Crawling from my forgotten well, I had a flurry of secondary thoughts. Could I leave a trap behind here? Or a letter telling them that they were chasing the wrong creature? These hunters, if they were supernatural guardians and not humans, were not guarding just one building but were roaming the countryside – so did they have a limited jurisdiction? Might there be a boundary where other spirits patrolled?

A more immediate question, as my thirst started to burn my throat: why couldn’t I find even one deer?

I decided to leave nothing behind at the well. I resumed my running hunt north, loosely following the path of the river that blocked the west, slicing through the air and weaving through trunks toward the road, where roadkill might be scavenged. Without slowing I snatched up a helpless hare standing in front of its burrow and inhaled its lifeblood in ten paces, a fine starter snack.

My clothes were starting to fall apart at this point, the joints stretched and tattered and unweaving, and my shoes disintegrated on this night from the superhuman pace. Sticks and stones poked me, and my balance failed a few times, but even the sharp gravel at the edge of the road was harmless to my bare soles. In time I felt even more sure-footed than before, and wondered what would happen if I devoured a goat. The hare might have contributed to my sharpening ears, which still gave me sonic images to piece together the darkness atop my sharpening vision, and I now wondered about birds.

That night, sliding into a field, I tried my first bird: a tiny barn owl patrolling for scampering movements in the tall grass of a quiet field. In all my killings so far I had targeted the head, but the owl turned in half an escape as I rocketing in with a raised fist, and for the first time I flubbed the clean kill, breaking the back with the hit instead.

The owl was still breathing when I found it in the grass, and I felt … well, a bit awful. A bit human, I guess. I wondered how long this would last as I kept feeding, as I crushed the owl’s tiny skull, licking my hands. Eventually I wouldn’t feel how awful I was at all.

Oh wow, was all I could think, for many minutes.

I had taken raw power before, and a few attributes, but now there were … other things. Memories of flight. Of catching mice, eating, hawking up pellets of fur and bone. It was a tiny little life review: from hatching and struggling for food in a crowded nest, all the way to the sudden strike of my hand, and the second blow on the ground that ended everything.

Barking dogs interrupted my confusion and wonder. The sloppy takedown and my confusion had been enough to let some of the nearby farm’s dogs notice me.

No. I fled back to the woods, too fast for the dogs. I did not want this extra ingredient in each meal – everything from puppyhood to playing fetch to the details of my destruction of the dog, however fast, would sour the drink.

That owl. That owl was still inside my head. Looking around, twisting her head like that girl in The Exorcist – and I knew it had been a female owl, atop the other details of its life. And beneath that, swimming out of the unconscious mind, that hare I had consumed earlier also scampered, stopping and standing alert with quivering nose. Were these animal ghosts? Did they even know that they were dead? They would fade away gradually, but at first they were quite bewildering.

There were others, now that I was looking within and looking for them. A collection of the animal dead, scampering in my mind. That skunk was sniffing around and its tail flicked up, as if trying to spray – and it seemed confused, in my mind’s eye, when there was no smell. My mind’s nose didn’t smell anything, anyway.

Well, how dare I complain about being hunted? I thought.