* * * *
The humans are on the run now.
They scatter like leaves in the wind. No direction, no tether, only fear to guide them.
The wolves have taken out most of their numbers and I have done the rest. I swallow the lights as soon as they think to turn them on. The electricity from their machines is tasty too. Like candy on the tip of my tongue. In the world below, the world of the dead, I used to gorge myself on flames. Lightning didn’t taste as sweet, but packed twice the punch. The voltage the humans seemed so proud of was nothing but a light snack in comparison.
Without it to power their little trinkets they cannot communicate with one another. They cannot tell the others that danger comes. Then it’s too late and danger is there. Tearing through flesh and howling of their triumph.
The wolves have always been fun to watch.
So messy and loud.
Like furry children.
The human whose shadow I ride is scrambling through their fortress. Running down stairs rather than risk being caught in the moving coffins they call elevators. I would have left him, stolen his shadow and taken his soul along with it, but the woman tells me to stay. That maybe he will bring us to the one we both seek.
Gabriel.
And he does. Oh joy, oh breathless rapture, he does. It’s all I can do not to whip down the hallway to reach him first. To touch him. To swallow him whole. The woman holds me back again. Together we watch the man walk past rows and rows of cells. Each one holding a Were. It is towards the back, in the last cell, that we see who we’ve come for. Gabriel looks up at the man and there is a smile on his face.
“Trouble in paradise?” he asks and the Specter chuckles. The lights flicker ominously and Gabriel’s eyes dart to them before falling to rest on what he can see of Agent Elijah Walker’s shadow. He frowns, but the Agent is too busy talking to notice.
“I don’t know how you did it, how you brought them here, but call them off.”
Gabriel hesitates, wondering if he should warn Agent Walker of the danger he’s in. Then he remembers what the man did to his wolves. He remembers that he is one member short now, and he settles back. Almost gleeful at the prospect of what the Specter will do to Walker once it tires of playing follow the leader.
“Sorry,” he says with a shrug and a devil may care grin. He is not sorry at all, and they all know it. “There’s really nothing I can do.”
The human is enraged, scared; I can feel it vibrating through his shadow and into my skin. My stomach growls, twisting like a wild, angry thing. The man steps forward, grips the bars with both hands and the threat in his voice is born of a deep, and all consuming hatred.
“Call. Them. Off,” he hisses, and the Specter convulses. So hungry. “Do it now, or I’ll play a little song for your Pack that will have them dropping like flies.”
Gabriel growls, face momentarily contorting into something monstrous and dark. Just as quickly, he is under control again and he sends Agent Walker a sly look from the corner of his eye.
“Something tells me that if you could have, you would have done it already. I don’t think you have the clearance to play with your little toy when your masters aren’t watching.” His eyes grow dark and his smile is a quick baring of oh-so-sharp teeth. “Don’t make threats you can’t follow through on. It just pisses people off.”
“You shit-eating son of a bitch.”
Rage, rage, rage. The human is angry and I am fascinated. Slowly, I begin to separate myself from the man’s shadow. The other Weres in the cells around us press themselves close to watch the scene unfold. Yipping in excitement as I continue to grow behind the human. Stretching higher and higher. I am the tower of Babel and the human nothing more than rubble. Still talking, but unable to hear. To understand.
“The next time the scientists cut you apart, I’m going to be there. Standing over you. I’m going to piss on your insides. Watch you drown in it.”
I’m not the one who loses control. It is the woman, the one who has been rising in my mind ever since I took her body. At the man’s words violence pulses from the woman like a beacon and she is taking control. Shoving me away so that she can rip into the man’s shadow as I’d considered just a few moments earlier. Darkness on darkness. It clings to us with greedy fingers. Even if I had wanted to release the human, I cannot. On the inside, in his human shell, he is just like me.
Damned.
Unforgivable.
Like calls to like, and the woman and I rip the man’s shadow from the mooring of his body. The violence of the action dragging everything that is Elijah Walker out along with it. The woman is horrified, and her concentration slips as she shies away from what she’s done. She doesn’t know what to do with a man’s soul in her hands, with his shadow dripping like ink through her fingertips.
She doesn’t know.
But I do.
My jaws unhinge, and I consume the essence of Elijah Walker in the span of a single heartbeat. His soul screams on the way down, but that’s all right.
He is still tasty.