[Author’s note: I use this journal almost entirely for full stories. This one’s different – it’s a vignette from something I wrote sometime back. I thought put it up for you to chew on.]
The fangy-clawy-furrish of guy sipped his drink and watched New York cook. It had been burning for several days now, and somebody was bound to notice soon. He leaned back a little further and drank again. When things like this happen, you find out who your real friends are, and his real friend was gin. Gin was the kind of buddy who didn’t leave you just because you happened to be a homicidal predator from beyond the reaches of primordial memory. He’d come to appreciate that, lately.
He looked at his hands. My, Grandmother, what long nails you have. You’re in serious need of a good manicure. Or a cursebreaker. He stared disgustedly at his body, peering at it through yellow, leonine eyes. Yesterday, they had been blue.
…no, not yesterday. Several days now, perhaps two weeks. Two weeks, hah! Two centuries, for all it bloody mattered. He was losing track of time…or, really, time was coming back to him, all at once, and he was having trouble figuring out which bits of it he was supposed to be dealing with right now. This wasn’t fair. He’d been perfectly fine being a human being, or at least as fine as being human ever gets. It suited him. Something scratchy in the back of his pineal gland seemed to recall that he’d been human for centuries—many humans, actually, one after another, living and dying, claptrapping through time and galumphing through days. He hadn’t been…this. Not for quite a while. You were supposed to be bitten for this to happen. That’s what all the good modern mythologies said. It wasn’t supposed to be part of some long-forgotten deal with something that wasn’t even a Goddess anymore.
You sing one song too many to the big pretty thing in the night sky, you make one promise late at night, soon after your tribe discovers the effects of fermentation on the juice of long-gathered fruit, and you end up with a skin that suddenly shifts at some indeterminate point in the Apocalypse? That’s idiotic; there has to be some kind of statute of limitations on forced reincarnation.
He hadn’t even been able to take this shape in this lifetime, or the last several. He hadn’t even known he could, much less that it would, one day, become entirely non-optional. All of his bodies had been 100% genuine long-pork homo sapiens for millennia. But Magic doesn’t forget, doesn’t even bother to care. He swirled the remains of his peace from the glass, draining it without feeling. No, Magic doesn’t give a rat’s ass, it’s just down with the sun and up with the White Lady and your teeth curl and your muscles swell and the animal’s fur sticks out of your body and every bar of soap you ever bought becomes thoroughly worthless and is it any wonder a werewolf howls at the moon?
(Lycanthropy: It puts hair on your chest.) He laughed, throwing his head back, and then he felt something nearby and turned around, slow-like, hand clenching reflexively on the glass, incidentally shattering it in his palm. He felt a touch that was no touch—and immediately dropped the bits of crystal to the grass and looked away. His past lives were fuzzy at best (he was fuzzy, at best), but more than one shaman of more than one of more than one of his tribes had gone off into the night to keep these things from their communal fire. He remembered that much. They hadn’t generally come back. He remembered that part, too.
What passed him then had no name in any remembered human tongue, no body in any particularly physical sense…but strange, nameless parts of him could feel its presence nonetheless as it broadcast a dissatisfaction, an anger, an inbred abhorrence of all things, a hatred as senseless and elemental as the last thought of an infant in convulsions. It had a soul powered by lunar energy and a mortal loathing of, well, mortals. It was drawn as he was, but though different reasons, to the weenie-roast of the City, and then, like him, brought to this hill because the Moon was wrong.
That mortal loathing, he realized, as its presence wrapped around his flesh, very much included him…
…and it touched at the animal core of his brand-new heart and was instantly gone.
Not destroyed, gone. He could still feel it, but it was moving away from him…slithering along ley lines like voltage through entwined bodies And his senses showed him now a single thing, branded across the being’s core: fear. He scowled.
He would have given three or four right arms (someone else’s, of course, but it’s the thought that counts) for another drink. Not long ago, not too long at all, something like that…he wouldn’t have credited its existence, less realized it was there…had you told him, as he died, that a continent of frost was suddenly growing on his still-warm heart, he would have wondered why his last moments had to be in the presence of a lunatic.(Although he would never know this, in point of fact all of his
previous incarnations had indeed died in the presence of one or more persons of the reality-misaligned variety. It was in the contract. Sort of a karmic foreshadowing. But I digress.) Oh, yes, things were a little different before. But today was not yesterday.
Today was not yesterday. This was no good; that was Wolf thinking – direct, practical, simple, true, and frustrating to the pulsating, thought-spitting human parts of his mind. He growled, something he was quite good at these days. Lord, he needed another drink. His first wanted to play bridge and needed somebody to be West. He scratched his shoulder absently, an action which would have torn a twelve-inch furrow in any normal flesh, and sighed. He’d waited long enough. He knew what the ley-line hunter had been sent for, and he doubted the thing would make it. It was the last of several he’d detected—no two of them alike in form, but he recognized kin when he saw it, and he figured that, if this was the best that could be done, they were in trouble. Besides, he could feel the call himself. He’d been procrastinating, resisting it, but he knew damn well he had to go sometime, and it might as well be now. He squinted at the ruins of the George Washington Bridge and trudged off towards the roasting, crumbling, thriving city, singing softly about frustrations, the selling of souls, and bloodstained hands. He was pretty sure Mick Jagger would have understood.
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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
I put on a convention for Villains every February.
I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!
