Hunger Pangs

Part 6

I just want to go home, wallow in self pity on my stupid bed and try to not vomit.

Crap. Now I've dropped my car keys somewhere, probably back there in the yard. Stupid, stupid. I kick rocks in the driveway in frustration. Nothing has gone right since the moment I said yes to a cup of coffee with a handsome stranger.

My keys are lying next to my now-empty biohazard bag; the bright red plastic flutters in the breeze. Maybe an animal?

"Your offering, it was delicious."

Clutching my keys in my fist, I whip around. A tall man is standing behind me in the dappled shadows. "What is your name, half-blood?" His strangely accented voice is oily and clings to my ears. The ghoul.

"Mirri?" My voice sounds squeaky with fear. Oh crap! Oh crap!

"There are not many of our kind in this young country. You are the first I've seen in many decades. Where do you come from, little half-blood Mirri?" His irises are so fiercely orange, they burn like embers and his earlobes are deeply pointed, much more than mine were before my piercings. But what transfixes me is that when he speaks I see a mouth full of pearly razors. A shark's mouth made by nature to bite chunks of skin and strip flesh from bones. I run my tongue over my blunt, inefficient teeth.

"I-- I-- Romania... Adopted!"

Curious and judgmental, he circles me closely, "Ah. A cuckoo from the Old World. Reared in the New World. Did you eat your siblings, young cuckoo?"

Menacing, he smiles softly. His breath smells like old death and ripe decomposition. The ghoul reaches out and tugs on my earring, then strokes a lock of my hair in an alarmingly intimate way.

He's sniffing my hair!

Sharpened thick yellow fingernails graze my cheek, leaving red welts behind.

I reflexively pull away and blurt, "I -- no. I'm an only child. I'm a cuckoo?"

"You are woefully uneducated. Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nest of other birds. The cuckoo chick hatches and is bigger, louder and much hungrier than the rest of the brood, so they get all the food. Eventually the inferior chicks die or are killed. I assumed that you would have eaten the weaker human offspring."

The ghoul says as an almost casual aside, "Infant humans are quite delicious. Tender and squirming."

He glides to a tattered woven rainbow lawn chair that wasn't there before and sits, like a king holding court, then gestures with a grand sweeping motion at the ground. "Sit. I wish to learn more about you." It's a command, not a request.

Cautiously I kneel, ready to spring up and run. Ropy muscles bunch under his short shirt sleeves. He could catch me in seconds if I did run, and rip out my throat with his bare hands. Even if I am part ghoul, he'd feast on me, I know it.

"Okay?"

Maybe I can amuse him or stall until Forbo returns. If he returns. Stall Mirri, stall!

"Why do you hide what you are with those painted lenses and those warping earrings? Have you no pride in your noble heritage?" He thumps his chest with a fist. "You're only a half-blood. I suppose you are the progeny of a different kind of hunger than we ghouls usually focus on, but still!" Licking his lips, devouring me with his gaze like a famine victim at an all-you-can-eat buffet. "You should be stalking the weak and the wounded, eating your fill and propagating the species." Then he tugs on his pointed earlobe and smiles, but it never reaches his eyes.

"I didn't know what I was." I want to run away, but my legs are shaking. "I just found out, like a day ago. I thought I was just a human freak."

Propagating the species? This is not an option. Ever.