Page 317 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

into the worried walls. Wolves had clashed here, and I
had great confidence as to who had arisen the victor. My
mind filled in the bare spaces between the butchery with
the great hunters. The shadows scribbled across the theatre
of violence gave form to the desperate battle. The blood
spatter and broken walls revealed a fierce duel that played
out before me in such detail, it felt as though I were there. I
heard the clash of steel and the crack of bone, I smelled the
sweat and blood as it rained to the floor. I felt the rage and
pain and bloodlust of two creatures gone mad by the beauty
of violence.
My reverie nearly cost dearly as a bullet buried itself in
the wall inches from my head. I returned to the darkness
like a shadow rejoining the night. Another bullet found the
wall. The hunter was firing blind. The gunshot served as my
guide, and I followed it to my destination. My sisters tore
a crimson smile across the hunter’s face so wide, it would
have required two sets of teeth to fill it. My whirring siblings
moved with red smiles to his belly, dancing quietly to the
dying rhythms within his quivering body. I allowed the
hunter-turned-art’s weight to gently wrest my work from my
sister’s warm teeth, laying it upon the soft glistening pillow
of worried bowels.
The hunter’s gun assured me he was not the skin-switcher.
I was glad of it, for I had hoped for a better introduction.
Clearly, I wasn’t the only one stalking Hide’s lair. The
Shepherd was drawing us all together—hunters hunting
hunters, hunting hunters.
The gunshot was like so much blood in shark-haunted
waters. More opponents converged, moving through my
carefully laid webs of silence. Someone tried to slink into
the room, traveling within the wide shadows leaking from
the hallway. I closed my hand around his throat, eliciting
a wet pop as I hauled him from the floor and stuffed him
into a small heating vent. I lifted myself into a nearby hole
in the ceiling and crawled under the cracked skin of the
320 | Mark Anzalone