Fight
Inuyasha watched the girl walk away, a cloud of anger around her. He was bemused. She had not responded correctly. He had started to moon-weave, and she had broken it. She had snapped it with anger. He was interested. He followed her.
He slipped gradually into a half state, nearer mist than form. It was easy - like dreaming, really - just let go of body and drift. His consciousness held molecules together with tendrils of thought. He blended with the shadows and became the air. She would never see. He flowed beneath trees, slid along walls, cut corners through dying autumn flowers. He always kept her in sight. She walked fast, shimmering the crisp air with her breath.
They usually came to him when his eyes softened with the moon, when he crushed his voice like velvet. They let him caress them. They tipped their heads back and drowned in the stars, while he stroked exposed throat and wallowed in conquest. Sometimes he let them go and allowed them to think it was just a dream. He left before they broke the spell of his eyes, to sit blinking and head-shaking in cold predawn wind. Sometimes teh dark hunger awoke too strong to hold. He clenched them tight, sank fangs deep into yielding neck, and fed on the thick, hot soup of thier life. He was lost in the throbbing ecstasy song of blood pumping, life squrting, until blood, horror, and life ebbed, and he abandoned the limp remnants to seek dark sleep.
He stood at the wooden gate, watching the girl enter a forest-green door with diamond windows. Lights came on in the house. He circled it, peering into the windows. He inhaled details from the golden warmth he could never have: an Oriental carpet, an antiuqearmoire, cream kitchen tiles, and a painting of bright, crazed, laughing girls. His eyes narrowed, the girls in teh painting looked right at him. Just a painting he chided, but he felt mocked, and an anger rubled deep in his throat. The lights downstairs dimmed. A light came on above. She goest to sleep, he thought, and begrudged her rest when he had none.
He paced her garden with slinking gait, examining basement windows and garage doors. He could not enter unless invited, but he liked to know the ways in, and out, if needed. The animal was close to the surface tonight. It reminded him of when he first changed, when he roamed the woods like a beast from what seemed an eternity, mindless from shock. Threads of memory clung to him, though most was a blur. Images sparked bright at times; pictures frozen in the muted green light of the forest-savaged corpses of animals, or gamekeeper crumpled and drained amid the fallen leaves, his head barely attached to his neck. Inuyasha could not ever control it then, and his attack was fierece, made vicious by his own fear. It took a long time to regain teh capacity to think. It took longer to leave the forest. But the forest had never left him. Tonight it echoed in him like owl cries, and pine needles rustling.
He marked the outline of her house, like a dog in a way. He marked it with glands from his neck and lower back. It helped a little. I know where you live, he thought.
He walked then. He walked long and far, beating the anger beneath his feet. The quiet, dream-laden suburbs gave way to the street life of the urban fringe. Here the streets pulsed with light from corner bars and pizza palaces, late-night video-game archades, adn record stores taht seemed to never close. The hot boys stood on street corners, whispering promises of romance to girls in leather skirts who knew that they were lies. Groups of lonely people huddled together against the dark. He felt a kinship here. He was as separate as they amid teh crowd. No one saw him. He was too much like the undernourished, ill-clad street waifs of this gangling street to catch an eye. A group of boys ran laughing down the sidewalk, one waving a shirt above his head, bare-chest drunk. Girls paraded bargain-store fashions, their bleached hair and bedroom eyes hiding the fear that they weren't good enough. Soon the cold would force them inside, so they clutched at lost summer.
Inuyasha drifted off the main road to teh darker streets. He hummed pitch perfect a song he had gathered along the way. It was one of teh angry songs he enjoyed. He beat out its driving rhythm on his thigh as he walked. Occasionally he'd sing a phrase, when he remembered the words.
He paced the uneven pavement in front of row houses with peeling paint but well-scrubbed steps. Through one uncurtained window at a corner house he saw a woman on a man's lap in a shabby chair. They were laughing at a game show on TV. He could have stod there unnoticed for an hour. Suddenly he wanted to smash the window and scream, "Look at me!" He wanted to be noticed. He wanted people to see him. It was dangerous, this want. It was mad. But sometimes he was afraid that he didn't exist. Now and again someone recognized what he was. They had to die. If they didin't, well...It was foolish not to think of protecting himself. There was no one who knew him, no one to say his name.
He turned a corner and startled a dog. They cringed and growled at each other. The dog's hackles spiked, then it whimpered and ran. Inuyasha walked on and found a weed-choked vacant lot. Its only inhabitant was an abandoned car. He sat on a ruined wall and gazed at the moon.
"Hey, boy!" A call from the high brick wall next door. A leg was flung over, and then a scruffy youth of about sixteen pulled himself astride it. Boy, Inuyasha thought sarcastically. he smiled in anticipation.
