More Than Imagined

Chapter 12

The wind was of the wolves. It gnashed and gnarled down the night-lit alley-quick on the heels of an unsuspecting young woman. She braced herself against frost-bitten walls; her legs flimsy from going so many days starved. She pulled her jacket tighter around her frame.

It had been snowing for days. They willed it so. Coaxed their machines to shake out fluffy, wet flakes from artificial clouds. Pretty to see, brutal to feel.

She trudged through fresh slush, desperate to make her way back to the smell of pine and dung. The smell of home—of warmth—awaiting her in her family's barn. She may not have been granted the extra rations she set out to claim, but at least she could return with the promise of some forthcoming. The envelope clenched in her hand made sure of that.

She turned a corner. And another. Stumbled down a fracturing sidewalk, the moon eclipsed by grey-faced clouds.

She took into the alley, the one that glowed at the end with the light of home. She could almost feel it melting away the chill of her journey. Could almost see the big, beady eyes of her horse-Calcifer-greeting her at the barn door. Almost.

A clang echoed off the narrow walls of the alley, ripping her out of her thoughts. She snapped her head toward the sound, frantic.

"W-who's there?" she stuttered, lips shivering. But there was nothing to be seen but ever-piling mounds of white against the dark of night.

Must be the wind. She fixed her feet to speed up, just in case, but when she turned around, she found herself face-to-face with a man. The height of his stance and shadow of his features weren't like any she had ever seen. But that wasn't so out of the ordinary. There was many a person under this dome with her-too many to have seen them all.

Besides, he looked as if he was from around here, if the hungering hollow of his cheeks was anything to go by. He was without proper clothing for the weather, and she thought he must be cold, though he didn't give even a slight shiver.

"You scared me," she said, and when the man didn't respond, she wondered if her words were swallowed up in the harsh gust of wind.

"What are you doing out in this weather with no jacket? You must be freezing. I was just on my way back to my barn, it's warm there. It's just up ahead," she said, this time with a hint of a smile.

"I am not cold, only hungry," the man assured, his voice hoarse-famished.

"Oh, it seems we share a horribly similar fate."

"Not quite."

"No? You've just received more rations then?" She asked.

"Not quite."

"Not quite?... I don't understand what you mean." A shiver ran down her spine, not from the chill of the night but from the ever-growing uncertainty the man inspired.

He seemed odd-off. Foreign even, as if he didn't know what rations were. As if...

A gasp escaped her lips at the thought, and she tried to side-step the man-pushing the envelope up the thin of her sleeve. Fear bubbled in her stomach when he mimicked the movement, blocking her off from her destination.

"I just remembered that I have to clean out the barn when I get back, so it wouldn't be right to bring anyone over." She tried to move past him again, to no avail. "You're blocking the way. It's cold, and I have no food to give you. Maybe you can try getting extra rations from the collections office. It's just a few streets back."

"I don't need rations, only food," the man reaffirmed, his eyes turning a deep black. They reminded her of Calcifer-beady and alert.

"I told you, I don't have any food. I need to go. Could you please-" she tried, using what little strength she had in her feeble body to push him from her path. He didn't budge, and when she turned to run, he grabbed her arm with a strength unlike any she had ever known.

"You don't have food. I know." He paused, watching her with a face twisted around something she could only discern as pure need.

He lifted her into the air, her body illuminated by the moonlight that had finally snuck from behind the snow-stuffed clouds. She writhed and kicked in his grasp, like a fly in the deadly stick of a spider's web.

"You are food."

The words sunk in her mind like dead weight, crushing all manner of rational thought as she thrashed as hard as her body would allow. He gripped her other arm, splaying her in the night, nails sharpening into her flesh.

In a flash of green light, he retracted his claws from her arms, pulling with them her entire essence. Her genetic makeup. Her DNA itself.

Like a coil of cold noodles, he slurped the strands-small and numerous. He unraveled her in the dead of night, gorging on her entire being until she fell to the ground in flakes of dust. She became like snow, and he became full.

He exited the alley. Her clothes-crumpled over the square of the envelope-laid flush against the white of the ground; the only sign that she had ever been there with him.

He passed the barn, the place she had been kind enough to invite him. To shelter him. The light from the lantern hanging on the front glowed on, and as he stepped into the portal opening in the ground, a longing neigh followed him through.