InsaneJournal

For weeks, the creature had survived on scraps. It ached with hunger until its joints were sore and the skin stretched like sun-dried hide over its jutting ribs. It felt small and weak and hungry. The Wild Hunt could not have come at a better time. When the sun downed on the 3rd, the fleshy pink thing he was forced to be in the daylight hardly fought the change.

The monster gorged itself. First there was a wiry Russian teenager in skinny jeans with studded boots it ate whole, slowing only to hack up metal studs covered in bile and viscera. Crack the bones, lick the marrow, relish the screaming. It had chased the manchild across the cirque grounds, though it could have overpowered the fleshy thing in mere feet. The boy needed time to soak, to stew in his fear, to scream a little while. Then it cracked the pinkboy's skull between its jaws like popping a grape. It was a clean, quick death. Fear had marinated the meat to perfection. Adrenaline, cortisol and glucose. Struggle and soft and sweet meat, sweet like the sounds the dying made. The last breath that left the body was so like a lover's, thought the half-present man-brain in the Wendigo's head.

Flashes of a woman's neck, long and slender and lovely. It arched and sighed when he'd dragged kisses across her pulse, felt the blood surge warm beneath the skin. He'd nipped at her shapely collarbone, sketched the line of it with his tongue. Then another. Too hard this time. Too red, too hot. He wanted to bite. The alarm clock from her bedside table crashed into the side of his head, but she was alarmed, not the clock.

So the creature chose a woman for its second meal, a lovely young thing who shrieked like a banshee. Shrill and sorrowful and savory, a sound to thrill the soulless. It started at her neck, and took its time. Meat was tender there, with slim muscle marbled with just enough fat. Pale blonde hair strung through his teeth like floss stained scarlet, tangled with sinew. The dark woman on the comm who wrote in such pretty rhymes and riddles was right. This was so much better than behaving himself, more free, more right. More more more. So much better than his fleshy self trying to be a gentleman. Gentleman. It hated gentle. There was nothing gentle about the way it left the remains of the second victim, but much that screamed of hate.

There was a third, then a fourth and a fifth. Its soiled chestnut fur was caked thick with gore by dawn. Or, by the hour that should have brought dawn.

Darkness persisted. Having eaten its weight in meat, the Wendigo had grown from its average 9 feet tall to nearly 13. This was its curse. The more it ate, the larger it grew to accommodate its endless hunger. On the three nights bracketing a full moon the change was mandatory. Only in the light was the creature a man again until the moon had passed.

There was no light.

Vaughn's mind returned when it was meant to. His body did not. He had a moment of disoriented panic before he understood what was happening. Magic shit. It was always fucking magical shit. Why couldn't they leave well enough alone? The creature hulked, huffing an angry breath through it's nostrils. He lifted an arm sticky with innards to wipe a clawed hand across his face. A chunk of scalp was stuck between his talons, platinum hair floating from it like streamers in the breeze. The man-that-was-Wendigo made a disgusted snort, shook his claw to loosen the flesh, then sank back on his haunches with a groan. His annoyance frosted the ground around him, drawing icy fractals in pools of split blood.

He was well and truly stuck. This was going to be a long three days.