Howl

Screaming in the dark, I howl when we're apart

Drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart

The saints can't help me now, the ropes have been unbound

I hunt for you with bloody feet across the hallowed ground

The first bite paralyzes. The second breaks the bone. The third bite is the final one. That is all it takes. The elders warn unruly children with the stories, but not a soul believes them. How could you when you have never had the fever? Never felt the caustic sweat dripping in your eyes.

Someone else climbs inside you. Your fingers twitch. Someone else whispering in your inner ear. Words like knives in your ears. Red and ringing. And someone is turning the dials on your heart and making it beat faster and faster. And someone is licking your lips and telling you 'blood', and saying it in your head. And the word bounces around in your head, up, and down, and up and down and up and down ricocheting like a bullet off of cement walls. And the word is coursing through your body and you want nothing more than to….and it's in your head, blending with the words of the someone else. Someone you don't even know. You don't know who they are. But you want them to get. Out. Right. Now. Please, get out.

Get out. Get out. Get out.

Kiba lies in his bed strapped down. His arms, his legs, his torso. His fingers twitch.

He can barely move his head. It's so heavy. His eyelids flutter open…and closed…and open….closed…like the wings of a dying Monarch. His face soaked, damp to the bone with sweat. His body stinging with its own salts.

Blood. Blood. Blood.

"Get out!" he screams.

When he lay down and said his prayers and closed his eyes he was Kiba. When he woke up he wasn't. When he woke up he was different. He was much more aware of the blood in his own body, of all of the canals and tunnels it was funneling to and from, deliciously red. Syrupy. His sister came to him, she leaned over him to push the brown hair like nettles from his forehead as he drifted, half asleep, but coming awake. He was more aware of the veins in her throat then than of anything else, the warmly pulsing tubes settled there like gentle unsuspecting sheep. Unaware of the wolf hiding among them, the yellow fanged beast lurking in his hands. The wolf that had leapt forward to claw at those tributaries of tissue, to unstop the river of red penned in behind the dam of her collarbone.

They had tied his hands and tied his feet. His sister. His mother. Strong arms. Strong rope. But nothing could be stronger than whatever was inside him, now. Nothing could run faster than his heart, racing feet pounding the pavement in his chest.

Blood everywhere. There was so much blood. His sister, standing over his bedside wide-eyed with fright was full of it. Gallons and gallons of it. She was a walking, breathing bucket of blood.

And he was so thirsty.

He could see it all just beneath her skin, a quivering red that lit her from the inside out. So close. So close. He roared. His mouth fell open and an animalistic sound came crashing out of his throat. His sister screamed and leapt back. He was sobbing. His shoulders throbbed from struggling against the restraints and the thirst was eating him alive. Bone by succulent bone, it was eating him. He dropped his head, sweat falling from the tips of his hair onto the already dampened sheets. "Help me please." He rasped in a voice that was not his own. A ragged string of blood soaked syllables that seemed to have crawled from the mouth of some caved beast.

"Help me…please."

"You mustn't give in to it, Kiba." His mother. His mother's voice encroaching in on him. He turned his head towards the sound of it. It was like he was looking through a telescope. It was like there was a focal point of clarity, a single pinprick of color and movement and light, and the rest was rough, jagged blackness all around. But he could still make out his mother's silhouette. Her broad back turned to him, her hands clasped blithely behind it. She stood in front of his bedroom window, the curtains opened just a sliver. She was peering out at something. Out at the cure or the curse deepening the wildness growing like a weed in his heart. He was sure of it. Her face turned away from him, and yet he could still her voice, her words dropping like stones onto his chest. "You mustn't give in to it."

"Give in to what?" Hanna asked taking the words Kiba couldn't manage to wheeze out from his open mouth, and offering them as her own. He coughed. The blackness closing in, the light dwindling away, fading out like a backwards supernova. His mother wheeled around to face them, her brows set, her mouth downturned, every feature shaded in by the dank darkness and she seemed less human than either of them. Something colder. Darker. More ferile.

Yellow eyes blazing in the night she said "He's 13. It happens to all the Inuzuka males." She took a step towards him, and he could see the patterns of millions and millions of blood cells out splayed like shadow puppets against the backdrop of her thin skin. The first bite paralyzes.

"No!" he roared, the call of a beast who has discovered its own nature, a raw knoll of pity. "Don't come any closer to me." He begged, his jaw heavy with overwhelming thirst, the sobs strangling his words. He thought his heart was going to explode. Blood rushing in his ears. Glowing under skin. Blood. Blood. Blood. The smell. The color. He wanted to control it, but he was just so thirsty. The second bite breaks the bone. She was near his bedside now.

"You're stronger than this Kiba." It escaped in a seething whisper, her face twisting into something akin to a sneer, above his bedside she looked down on him unblinking, the silhouette of his writhing, sweaty body reflected in her ribbon-like eyes, sitting next to her disgust.

"Resist!" she commanded, her hand dangling, a link of meat in front of his face. So thirsty. So thirsty. He almost couldn't see, the black around him swallowing up everything. He was so thirsty. His pounding heart. "Please! Don't….come…any. Closer!" She touched his chest with the flat of her palm, her heavy hand on his chest as if flesh and bone were enough to keep the beast inside at bay, as if the beast was not attracted to the scent of it. The third bite is the final one. "Resist!" He lunged for her.

