the final day, she spent most of her time shaking or pacing, trying hard not to think about what was going to happen. She focused on whatever chores she was given, doing them with more enthusiasm than either of her parents had ever seen. When asked what was wrong, she would tell them nothing and shoot them a false, too-sweet smile that they were happy to assume meant all was right in her world.
She gave Matthew his last dose and kissed his dry, too-warm forehead.
She dribbled some of her blood and his into a thimble.
She dug up some leftover meat from the fridge and lumped it onto a plate.
She took a deep breath and went up the stairs.
And the dragon was out of the closet, coiled in all its impossibly large majesty on her parents’ bed. Its tail coiled languidly on the floor, with the rest of its bulk precariously perched on the bed proper. Mathilda nearly dropped the plate at the sight, the thimble almost following suit; but the iron grip she had on both in her nervousness was enough to keep it all in hand.
Place them on the floor, my dear.
She did so, compelled by the maelstrom of ominous intent in its eyes. The girl shuffled back, watching as it ate the food - plate and all - and then consumed the thimble. It settled back, chuckled to itself with a rich, brassy voice.
You said you would give anything.
She nodded.
Then I shall take everything.
She heard a horrible sound from her brother’s room, a sound like breaking glass and tearing skin, all with the terrible smell of burning flesh and hair. Smoke wafted up the stairs, her brother’s agonized cries turning metallic and raw while his torment continued.
Mathilda tried to turn and run, but she was caught in a living nightmare and in nightmares, no one runs except the monster. The dragon snapped out a talon, catching her by the shoulder and spinning her around to face it.
He will live. He has been changed, but he will live … as shall you.
Its other taloned hand reached under the scales of its throat and withdrew a blood red pearl, one which it rather unceremoniously forced past her lips and down her throat. She gagged and choked and swallowed it down as the only other option of choking to death seemed highly unreasonable.
The dragon poured past her, a fluid thing of light and darkness and everything in between. She followed, only to be shoved into her brother’s room with his smoldering shell of a body. The door was slammed shut and held shut by the bulk of the beast. Outside, the screams of her parents could be heard … at least until they were silenced by a pair of wet, meaty crunches.
The dragon fed while the husk of the boy burned.
Mathilda screamed until she couldn’t feel her throat any more, until she couldn’t hear any more, until her body became too rigid to move and her eyes refused to work. This must have been what it was like for him, she wondered and then felt her thoughts fade.
The next thing she knew, her body was on fire and she was howling, making a sound that no human throat should ever make. Standing over her was a darkling shape, tearing at the burning shell and flinging pieces of the girl aside. The room was ablaze, the beast over her was frightening and too close, but somehow … somehow familiar.
Brother? She thought-asked, unable to make her throat and mouth work the way she wanted them to.
Yes. You’ll be okay. Just stay still, okay? I don’t want to hurt you.
The house burned around them as they made their way out of the room. Of the Golden One, there was no sign, but a dim flutter in the back of Mathilda’s mind told her that it wasn’t too far away. He. That He wasn’t far away. And for all that she’d hated Him, she suddenly felt a need to be near Him again. To thank Him.
It took far less time than she thought for her to acquaint herself with her new body. The largest trouble was coordinating her wings and tail; her brother, however, seemed perfectly at home in his new body and lead the way outside with a confidence she never imagined he had.
He was darkness incarnate, his eyes a blaze of gold against the darkness. She dared to look at herself and saw pallid opal, white glossed with a rainbow shimmer. They passed by a mirror in the hall and she caught a glimpse of blue-silver eyes. The fate of their parents was a fleeting curiosity that they knew the answer to, but wanted to see the aftermath of.
There was no time to linger, however. Something else was pushing them, goading them to escape and it wasn’t the pleasant heat of the house blazing around them. He beckoned; He called and they could not refuse Him.
They burst out of the front door and took wing, vaulting skyward and soaring toward their new sun.
Perceptions.
Vampires
"What. The. Fuck."
The words were more statement than bald-faced question, the speaker unable to procure the mental wherewithal to string the words together and make them into a proper question.
Horror tends to do that to a person.
It also tends to do quite the number on a person’s intestinal fortitude as well and Marcus was never possessed of an iron stomach in the first place. His rather expensive dinner came right back up the way it came and it was only due to convenience that it was deposited on a brick wall nearby and not on the bloodied heap in front of him. His date had already fled screaming into the night, but he scarcely noticed that. Nor did he notice the fact that that screaming ceased abruptly and violently just a block down. It was categorized to his poor mind as ‘unimportant’, just as the girl had been categorized as ‘eye candy’.
