AN: I wasn't in the mood to write smut for my other story quite yet, so this little thing popped into my head. Basically, Vincent has his own cabin a couple miles from where Catherine's mom was killed. On the night he first saves Catherine's life, Catherine follows him to his cabin in the woods, where she discovers the man hiding behind the Beast. Each chapter shall carry the theme of a word which will be defined at the beginning of each chapter.

fear: a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid

Fear in movies always looked scary enough. Usually the blond ingénue in any horror film stared wide-eyed past the camera and let out a wrenching scream whenever the incredibly gory menace appeared. The villain was always some hideous monster with a marred, grotesque face. Almost invariably, something in its past had caused it to curl inward, any dredges of humanity left locked behind the confines of its evil heart.

Catherine could never have imagined that the real monsters in this world carried guns and rode in cars. The worst monsters in the world were the ones that killed her mother. Mama Chandler protected her daughter to the bitter end, pushing her towards the car. Catherine couldn't even scream when the bullets ripped through her mother's body, the sound strangling itself in her throat. She didn't even have time to mourn her loss, even tell her mom that she loved her before the gunmen aimed at her.

She sprinted off into the woods, the cold air whistling into her wheezing lungs, the frozen ground crumbling under the soles of her boots. She wove her way between trees, over stumps and past a creek before a felled young sapling caught her unaware. The only warmth she could feel as she rolled over was from the blood that ran down her face, the pain slamming into her like a truck. Cat heard herself plead the men to spare her as they squared their sights. She squeezed her eyes shut just as they were about to pull the trigger.

This fear was something far worse than what could be portrayed in any cheesy slasher. This fear was smothering her, choking the breath out of her as she struggled to come to terms with the fact that she would feel the impact of the bullets any moment now.

The bullets never came, instead a rather sickening ripping noise made her open her eyes. Their screams were wet as they spurted from their torn throats. Whatever was ripping them apart did so with a fire in its heart, its claws tearing flesh and limbs faster than any bullet could've traveled. Catherine did not scream now either, both because she wouldn't have had time to and because she was no longer afraid. The bodies of the men crumpled to the ground like pitiful sacks of flour, their insidious DNA running together in the blood-soaked earth.

The Beast turned its golden eyes upon her, pinning her under its piercing glare like a falcon holding its prey under sharp talons. Her heart quickened as the fear returned in a smaller quantity: merely instinctual fear of the unknown. Her fingers dug into the soil as she tried to sit up, but found herself being forced back by a wave of pain. It seemed she had fractured a few ribs in her fall, as well as a torn ligament in her wrist.

"P-please," Catherine groaned, her mouth salty with the taste of her own blood, "I c-can't." She tried sitting up again, but her left wrist twisted painfully at the wrong angle. The Beast regarded her for a moment before approaching her with its arms outstretched. She cringed, again instinctually, shivering as her back arched against the frozen soil. The Beast grasped her right hand and pulled her to her feet. It would occur to her, hours later, that it hadn't wiped the blood from its hands before helping her.

It leaned Catherine rather gingerly against a tree before abruptly speeding off into the woods. Catherine naively thought it would return with a phone or some bandages, but after five minutes of waiting, she figured it wanted her to limp back to her own car.

But she couldn't. Even if she took a step in that direction, her body seized up in paralyzing fear. The knowledge that the corpse of her mother lay in a gruesome pose on the other side of the trees made bile rise up in her throat. Her hands shook, the transferred blood from the gunmen drying in a gory mockery of a glove. She cried, nothing loud or ostentatious, nothing heaving or sobbing so loud that it would startle the woodland creatures. It's not that she wasn't sad, she was, cripplingly so, but the pain from her fractured ribs scarcely allowed her a teary gasp.

"Momma," she whispered into the frozen darkness. She could do nothing for her mother now and she certainly couldn't face the task of repeating her story over and over for the police to just use to call her crazy.

Catherine instead turned in the direction of where the Beast had gone off to. Years of girl scout training had given her the skill to track rabbits and other cute woodland creatures, but the thing she now sought was far from cute. She steeled herself as she pushed off from the tree, cradling her broken wrist against her chest as she limped forward. Her tears froze on her cheeks as she followed the trail of gigantic boot prints in the mud where snow had melted the day before.

It was tedious work: picking her way over boulders and felled oaks with a couple of busted ribs was no picnic. Occasionally, Catherine rested on a stump to catch what was left of her breath, not letting her mind stray from the task at hand. Her fingers began to go white, the blood in her body rushing to warm her organs, and her toes weren't faring so well in her mud soaked boots. The cut on her forehead was beginning to swell a little bit, stinging every once in a while to remind her of its presence.

What the fuck am I doing? Her mind turned on her, jeering at her, telling her that the next step she takes would be her last. She could barely see the Beast's trail through her veil of tears, limping blindly, encumbered by the pain that shoot through her sporadically. Her nose was the next thing to go numb as her body struggled to stay warm under the thing she called a coat.

She remembered learning about hypothermia in high school. It started off with the body shivering, the extremities being drained of blood, and erratic thought processes. The second stage continued with the inability to form coherent thoughts, loss of motor function, and chronic pain. The last stage is the body stops shivering and any sense of cold is gone only to be replaced with numbness. So far, she was only in stage one, but if she didn't find whatever the hell she was looking for soon, she would be in deep trouble.

Mwahahaha…cliffhangers! JK I'm posting the second chapter right after this one. Reviews are appreciated.