Page 11 of Hunger

She's there. She's everywhere in this man's mind. I find her in dozens of brief moments and each one curdles in me as I see it. Jenny behind the counter. Jenny bending to retrieve something from a low shelf. Jenny's profile in the light. Jenny's hands as she counts change. Jenny laughing at something the red-haired woman said. He's watched her. He's watched her for months. He's built a mental map of her movements through the food court and he has timed his patrols around her shifts.

I push deeper.

The memories curdle further. There's what he's seen, and there's what he's imagined, and the two are tangled in his mind as they are in the minds of men like him. I see what he's fantasized. The things he's imagined doing to her. The script he's been rehearsing in his head, the words he's been practicing, the moment he's been waiting for when she'd walk out of the back door alone and he'd be the only one in the parking lot.

I see what he was going to do.

The blood is in my mouth. I have a thousand years of holding myself in check. They don't save me tonight.

I tear his throat out.

It's fast. It's messy. The blood is hot on my hands and my face and I let it run. He doesn't make a sound after the first one. His body jerks and then it stops jerking and then it's just weight in my arms.

I stand in the alcove and I breathe. Slow breaths I don't need. I let the body slide down to the concrete.

I look at him. I think about how easy it'd have been for him to find his moment. I think about her stepping out of the back door at the wrong hour into the wrong empty lot. I think about her hand in her bag. The keys. The cold.

I drag the body further into the shadow behind the dumpster. The concrete here's patchy and uneven and the snow has melted in spots. I leave him there for now. I'll come back before dawn to deal with him properly. The lot is quiet and the body won't be found in the few hours I need.

I straighten and look down at my hands. The blood is darkening on my knuckles. I crouch in the snow at the edge of the alcove and scrub them with handfuls of the crusted white. The snow turns pink.

I clean my mouth. I clean my face. The polo shirt under my coat is ruined but the coat itself is dark and the blood doesn't show.

I walk out of the alcove and across the lot. I don't feel calmer. The killing didn't settle anything in me. It's still rising. The shape of what he was going to do is lodged in my head, and the image of her in the parking lot sits beside it, and the two of them together are a fire I can't put out.

I should go to the farmhouse.

I don't.

I walk to her apartment complex.

The building is a low brown rectangle. Her window is on the second floor at the southeast corner. The light is out. The wind has died down and the snow has stopped. I stand across the street in the shadow of the elm and I look up at the dark window.

I climb.

The wall is brick and there are gaps in the mortar and a drainpipe that runs the corner. My hands are made for things like this. I'm up to her window in less than a minute. The window is closed. The frame is old. The latch is the kind of flimsy thing that's been failing for forty years. I work it open without sound.

I push the window up. I step through.

The room is dark. The smell of her hits me first. Shampoo and skin and the lingering ghost of grease from the polo she wore today. The air is warm. There's a humidifier somewhere in the apartment. I can hear its low hum through the wall.

She's in the bed.

She's on her side, curled toward the window. Her dark hair is loose on the pillow. One of her hands is tucked under her cheek and the other is splayed across the blanket near her ribs. Her breath is slow and even. Her mouth is slightly open.

At the foot of the bed, I look at her.

I don't move. I haven't breathed in centuries except for the small useless motion of air I do when I'm with people. There's no one here. Only her. Only me. The room contracts to the small bright fact of her sleeping form.

There's a stone on the nightstand beside the lamp. My stone. The one I left on her hood. She put it where she could see it from the bed. It catches the faintest light from the streetlamp outside and shines in the dark.

I lower myself to my knees beside the bed.

She doesn't stir.

Her face in sleep is different from her face when she works. The exhaustion has loosened. Her brow is smooth. The faint permanent crease between her eyes has softened. Her lips are slightly parted and her breath moves across them in slow, soft passes.

I don't touch her.