No, he was a tad too busy trying not to look at what was probably a person at some point, but was reduced only to a pile of steaming, throbbing innards. Much as he wanted to look - it was, after all, the greatest train-wreck of a horror show he’d ever been witness to - his stomach resolutely held the strings that kept his head pointed at the wall.
The sound of his ragged breathing was too loud, the smell of his food still tantalizing despite being soured. His senses were tuned and humming, working at the capacity they were designed to. But his senses were simply never attuned to seeking out something beyond his usual perception … and that was his downfall.
The figures were not clad in black, nor did they wear ridiculous makeup or anything of that nature. They looked, for all the world, like any aristocrat he would willingly dine with. Fine clothing, superior grace and overall style combined with an air of nobility that might have put him in awe if he weren’t debating on whether he might have a bit more in his gut to decorate the wall with.
Of course, there’s also the fact that their finery was drenched in blood, but that trifling detail escaped his peripheral notice.
He didn’t know how many there were; at times there were three, at others, a few more would emerge from the shadows, only to slip back into them. Five? Six? He wasn’t sure. It was dizzying and strange and summarily chalked up to the quantity of wine that must surely still be coursing through his veins.
Perhaps this is all a nightmare, his naïve mind decided and the thought relieved him.
He then relieved the pressure in his bladder after turning and getting a solid look at one of these queerly placed nobles.
Something was very wrong with their faces, something he couldn’t place as any one thing. Their mouths were too big, their eyes too bright, their nails too long, their skin too luminous to be natural.
Everything about them was subtly skewed, their very auras distorted in a way that warped the air around them. His breath caught in his chest, his eyes slid, unbidden, to one of the females, and he recognized his date’s dress.
On her.
He only recognized it because the cut of the dress was so unusual and likely very expensive. Only belatedly did he realize that the woman’s hair was cut the same way … but her hair colour, her eyes, her skin, it was all very wrong. She pointed at him and smiled a horrible, beautiful, unholy smile.
He wanted to say ‘what the fuck’ again. He truly did. He wanted to from the bottom of his wealthy, though hopelessly ruined, heart. But his tongue was a leaden weight that was super-glued to the roof of his mouth and his stomach lurched again with a far more violent intent than before. It was a visceral pain, something so deep that he could scarcely fathom it. His ribs were cracking from the force of it, his very insides rioting in an attempt to escape.
Marcus collapsed to his hands and knees and proceeded to vomit up flesh and blood - his flesh and blood - in copious quantities. Some part of his mind realized what was happening, but even that revelation wasn’t quite accurate.
He had thought they wanted his clothes and had no need for the rest of him.
But what they wanted was more.
It shouldn’t have been humanly possible for him to vomit up his intestines, but it happened somehow. His worldly perceptions began to change radically in those last moments, when whole organs were slithering from his mouth to join the heap on the ground. His jaw ached, but that was all the pain he could feel now; with each heave of his body, he felt more and more empty, more and more dead on the inside. There was very little left to give, but he gave it all in an obscene sacrifice to these things that smelled like centuries past and emanated the power of archaic gods.
He felt nothing, not even as the last of his parts were deposited on the ground and all that remained was a literal husk of skin and bones. One of the males took an appraising look at him and smiled - it was unearthly, that smile, all glinting teeth and a glimpse of an impossibly long, black tongue - and then he advanced.
Though the body was dead, the soul remained intact - Marcus briefly wondered how that could be, as he was never a spiritual or a religious man, but all he could do was accept it now - and as the man-thing knelt over him, placing his mouth close to Marcus’ own, the latter truly began to understand.
His thoughts, his memories, all of it faded away. Every last part of what made him him was extricated neatly and cleanly, useful bits and information filed away among centuries of other persons, his skills and talents distilled and stored where they could be used. Most of him was discarded … but not before it spent what felt like an eternity mocking his memories or raping his thoughts with disdain. In a matter of minutes, the violation was complete.
When all that remained in the natural world was Marcus’ mortal shell and the broken tatters of his mind, the taller figure straightened.
In the end, it was no more complicated than changing clothes
The figure stepped out of his old skin … and into a new one. He straightened the lapels of his jacket, offered an arm to his ‘date’, and all of them left as one to enjoy what remained of the night.
