Page 3

Here, though, he wasn’t in the meats’ own backyard, and he could take risks which might be otherwise unacceptable. His tongue stole out, its tip licking his lips in unconscious anticipation.

On the other hand, up here in the mountains, any meat would be scarce, unless he intended to raid one of the small, isolated villages, and without proper scouting that was an insanely dangerous thing to do. He shook his head. Raiding a village was out. He would take his chances in the hills.

Rolling the bitter coffee in his mouth, he waited for the moon to rise.

They left the cabin shortly before darkness fell.

In the gathering twilight, the forest was a wall of grey, its silence ominous and threatening. The sun had already vanished to the west in a smear of yellow-orange sky, and though the moon hadn’t yet appeared to the east, they could both feel its pull already, their nerve endings buzzing as the satellite’s influence worked its magic.

They had both stripped naked before leaving the cabin, silently and without embarrassment. Meat-form nudity was immaterial to what they would do tonight, and shame a piece of stupidity. Together, they walked down the slope below the cabin, stepping gingerly over the twigs and pebbles of the forest floor, until they could glimpse the lights of the distant village.

"It’s getting cold," the boy observed. The skin of his arms was covered with goose-pimples.

"Yes." The woman’s eyes were already turning amber. She looked over her shoulder in the direction of the moon. "It shouldn’t be long now."

"Should we try for the village?"

"Do you want to?"

The boy shrugged. "You know more about it than I do." His voice had begun to thicken as the first effects of the Change took hold. "If you think we shouldn’t, it’s all right. No problem."

The woman peered at him. Her eyes were going through the transition, her retinal structure changing, the sense of colour being discarded but not yet supplanted by the mirror-backed rods which would give her phenomenal night vision, so she couldn’t see very well. She could smell the desire in him, though, the pheromones he was exuding through his skin. He wanted the hunt, very badly. His body couldn’t disguise it.

"All right," she said quietly, crushing down her own misgivings. "We’ll try for the village."

The edge of the moon’s disc peeked over the horizon.

He had left his car when the sun set, and had clambered up a narrow stone staircase cut into the side of the cliff. Long ago the staircase had probably been safer, but now it was slippery with moss and crumbling at the edges. That didn’t disturb him, though. He had always been good at climbing.

At the top of the cliff, he found a large flat rock, from where he could watch the road, and sat down to wait.

His eyes began to glow amber in the last of the light.

The Hunter checked his hide for the last time before working his way into it.

It was a good hide, he thought, better than most. He had built it below a pine that had fallen in a storm, its crown still held up by a rock, and its shallow roots apparently still finding enough sustenance in the red soil to somehow keep itself alive. The triangular space between the rock and the trunk of the pine was big enough for his arms and shoulders, and he had dug away enough to provide support for his elbows. Dead branches draped over the trunk of the tree provided good enough camouflage.

He was in early middle-age, his short beard as grizzled as the long hair spilling from beneath his cap to touch his collar. He was dressed for the night, in midnight-blue jacket and black denims, his hands in black woollen gloves. His eyes nested in clusters of wrinkles, and were black and completely without expression.

When he came out to hunt, he stopped thinking of himself as an individual with a name and a life apart. He became the Hunter, and if he ever thought of himself in any other terms, he never let it enter his conscious mind.

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