Page 31 of Psycho Beasts

Like a desperate man, I looked back and forth at Sadie’s and Cobra’s battered bodies.

My eyes burned with unshed tears, while my throat was scratchy with the screams that bubbled up but wouldn’t release.

Every muscle in my body strummed with tension and pain. A type of mind-melting agony I hadn’t experienced for over a hundred years.

The remnants of suffering dragged me back into the past, back when I’d been Sadie’s age and unaccustomed to physical suffering. Back to the last time I’d known true, bone-wrenching pain.

When the oligarchy had paid me to hunt down a massive elk that was carrying a plague.

I was a new alpha, and it was a job nobody else had wanted.

Over mountains and vast forests, I stalked the plagued beast.

At first, I hunted as a bear. But my shifted form required more nutrients, and I quickly ran out of food a few weeks into the hunt.

I didn’t have time to waste, so I shifted back and followed my prey on two legs.

It was the dead of winter, which meant the red sun didn’t bother to rise above the horizon.

At first, snow turned to sleet, and it froze to my face in a mask of ice.

Next came the hail.

Massive balls of ice pummeled from the sky. They smashed into trees with loud cracks. Ice exploded around me.

Then the blizzard hit.

When I finally found the elk, I was frozen to the bone and had fasted for two weeks straight.

In a blur of agony, I snapped its neck with my bare hands. Covered in blood, icicles dripping off each of my braids, I turned around and trekked back.

I didn’t reach civilization for another two weeks.

Over a month with no food.

Before my journey, I’d foolishly thought that if I was hungry enough, I would just hunt for food until I was nourished.

But in the dead of winter, the few animals that didn’t hibernate were the ones crafty enough to escape a predator.

That month, I learned an important lesson.

When food was nonexistent and every cell in your body was screaming for sustenance, you were already too weak to fix the problem.

Hiking for miles in the hail and driving sleet, something changed inside me. My body burned with hunger for so many hours that a part of me stopped recognizing the agony.

Every step forward through the chest-deep snow was a step away from giving in to my base urges.

The urge to curl up into the cold and sleep. The urge to gnaw on bark like a madman.

Ever since that hunt, physical pain hadn’t affected me the same way.

I’d left a piece of myself in those woods.

In the murder of a diseased elk.

The man who had returned from the hunt had known a depth of suffering that was unmatched.

Either the cold broke you, or it remade you into something sharper than ice and tougher than pounding hail.

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