Of the Night by Aaron Redfern (good beach reads TXT) 📕

Carver was a creature of the night. Often on frosty, corpse-chilled midnights like this, when few people dared to walk in the open and brave the primal resurrections of their childhood fears, he felt a thrum of pride from high in his gut, from that same place where people felt the screeching nails of terror pulsing up with every sound out of the brush, because he knew that there was nothing really in the shadows that was dangerous as him.

The bite of the air and the sharpness of the moonlight made him feel alive. The crispness he drew in with every breath and the way his skin prickled up along his arms made him feel like he was the only one in the whole landscape of the night as real and pure as he was. The dark wool coat and hood he wore flexed against his skin as he moved, the inner lining of black fur touching his skin. It was a token of power; it gave unto him, drew out his strength to fill it, to make him larger. But it was the thing inside him that gave him his power, the creature of the night. The trueness of his inner self.

The moon was full. That would make him more visible, but he reveled in the challenge. It thrilled him knowing that there might be a split second more of awareness for whoever came to him, that she might have time to coil and lash, that fingernails might scrape futilely across his skin, that she might try to bite.

He was the only one. No one knew how many he had killed but him and the moon.

He drew in a deep breath and listened. He couldn’t see anyone yet, but he heard, so faintly he thought it might be imagined, the patter of feet far off up the trail.

The park held one of many spots he sometimes used for his hunts. There was a tall oak there, two hundred years old and huge enough to hide him, both with the opacity of its trunk and the density of the pool of shadow that it cast. The earth to one side of it had been cut away to make the running path, so that it sat at the top of a swell of earth. It was a perfect ambush point. It was as though the builders of the park had known he was coming.

The path ran under the tree. To his left was the grassy sprawl of the park, sparsely lamp-lit. To the right, the trail ran out to a nearly shattered sidewalk that ran through the old, half-abandoned industrial district. He saw lights in the highrises to the south, distant and small as candle-flames, but that was all. There was no one but him...and the sound of footsteps, coming nearer at a jog. Someone was on the path. He was certain of it now.

He would have drawn deeper under the old oak, but he was as deep as he could go. He would be unseen by whoever was coming.

He saw her now, like a dream, like a gift. She was young, small, pretty. Strong too, as they went, with the tone of muscles standing out on her nearly bare arms. Sweat stained the front of her sweatshirt, dripped down her biceps where the sleeves had been cut away, and she was breathing heavily but evenly, barely feeling the strain.

He appreciated the way she moved, but he did not enjoy watching her. There was little need for enjoyment. She had dared to come out, to face her own instinctive fears in the deep ocean of the night. His night. He was stronger, and there was a lesson to be taught by his strength.

When he had been very young in the stucco jungles of another town far away, he had been afraid. The playset in the backyard, a swing and two ladders and the snaking steel sheet of the slide, had loomed so much larger in the dark; with all its colors drained away, it had become like an animal, a thing with many tangled limbs. One night he had seen a raccoon slinking across the top of it, wiry and alert and utterly silent as it padded over the painted grain, and he had realized that though the darkness changed everything it touched by making it seem closer to death, there were creatures that dwelled in it and made it their home. And that since everyone else was afraid, after the sun went down the world was truly theirs. In later years he had come to know that he was not merely Michael, the freckled boy, the unlikeable young man, the stocky paper-pusher. He was Carver.

Twenty feet and closing. He crouched perfectly still.

The strangest thing about her was that she wore sunglasses. Little round ones like the girls wore who stretched out on the grass in the daylight. But she wore them in the dark. The corner of his mouth twisted up with grim pleasure. That was foolish of her; she would not see him until it was much too late.

Yet something nagged at the edge of his mind, something about her assurance, and the way she hid her eyes. There was something about her that he was not accustomed to. But as he knelt merged with the shadows under the tree, he remembered that nothing could hurt him in the night, and he pushed his petty doubts aside.

She passed beneath him, legs extended forward and back like a ray of silky infinity, lovely in her vulnerability, in her potential to be broken.

