(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 15; fawn

One breath and his body tingled to the scent of pine and wet soil. It was strange how he could smell something so vividly within his own dream. How he could feel the wind hit its skin, hear it slithering beyond tree trunks and trying its might to reach him through the multitude of shaggy hemlocks. His stomach snarled and his face ached from all the times he'd been slapped by the dangling branches of evergreen trees and the thorny stems of foliage.

But he was almost there.

Something in his gut told him. Maybe the emptiness. It'd never felt so empty—a rabid kind of hunger wrung his insides. Like a fire, it licked along all the empty spaces and drove him through the snow-clad mountains, over frozen moss and brush that felt like broken glass underfoot.

That hunger led him to a bluff, where water stretched into rocks and ice below, misting and cracking with every new deluge. He could smell salt and something else. Something that made that emptiness in his stomach twist and thrash and suck into itself with a famine he'd never felt before.

He was leaping down the rocks now—not climbing, but leaping. Clinging onto each narrow bulge of stone by his fingertips. And once he'd hit the round, smooth-washed gravel on the beach below, the pain in his fingers was something of the past. Now he could only feel the icy ocean mist bathe him in its salt. The grit of sand beneath his feet.

And Jaylin was running. He was running, barefoot on sharp stone and beached coral and ice that felt like daggers on his frozen toes. He was running and slipping and leaping over beach wood and polished glass. And then he found that smell. The smell that was calling to him all this time.

On the rocks laid the small brown body of a baby mule deer, guttering with sharp, shallow, upsetting breaths. It looked to him from the corner of its eye and tried to stand, but the creature gave a horrified yowl and laid its head back down onto the bloody stone.

He'd fallen from the cliff, Jaylin thought. He'd die like this.

He ran his hand through the short, soft down of its fur. Felt the creature recoil beneath him. And for some reason, Jaylin's stomach bellowed in want.

No, he thought. You wait. You find something else. You wait.

But that hunger was drawing closer. It was wrapping its fiery hands around Jaylin's throat, squeezing until he felt parched. Until he craved the taste of blood and the feel of flesh between his teeth.

He held the fawn beneath the jaw, tighter as it wriggled in fright. Then he leaned down. Down until he felt the feathers of its coat silk against his lips. Until he could hear the heartbeat. The one singular pump that pushed its blood through its veins like a million little rivers in a world so complex, so fragile that might he squeeze any harder, could very well crack beneath his fingertips.

"Jay. Jaylin."

Jaylin woke with his head in his arms and the taste of pencil dust on his tongue.

"Jay, you alright?"

He felt sick, the smell of blood still strong, the taste of it putrid on his pallet. The thought of biting into a live animal made him shutter and he sat up, wiping his face with his sleeve. "What?" he slurred incoherently with sleep. "What is it, Matt?"

Matt had been playing browser games on the computer last Jaylin had noticed. Now he was sitting there with a worrisome frown and Jaylin's phone in his hands. "Someone kept calling. You look pale, you okay?"

Jaylin stole the phone from Matt and flicked away the lock screen. "It's three AM, who the hell is calling me?"

"That's the thing," Matt said, "It's not a number in your contacts."