What comes out of a wendigo when it bleeds – when it really bleeds – is something like the St. Elmo’s fire. Something like the polar aurora, something green and liquid and crawling, something that snakes around with its own will, trying to find the mouth or nose of a new body. She sucked and snatched up her blood as fast it came out of her. Almost.

For all her disadvantages she was still faster and stronger, but lunging like the starving beast that she was, each spring announcing itself vital milliseconds beforehand. Again and again I dodged her like a matador, hurling myself left and right over her arcing claws, dropping myself to the ground, trying to hit back. Finally I jumped in the right direction, forward and under her, tripping both feet, and her jaws broke on hard rock, releasing the first emission of this true blood. She huffed it up fast, but I saw it.

A trickle of cool rationality tried to get through my mind enough to strategize, compelling me to seize a leg and twist her, stamping into her groin for leverage, keeping her from rising. Those claws and teeth in motion were very deadly, but if it came to pinning and wrestling I might snap her like a bundle of sticks. With those stretched limbs I could make myself too close to hit.

But that glimmer of sense vanished because wrestling is a more intimate way to kill than chasing after someone – she couldn’t stop eating, and as soon as I actually got my hands on her I wasn’t able to stop mangling her either. I’d throw away better ways to kill to keep mangling, twisting, dislocating, not feeling her claws digging in as she would not feel or care about the poison.

Soon I was fisting the bitch with my arm down her throat and her jagged brown teeth at my shoulder, our bodies rolling over and under each other, our granite bed bashing us both. My poisoned blood was rushing into her straight from my tainted heart. Gila monster venom or skinwalker magic came forth, more advanced than anything I had – but I just liked how it hurt her. Now I was fully gone-over: there was no practical thought of improved odds, just the infliction of pain in the moment, the severity of the fucking, and I fucked her with fist and teeth, giving her a mastectomy on her un-flayed side, attacking like a chimp. There was only the pure pleasure of seeing my poisoned blood hurt her while she was unable to stop drinking, even when her eyes knew that it was poison, knew that a skinwalker witch had fouled her meal. She knew that it was summer and her power was waned, she knew that she was injured and should heal before continuing the chase the meal, and now she knew that I was something that thrived in darkness and barely felt the cold … but the hunger ruined everything, destroying all the years of experience.

Degradation, ejaculating and blinding and choking the victim – this was a kind of release that didn’t weaken me at all. Take my fluid, my life, my crawling seed, take it in every hole you little hungry whore, it will lessen you and not me. Not a single square inch of her could be called attractive – she was beyond anorexic, her hips like blades and her breasts airless balloons, every part undead and unholy, and her veins swirled with communion wine turned into black acid piss. But right then I didn’t care – she was every teasing bitch humbled and then fucked into the dirt.

The arm down her gullet was flensed, almost severed, but there was something beating close to my outstretched fingertips down in her torso. Something colder than the rest of her. I pushed in harder, letting her chow down on my shoulder, still locking up her legs with my own enough to keep us both on the ground. The cold calculation in my new and monstrous soul was still there for handling the pain, that little thing that humans complain about. Mental triage cut away less important things: my shattered legs as she now spun us both to get on top of me; the gashes to my head that made my left side naked bone above the ear, the scalp hanging off by a few pink strings, our interlocked fingers broken together in their jamming and clawing.

Her terribly stretched neck needed to be crumpled like a tin can to put that beating cold heart into reach. My tunneling awareness and lust – lust of the deviant who needs one specific thing to climax – felt a lot like that death-tunnel where the angel had smacked me.

An unraveling sensation far, far away … that was my intestines.

And then Nocome was prying out my right lung on her more forceful way to my heart through my side. The lung expanded and contracted in the deathly cold air, trying to suck back in – that almost distracted me, almost took me out of the coming/dying tunnel, where people who enjoy strangling themselves as they masturbate take their risk. But I had worked out the problem with Nocome’s heart, feeling it pulse while only seeing a black hole in her chest from the outside.

It had sunk down into her stomach – where else would a wendigo’s heart be?

My arm wasn’t long enough for that. Just leaning against each other and slowly ripping ourselves to pieces simply wouldn’t do, so I bashed out some of her teeth with my half-naked forehead and conducted a maneuver she couldn’t be familiar with: an enemy trying to get inside her mouth, dilating it and cracking open the jaw with the sound of a dry turkey wishbone snapping. A vile yellow tongue tried to strangle me, until I bit it off. At first her huge palms were hugging and pressing me up, encouraging my new course of action, forgetting my heart – then there was finally fluttering panic, a thought beyond pure hunger, and those talons of sharpened bone were now trying to pry me out. There was just enough mind left in this bitch to make my purpose clear.

Ironically, I had been reduced to one word in my own mind.

Handstand handstand handstand

She was trying to vomit me out, which was hard with my elbow somewhere in her neck and my teeth gnawing at the grey roof of her mouth. Nocome managed to find her feet. She bent down with her head hanging and pushed with all of her guts at once to get me away from her heart, slamming my feet back down to earth. I let my knees bend, and then I performed the hardest squat of my life, duckwalking toward her, her own weight sending me back up her dilated python-wide maw, my fisting arm held straight. Come bring me your tired, your poor, your heartless-bitch heart.

Her feet went up, and her hands went down, clawing in confusion on the rock I was straining to stand on. With her longer limbs she was finally in a handstand.

Without living connective tissue her heart was loose and swinging around in her guts, normally sunk by gravity, and now it finally sank in the opposite direction, up into the bottom of her throat and landing in my questing palm. Plop.

I held it, and started to scream. The orgasm from asphyxiation is supposedly fifty times better than normal, and I was in the light at the end of this horrible tunnel. Somewhere close my lung was coming out of my chest, and I felt cool air hissing on my own hammering heart.

Almost lost it there. Almost wanted to laugh and gloat and relish in the sight of a victim well-fucked. But I smashed Nocome’s heart in my fist first. It was a blackened, rotted fruit that dribbled beads of red ice like pomegranate seeds.

(first kill first murder as a monster and not a man I feel him he is north and west of where I bit him beyond the great river)

The death-spasm hurt me more than anything else, squeezing all around me, almost crackling my neck, clashing my radius and ulna together, breaking one of my eyes. The remaining and regrown teeth around my neck tried to close, piercing my jugular, drawing a hot gush of St. Elmo’s fire that burned my remaining eye. But more was coming in than rushing out – the feeling of dense acupuncture across my whole being was the feeling of taking from Nocome. Taking Nocome, all of her, the emaciated being disintegrating into a cloud of greenish sky-fire that crawled into every pore and crevice, a drug burning like the deepest frostbite on the way in.

In the vague afterward there was something very close to my heart, which still beat in cool air, my chest cavity opened and half-unpacked like a suitcase. At the climax of each heartbeat the lining of that red mass was just grazing … something …

I felt it, with ever beat, something hard. If my heart didn’t slow, didn’t stop expanding so far, it would eventually be pierced.

But, as with many men, sexual release is followed by rest. My thoughts – trying to come back together into sense, after the horrible melee – were scattering back apart.

Hurdle … sex and death … has to be strenuous as cardio test, force heart rate … up … filter out the … weak … so many old men go that way … peacock tail makes harder to fly easy to catch … but men who live anyway … must be strong … handicap guarantees strength … paradox … what?

Boom. Lights out.