The pain starts long before the shifting of limbs.
The blood heats, the senses sharpen, and there’s a surge of vibrations, like high voltage hummingbird wings, that makes you shiver as it drives you down to your hands and knees.
As if pushed out of the skin from the inside, the brindle hairs stab like a million tiny knives, the cracking of remolding bones racks us, paralyzes us as the full power of the moon rushes in like a flood, and we are helpless before it; it isn’t known, but that’s the perfect time to kill us.
The Lore Keepers watch, ready to slaughter the infected if any mutations hint of impurity; it has always been that way.
The pain itself eases over time, as the killing takes root, takes its toll, but it never fully ends; I suppose it’s the trading of human for canine, the regressing (or evolving, some would say), that makes it such an awful event.
I hate this life, this world we walk between predator, scavenger, and cannibal; there is nothing noble or proud about this, only the scent of the prey,, the heady wine taste of the blood in our mouths, the tough and tender gory chunks of its insides on our muzzles.
I regard us no better than dogs; our culling serves no purpose, save to scythe other paranormals. We should have been uniting, but one faction always seemed to relent.
Killing mortals would only bring attention, and my Alpha had already spoken about curbing our impulses at least once before; I didn’t want to be the one responsible for that.
In the rare moments I’m alone, I pray for the moon’s destruction, the world be damned.
Yes, the world be damned…
And me along with it.
Nightshade Stories 