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Writer's pictureJ. Joseph

The Hunt

The air is stiff. That’s never a good sign. The air only gets stiff when troubles around. I haven’t let go in a while. Trouble might be too much for me to handle. I pause to feel the air. I don’t sense anything, not yet anyways. Good. Perhaps I will be able to go another night without a hunt. I have finals to study for and an essay to write. No time for a hunt. The silent voice, the prodding urge, it’s always there. I never manage to sate it’s appetite. But, I have learned methods to push it back, keep it down. I unlock my building’s door and enter my sanctuary. The air conditioning unit in our dorm building has been slightly broken since before I moved in here last semester. Part of the reason I chose this one. The air always feels stale running across me. According to the guys down at Physical Plant, the filter has some kind of part missing that’s been on back-order for a decade. What matters is it helps quiet things. Disconnects me from Nature. Helps keep me able to contain myself. I walk up stairs to the fifth floor. On the other end of the hall, I see my RA. Don’t want to talk. Talk means confrontation. Confrontation means stress. Stress is problematic. I turn into the common room and sit down. The chair is comfortable. The room is almost empty. Weston, our team’s backup center. Studying for something. Sarah. Nice every time we talk, always reads a book in the quad during my English class. It’s a requirement. I pay little attention. But I have line of sight to the quad and several buildings across the campus whenever I zone out. And Raf. Grade A D-bag. Listening to music. Doesn’t notice me yet. Good. Avoiding confrontation. I close my eyes, and lean back. Counting the seconds in my head. The RA was five doors down from his room, walking at a leisurely pace. Thirty seconds should be sufficient. Unless someone stopped him to talk. I pull out my notepad. It’s small. My writing smaller still. I have the entire outline for my essay on it. I start to write down ideas for how to use the sources I found for our last project. My head whips around as a strange wind distracts me from my work. Breathing in, then out, I walk out to the hallway. My RA is not there. Good. I walk down the hall, past his door, to my room. My roommate is at his girlfriend’s apartment. I have my room to myself. Unlocking my door and entering the small room, I can’t help but smile slightly. Time to get to work. The strange wind returns. I can feel it. I can hear it. It calls. No. I have to study. I can’t afford to hunt. I sit down at my desk, and open up my computer. The screen starts to halo with more colors than visible light can provide. No. Not now. I can feel myself getting lighter. I open up my window. Safe to have open. It’s the fifth floor. And it seems I will be hunting. It is the least pleasant feeling in the world. Becoming something else, something inhuman. The pain as my body twisted its very shape to the will of nature, a will no one, not me, not my forebear, not one truly understands. The prickling of every hair on my body suddenly receding into my skin. The discomfort of my arms being pulled out of alignment and my hands being compressed into a single digit. The numbness of my face, as my nose pulls back inside my face and my mouth protrudes out to a point, hardening. I climb outside onto the windowsill, my newly congealed talons gripping the frame. I’m thankful for the darkness. I broke the lamps outside my dorm at the beginning of the year for this eventuality. Windows are difficult to deal with for the last part. Being seen mid-transformation is worse. Flowing out from my hairless, misshapen body, dark feathers cover me. Letting go and with a mighty thrust, I am in the air, flying once again. There is no feeling in the world quite like flying. Not truly. People might say some things, like skydiving or hang gliding come close, but those are people who’ve never flown. The few of us who have, just our bare bodies buffeted by wind, far above the ground, we understand. It is so freeing, the feeling that with the slightest twitch of my muscles, I can go anywhere. The strange wind that nature called me out with is to the south. I turn to look towards it. A small group of people. Walking down the street. Not likely. Rooftop. Something odd about it. It looks fine. But the wind originates there. As I soar higher, keeping a careful eye on it, I see movement. It’s mystically shielded, but they haven’t accounted for the UV spectrum. New magicians here, then. Ignorant of my being here. Who I am. What I am. Three vague figures. Two looking towards the third. Young. Third one must be in charge. Take him out first, the others should flee or be helpless. Pointing towards him, I pull back my wings and with one single push, I dive down. Fast. A diving bird of prey is one of the fastest things in all nature. And we are made superior to our natural counterparts. I’m unsure whether they even could physically see it coming. Approaching at extreme speed, I stick forth my massive talons and grip tightly the leader. Working my wings hard, I rise back up into the air, high above the other two. The mystical shielding goes down with the leader’s and his followers’ surprise at the attack. The fire they were working on blazes for all to see, if any were to care. No one does. I