She leapt back at the last second disgruntled, but he continued to struggle against the tethers. His sister grabbed his convulsing shoulders and called his name, her perfect eyes filling with tears, but his opened mouth filled with foam. And it was clear then, that Kiba was gone. Not even a single tingling vestige left of him behind those lycanthropic eyes. And as his sister realized this, she pleaded with her mother "What's happening to him?"

"It's the moon." Said her mother.

"How do we stop it?"

"Stop it?"

He ripped free of the tethers, leather and chafed skin falling like confetti. His sister was blown back by the force of his leaping fists into the wall. She hit her head and later would momentarily forget her name, and dates and things, and forever this night, that anything had ever happened. But his mother, cowering on the floor by the bed, her arms thrown haplessly over her head to cocoon her vulnerable neck, peeked up and watched as the beast leapt on the window sill and then went sailing through the glass, shimmering shards sparkling everywhere and falling like stars, like rejected wishes. The moon was full and as his limber body plowed through gravity into the night, the dogs locked safely away in the basement lifted their noses and bayed. And as the hair rose erect on the back of her neck she knew she would never forget for as long as she lived the sound of her boy howling back.

The beast ran on all fours. Through brambles and under the tops of trees where the stars draped themselves luxuriously. Chasing the sky's silver eye and the smell of the purest blood. There was a rabbit hovering near a flower bed in a dark strip of a forest and his muscles coiled and his thirst was too great and would not subside. The silver eye kept angelic watch all through the night as he made good on his meal, the screams drowned out by the rushing in his ears. He fell asleep and when he woke it was morning and he was lying on his belly naked and sticky in a forest clearing. There was a bloody human foot in his mouth, the rubbery skin caught on a canine tooth, and the rest of the human lay not too far away, glassy lilac eyes fastened on forever.

Hinata didn't want to die. In her mind death was nothingness. It was neither that you felt good, nor bad, it was nothingness. Which perhaps might be better than anybody was letting on. She hadn't been planning on dying, however. She hadn't been one of those people. It had been merely a walk in the forest in the middle of the night, perhaps too far away from the boundary lines of her own compound, perhaps not. It was trivial now. She had been out looking for the full moon. For a bit of stardust. She had hoped it was possible to find some magic in a forest at night. She had hoped it would clear her mind. She hadn't deserved to die. But then again she hadn't deserved to live either. Not really. No more or less than any other person.

She'd stopped to pick a flower and felt the weight on her back. Something latched onto her arm, and when she tried to pull away from it the flesh ripped. Blood fleeing down her arm, she should have panicked. But she didn't. She barely had time to scream. It happened so quickly.

The first bite paralyzed her. And all thoughts of escape quickly vanished. She could only think of how lovely the trees looked at night, how strong and safe, erected all around her like sentinels. The second bite broke the bones, all of the bricks shaken loose, the godly architecture it had taken to construct her demolished. And she felt a little sad that such hard work was going apart, but mostly that the something killing her couldn't possibly understand what it was doing. So she put her arms around it, and it felt like a boy. The third bite came like lightning and then nothing. And when she realized she was dead she started to cry, because it was quiet and black, and it didn't hurt.

Her parents came and found her. She didn't watch them combing through the thin morning light, with her crumpled body in their arms, because she didn't like to see people cry. They put her in a wooden box and she stared at the dark veins on the back of her eyelids until they nailed it shut. She lay flat and still during the memorial service and tried to send her thoughts on planes headed elsewhere, because she didn't want to hear people talking about her fragility. And she didn't want to hear them cry.

In the box, Hinata found that she didn't mind being dead, much. Could have possibly grown to like it, if not to resent the stillness. But then she was lying in the box and her leg itched, and so she moved her hand and scratched it. Moved her hand. Scratched. A very palpable, tangible scratch.

Ah, yes.

It should have been surprising. Terrifying. Thrilling. To find oneself blissfully alive, and then blissfully dead, and then once again alive. But somehow she felt nothing. Well, not nothing. There was a creeping feeling in her head as if someone was walking around in there uninvited, all of their weight making the floorboards creak. She worked up a stream of chakra and loosened all of the bolts on the coffin door. She dug to the surface, and then sat on the side of her grave made exacerbated and outright exhausted; dirt sticking to her shins and burrowed beneath her fingernails.

Taking greedy gulps of the fresh air, she held each of her appendages up to the light examining herself like a curious child having just discovered itself to be the possessor of ten fingers and ten toes and everything else in between. Not a scratch. Not a scar. Not anything to remind her of death. How terribly sad.

She could go to her father. She should. Go to her father and show herself to him. See? A miracle child. The special one at last. She should let everyone know she was alright. Everyone. They were probably worried. No sad. You were sad when people died, because you didn't think they were coming back. When people died they didn't come back. A slow smile spread across her face. But there was a nagging tug in the back of her head, and she realized there was something she had to do. Climbing to her feet, she brushed the dirt from her shins and tossed her long mercurial hair over her shoulder, its barrettes of twigs and leaves the only evidence of her scuffle in the forest that night in the woods. Her heart was beating faster than it should, and so she knew there was something she had to do.

She turned and headed out of the cemetery, past the memorial stone, and into the village. Oddly, she was very thirsty.