The water comes over me, and I whisper to it: “Please, unmake me.”

Winter is swallowing everything. The grass is choked in frost; it creeps over forgotten car windows and is turning hot spring water somewhere into wisps of dying steam. The trees were already taken. The flowers were gone long ago. In the modern world, it is easy to forget that winter is a season of death. We live in heated homes built atop the graves of those that were lost to the cold long ago. We happily eat slowly rotting spring fruits that is plucked far away by someone we would rather not think about. The human animal is one that seeks to constantly exceed the force of decay; it is a venture that we are only very rarely prone to success in, although that success has long since aggerated into a mountain of that which may not be considered natural.

A woman is stabbed. Then, very shortly after, she is stabbed again several times. And then she dies. Someone sees her and calls Civic Outreach. It is in the quiet corners of a parking garage at night. This is one of the places in this world where your brain tells you danger may lurk; often, you can spare yourself undue worry by ignoring this impulse. This is what many do, since, often enough, there is no danger. However, you are always only one unlucky night away from eternal oblivion. This is the case for the dead woman, one Diane Riovar. This is also what Seluna tells herself as she drags her fingers through Diane’s cold blood. Seluna knows better; she does not let her brain fall silent in the face of danger. She brings her fingers to her face. A tress of ashen hair falls.

She ignores it; instead, she watches the way the woman’s blood drips down her finger, a little bit onto her hand, and a little bit onto the ground. She brings her tongue across her finger. The metallic taste and odor consumes her senses. Everything becomes a little sharper. She becomes deeply discomforted by how cold it is here. Even through her synthfur coat, even though she is always cold. The air here is stale, dank; mold grows in the spaces between the walls; someone, somewhere distant, screams for help and no one save for Seluna will hear him. But that is not her concern.

“He didn’t want to do it,” Seluna says.

“Hm?” says Mick. Seluna can feel the vibration in the air made by the way Mick tilts his head.

“She reached into her coat pocket – he was scared she was going to draw a weapon on him. He only wanted her money. But he felt guilty. Weak. He did not want to end up on the evening news. He was worried about what his daughter would think of him. She only had pepper spray, of course. But that did not matter; his synapses were already firing. He lunged. Then she died. He stabbed her again and again to make sure it was over,” she says.

“You sound like you’re justifying,” Mick says. He shakes his head.

“No, I am not justifying. I am merely explaining the events as they happened.”

“Sure. Whatever. Poor damn girl. Which way did he go?” he asks. She can feel the spark in him: the human impulse for retributive justice. The human impulse to watch someone get everything beat from them, or even, perhaps, to do the beating for oneself. He pities Diane; he is not wrong to.

“This way,” she says, standing. She shakes the cold away and walks, stepping down the stairs. Her heels make a potent click that ring through the parking structure. The sound seems, in context, to be declarative. It is a warning.

Mick thinks that the way she walks is like a predator stalking prey. He is still scared by it. He is older, gruff, aged, beaten by the world; he had thought he was too jaded to be terrified by a girl in her twenties. But then again, she is not an ordinary girl. In compare, the way he steps seems clumsy and unconsidered. It is declarative in his own way. Perhaps, Seluna thinks, in the way a doe runs through the underbrush when its animal instincts trigger and it is told it must flee. Or perhaps he is the brazen huntsman that beats his rifle against his chest, following after his hunting dog.

She is keenly aware that the blood fugue was affecting the shape of her thoughts. The colors of the world around her are sharpening more, into impressionistic barbs. She almost feels where the murderer is. Sometimes, she feels like bounding after them on all fours when the fugue takes hold. But she remains composed. They pair descend to the ground floor of the garage. She reaches into her pocket and finds a cigarette, lights it, and drags deep and hard. Nicotine helps her keep focus.

Mick lets out an exaggerated cough, although this slight is not answered.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“He is not running. He does not know he is being tracked,” she says.

Mick just nods. He knows that she knows, even if she is not looking.

There are few cars; most people have the sense to be home at this hour. Seluna knows that Diane was coming off her shift. It was late. She was excited to go home. She wanted to make pasta. See her cat. Catch up on some schlocky show on streaming. She was working a late night close at a big-box retail store. She was just barely not a child, really. The fugue tells Seluna all these things.

They see the man. He is not running. He does not even see them. He is slumped against a cold concrete wall. The bloody knife is on the ground. He is not sure what to do with it, trying wildly to cobble together what he has seen people do with murder weapons in film and television into some blunt approximation of reality. His hair falls in messy strands. He knows what he did is more wrong than anything else he has done before, and he does not know what to do with this information. And he rationalizes, I am not making excuses for myself. I’m not that bad of a guy. I’m –

Then he hears Seluna, her heels clicking, echoing into the darkness, through it. He looks up but does not see her. Then his eyes adjust a little, and he sees the ember red of her cigarette. Then he sees green eyes in the darkness – although they are not a normal green. They glow. And he knows what she is.

