The scent of salt wafted through the usual musky air of an alley in the afternoon. Few people in the world would have the capability of detecting it. One such person was standing in front of two makeshift graves, one fresher than the other, of shattered gravel, dirt, and mud.
A sigh escaped his lips as he stared at a weathered wall that served as a tombstone.
He never intended for this to happen. Not once did he have any desire to hurt them, much less anyone. In the ten years he had been alive, he never once wanted for anything, much less this.
It happened because of him anyway.
Taking a short breath he turned at the older boy by his side.
Bald-headed, dark-skinned, and weathered for his age, Marcus wept in silence over what he had taken from both of them.
They fed them, clothed them, and cared for them yet he killed them. One disciplined them, trained them, and enlightened them yet he killed him. The other groomed them, sheltered them, and paid them yet he killed her. In the entire world, there was no one else who valued them yet he led both to their deaths with barely any thought. He barely woke up from his life-long slumber only to slaughter what had been helping him stay along when he woke up.
The murderer parted his lips and shut them.
Nothing could be said, nothing that mattered at least.
He took a step that cracked the asphalt beneath his feet.
Marcus glanced at him and focused back on the crude tombstone wall while he continued on his silent path.
There were no words that could express either of their feelings towards each other or for this.
Putting his hands in his ragged sweater pockets, Kojo Reyes took heavy step after step away from the burial ground.
It didn't matter anyway.
The brown-skinned, dark-eyed, and youthful child lifted his horned head high before he bent his knees and leapt to the roof of a neighboring building.
A fanged smile that had never once adorned his face took shape as he took in the setting sun.
He felt it: a warmth he had never once felt or understood but observed in others.
The hundreds he killed before were nothing. All of them were rotting meat to begin with. Two took the place for every one he rid of this earth. Not him though: not Dan "the Old Soldier Man."
He was their guardian, and he killed him. He was their teacher, and he killed him. He was their commander, and he kill him. He was the closest thing in this entire world they had to a father, and he tore his insides out as if he were a useless bag of meat like the rest of them.
An odd-feeling sound he had seen so many others emit thumped in his chest.
Clutching his sides, the alien crackling emerged from his lips.
He did not understand then what he had done and wouldn't until He was whole.
Kojo Reyes, for the first time and the second time in his life, felt joy.