In the meantime, I'm waiting for a response from pr_au100, which I finally forced myself to join because I realized Bright Skies already works under that challenge and I haven't done one before. I said I'd do thirty for sure, and then ended up planning out the whole one hundred anyway. x.x My roommate said she'll never see me again.
Anywho, here is the illustrious work of my 'nee-chan (Japanese for 'older sister'), who coincidentally, also drew the original picure my Akume icon comes from. (I'm her biggest fan, I swear.) Please give her lots of love and feedback at aetherialdrake@gmail.com. And possibly help con her into a LiveJournal account to post more of this, so I can pester her further. -Evil grin-
Warning: these are not for the squeamish.
It was an ill-fated camping trip from the start.
None of them were entirely sure who came up with the ever-so-brilliant plan of going camping in the mountains in the middle of winter, but they had gone along with it all the same. It was done on a lark, spur-of-the-moment style, and no sooner had they arrived at the ice- and snow-choked campsite than they realized the error of their frivolous ways.
They numbered five, an auspicious number by all accounts; three males, two females, and just enough common sense among the lot of them to bring warm clothes, food, and plenty of booze. The fact that they’d chosen a site with cabins was merely a point in their favor by fickle fate. A single cabin was all they’d need - it was spacious and sufficiently furnished for their purposes. It was appointed with simple, efficient elegance and that was all any of them could have ever asked for.
Avery glumly observed the full moon through an ice-rimed window that cast a dreamlike haze over the world outside. He muttered of werewolves and vampires and all things that go bump in the night, giving an unwanted voice to the thoughts that occupied all their minds. Darla told him he was full of shit and needed to stop being a superstitious lout. The others laughed, of course, but that laughter turned nervous after the low howl of a wolf arose in the distance. Laughter gave way to silence as they started settling in for a long, cold night ahead of them.
Only a night, they decided; they would only stay there one night, then they’d go back to civilization and pretend this thing never happened. Ennis tried to call a hotel he’d seen a few miles back, but his cell-phone mockingly refused to work. Blame was squarely placed on the ornery bit of technology and it was shoved into the bottom of a bag as penance. Dale poured himself a stiff drink and tried futilely to get the heater to work.
Despite its efficient appearance, the cabin as a whole was the very model of inefficiency as far as its wiring went. The electric heater refused to cooperate, forcing them to consider the wood stove as a viable alternative. By a draw of straws, it was decided that Avery would be the one to venture outside in search of wood. He did not accept his fate willingly or eagerly; he complained bitterly the whole time he bundled himself up and trudged out the door.
He was not surprised by the lack of wood on the ground near the cabin … or even a few paces away; his inner cynic told him he’d have to go to the nastiest part of the ominously dark forest that loomed behind the campground to find what he needed. While his common sense dictated that going into the dark woods alone was a bad idea, his need to prove himself - however infantile that need was - was enough to send his feet unrelentingly in that direction.
He grumped, he growled, he bemoaned his poor fortune … all while fate was staring him down, unbeknownst to him.
A patch of darkness pulled away from the forest, a shaggy monstrosity that was less wolf and more some kind of nightmare monster. He didn’t get a good look at it, nor at the others that peeled themselves out of their element to circle him. Some part of the primordial predator in him was in awe of their speed and primal efficiency; the rest of him was really wishing he could scream or do more than just lie on the ground in a bloody mess.
They numbered five, an inauspicious number by all accounts; three male, two female, and their hunger was tangibly insatiable.
One of the smaller ones - and compared to that first, they were all small - had laid claim to Avery’s throat and was happily crunching on it as he towered over the young man. Spatters of his own blood dripped on Avery’s face and he could do little more than cringe in horror and try to turn away.
An approving grunt was given by the largest and the one settled into dining properly on his meal. Avery felt only a brief pang of self-righteousness at his previous worry, accompanied by a distinct thought of ‘it serves you bastards right, fucking doubting thomases’ directed to the oblivious quartet just a few yards away, before he felt neither pain nor cold. There was only a queer sense of emptiness … and then nothing at all.
***
"Where is that fucking pansy?" Dale wondered aloud, his mood soured considerably by each successive drink. He was three drinks in and Janice knew he would be totally insufferable by his fifth. If they were lucky, consciousness would be lost by the sixth, but she’d learned long ago not to believe in luck.
Ennis glanced out the window but his breath fogged it too much to be useful. "I don’t know. I do know I’m not going out there. Fuck that."
