“I’m so sorry, Miss Bryce,” Inquisitor Ereldin Sung spoke over my growl, punctuating his feigned compassion with a sigh. “Please return to your cell. No one else needs to get hurt tonight.”

Return to my cell? No one else hurt?

Hah!

Nine out of maybe a couple hundred Inquisitors in all of Thysa lay dead in this dungeon. How naive did he think I was? If they captured me again it would not simply end with me back in a cell. He knew that. I could taste it in the fear and regret he tried to hide behind a nonchalant demeanor. I could feel it from the nervous pulse of the blood in his veins, so deliciously exposed on his naked skin.

The convenient line of his exposed neck.

All those tender nibbling spots so carelessly presented.

The heat of his body.

That wondrous fragrance!

I scrunched up my nose in an attempt to dampen his intoxicating fragrance, and exhaled carefully to get my raging hunger under control. I had to keep moving, doing, thinking or I’d succumb entirely to these feral cravings.

This doorway of Tonaltus blocking my path was a trap of his making. All those torches I’d run past, lighting the way, they must have been dropped there by him. Even how he had positioned himself between me and the way my dad had fled, forced me to react. He had led me here, and I had fallen for his ruse like the blood-starved idiot I was.

Irina and Piers in on this?

Behind me, the three humans finally caught up. “Sarding hell Valentina.” Irina huffed, coming to a stop next to me. Wariness filled her flavor. “Oh hell… Sung.”

Stop calling me that!

“Think we can get past him?” Piers asked, arriving way ahead of the third person. “He’s unarmed?”

“I don’t think I fancy our chances,” Irina replied. “If Sung looks like he’s easy to take on, it’s going to be a trap.” For the first time since meeting her, I caught an actual whiff of uncertainty from her.

Wait. Third person?

“Tonaltus field,” I snarled as I dashed back the way we had come. The third one was not with Irina and Piers, but was Sung’s Young-chicken-in-early-spring flavored associate. That mousy snack of his was attempting to use the arrival of Irina and Piers to mask her scent and sneak up on me.

The moment the short Spring-chicken snack trailing behind Irina and Piers saw me dash at her, she lunged for the wall. Slow. Humanly slow. I was so much faster. I was going to make it. I would rip her to pieces. I—

Another Tonaltus field snapped in place right in front of me, far too close for me to be able to avoid it.

I flung an arm at the wall. My right arm, still frail and tender. The talons at my feet I dug into the ground. I held on, claws digging deep into the cracks between stones, even as my momentum kept carrying me forward.

The jolt as I pulled myself to a stop traveled up and down my arm. Something frayed, then tore in my shoulder, muscle and tendon being pulled apart in rending agony. I felt it happen, powerless to stop the tearing of my flesh, yet praying that it would hold a little longer.

Relief from the rending pull of my momentum came in the worst possible way. The stone I was clinging to jolted forward. My talons on one foot lost their grip on the floor.

“Aaaa—”

My face slammed against the wall, cutting off my panicked scream. My cheek scraped over rough stone, mangling the side of my face into a pulp. Inches from the hum of Tonaltus I came to a stop.

From the other side of the containment field came the gasping breath of the female that had trapped me here. “Holy hells. Holy, holy hells. It worked. It worked sir! Your plan worked!”

I scraped my face off of the wall and poked at the bleeding mess that was my cheek with the only hand I could still feel. My scraped-raw flesh should have hurt. It should have been so debilitatingly painful, yet just like all my earlier injuries, the pain of grit and grime embedded in my flesh was but a disturbingly distant ache compared to the immediacy of my situation.

I lifted my hand — now bloody with my own gore — and reached out towards the Tonaltus field, testing its edges. The blood on my claws sizzled. Powerful. Instant death. If I hadn’t been able to stop, if I had skidded just a foot further, then my passage through the field would have spattered this entire corridor with viscera.

Utterly failing to hide my frustration I snarled at the little mouse-haired Spring-chicken. These were my two tormentors. These were the people who had dumped Arrin into my hole, who had tossed a living, screaming child 20 feet into a pit without the slightest hint of remorse. These were the Inquisitors that had tortured my dad. And now they had trapped me again. I would hunt them down. They would bleed. They would feed me and they would die and I would make it so sarding painful for them.

Under my glower, the Spring-chicken meal stepped back and away from me. Once she was at a safer distance she shook her head in disbelief as she muttered under her breath. “Holy hells. That totally shouldn’t have worked. She really ran after her dad?”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Do you always talk to yourself?” I goaded her, still struggling to clamp down on my fury.

My remark made her go infuriatingly quiet. She had been talking to herself, and I should have let her continue in the hope she revealed something more. But in my anger, I had made her aware and shut her up in the process. With a great effort of will I forced the burning hatred I felt down. These all too human emotions were only making me react recklessly and foolishly, and at a time when my hunger was already leeching away what little rational thought I still had left.

A quick prodding of my shoulder gave me the futile confirmation that my flesh was no longer knitting together. The limb was useless and I was so close to starved that I’d instinctively pulled the Metzus puppeting it back in.

I fought that instinct now, pushing my Metzus back out and into it, forcing the torn-apart limb back to something closer to a functioning arm. Struggling against the lightness hollowing me out and the hunger devouring me, I turned to my two pet snacks. “Locked me in. Tonaltus field on both sides.”