soar higher. The man is struggling. Futile. No one can win a fight against nature. He begs. They always beg. He claims he’s different. He claims I should free him. He thinks it is my choice. He thinks I am in control. Magicians are a foolish lot. Spreading his flesh with my talons, I rend it with my beak, getting at the lovely, mystic energy filled liver. Many of my kind love this, savor the kill, savor the feast. I, once transformed, do not mind the hunt, sometimes even enjoy it. But the feast is a necessity, not a joy. Once the liver is consumed in its entirety, the mystic energies no longer flow through the body. I simply discard the body, tossing it aside. From this height, that fall would utterly wreck the body. Make it more difficult to track me. I look back down at the rooftop. The blaze has fallen. They are focused o n the sky. Looking for me. They would not find me. Their eyes are insufficient. They are not gifted. I decide to go for the one on the left. She is nearer. Once again, I turn my body downwards towards the roof, this time towards her figure. With a mighty push and held tightly back wings, I swoop down onto my now suspecting prey. She doesn’t see it coming. Her friend does, but is untrained. Unprepared. Screams, rather than fights. Falls back as I open my wings and grab the woman in my talons. With a caw, I flap again, and rise into the skies. My newest meal gripped as tight as my last. Rather than struggle against the inevitable, she moves directly to begging. Not with her differentness, or righteousness. She offers up a sacrifice. She offers up her own ability to practice, in favor of her life. She claims she never wanted it. She claims she has been looking for a way to get rid of it. She knows not what she says. For while the cleansing of the mystical is the purview of my kind, the separation of it from the body by mystical means creates an area of emptiness forever. An area in which no magic can happen, and no Hungered may venture. It is known. It is one of the many things my forbear taught me. Once again, my talons stretch the skin and separate the cages, and once again my beak tears into the flesh, straight to the liver. I suppose, in a sense, I granted her wish. In her dying moments, as I cast her dying body aside, she was free of her mystic energies. Her fall was entirely mundane. I turn back to an empty rooftop. The last of my night’s prey has fled inside. Smarter than he seems. Good is my first thought. Immediately followed by no, not good. I need to finish this. I need to work. I need to write my essay. I need to study for my final. I need sleep before my test. This kid running is not helping any of those. No matter how much a hunt might relax me. I listen for the humming of his energies. It is loud. He’s still in the building. Third floor. He’s setting a trap. Smart. Landing on the rooftop, I hobble my way through the door to the stairwell. Walking is hard. Irritating. Not supposed to. Not built for it. But sometimes, it is necessary. Hopping down the stairs, one landing at a time, I make it to the third floor. Gripping to the stairwell above, I stretch out my massive wing and open the door, letting it swing open on it’s one. As expected, the kid bursts through with a powerful gust of wind, and then sets the gust alight. I don’t expect the second phase of the attack. The heat is great, and even though the flames miss me, the heat does not. My feathers get singed. My target, visible and before me. I let go, slamming my body into his. I care not for the efficacy of the kill. He hurt me. He is dangerous. I need him neutralized fast. Pecking and tearing at his chest, I rend into it and he falls unconscious. He never even gets the chance to beg. Slurping down what remains of his liver, I grip his spine from inside with one talon and start hopping up the stairs. I don’t want anything spilling. Making it back up the stairs, I push through the roof access door and pound the air down, forcing myself and the corpse up and away from the building. Once high enough, I let go of the body, and it falls down and away. My hunt is finished for the night. It is time to resume my studies. I fly back to above campus, and start a dive towards my dorm room’s window. I wait until I’ve darted through the window, faster than an eye could easily spot without looking, before I open my wings and stop my dive. My feathers knock over books on top of my roommate’s dresser. They also mess with the poster over my bed. Dropping to the ground, I begin the irritating and uncomfortable process of becoming human again. My finger separates into proper hands. My feathers fold themselves across my skin, before getting pulled into it. My beak pushes itself back into my face, smoothing and softening. Hairs bristle out from every inch of my body, some growing faster and further than others. In no time, I am back to my normal human self. Nude in my dorm room, I quickly grab the underwear, which fell off of my stick-like legs when I transformed, and pull it on. It’s important to be at least somewhat presentable, just in case. I sigh to myself as I put my roommate’s books back onto his dresser, then settle into my desk chair. I feel no pull. I never feel a pull after a hunt. That means it is time to do my work. My actual work. Opening my essay outline on my laptop, I get to typing.

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