"Fucking pansy." Dale downed the rest of his drink and stood with only a hint of unsteadiness. "Fine. I’ll fucking go. Like hell if I’m gonna freeze to death because the lot of you are fucking lazy douchebags."
The girls stayed silent. Ennis bit his lower lip.
Dale left.
He was greeted by Avery, naked and covered in blood. To his booze besotted mind, he didn’t notice anything immediately amiss - aside from the lack of clothing, at any rate - and commented only on the obvious. His tone was irritated rather than curious, his gestures equally annoyed as he motioned at the other young man.
"What the hell happened to your clothes?"
Avery cocked his head to a side, the gesture curiously dog-like. His tongue lolled out.
"What? Don’t speak English all of a sudden, you retard? Why the hell are you naked?"
Avery just smiled. Four dark shapes emerged from the silver-touched folds of night’s cloak, two to either side of their oblivious victim, and it was the largest of them that claimed Dale. The alpha descended ruthlessly, excising Dale’s throat first, and then working methodically from there. Eyes. Tongue. Heart. Fingers. And as he set about consuming the last part, the other three continued inside, their howling laughter growing more maddening.
Outside, the wind screamed and tried to hide the deeds to come by drawing down a blanket of white atop the cloak of darkness. Its efforts were in vain. Inside the house, the girls screamed in unison as the wolf-femmes launched themselves at them. Darla was strewn all over the cabin, her intestines flung about festively like grotesque garland.
Janice was kept confined to the bathroom, although her last moments were spent halfway in the tub and halfway out, one eye briefly catching a glimpse of the naked, bloodied figures of Dale and Avery in the doorway, watching the slaughter with happily shit-eating grins on their gore-streaked faces. Dimly, she wondered why Avery had dark hair when he was blonde, why his eyes were silver and not brown, and then her thoughts turned to her demise and the revelation that she was beyond feeling anything.
Ennis fumbled with the bag, screaming apologies to his cell-phone and swearing he would never bury it again in a bag if it would just work this one time. He no sooner got it out than it was slapped from his hand by the last wolf, his silver eyes glittering with unspeakable malice. His hunger went deeper than mere flesh and bone, Ennis realized; the beast wanted his soul. Unable to resist, the human gave it all up in a single, shuddering sigh. He and this monster would be as one until the rite came around again.
The rest of the night was spent with the human-formed creatures going about the task of cleaning, erasing any sign of their presence from the cabin. And even if there were a few hints, the cabin’s owner would be sure to remove the rest; he was reliable, if nothing else.
Dawn sent peaches-and-cream fingers into the sky and all that remained were the wolves in their victims’ shed skins. After no small amount of joint-cracking and stretching to get accustomed to their temporary human bodies, ‘Dale’ led the group back into the unnatural darkness of the woods.
Another year.
Another rite.
And, as they say, life goes on.
The girl and the dragon
Christmas in the Paxton household was never a jolly affair. Their family was small, consisting only of Lenora and her husband Daniel and the twins, Mathilda and Matthew. His family lived too far away to visit and she refused to speak with hers since high school. While one might think that would mean that they have a lot of money to spend on their children, that one wouldn’t know the first thing about the family as a whole.
Lenora had never held a job, not since graduating from an art college; she spent the bulk of her time painting and trying to sell clothing designs to upscale clothing manufacturers. She failed miserably on both counts - much like she should have failed out of college, but didn’t by virtue of having wealthy parents. Being a wife and mother wasn’t something she’d ever wanted or planned, but they happened all the same and she was resentful for it.
Daniel was a teacher, which paid enough to cover the house bills. His son’s medical bills, however, drove him to dip a toe in illegal smuggling. He often used their brick townhouse as a meeting point and storage for those goods while they were in transit. His wife was too sparse in the mental sense to understand what was going on and his son spent too much time wavering between consciousness and unconsciousness to terribly care. Daniel had always wanted a family, but not like this; not ever like this. And, so, he was resentful for it.
Mathilda, on the other hand, was quite savvy for a young girl and knew her father was up to something shifty. She also understood it was for the good of the family, which is why she didn’t say anything. Being the savvy lass that she was, however, she knew her parents were resentful - either of each other or of their son’s illness and she was resentful toward both of them for it.
Matthew was too frail and drugged up to be resentful of anything but of whatever uncaring god made him so brutally, inexplicably ill.
