Just a man

I wish sometimes that it was like the movies. I hit the wall and stop and feel the back of my head smash into solid, screeching pain. Both my eyes tear up and I can’t hear. It’s my sense of smell that tells me he’s close before he’s on top of me. Rank, sour, wet fur smell. I let my knees quiver out from under me and slide down the wall just enough, and splinters arc in the moon’s light.

I keep falling forward. Now it’s controlled, desperate. I kick off as I drop and slide right between his legs, black fur, soaked from waiting outside for me. I didn’t have anything prepared for this. Naked except for a poorly fitting pair of jeans with blown out knees, the wind and rain stinging my face from the ruined window. He snarls as I kick the back of his knee a lot harder than I should be able to.

A clawed hand tries to disembowel me. My body does the work of getting me out of the way and up to my feet while I can feel blood running down my neck from where I hit. My eyes still won’t clear. Everything is dark, the light from the moon between clouds. There’s no time to do anything fancy. He, or she, hard to tell, drives in that black muzzle and tries to bite my throat out.

I grab it by the neck and lift it squirming off of the floor. Even with my bell rung, I can tell it didn’t expect that.

“I once broke the neck of the Lone-created Bull. I culled the verdant one, and sent back those that death refused.” I’m croaking, which completely ruins the effect. Irritation makes my fingers dig in deeper, flesh squeezed between them, black coarse hairs like spines. “You tell her that I’m insulted. A werewolf? One werewolf? I killed the Wild Hunt and defied Attertag to his face and she sends one werewolf?”

I turn and throw him out the wreck of my window. It’s three floors down, so he won’t really be hurt by the fall, unless he lands on something silver. Does silver actually work? I’m not sure. If I knew where my Lewis Spence was I could look it up. I touch the back of my head and pull my hand away sticky. The back of my head feels like tenderized meat.

Every year I hate this holiday a little more.

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Black Metal 2

Running in darkness, even darkness lit by moonlight, can easily end in a loss of balance. Running in darkness on a mountain can easily end in a loss of life. Yet she hurled herself onward, trusting in her feet to find purchase, following the sound ahead of her and the flickering of an obvious cooking fire glowing like a coal ahead. Her breathing, her heart hammering drowning out much of the sounds around her.

One lunged into her path, barely visible, a blur of moonlit warts and yellow teeth. She dropped her shoulder and rammed herself hard into its chest, bringing the mace haft-first into its gut and letting the impact push her back, bowling the creature over. It bounced in her path. She used the momentum to spin herself around, sliding her hands up to grip the mace and bring it up and then down. The head caved in from the blow and flattened into the stone, bone crushed. The kick she dealt it wasn’t even necessary.

Leaving the bodies in her wake slowed them down. They stopped to eat their own. Despite their fearsome appearance, hideous mottled skin, claws like razors and teeth like a mouthful of broken glass, they were easier to kill than a man for her. Oh, they were stronger, faster, but there was nothing about them that inspired hesitation. Nothing that made her remember that these were someone’s sons or daughters, nothing she felt any sort of sympathy for.

Sympathy for her required some ability to feel kinship, and she refused to feel that. Not for them.