Timothy Carver shivered in the evening cold and came to the conclusion that it was time to head to the shelter for the night. The idea of a hot dinner and a warm bed took center stage in his mind’s eye, survival imperatives crowding out the daily litany of life’s regrets, anxieties, and even his core personal anger.
Tucking his hands into the pockets of his fatigue jacket, he let his feet turn him toward North Winooski and the vision of food and heat. He was not too excited about the idea of others being present, as he trusted no one and had little use for all other people, even his fellow street inhabitants.
He trudged forward in the early darkness of northern Vermont’s late fall, part of him noting his surroundings, part of him focused deep down inside.
His street-honed awareness alerted him to a slim form that was headed in his direction on the sidewalk, just now bathed in a pool of illumination from an overhead streetlight. Female, student, and young was the assessment his brain provided with just a glance. LL Bean boots, leggings, and a green UVM sweatshirt gave away much of that information, just as the older, reptilian parts of his brain rated her overall health as high, based on muscular, shapely hips and legs, and glossy black hair.
The anger that seemed central to his person rose within him as he studied her approaching figure, and his glance became a fixated leer by the time she drew close enough to make out the details of his face. He pulled his hands from his pockets and clenched both fists.
Now, within several strides of her, would be the moment she became afraid of him, the delicious instant when her privileged, protected place in society would seem too far away to provide her any sense of security.
She looked up, met his eyes, and widened her own. He saw the instant evaluation, the instinctive, genetically programmed assessment, take place. But instead of ducking her head, cringing, or stepping far to the side, she did something shocking. She smiled. Right at him.
It wasn’t a friendly smile, or maybe it was better to say it wasn’t just friendly, but held a deeper, hotter meaning within the gleam in her eyes and the light moistening of her lips with the tip of her little pink tongue.
She was right up on him now, and he froze at the unexpected response. She kept moving, coming right up to him and, without any hesitation, reaching out to touch the back of his bare left hand.
Need. Sudden, instant, overwhelming need flooded his system, making him instantly, painfully erect, driving down every thought but the biological drive to dominate and subdue this female.
His hand lashed out and surrounded her wrist, clamping down with awful strength as he turned without hesitation and dragged her into the shadowed yard of a darkened home. But she made not a single sound, a fact that lightly brushed his reasoning centers and evoked a tiny, tiny note of curiosity.
The overwhelming flood of desire and need crushed all reason as he found just enough shadow, if only barely, to cloak their presence. With both hands, he pulled her to him and looked down into her upturned face. Rather than fear, he saw hunger in her eyes, and her own free hand reached down to latch onto his rampant need. Then she smiled and, despite the thunder of his own heartbeat, he noted that her teeth looked... sharp. Not the fangs of those bloodsuckers that had burst into society, or the mammalian dentition of the shapeshifters that had followed into the light, but rather these were the saw-toothed triangles that filled the jaws of sharks—big sharks.
Before he could more than register this wrongness, he felt needle-sharp pain in his privates, as if pierced by talons. His ears heard a tearing sound that was simultaneously the shredding of cloth and the wet rip of flesh.
Pain on a scale he was previously unaware of hit his groin, even as she raised a hand grown huge and scaled, drenched in red, clutching bits of blue material and pale skin, and he felt a hot gushing between his legs.
Now it was his turn to scream, but when he opened his mouth and raised his chin, she blurred forward and he felt razors clamp down on his throat, cutting off all sound before he could make it.
The cold, wet ground came up to slam into his back as heat poured from two places in his body, the dim light silhouetting her bald head and heavy shoulders before fading away to complete blackness and the cold of oblivion.
His feet thrummed the ground reflexively as she fed, a flood of hot liquid pooling out into the leaves and dirt around them. The fast, staccato pulse of sound slowed and ceased, replaced with a sodden slurping and the periodic crunch of hard bone.