Christmas, then, was typically a horrid ordeal for all of them. They put on false, tooth-rottingly saccharine faces of glee at gifts that they never wanted, but were the only ones they could afford. That’s assuming they could afford gifts at all that year. Dinner was usually leftover Chinese or cold pizza from two days previous; not terribly different from Thanksgiving, really, except that booze was more likely to be involved later on.
After the forced get-together dispersed, Mathilda went to medicate her brother, Daniel went to grade papers in the kitchen, and Lenora went to paint in her make-shift studio - a room that, by all rights, should have been Mathilda’s room, but which Lenora’s sense of entitlement had claimed as her own.
When Matty finished giving her brother his medicine, she kissed his too-cold forehead and murmured a soft and bitter "Merry Christmas" to him before heading upstairs to her parents’ room. That’s where all her books were kept, since Lenora had claimed the only other available room, and that’s also where she often sought solace since her parents were so rarely in the room at all.
She knew her father often kept strange things in the closet, but her curiosity was generally quashed by a propriety that she surely got from her father. This time, however, something seemed to beckon her, to summon her with honeyed whispers. She couldn’t make out the words, but words weren’t really necessary in the end. It was merely the feeling of being needed by something in there that compelled her to stand and reach for the handle.
The handle was cool, cooler than usual, and she pressed it down with nary a sound. The door swung soundlessly open and all she saw, at first, were clothes hanging up (her father’s) or heaps just flung about at the bottom (her mother’s) and a few brown paper-wrapped packages.
One in particular drew her eye, one that was nearly as tall as she - not that she was a terribly tall girl - and that seemed to be moving just a bit. The paper rustled and she reached over to gently touch it. Something moved under it. Something was alive under it. And that something felt curiously hard, not soft like a puppy or kitten.
Much as she wanted to cry out, Matty bit her tongue and touched it again. This time, she was met with a metallic hum of pleasure. She offered a tentative smile and then started to gently remove the paper, occasionally glancing out of the closet to make sure that no one was coming up the stairs. Of course, that was unnecessary; the stairs squeaked, no matter how many times Daniel tried to repair them, and it would be plenty loud to alert her to any interlopers.
She almost didn’t want to look at what was underneath, but she had to. She had no choice but to look. And what she saw took her breath away.
It was a dragon.
A real dragon, just like in her storybooks.
And it was beautiful.
Butter-colored talons were the first thing she saw, deceptively cruel and sharp. Its scales were a rich blend of goldenrod and mustard, with a slight metallic sheen. The colors darkened to charred bronze along its underbelly and created a most unusual mask on its delicately pointed muzzle. Its belly scales were like those of a snake, but the rest were smooth and round and probably quite sharp. Its wings were improbable constructions of goldenrod spars and diaphanous veils of gold that were as sheets of refined sunlight. A ridge of spikes ran from the back of its head to the tip of its wickedly hooked tail, a tail that was coiled around its forelegs in a quaint, catlike posture. The color was nearly translucent, reducing it to a vision of glass and fantasy.
Its eyes were the most fascinating part, however. Those were clear and blue-grey, the shade of a winter’s sky without threat of storm or snow. Its pupils were quicksilver and catlike, narrowing to slits, then widening a bit as it studied her.
She dared to touch the spike-studded jaw, and winced when she inevitably cut her hand upon it. The creature reacted by tilting its sleek wedge of a head and extending its black tongue to lap at the wound. It stung at first, but the pain receded into a warm tingle that had Matty looking at her hand as soon as the dragon was finished with its ministrations.
The wound might as well have not been there in the first place.
Her eyes widened.
It simply smiled (or seemed to, at any rate), its serpentine tongue slithering back into its pointed maw. His color seemed a bit more tangible, but some part of her mind figured it must merely have been a shifting of the light.
"Can you help my brother?" Mathilda breathed.
It answered with a yawn that sounded like tinkling golden bells.
She looked at it expectantly, but when it made no further response, her expression soured. She reached for the paper and prepared to wrap it up when a curious tingling grabbed the base of her spine and shot straight up to the back of her head.
I can help, if you ask the right question.
"What is the right question?"
If I told you, then you’d just be a parrot. It cocked its head to a side to study her with its inscrutable gaze. You don’t look like a parrot to me. Are you?
She shook her head. The voice lapsed into silence, which suited her just fine; it was uncomfortable and strange to have that presence in her mind. She was already getting a bit of a headache from it, in fact.
