The dying man really was gone. I found the tree he had been lying against, but he was gone. The tracks were still on the ground from where I'd dragged the demon to the festival site, but there were no physical tracks showing where the man had gone.
Now though, there was a smell. The metallic smell of blood was in the air. Mixed in were mud and rainwater soaked clothing. He must have spent a long time on the road. His smell moved away from town, deeper into the woods.
The feeling of being in the woods had changed. Marcus the hunter had explained moving through the woods when I was younger. He said that the woods tended to get out of a person's way. Animals could hear people from far off. They could hear the sounds a person made, and from that they knew how long they had until the person reached them. Marcus explained that a hunter had to train themself to become a little more like the woods, so they could sneak up on the animals.
My new body was bigger and heavier, but it was also quiet. The leaves barely rustled beneath my feet and the twigs never seemed to break like they did before. I could hear hundreds of animals all around me, and often the same scene played out. The animals either couldn't hear me, or if they could they thought I was just another animal moving through the woods. Then when I was very close their heartbeats went wild as they realized that I wasn't one of them. They could sense that I was still like a person, but they'd never encountered a person who could sneak up on them the way I had.
Sometimes I passed an old tree that towered above the others. These trees were wider than a dinner table and smelled old in the same way a person can smell old. Some of them were marked with faded claw marks or burns.
I came to a stream and drank as much as I could. Across the bank from me was a family of deer. They plunged their muzzles into the water to drink. I wondered if I could do it the same way, but decided to cup my hands instead. I drank cup after cup, and was there long after the deer had left.
The sun was high in the sky when I first felt hunger. I hadn't eaten anything since the demon two days before. That whole time I hadn't felt hungry once, but I'd been distracted by everything else. Now it felt as though I couldn't focus on a single thing until I was fed.
In the air I smelled a boar moving through the woods. Luke and I had found picture books in abandoned houses, and in the books were pictures of men on horses riding down boars. Boar meat was rare because they were aggressive, and Marcus didn't like taking the risk. He had a long scar down one leg from a run in with a boar.
I glided through the woods without a sound. There was no sense of a plan or of the danger I might be putting myself in. All that mattered was that I caught him off guard.
I rounded one of the bigger trees and saw the boar shuffling through the bushes. He had shaggy gray fur and dark eyes. Without really knowing what I was doing I threw my knife at him. It spun end over end and lodged itself in the boar's neck. It kicked its legs a few times and died.
I ran from cover and heard birds take off above me. I nearly dropped to all fours and began eating, but I remembered dad's scared face. I wasn't an animal, so I wouldn't eat like an animal.
I gathered loose sticks into a pile and lit them with sparks from my cleaver. Once the fire was burning I speared the boar and began turning him over the coals. While I cooked I caught a few glimpses of wolves and even a bear off in the distance. They watched me, but kept their distance.
For a moment I forgot all my troubles. I was caught up in the fun of making my own fire and cooking my own food. Life in town tended to feel static. People had their own roles, and we all had to carry them out so everyone survived. Out here I was doing all the roles myself, and so far I was turning out to be a good hunter.
When the boar had gone from pink to brown, and the fat dripped down into the fire and sizzled, I finally let myself eat. I cut a long strip of boar and held it in both hands. It was so tender that it nearly fell apart before I could take a bite.
I bit into the meat and chewed slowly to savor such a rare taste. Immediately I had to spit it out. It tasted awful, like puddle water and dirt.
It didn't make any sense. Two days ago that boar would have been the envy of anyone in town. The change meant I could no longer stand the taste of wild meat. In my frustration I flung the boar into the woods and watched as a pack of wolves squabbled over it.
It was such a waste. Back home people went years without seeing an animal like that, and I'd just thrown one away. I sat and wondered if I was fated to starve to death, and if there was anything the new body would accept. All my early pride had evaporated.
The woods suddenly seemed much bigger. The trees and the animals seemed to draw back away from me. I was not one of them. I could kill them, but there was no place for me in their cycles of living, dying, and then having their death benefit those who were still alive.
I took a long breath in and smelled the air. I wanted to see if there was anything that smelled appetizing. Underneath all the usual smells of woods, animals, and even the faint smell of a storm was something that caught my attention. It was so faint that I barely noticed it, but once I did I felt ravenous. An image flashed in my mind of a faceless animal lying beneath me while yellow blood dripped down onto its body.
I inhaled again and found the smell. Like a fine thread it wound between the trees. All other thoughts were pushed to the back of my mind as I followed along.
Suddenly I wasn't sneaking up on animals anymore. They heard me coming from a long way off and didn't wait for me to arrive. In that sense the forest became eerily silent.
The sun finally set, and the smell was becoming stronger. I had to fight the urge to drop on all fours and race toward it. Above the trees I saw a shadowy building set against the sky.
The forest gave way to pavement. Long stretches of asphalt looped around the building. The streets were cracked and overgrown with weeds. The building itself was all faded glass. The setting sun was an orange spot on the windows. I could see myself as a crooked shape in the reflection.
The smell was coming from inside the building. I found doors chained shut, but almost every window at the ground level was broken. The hard part was finding one big enough to let me through.
I stood in an atrium on the first floor. The other floors were made from balconies that left a gap between the first floor and the ceiling. The inside of the building was filled with dust and discarded things. Desks were scattered around the hallways. Rotted books soaked up puddles. The air smelled of mildew and rot.
Once I was inside I felt a tension. It was hard to explain why I suddenly gripped the cleaver tighter. My pulse came in a hard but slow rhythm, and my mind cleared itself of intrusions. Every part of me was relaxed, but I knew that at a moment's notice I could lash out.
"I could smell you coming," a voice above me said. "The same way you could smell me."
I looked up toward the source of the voice. He was standing on one of the balconies a few floors above me. Outside the light was beginning to disappear, so I could only see the silhouette of the speaker. He was tall and built like a house.
"Are you the same as me?" I called up to him.
"I am. And that means one of us must destroy the other."
The figure retreated from the edge and disappeared. I heard heavy footsteps echo through the building. Everything vibrated with each step and sent clouds of dust into the air. I gripped the cleaver and wondered if I should hide, but hunger kept me rooted to my spot.
From a dark hallway the figure began to take shape. He was a few feet taller than I was, and much thicker. Scalloping black plates covered every inch of him, so that he resembled a massive bug. His head was half covered by a tall collar of armor, but the top half had blunt horns like a beetle.
His voice was a deep bass. "I almost had it, but it gored me at the last moment. I should thank you for finishing it off, but now I'm turning into one of them."
I smelled him again and caught a familiar smell under his monstrous exterior. Most of him was the reek of beetles underneath rocks, but there was something that might have been human once. It smelled like blood and leather. Standing across from me was the dying man from the forest.
