Chapter 1
If you had need for such a thing as justification, you would remind yourself that she never changes.
You never let her forget a run – and if you do, it's because she's done that particular one so many times, explored that territory of yours to the point that sentiment would suggest its almost hers, too. But you do not possess sentiment. You only possess hunger, and what is acceptable, and what is not.
Her stubbornness, you had decided long ago, is acceptable. That is the thing you know the most about her, and so the most about her is acceptable.
You have dragged her through so many of your keeps. She has been in the prison, the abandoned kindergarten, the decrepit mansion. She has run the old forest so many times that she has given certain landmarks names, and calls them out as she reaches them to taunt you.
That is unacceptable.
You have stopped bringing her to the forest, unless no other place suits you that day, or she is sweaty and filthy from running marshes and prisons. She uses the shower in the enclosed building, and keeps a mind not to get the pages wet. You only wait for her to finish because she is fast when she is clean, and the chase is all the more entertaining to you.
You find her efforts to remain sane acceptable, actually. More so, you find the fact that she acknowledges them as foolish amusing. She has long given up on trying to remember her name, scrawled in the walls that you smeared with her blood when you caught her and injured her.
You have injured her many times.
You have other prey, of course. There are so many that disappear without a trace, that keep you alive with their flesh and their blood and their life force. She is no longer acceptable as food. She has run the gauntlet too many times. To give up such an amusement without finding another that was just as reliable was too risky. She was yours, and you would keep her alive as long as you wanted to.
Sometimes, she would cry. She would have found the eight page, if she decided that collecting them was the goal of that particular run, and she would cry when you caught up to her, looking up at you and demanding to know what it is you want. She would demand an answer, as if you had a goal the way she did, as if you existed in the same mindset of planning and execution that she and her entire species does. You have never needed to.
Sometimes she would try to fight you. Her nails would not harm you, but you gave her the illusion anyway by letting her rip your suit jacket, because that moment of power she feels is hope you can sap away. It was particularly good.
Sometimes she would just stare up defiantly, refusing to budge. This was less than acceptable, when she would not run, but she never did it at the beginning of a run, either. It was usually once she was injured or out of breath from evading you. She would just stare up and not move.
But, as you already knew, she never changes. And tonight, just like with any other night, you have caught her, five pages gripped in her hand. She looks up at you as always, eyes a bit pink this time, face smeared with dirt and blood. Her mouth is dripping red, and her eyes are going bleary from looking directly at you.
She smiles.
"You win again. Next round?"
She never changes. That is acceptable.