It waited and she began to puzzle over the question she should ask. Matty finally blurted out, "Will you help him? If you can, then I want to know if you will do it or if you won’t do it at all. Because if you won’t, I’ll just wrap you up again."
A quaint threat. But you have to wonder if I could have escaped on my own or if I was biding my time for this moment. I am not quite as frail as I appear.
She glared at it and it heaved a thin, tremulous sigh.
I can help. I will help. But there is something I need from you, first.
"Okay."
What would you give up to help him?
And she, being a child, had no concept of the things that grown-ups think about when given such a question. Her thoughts were not entirely focused on material things like money or toys or any such nonsense, but she also had her wits about her enough not to offer up anything important. Not so flippantly to a beast she scarcely knew. She did not spend long in her thoughts before her savvy side popped out with a single question that made more sense than the beast’s.
"What do you want?"
That isn’t the question.
"You want me to pay something for your help. If you don’t know what you want, then I don’t know if I can pay it."
A terrible shame. It clucked like an admonishing mother hen. Well, then, you might as well wrap me up, then.
"That’s not very fair."
Life is not fair. This thing you call a ‘life’ here is far from fair. But it is what it is. Fairness is an illusion, an illusion that I do not cater to; I am here only to bring the reality of life to the surface. So, I ask one more time, what would you give up to help your brother? Its narrow muzzle pulled into one of those queer smiles again. If it helps, just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. That, I find, is the most honest answer.
Mathilda choked on the suggestion, her mouth gaping, closing, and gaping again before snapping audibly shut.
Nothing, then? I see. Then wrap me up. Our business is done here.
"No."
No?
"I’d give anything to help him."
Would you? It sounded too eager, its mental voice latching on fiercely with a hunger that horrified her.
"I …" Her thoughts stalled a moment, confused.
Your intent is pure, even if your answer is misguided, it remarked idly, glancing at her, then craning its head around to preen a bit. Regardless. Under my other wing is a parcel, a paper-wrapped package and a vial. The package contains a powder that must go into every meal. Just one pinch should do. The vial contains a clear liquid that must be given with every dose of his medicine. He will complain that it is bitter, it may make him sick, but he must take it every time. Is that understood?
She nodded numbly, her mind working double-time to commit it all to memory.
Every day that you do that, you will bring food up here to me. I will also need blood from you and him if this is to work.
More nodding.
In a week, he will be cured and I will extract payment.
"What will you take?"
But it did not answer and she shuddered. She took the parcel, wrapped the dragon up, and ghosted down the stairs to her room to examine the things.
The vial was small, the packet equally so, and both were odorless. She dared not taste them, but she truly had no other recourse but to trust it.
Or did she?
Desperation dictated that she did not and, so, it went. For a week, she did as prescribed; doctoring her brother’s food and medicine, feeding the dragon its regular meals and a smaller supper of blood. Her brother was too incoherent to care that she was bleeding him little by little; her parents were too busy arguing or ignoring each other to care that their daughter was sneaking about more than usual.
After every meal, the dragon seemed stronger and more richly colored; after every dose of medicine, her brother grew more pale and rigid. He found it harder and harder to move … and, when he did move, his skin would crack and break in ways that she had never seen before. The first time it did that, she stormed up to the room and flung open the closet door … only to be met by a beast that was easily twice as large as it was mere days before.
It was a blazing sun of gold and light, its eyes grown dark and darker still, like pools of midnight shot through with quicksilver lightning.
"What have you done?!" she hissed angrily.
Precisely what I said I would. You must trust in me, child.
"Why should I? You’re just killing him!"
Am I? Is he still coughing? Is he still wracked with terrible spasms?
"N- no."
Then he is getting better.
"But his skin- ! He’s breaking, like a china doll!"
There are always side-effects. I’m saddened to think you are surprised by this.
"But you didn’t tell me …"
Nor did you ask. He has two more days left and all will be well. It lowered its head, its darkling eyes catching hers and holding them fast. Trust me.
And she fled, horrified by the visions she saw in those flatly gleaming eyes.
She went through the motions with an empty heart, fearing the repercussions of not doing it more than what might happen when it was all done. Mathilda cried herself to sleep before that last day, knowing that it was her doing that caused her brother’s eyes to glaze over and his skin to become even more chalky pale and weirdly translucent. The last time she dribbled a bit of medicine on his lower lip and his tongue snaked out to lap it up, but the tongue was not human - it was dark blue and forked and unnaturally quick. His eyes were sealed, covered by thick white tissue that she was loathe to touch.
