Howl

One

❗️Content warning❗
References to groping and gore.

-----

The red marks from five splayed fingers on my throbbing cheek streaked across the rows of mirrors in the restroom. The steel door handle rebounded with a sharp tock from the force I had used to push it down. The door slammed into the wall and I strode out, my fingers fiddling with my silver suit buttons. I imagined her face on the elevator button and punched it. My toes tapped, counting down the numbers on the display overhead from six to two.

I looked down at my scarlet Armani suit and glared at the liquid foundation stain. It was a gift from my grandmother the pig had ruined in a heartbeat.

The audacity of that wretch to raise her hand against her head manager! Had I not pulled the right strings, that skeleton of a girl would've never made it out of Gangnam. Did Seo-eun think that everything came on a silver platter to a K-pop girl band after their debut? Arisu Light had to go on fifty dates with our CEO just to secure a Seoul tour. All I had asked for was one date. And when I tried to kiss her, she...

I glared at her image on the life-sized posters plastered on the walls near the elevator. Those pouty lips had once been two parallel strips of dried skin. The sharp jawline she was being celebrated for came at the cost of a billion won check fished out of my pocket. The double eyelid surgery, the nose job and even the not-so-subtle silicone implants that gave her wiry frame some feminine curves, everything, had come exclusively from my wallet. And the leech dared, she dared to slap me in front of her bandmates and assistants.

The elevator pinged and its steel doors separated, spilling out soft golden light and a soothing low-fi tune. The teenager standing inside had a Hello Kitty themed face-mask covering half her face and a soft black fringe obscuring her forehead.

Her almond-shaped eyes were thrown wide open as she clutched the translucent folder closer to her chest.

Inside the folder were filled papers and music sheets. The girl was probably a new trainee, and her slouched posture would need immediate fixing if she wanted to debut. She dropped her stare, bowed and moved aside as I boarded the elevator. The button with a four on it was already pressed.

My fingers pulled loose the red tie strangling me as the doors closed and ruffled my brown hair to give it more volume. My companion pretended to be engrossed in her phone, swiping left and right. But I could see the girl ogling at me through my lashes. All women were the same when it came to good looking men such as myself; their brains would go into monkey-mode and gape at me like I were a sack of peanuts.

Her sneakers tapped a beat that clashed with the elevator music. The exhaust fan fitted into the metal roof whirred away overhead, mixing the fading scents of my cologne with her strawberry perfume.

"Am I pretty?"

The lights in the elevator flickered briefly along with a rather brutal jerk, making us both look up, hoping that the elevator wouldn't stop mid-way. Thankfully, the machinery tittered back to normal.

Our gazes connected. She blinked out a hair strand and repeated, the fabric of her mask moving with her lips. The voice that repeated the question had the soft, melodious lilt of a singer.

"Am I pretty, sir?"

My hands scrambled up my collar to rub my burning neck. She wasn't exactly what I would find attractive; her pointy ears jutted out and her shoulders too hunched. Then again, I had seen even the ugliest of school girls bloom into vixens capable of stopping male hearts with a wink. I nodded and played along, unwilling to lose another trainee to the fragile female ego.

"You're a natural beauty unlike those plastic mannequins you find walking around in Gangnam. Must be in your genes," I said with a shrug to emphasize the last sentence.

My arms wrapped themselves around me, the hairs on the exposed parts standing up on their goosebumps in the sudden chill.

The more I looked at her, the prettier she seemed. Sure there was a little work needed here and there, but I could see the goddess hidden within the scrawny, hormonal casing. The girl covered her face with a folder and giggled in a way that she might have found cute, but sounded like the chittering of a bat to me.

"What do you think is my prettiest feature, sir? I'd like to improve my makeup game on that part for my debut."

I pondered about it for a while; she certainly did possess a pair of large, intense, brown eyes.

"Little lady, what huge, pretty eyes you have, haha."

"All the better to see you with, sir." The girl laughed.

Her fingers moved behind her ears and pulled back the white bands holding the Hello Kitty mask to her face. The lights flickered as the machinery above us coughed and spluttered to a stop.

My fingers fumbled in the dark, hoping to make contact with her assets.

In the silence that displaced the sounds of the fan, the cables pulling up the elevator and the gentle music itself, I could hear the beats of my fluttering heart. Beads of sweat burned the bruises Seo-eun had made on my cheeks as they flowed down, yet the chill from earlier turned the rest of my skin numb. A faint screech fell on my ears that sounded like someone keying a car's metal hood from a distance. A shiver travelled up the nape of my neck. It was probably the people on the floor outside our little prison.

"Heh-Hey, kid, you alright there?" I asked, my jaw trembling as the cold seized control of my bones.

"Whoa," I exclaimed and staggered back as her pale face popped into my sight. My eyes adjusted to the static grey and darkness of my surroundings. The shadows were either playing a trick on me or her ears just seemed bigger and sharper on either side of her head.

"Kid, what happened...what happened to your ears?"

"Nothing," she replied.

"All the better to hear you with, darling," she crooned, her voice dropping into a luscious, smooth whisper. I could hear her inhale slow and deep underneath my strained panting. Then there was nothing from her side. I gulped, feeling the drop and rise of my Adam's apple in my throat, and listened. My ears registered the metallic screeching from earlier, this time coming from right outside the elevator. My eyes darted across the walls, taking in my cage made of lights casting bizarre shadows and glares across the metal surfaces.

A sharp pain sprouted at the lower right corner of my abdomen, tracing a path up the middle of my torso till it reached the pit of my throat. The bruises on my cheek throbbed like war drums keeping rhythm with the pulsations of the pain in my body. The lights flickered back on for a split second and my screams were stolen from me.

"My, my, my," I could only rasp while standing in a puddle of crimson blood flowing free from my gutted belly. "What huge teeth you have."

The kumiho towering over me grinned a little wider, letting the skin over her protruding jaw retract, giving way to a vulpine muzzle full of ivory canines. As the creature shed the final vestiges of her human disguise, her claws delivered the final cut.

"All the better to eat your liver with, perverted scum."

-----