Prologue: I'm Laughing at (your) my Rage
The little man that had brought in the story of a flying human girl hadn't lived long. Just as long as the team assigned to him needed to be sure he wasn't straight-out lying. That didn't mean what he said was true, he could be crazy or drunk, drugged or fanciful, but it was enough to check the village where he had reported seeing her. If she was real the scientific branch wanted her, and the team he had been assigned to was nothing if not the perfect delivery system.
When they arrived, five in total, the locals put false smiles on their faces as fear glazed over their eyes. The fear made the leader giggle, it made the four humans giggle too-that was why he had chosen them.
The cowardly of the village directed them far up the mountain-side. It was the perfect place to raise a child that would already have met its natural fate in a city.
The house, when they finally found it, was small, pretty, and painted deep red; not the right shade for the blasphemy of human blood, but close enough to make the leader laugh. The humans wouldn't get this joke but they fed off his mirth, as they fed off the chucklevoodoos that began to radiate off him. Their fear made them wild, wide terrified eyes accompanying flat toothed grins.
The girl they were looking for wasn't in the house, but her mother was. When the woman still refused to say anything with a knife to her throat and fear in her soul the team knew they had struck gold.
She was stubborn and single-minded, refusing to scream, and spiting curses instead of begging. The team liked her. It was so boring when they broke fast. it was almost a disappointment when the girl they were looking for banged in through the door, with hair wild and eyes and hands glowing the same shade of red as the house. Just a tad off from the bright red of her mother's blood.
The leader let the woman yell her daughter's name once before breaking her neck. He considered taking the head but thought better of it when the girl screamed in rage instead of fear. He felt his voodoos shed from that anger, oh this one was going to give them a fight.
It was a good fight too, the human girl could do more than fly, she could move things, and people. If she wasn't so blindingly angry, and if the team hadn't been trained to turn their own fear into aggression and to love it the deeper it got, she might have won. As it was, she killed his best tracker. He forgave her the inconvenience for the loveliness of the death, the woman cackling in delight at her own bright red sin as her arm was ripped off, she became silent only when her head was in turn removed by the screaming girl.
In the end they took the child down only by using the full force of the leader's chucklevoodoos, he would have controlled himself but she was trying to rip his horns off, so oh well. The three remaining humans, all of them battered and with some broken bones, but having a wonderful time of it, shot her first with electric guns then injected her with sedatives and she was out.
They left the body of their own fallen with the body of the girl's mother and burned the place to the ground. Waste of a good painting to tell the truth but motherfuck if it didn't make a good campfire.
What the scientists would do with the girl the team didn't particularly care.