On the final day, she spent most of her time shaking or pacing, trying hard not to think about what was going to happen. She focused on whatever chores she was given, doing them with more enthusiasm than either of her parents had ever seen. When asked what was wrong, she would tell them nothing and shoot them a false, too-sweet smile that they were happy to assume meant all was right in her world.
She gave Matthew his last dose and kissed his dry, too-warm forehead.
She dribbled some of her blood and his into a thimble.
She dug up some leftover meat from the fridge and lumped it onto a plate.
She took a deep breath and went up the stairs.
And the dragon was out of the closet, coiled in all its impossibly large majesty on her parents’ bed. Its tail coiled languidly on the floor, with the rest of its bulk precariously perched on the bed proper. Mathilda nearly dropped the plate at the sight, the thimble almost following suit; but the iron grip she had on both in her nervousness was enough to keep it all in hand.
Place them on the floor, my dear.
She did so, compelled by the maelstrom of ominous intent in its eyes. The girl shuffled back, watching as it ate the food - plate and all - and then consumed the thimble. It settled back, chuckled to itself with a rich, brassy voice.
You said you would give anything.
She nodded.
Then I shall take everything.
She heard a horrible sound from her brother’s room, a sound like breaking glass and tearing skin, all with the terrible smell of burning flesh and hair. Smoke wafted up the stairs, her brother’s agonized cries turning metallic and raw while his torment continued.
Mathilda tried to turn and run, but she was caught in a living nightmare and in nightmares, no one runs except the monster. The dragon snapped out a talon, catching her by the shoulder and spinning her around to face it.
He will live. He has been changed, but he will live … as shall you.
Its other taloned hand reached under the scales of its throat and withdrew a blood red pearl, one which it rather unceremoniously forced past her lips and down her throat. She gagged and choked and swallowed it down as the only other option of choking to death seemed highly unreasonable.
The dragon poured past her, a fluid thing of light and darkness and everything in between. She followed, only to be shoved into her brother’s room with his smoldering shell of a body. The door was slammed shut and held shut by the bulk of the beast. Outside, the screams of her parents could be heard … at least until they were silenced by a pair of wet, meaty crunches.
The dragon fed while the husk of the boy burned.
Mathilda screamed until she couldn’t feel her throat any more, until she couldn’t hear any more, until her body became too rigid to move and her eyes refused to work. This must have been what it was like for him, she wondered and then felt her thoughts fade.
The next thing she knew, her body was on fire and she was howling, making a sound that no human throat should ever make. Standing over her was a darkling shape, tearing at the burning shell and flinging pieces of the girl aside. The room was ablaze, the beast over her was frightening and too close, but somehow … somehow familiar.
Brother? She thought-asked, unable to make her throat and mouth work the way she wanted them to.
Yes. You’ll be okay. Just stay still, okay? I don’t want to hurt you.
The house burned around them as they made their way out of the room. Of the Golden One, there was no sign, but a dim flutter in the back of Mathilda’s mind told her that it wasn’t too far away. He. That He wasn’t far away. And for all that she’d hated Him, she suddenly felt a need to be near Him again. To thank Him.
It took far less time than she thought for her to acquaint herself with her new body. The largest trouble was coordinating her wings and tail; her brother, however, seemed perfectly at home in his new body and lead the way outside with a confidence she never imagined he had.
He was darkness incarnate, his eyes a blaze of gold against the darkness. She dared to look at herself and saw pallid opal, white glossed with a rainbow shimmer. They passed by a mirror in the hall and she caught a glimpse of blue-silver eyes. The fate of their parents was a fleeting curiosity that they knew the answer to, but wanted to see the aftermath of.
There was no time to linger, however. Something else was pushing them, goading them to escape and it wasn’t the pleasant heat of the house blazing around them. He beckoned; He called and they could not refuse Him.
They burst out of the front door and took wing, vaulting skyward and soaring toward their new sun.
Perceptions.
Vampires
"What. The. Fuck."
The words were more statement than bald-faced question, the speaker unable to procure the mental wherewithal to string the words together and make them into a proper question.
Horror tends to do that to a person.
It also tends to do quite the number on a person’s intestinal fortitude as well and Marcus was never possessed of an iron stomach in the first place. His rather expensive dinner came right back up the way it came and it was only due to convenience that it was deposited on a brick wall nearby and not on the bloodied heap in front of him. His date had already fled screaming into the night, but he scarcely noticed that. Nor did he notice the fact that that screaming ceased abruptly and violently just a block down. It was categorized to his poor mind as ‘unimportant’, just as the girl had been categorized as ‘eye candy’.