Hungry!

Just keep talking. Can’t eat what I’m interacting with.

At least Irina and Piers were still here with me. If they were working with Creeping-vines and Spring-chicken then they would have stepped through those Tonaltus fields, out of this makeshift cage, and into safety. There really were multiple Inquisition factions then. Not that this meant I trusted my two saviors. Helpful as they were, they clearly had their own agenda.

“Hmmm,” Elderberry-poison Irina scrunched up her nose and glanced from one end of the corridor to the other, observing the trap.

It caused the Creeping-vines predator to focus on the two Inquisitors with me. “Irina? Piers? And here I was wondering what happened to the other guards.” He scratched his nose in a terribly fake attempt at acting casual. “Of course, it’s you two siding with Retivius, isn’t it? I suppose I should be surprised or disappointed that the rot has seeped all the way here, but lately I can’t seem to bring up the energy anymore.”

Pacing the three strides towards the other wall in the narrow corridor, he then turned to look at me. “I know you’re a reasonable and intelligent person, Miss Bryce. I do hope you’re properly considering the… implications of this little prison break. You’re going to get out, and then what?”

Reasonable?

“Weren’t you supposed to be a little more discreet in front of her?” My honey-blood snack pointed out.

Reasonable!

“A little late for that, Irina dear.” A dark frown of annoyance spread out across Creeping-brown prey Sung’s face. “I doubt you’ll be lodging a complaint about me to the commander any time soon.”

He dares….

“A reasonable person?” I stormed towards the Creeping-vines. “You tossed a kid into a gods-damned murder hole. Alive. Conscious! You don’t get to tell me anything about being reasonable!”

He roared at me in sudden rage. “That wasn’t—”

“Did you even know the boy’s name!” I snarled right over him. “Would you like me to tell you? Would you like to know how many broken bones and internal injuries he suffered from that fall? Do you want me to tell you how long he begged and pleaded!”

I stepped up, seething, burning with hatred. I stood right in front of the Tonaltus field boxing me in, panting in fury even as my nose and the edges of my hair sizzled and burned from the closeness of the deadly trap.

Finally, with the worst of my fury spent, I looked up at him and whimpered pleadingly. “Did you harm the people in Birnstead?”

“Oh divines, oh by the divines, you were right,” The Spring-chicken babbled from the other side of my new cage.

Only then, based on that comment of hers, did I realize that I had slipped into oh-so-human fury again. And they were studying that part of me. When he’d sprung that Tonaltus field, Sung’s eyes had roved over me. He’d tracked every little twitch I made, every shift in posture, every change in expression on my face. He’d followed my gaze as I tried to not look at where best to sample him. He’d frowned when I’d exhaled. Even his Spring-chicken assistant became excited every time I lashed out.

Unthinking, I had fallen back on my human mimicry. Despite all of my misgivings, despite seeing the flaws of my past actions, the second I had gotten out of that pit I had still defaulted to breathing in their presence. For all my taunting them with their fear of me, despite my every murderous glare, every hint of a fang, all the inhuman intensity I showed, I had still tried to project gentleness.

I had colored my voice with humanity and compassion. I had even mimicked all the little gestures that could make even my dead vessel look alive. I had spent so long, an entire life before my capture, pretending to be human that I had slipped back into the act naturally. Naturally as... as breathing, something that when I wasn’t paying attention, I did by default.

In front of the Creeping-vines predator and his assistant, that was a liability. They were reading me, studying me, marveling over my pretend-humanity as if I was some kind of circus act. I always feared that dropping my human mask and surrendering to my nature might turn into something irrevocable. When I did, nothing I cared about seemed important anymore. But these two were exploiting my weaknesses. I had no choice.

I breathed in deeply, closed my eyes, and exhaled.

Together with my exhalation, I flushed it all out. Breathing. Heartbeat. Sympathy. Anger. I scrubbed all emotion from my voice. I dropped all pretense of humanity from my posture. I stripped myself of every last layer of human veneer I had spent decades building up. At first it was hard, every part of the act I dropped like something precious torn asunder. But then it became easier, the suffocating shackles of human expectations dropping away.

The trembling inhalation of the silly Little-vines rat whistled through the air. His sobbing exhalation brought the first whiff of fresh terror. Then his fear spread like a plague, first infecting the Mouse, then the Remorseful runt, and finally even spreading ever so slightly to my Honey-sweet pet.

They might not have quite realized what exactly had changed about me just yet, their minds slow to articulate the difference, but their hind-brains already knew. Centuries of civilization had turned mankind into an apex predator that dominated everywhere. But when faced with something like me? Prey. They were but prey.

Once, having such primal terror directed at me would have horrified me. That cute little demon hunter Vale, scarred by years of being considered a monster, she wouldn’t have known what to do with it.

Now, looking back on my past actions, none of them made sense any longer. That blubbering mess I’d been before, that useless creature that hoped it could be human? Hah! Yes, she’d had her reasons for acting that way. I knew them so well because they were my own. But at the same time… utterly incomprehensible. How could I have ever thought that irrational, emotional reactions and behaviors were a solid foundation to build a life on? The only thing being kind, being human, had gotten me was a spot in this dungeon.

This would end. Now.

I opened my eyes, and finally saw the world in perfect predatory clarity.