There.

He sprang. One foot up onto the crest of the earthen mound where the oak’s thick root lay, and then forward into thin air, propelled toward her with all the force of the kickoff, arms out to the sides, fingers coiled to close around her mouth and her shoulder, all of his size and strength flying to engulf her with a crunching impact that he knew well and lived every moment to feel.

The gazelle’s flight of her stride was swept away and became something else, her body whirling, legs set, chin lifted. She had already turned. On a dime, and she eyed him for a moment as he sprung off of the rise. One hand had gone to the jet ovals of her superfluous shades. She flicked them off into the grass.

As they fell, teasing points of moonlight in a lazy spiral, she began to change, her shape coopted as swiftly and easily as her movement had been a heartbeat before. Her skin flowed and darkened, became jagged, became other than skin. Her limbs stretched with a grace that seemed to flow out from her core, bent smoothly as the joints moved. The uselessly soft femininity of her lips peeled back into nothing as her mouth became longer, the whiteness of her teeth gleaming brilliant against the velvety blackness that had overtaken her flesh. Her body became a hunter’s body, every piece honed to its purpose, and Carver thought that he had never seen a woman so beautiful. The only thing that did not change was her eyes, which he had only just begun to see. They were large and round and very, very dark, and they held him so rapt that he felt suspended in his leap, frozen in the air in a moment of wonder.

An old ache within him screamed for release, threatened to burst inside him. He wanted to hurt her very badly.

In the moment of his distraction, she must have moved. He came down hard on his feet, almost thrown to the ground by the absence of her body in his arms. He reacted instantly, bringing his weight around to the side where he instinctively knew she must be.

Something wickedly sharp tore open his entire right cheek. He almost fell again, but he was quick as a cat, quick as a creature of the night. He checked himself with a carefully placed foot, continued his spin, shot his arm around behind her neck, reaching to catch a handful of thick black fur.

He had a sensation of being lifted and thrown. His shoulders slammed into the earthen rise underneath the oak tree, and his legs were still in the air, cycling for purchase. His vision struggled to orient itself, to make sense of where he was, and for a moment all he saw was her, the curve of her torso and shoulder and arm following through the sleek, perfect motion that had sent him through the air.

He shot to his feet, pulled himself tight into a fighting stance. He threw the swath of his coat aside and pulled free the heavy hunting knife from its sheath in his belt. He had only used it twice before, not because he had been forced to, merely for a different thrill. Yet it was another tool at his disposal, a claw, an extension of the thing inside him. He would tear her apart.

He lunged, swinging the knife underhand, his free arm reaching around her neck for the second time to pull her into the blade.

She caught his wrist, and with a motion like that of his own thrusting knife seen through a mirror, snapped both the bones of his lower arm. Pain smashed through him, and his vision was swamped with a dark redness like blood. He reeled away from her. The knife was gone; he did not know where.

She loomed into his vision. He could just see the swirling darkness of her eyes through the haze of his pain. Her lips were pulled back, revealing the curving snarl, or perhaps grin, of her teeth.

Carver turned and ran.

He was out of the park in half a dozen strides, wheeling through the empty streets of the industrial quarter toward the highrise lights too far away. He almost screamed for the people in those distant windows, but he remembered the times when women in his arms had found one desperate breath. No one had come for them.

Metal and concrete and plate glass blurred by. His legs moved like he had never known they could move, but he caught her out of the corner of his eye, loping off to the side, keeping pace with him easily. She fell back out of sight, and he only barely heard the heavy but soft falls of her feet as she crossed behind him and reappeared to the other side and pulled ahead of him.

He was between her and the buildings, she with the tree line of the park at her back. He ground to a halt as she shifted farther into the street, between him and the lit city to the south. He glanced around him for a way to run, but found nothing.

She came toward him, covering more ground with each gorgeous stride than he could backpedal in two. His shoulder glanced off of the corner of a building. He was at the mouth of an alley and she was still coming, and