Page 416 of Rage

The echoing clank of my teeth made him flinch. He looked over his wool clad shoulder. It was gratifying to see the flat cap that covered his dirty hair doing nothing to hide the widening of his eyes or the rising of his thick brows. The morphing of his expression as fear curled through the creature’s chest and bloomed on his pale face.

Yes. Fear me. I am here for your pain, your blood, and your teeth.

I clicked my teeth again, harder, the sound so bright and pure. The sliver that coated them making the noise brighter and sharper. My claws echoed through the air as I stalked forward, the silver tips ring bright and fairy-like as I clambered throughthe gutter. I winced as my bare fingers and toes sunk into the unidentifiable muck that lined the gutters of the streets. It squished between them and coated my skin, skin that was still bloody from the last kill. Had it only been half a day ago? What had I done with the time? Time wasn’t as linear as it had been before my near-death experience and transformation. Now it keeled and yawed, like a ship on the rough seas, moving rapidly before stalling out, moments stretching for ages and hours condensing into a single breath.

“P-please,” he whimpered. Fear was coalescing around him, filling the air with its bitter tang, wafting off his skin and trailing through the mist.

I pounced.

He was smaller than I remembered.

I knew a lot had changed about me when I took this curse of vengeance instead of accepting a clean death, but I hadn’t gotten bigger. Perhaps it was that he cowered before me. Yes, that’s what made him so much smaller, so much weaker. A pathetic little thing, just like the cowering worm he’d thought to turn me into. His vampire strength was useless now, his speed was gone, melted away in the face of the endless, rising fear thatIinspired, thatIwas.

His first scream was music, the cry cut off as I rammed my razor sharp talons, the tips caked in muck and gore, through the base of his throat.

“I couldn’t scream either,” I whispered, gently pulling them back out, watching as the blood dripped onto the pristine white of his cheap shirt, the red blooming over it like the most decadent rose.

His sobs when I pried his mouth open were wretched and pitiful. When I peeled his jaw wider, tearing the flesh of his cheeks and giggling while I did it, I could feel the moment he remembered me. That he knew what he had done, and how hehad created his own demise. I squealed along with him as my claws dug through the soft tissue of his gums, continuing to burrow into the bones of his face. Followed by the satisfying crunch when I ripped the first tooth free, one of the most precious ones, his dainty vampire fang. I held it up to the weak orange light of the gas lamp, admiring the brilliant pearly shine of it.

Oh, it wasperfect.

His tears mixed with his blood, spooling off of his ruined face in long, thick strands of gore. The fluids, thick, warm and viscous as it pooled around where I knelt, mixing with the muck of the street, the piss and the shit, the grime polluting the already filthy cobblestones with gore.

“Tears, tears, tears,” I sang, jabbing my silver claws into the ruins of his mouth, plucking out his teeth one by one.

I chittered, and he chomped. I rustled while he glommed, the sounds of my hands working over his flesh, an orchestra of the grotesque. His lips sucked, his tongue licked, the sloppy sounds they made a delightful counterpoint to the harsher crack of my inexorable claws and implacable greed. If only this silly little man would stop whining.

“Sticks and stones, and teeth and bones, and sticks and stones, and teeth and bones, and teeth and bones, and bones and teeth, and teeth, and teeth and-” I sang the nonsense words as I worked the teeth from their bony cavern homes, drowning out the weakening protests he was attempting to make.

“Have you had enough vengeance, little one?” The strange voice, calm and faintly amused, pulled me out of the bloody reverie I’d sunk into.

I whirled, baring claws littered with chips of bone and threads of flesh to the stranger who’d dared approach me, who encroached upon my kill and interrupted my meal. I hissed, ready to fight.

“Don’t worry, toothtaker. I’m not here for your prize,” he continued, holding pale green hands up in a placating gesture. I eyed his fingers. They were soft, especially compared to mine. His fingers would be weak and useless at any of the tasks my own excelled in. How would he strip the flesh from this corpse? My fingers were long and spidery, ending in sharp metallic points that I could sink into the flesh and bone of my victims to tear their teeth out by the root. His teeth were flat, useless, and soft.

The idea of plucking those bones from his face and pulverizing them turned my stomach, though. He wasn’t one of the vampires I hungered for.

He had no fangs for my collection.

“Mine,” I growled, crouching low over the moldering corpse, rooting through the shredded gums for the final two teeth, a pair of fat, squat molars.

Hargrave

“It’s yours.” I assured the toothtaker as she turned back to me once again, another pair of teeth in her hand. I stood very still, taking in her curtain of tangled, black hair, pale, gore-splattered skin, glittering teeth and claws. Her wide, reptilian eyes were like the black of an abandoned well, of a winter night, of the new moon. They ate the light as ruthlessly as she devoured her victims.

“He held me down…” she whispered, carefully weaving silver wire around the base of a fang. “He helped,” she moaned, despair colored the words, and I froze.

“They hurt you?” I asked, careful to stay calm in the face of this awesomely violent being.

“Hurt me,” she gasped, closing her bottomless eyes and clutching the remaining fang hard enough to draw blood. “In a sky so dark and so still, on a night with no moon, they came to kill.”

“A kill, little demon?”

“A death, a kill, a maim, an ill will-” she was slipping away from me, heedless of anything around her as she created another fang pendant and threaded the two onto a necklace that, I realized with a shudder, was not ropes of pearls stacked around her slender throat, but a collection of teeth. A staggering number of ivory white teeth, vampire fangs interspersed with the more normal molars and incisors, all of them carefully strung along silvery, delicate chain.

“He helped?” I nodded to the vampire’s corpse.

“He helped, he helped, he helped, he helped…” she was rocking back and forth, chanting the words.

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