Wolf, in League

Chapter 2: Do You Feel Me, Child?-1

Chapter 2: Do You Feel Me, Child?

Children…ah, but how he loved to watch them most of all. As tempting as an unwatched sachet of heroin to an addict, they were. It wasn’t just that they had the sweetest blood (though they most certainly did), nor that their busy minds made them curious and, as such, easy to lure. It was the angst their destruction left behind. Mankind hated to lose their seedlings, they surely did. As if the humans had forgotten how easy children were to replace, how easy they were to do over. Man spoke of renewable resources as though they would stop the destruction of their planet—solar, wind, water, bamboo, hemp, forget the oil and the coal and focus on that which can be reborn on every turn of the planet!—and they failed to see that they themselves were the most renewable things that walked the Earth. In a mere forty weeks, a child could be seeded and pushed out of a body. Within twelve to sixteen weeks after that, the blood that coursed through them was as strong as it would ever get. One didn’t even need to wait until they were walking—or, gods forbid, talking—to take full advantage of their nutrient value. The bites were small but they were oh, so fulfilling.

The two at the table, with their heads over their books and their minds who even knew where, were not infants by any means. They sat in a well-lit kitchen, no doubt feeling safe and cozy under the watchful eyes of their father and the father’s concubine. Somewhere a brother sat and watched as well—not with his eyes but with his ears and his instinct—and alongside that brother sat another man. A strange man. A talented man. A man that could be turned to the proper bidding if time and fate allowed it to happen. When time and fate allowed it to happen.

He lightly rested his hands on the windowsill and smiled at the twitch of tension that worked its way over the spine of the youngest one at the table beyond the window. The girl child. Another odd bunny, that one, and to make matters most confusing, he had no idea what was odd about her.

Do you feel me, child?

He sent the thought out, daring to let it wander from his mind into the house even though it might get heard by someone other than the girl. And perhaps it did. At that moment, the doorway to the kitchen darkened and a curly-haired young man with olive skin and a deep frown entered the room.

“Mine,” he mumbled at the glass, staring at the frown, willing the newcomer to come closer. That didn’t happen. The man did, however, motion at the window and the father stood up and drew the blind. Before that, though, the father peered through glass to try and see into the dark beyond.

Had the father been a sharper man, he might have seen the twitching branches that marked their visitor’s passage. He wasn’t.