No, he was a tad too busy trying not to look at what was probably a person at some point, but was reduced only to a pile of steaming, throbbing innards. Much as he wanted to look - it was, after all, the greatest train-wreck of a horror show he’d ever been witness to - his stomach resolutely held the strings that kept his head pointed at the wall.
The sound of his ragged breathing was too loud, the smell of his food still tantalizing despite being soured. His senses were tuned and humming, working at the capacity they were designed to. But his senses were simply never attuned to seeking out something beyond his usual perception … and that was his downfall.
The figures were not clad in black, nor did they wear ridiculous makeup or anything of that nature. They looked, for all the world, like any aristocrat he would willingly dine with. Fine clothing, superior grace and overall style combined with an air of nobility that might have put him in awe if he weren’t debating on whether he might have a bit more in his gut to decorate the wall with.
Of course, there’s also the fact that their finery was drenched in blood, but that trifling detail escaped his peripheral notice.
He didn’t know how many there were; at times there were three, at others, a few more would emerge from the shadows, only to slip back into them. Five? Six? He wasn’t sure. It was dizzying and strange and summarily chalked up to the quantity of wine that must surely still be coursing through his veins.
Perhaps this is all a nightmare, his naïve mind decided and the thought relieved him.
He then relieved the pressure in his bladder after turning and getting a solid look at one of these queerly placed nobles.
Something was very wrong with their faces, something he couldn’t place as any one thing. Their mouths were too big, their eyes too bright, their nails too long, their skin too luminous to be natural.
Everything about them was subtly skewed, their very auras distorted in a way that warped the air around them. His breath caught in his chest, his eyes slid, unbidden, to one of the females, and he recognized his date’s dress.
On her.
He only recognized it because the cut of the dress was so unusual and likely very expensive. Only belatedly did he realize that the woman’s hair was cut the same way … but her hair colour, her eyes, her skin, it was all very wrong. She pointed at him and smiled a horrible, beautiful, unholy smile.
He wanted to say ‘what the fuck’ again. He truly did. He wanted to from the bottom of his wealthy, though hopelessly ruined, heart. But his tongue was a leaden weight that was super-glued to the roof of his mouth and his stomach lurched again with a far more violent intent than before. It was a visceral pain, something so deep that he could scarcely fathom it. His ribs were cracking from the force of it, his very insides rioting in an attempt to escape.
Marcus collapsed to his hands and knees and proceeded to vomit up flesh and blood - his flesh and blood - in copious quantities. Some part of his mind realized what was happening, but even that revelation wasn’t quite accurate.
He had thought they wanted his clothes and had no need for the rest of him.
But what they wanted was more.
It shouldn’t have been humanly possible for him to vomit up his intestines, but it happened somehow. His worldly perceptions began to change radically in those last moments, when whole organs were slithering from his mouth to join the heap on the ground. His jaw ached, but that was all the pain he could feel now; with each heave of his body, he felt more and more empty, more and more dead on the inside. There was very little left to give, but he gave it all in an obscene sacrifice to these things that smelled like centuries past and emanated the power of archaic gods.
He felt nothing, not even as the last of his parts were deposited on the ground and all that remained was a literal husk of skin and bones. One of the males took an appraising look at him and smiled - it was unearthly, that smile, all glinting teeth and a glimpse of an impossibly long, black tongue - and then he advanced.
Though the body was dead, the soul remained intact - Marcus briefly wondered how that could be, as he was never a spiritual or a religious man, but all he could do was accept it now - and as the man-thing knelt over him, placing his mouth close to Marcus’ own, the latter truly began to understand.
His thoughts, his memories, all of it faded away. Every last part of what made him him was extricated neatly and cleanly, useful bits and information filed away among centuries of other persons, his skills and talents distilled and stored where they could be used. Most of him was discarded … but not before it spent what felt like an eternity mocking his memories or raping his thoughts with disdain. In a matter of minutes, the violation was complete.
When all that remained in the natural world was Marcus’ mortal shell and the broken tatters of his mind, the taller figure straightened.
In the end, it was no more complicated than changing clothes
The figure stepped out of his old skin … and into a new one. He straightened the lapels of his jacket, offered an arm to his ‘date’, and all of them left as one to enjoy what remained of the night.