“Would you like me to catch him?” she asks.

The murderer scrambles to his feet. She knows: his name is Jason.

“Go for it,” Mick says.

Jason tries to grab his knife, although he wraps his hand around the wrong part in his panic. He drops and yelps as blood is spilt. This is one of many mistakes he has made tonight. He runs, leaving it behind. It does not matter; it would not have saved him.

Seluna does not run. The effort is not required; it is her instinct to conserve energy whenever possible. She extinguishes her cigarette on the heel of her shoe and discards it. Mick scoops it up into his hands, grumbling as she walks away. He will find a trashcan later. For now, he shoves it into his pocket.

The fugue progresses, Diane’s blood working its ways towards Seluna’s heart. Seluna knows not only where Jason has gone, but where he will go. If he escapes, he will go home to his daughter and wake her up. He will be scared and fall asleep with her in his arms as they watch television. Instinctually, he knows he is doomed. The sensation that he is very close to the moment where he dies plunges through him. If he managed to make it home, she would be waiting for him. Although he will not.

Jason makes it out of the garage. He looks back and does not see her. He feels safe for a moment and thinks he has escaped. But he does not see the slick patch of ice beneath his feet; he hits it, skids, and his legs fall out from under him. He is caught unaware. His head bounces on the concrete, and the back of his skull caves into his brain and he dies very quickly, cracked like a yolk. In the end, Seluna had no part in his death beyond driving him towards it.

Mick finds her crouched over the corpse. She has another cigarette. He looks over and find the body intact. She still has a hold of some vestige of humanity; for another day, she proves herself to be only a monster in part.

“It was an accident,” Seluna says, “he slipped.”

“That the plan?” Mick asks.

“No. It was an accident.”

“If you say so.”

“Humans are very fragile. I find it hard to believe you can ever feel safe like this.”

“Me too, I guess,” Mick says.

Seluna cups the back of Jason’s head. Moonlight is reflected by his eyes. She does feel very cold. There is still a part of him that remains, but it soon leaves.

“Go call it in,” Mick says, “I’ll handle him.”

“Okay,” Seluna says. He thinks she sounds almost hurt.

People from the Institute came and took the bodies; soon, families would be notified and lives would quietly shatter. Seluna hydrates to help flush her system of the girl’s blood. She leans against the walls of the parking garage and watches the support officers work as they clean the blood, along with all the signs that anything bad ever happened here. A man comes and takes the stories of both her and Mick; their recounting, which are conducted separately, are deemed sufficient to keep Seluna in commission. Mick drives her back home. They do not talk.

It was raining by the time they got to her apartment.

“Good night, Michael,” Seluna says.

“Night,” he says.

She gets out and waves. He drives away. She looks up and lets some of the rain fall on her.

Upstairs is her apartment. She lives alone. She has always lived alone. For a moment, when she enters, she shuts the door behind her and considers how everything familiar to her is in the dark. She is still afraid. The dark scares her; she knows not what lurks in those corners. That is until Persimmon rubs against her leg; she turns on the light and picks the cat up. Seluna pets Persimmon and finds some comfort in the way she purrs.

She regards the cat. “You trust me, do you not?”

The cat, however, tires of being carried, and insists on jumping out of her arms. The answer is sufficient.

Seluna undresses and showers. She sits in the tub basin cross-legged. She does not clean her shower; the floor is caked with dirt, long past the point where it can be scrubbed away with ease. She does not clean much. She looks at her hands and thinks about how unnaturally pale her skin is.

Everyone must give up things to become the monster that she has become. Many things. Favorite things and secret things. She does not feel warm. She will never feel warm again. The shower water steams, yet to her it is frigid. The woman’s blood must have been warm, she thought. She suspected that Persimmon would be warm. The sun, likely enough, was warm. These were all things that others would have her believe.

She turns off the shower. In her past life she believes that she may have liked long showers. She goes to the couch. She watches television with Persimmon in her lap. The news recounts the deaths of Jason Fiddleborn and Diane Riovar. Per the story, Jason was deemed fit to be executed by responding officers; the anchor quickly recounts that a Beast had done so.

Oh well, Seluna thinks.

She wraps herself in blankets – out of habit, as they provided her with no utility – and falls asleep to the hostile blue glow of the TV. She believes that leaving it on helps her stave off nightmares; some nights, perhaps, she is right. Although this is not one of those nights. In her dreams, she is a woman who works at a retail store who dies by complete happenstance in a parking garage. In her dreams her head caves in after she slips and falls; she was running from something monstrous. In her dreams she is consumed by something more ancient and dangerous than her.

The next morning, she awakens and wonders if she truly is the predator.