Bewere the Night

by on the way home from work, sometimes sitting outside for a while. I felt stupid, jealous. But I couldn’t stop myself. Then one morning, about a week ago, I watched this Paul guy walk out of her apartment with her, intimate hands brushing her face as he left. The shock was quickly overtaken with anger, burning rage. I couldn’t believe the fury I was feeling. I wanted to rip them apart. It scared me. I didn’t know how far I would go. So I drove away. I chickened out. And now I can’t stop imagining what I could have done. Should have done.

I stare at Kelly and feel a rising anger and hatred. She smiles over at me but I turn away and descend past the vomit and beer-stained couches and stand at the balcony looking out over the huge gothic expanse with its sudden three-story drop to the Pit, crisscrossed and bisected by lasers and spotlights like prison-camp searchlights that pierce the hanging smoke. The dancers are a sea of sweaty, jerking bodies, a blind mass of conformity. I feel like jumping, smashing into them from above, shocking them out of their trances. Destroying their oblivion.

It would be so easy.

But I had the chance to run. And I couldn’t.

Something distracts me. A frenzy of movement in the far-right corner couch, a couple in oblivious ecstasy, the girl with goth-black hair and raised skirt, her face slackened as she straddles a greasy guy, some mafioso scumbag. As I approach I see the slimy length of his penis jamming up inside her with every raise of her fleshy white cheeks.

I should tell them to zip up, walk them outside.

I wonder if Paul’s cock looks like that.

I grab the girl’s shoulder and roughly pull her off him, baring her seeping cunt. She tries to break away and stumbles backwards, hitting the brick wall. I let her fall and she lies spread-eagled, blood trickling down her face. I stare at its darkness. Everything shuts down.

Then I’m grabbing her by the throat, leaning in. She smells like metal, copper. Life.

Something on the edge of vision: the guy fumbling for something in his jacket. I swivel as he lunges at me and something wet slices my face, like a spray of cum, like he has opened my face with his cock. I touch the blood on my cheek and the guy stares at me in shock, as if surprised he has cut me, virgin knife held before him like a talisman. I tense and spring and he instinctively arcs the knife back to defend himself. But he is too slow. I grab his wrist then slam the heel of my other hand into the crook of his elbow. His arm jackknifes into his skull and he falls back onto the couch. There’s a moment of silence before the girl slumped at my feet wakes up and starts screaming. The guy sits completely still, arms hanging by his side; dripping, alien cock pointing up from his open zipper. The knife is buried to the hilt in his right eye. The socket leaks blood and a clear viscous fluid.

I stare at him, shaking my head in disbelief, in horror.

A figure by my side. Lucs, taking my arm. My muscles burn at his touch and I try to pull away but his grip is iron. Behind him, Raph and Gabe close the area, moving in on the witnesses, silencing the girl. One of the patrons tries to run and Gabe chases him up the stairs, slamming him into the ground.

“You are ready now,” Lucs says.

He leads me with his steel grip past the upstairs bar and downstairs. Patrons jump out of the way when they see the blood dripping down my face, staring after us dumbfounded. We head for the stage doors. The club sinks away as the doors close behind. Down the barely-lit corridor and towards the back door.

The outside air is cool on my face. But I don’t get a chance to savor it because there’s movement in the darkness of the alley. Figures emerging from an alcove: Mikhaels holding a blond-haired girl by the throat, one hand over her mouth. She is dressed in blue silk pyjamas and shivers in the night air.

I look at her face.

Oh God. It’s Lisa. She stares at me with terror-filled eyes.

I try to pull away, to run for the street beyond, but Lucs’ fingers dig into me like claws. “You know what to do,” he says, something wrong with his voice. “Become one of us. Finish the Change.” I turn and his eyes have become black holes in his face, dilating with darkness. His teeth fill his mouth.

I thrash against him in horror, feeling his fingers sink into my skin like needles of fire, but I have to get away from him, have to escape what he’s—

And then the other figures appear: hunched shadows in the darkness of the alley. Gabe, Raph, Danteis, Peteris, all grinning. Waiting.

I can’t look at Lisa, forcing my eyes away from her, searching for a gap in their numbers, some way to escape this. Lucs senses my resistance still in the face of the inevitable. His voice like gravel in my ear: “Then if you will not kill her, if you can still resist … ”

Peteris reaches back into the alcove, drinking in my despair, and pulls out a struggling man dressed only in tracksuit pants—dragged out of bed also; thin but muscular, like a skinned rabbit, impossibly-defined abs a downward-V.

So this is what she wanted. This is who she chose instead of me.

I feel the hatred hit.

“You are a god now,” Lucs says. “Take what is yours.”

My anger surges beyond control. As I stare at Paul the darkness kept deep inside me opens out like spreading wings and a searing pain suddenly runs in rivulets down my arms and across my neck and up my face. Agony floods my throat and I throw my head back to cry out and my jaw dislocates with a wet clicking sound and I can only manage a strangled guttural croak. I feel my nerve-endings fry as my hands and arms and chest ripple and bubble like melting plastic, my back pop and break and fill out impossibly, my fingers lengthen into claws and brow form over and become stretched and lupine and teeth distend my mouth. Then my vision goes black and suddenly all- encompassing as my eyes dilate, the weak moonlight from above sending shards into my brain.

I see the shallows of blood pumping beneath Paul’s skin. Can smell its hot, sweet scent. Can smell my girlfriend beyond.

I look at Lisa in Mikhaels’ arms and inexplicably a part of me senses I have started crying. Burning tears that score my face. I wish I could tell her I’m sorry, that part of me will be forever destroyed by this. That I loved her.

But when I see her weak, pleading eyes, like an animal at the slaughter, the realization eclipses everything.

She deserves this. They all do. They are only prey.

The growl sounds deep in my throat and is joined by the growls of my Brothers. The man before me pisses himself in fear, the acrid stain blossoming across his track pants. Once I have tasted his flesh, once I have drunk my fill of his life I will kill the woman behind him also.

This is the way it should begin for me. Ending the life I once had. Embracing my rightful place in this world.

Her blood takes me.

AND NEITHER HAVE I WINGS TO FLY by Carrie Laben

“I’m sorry,” Faith says. A lie, but the satellite phone connection is too expensive to argue across. “The only safe thing to do is to stay put. We’re well supplied, we’re on the sheltered side of the island.”

Vivian sighs. It’s one with the wind against the porthole. “I wish you hadn’t gone. Dad is worried to death.”

I hope so. “This is my job. If I only went out when there couldn’t possibly be a storm, I wouldn’t go out at all.”

“Yeah, but … ”

“I have to go, Viv. Don’t call again unless it’s a real emergency, okay? I’ll let you know as soon as we get back, promise.”

“Okay.” Faith has the phone halfway back to the cradle when she hears her sister’s voice add, “One more