"Yeah, you!" came a deeper voice. Another youth, perhaps a touch older, stepped out from behind the car. He was a big lout in jeans and a flannel shirt like a lumberjack. A sneering boy in a leather jacket followed him. "This is our lot," he hissed. He carried a half-empty liquor bottle and swayed slightly. His right hand flashed silver. Inuyasha saw he carried a knife, and he didn't like long pointy things. They made him nervous. He didn't like being nervous.
A scuffling announced the decent of the wall straddle, a thud his landing. The boys spread out and converged on Inuyasha. He rose slowly form his perch, muscles tightened. The boys advanced. "Where you from?" "You ain't from here." "Nobody here knows you." "Yeah," spoke the wall climber. "And if nobody knows you, you ain't nobody." He giggled, a high-pitched, nervous sound, and swiped his hands against a ragged Ozzie Osbourne T-shirt.
Nobody. Even this scum called him nobody. Inuyasha stepped toward the danger, into their net. They'd caught a caged dog this time. He smiled.
"Pretty tough, huh?" said the big one mockingly. The boy with the leather jacket settled his bottle into the crotch of two bricks. "Pretty stupid, you mean." He tossed his knife from hand to hand. "You a retard or somethin'?" "Yeah. He's too dumb to be scared."
Inuyasha turned his back on the third boy, the one who had said that. He was a sheep. The big one was a bully, but the leather-clad one was trouble. He was crazy. He didn't smoke weed, he smoked green. Inuyasha could smell it on him. It reeked like burning plastic and it killed the brain. It made people think they couldn't die.
"This is our playground buddy." "Yeah, wanna play?" Inuyasha finally spoke. "Is that what you said to your mother last night?"
"Son of a ..." The big one charged him, swinging meaty fists. Inuyasha stepped aside, quick as thought. The boy stumbled, looked confused, then turned like an angry bear to attack again. Inuyasha stepped aside once more. His opponent breathed heavily. Inuyasha smiled. Get the biggest once, and the rest often run. But he kept the crazy one in his sight all the same. You didn't know about dusters.
They danced a lopsided waltz on the wasted ground, and the big youth's fury grew and grew. Then Inuyasha stood still. The boy grabbed. He expected to miss but, to his surprise, fournd that the quarry was his. He panted and grinned. He had Inuyasha's arm in a crushing hold, as he prepared a blow. And Inuyasha, who didn't come up to his chin, clutched the boy's belt with his free hand and lifted him into the air. The boy waved his arms like an insect and gurgled with fear. The boy in the jacket spat an oath but was frozen, enthralled. The other boy trembled but couldn't move either. Inuyasha threw his opponent then, an impossible distance. The boy sailed the air for a moment, then crashed in a pile of debris. The sound broke the spell, and Inuyasha heard the third boy run.
But the boy with the knife laughed. He slinked forward, stell flicking in the streetlight. He had seen a fight or two, Inuyasha sumerised, but probably won through sheer viciousness, not skill. Best to deal with him as a dog does a rat-no play, snap it fast.
The boy was expecting another dance, not for his victim to walk right up to him. He hesitated a second, confronted with craziness greater than his, then he saw something in Inuyasha's eyes that made him lunge. He slashed wildly in fear, but too late. His knife went flying. His arm, captured for a moment, went limp, and searing, and useless. He backed away.
It was Inuyasha's turn to laugh; a sound dark and cursed. The blow he landed snapped the boy back and smashed him against the car. The boy started to slide to the ground, bust slim white hands reached for him delicately and slammed him once more against the car. The third blow rendered him unconscious and flooded Inuyasha wit the sweet warm pleasure of the kill.
"Call me nobody?" he whispered, and his fangs slid from their sheaths. "Call me nobody?" he screamed as if in pain. He hoisted his victim up and tore the boy's wrist open with a savage claw. He raised the boy's arm and, with the pulsing blood, wrote wavering letters on the dingy primer of the car's roof. 'I AM.'
The dark, raw smell of blood intoxicated. He found himself embrasing the boy and pullin the damaged wrist up to his mouth. Faintly, somewhere, he felt disgust. A distant echo cried for him to stop. But the blood call was too strong. He had almost placed a reverent kiss upon the hand when sirens screamed too close.
He pushed the limp body from him, but it seemed to cling. For a moment he felt trapped. Then it slid to the ground. But in the midst of panic a perverse whim took hold. He began to strip the jacket from the huddled form, struggling with the boy's inert bulk, bloodying the lining, ripping a seam until it pulled free. Black and glittering, he had his prize. He clutched it to him, leaving its owner his life.
Then he was running. He fled past his first assailant, now staring with white-faced ructus fear, through the rubble of lost homes, out into the night, on and on through the streets, until he arrived in the quiet yard of a house with a dark green door. He wrapped the bloodstained jacket about his shoulders and sank down beneath an azalea bush. He stared at her window until dawn.