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He clutched his blade, a look of disgust on his features. He was a young man in his mid-twenties, around the same time I estimated I had spent on this Earth, although I couldn't say for sure.
The scent of some strange herb hit my nostrils, rich and alluring enough that the hunger it sparked sent a fresh surge of adrenaline through me, allowing me to lift my head. I turned my head just in time to see another man walking toward the hunter, his clothing comparatively normal. Black pants, black shirt, and a long, dark cloak that brushed his knees. His hair was black, too, his pale skin and the white clerical collar around his throat the only deviations from his color scheme. He held a pistol in his left hand and a thin, curved blade in his right. Blood dripped from the blade, hitting the toe of his right black leather boot in a steady rhythm.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
It was mesmerizing. Hypnotic, though not as much as the scent I realized was emanating from him.
A hungry growl tore from my throat as I tried to claw my way up again.
The man turned his head slightly to look at me, revealing the rest of his face beyond his elegant profile. His face was cold and hard, the angular planes sculpted in smooth marble free of any blemish. He had a strong jaw and gray eyes as hard and piercing as the blade in his grasp.
He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and in that moment, the hunger his scent had stirred up warred with a different impulse I hadn't known in long enough that it felt foreign to me.
It felt… human.
The only shift in his expression in that instant our eyes met was the slight downward curl of his lip and the darkening of his eyes. When I looked at him, I saw an angel, terrifying in his perfection—but when he looked at me, he saw me for exactly what I was.
A beast.
He turned back to the other man on the rooftop, who presently seemed torn between finishing off his quarry and his apparent wariness of the hunter in front of him. Maybe he, too, recognized that he was in the presence of a far superior being.
"Castor," the first hunter said, his voice a hiss of indignation, as if the other man's name were a curse. "The Church has no business here."
Castor...
A fitting name for an angel.
Castor lifted his blade so the dull end of it rested against his shoulder. "This is neutral ground. You chased your prey off the Order's territory."
The other man gritted his teeth, looking for a moment like the things he hunted. His eyes were such a light, golden shade of brown that I wouldn't have been surprised to learn he was a wolf in sheep's clothing as well, if it were possible. I didn't know if my original form was even still accessible to me, or if I was trapped forever as this monster, but my death was imminent, so it didn't seem to matter.
The promise of death seemed sweeter if it came from the angel's hand.
"Even so, I found him first," said the hunter.
"Take him, then," Castor said, pivoting on his left boot to face me. He held his left hand out and gestured at me. "Come on. Don't be shy."
The hunter tensed, but he didn't take his eyes off of Castor. It was clearly a threat. Mockery.
Rage seemed to overcome his sense of self-preservation, and he ran in a straight line across the rooftop toward the other man. He swung his blade, but by the time it arced through the spot where Castor had been, he was no longer there.
In a flash of movement that was only visible to me now that my senses had sharpened—and seemed fixated on this man in particular—Castor was on the hunter's other side. He swept out with his blade and the hunter blocked it by a narrow margin, his arm trembling as their blades remained locked for a moment. He was the first to relent, breaking the lock of the blades to roll past Castor, sliding into a crouch on the other end of the rooftop.
He seemed about to attack again when something else caught his eye. Something to my left. I turned and saw another man, dressed in the same black clothes and clerical collar as Castor, drop down onto the rooftop. He rose to his full height, towering and lean, as if the drop-off beyond his narrow perch wouldn't be a fatal fall.
Castor’s hair was smooth and slicked back, styled and elegant, but this man's brown hair was wild and untamed, loose curls brushing the edge of his collar. His eyes were equally wild behind partially tinted, perfectly circular lenses. His glasses were perched low enough on the bridge of his nose that I could see his irises were a striking shade of gold remarkably similar to the eyes of the man across the roof, even though his strange garb suggested he was on the same side as Castor.
"A Rosebud and a mutt," the newcomer said in a voice like a demon’s, seductive and raspy, before his tongue darted out across his lower lip. Something about the way he said Rosebud made it seem like an epithet, and the way the hunter's expression soured suggested he felt the same. "And here I thought it was gonna be a boring night."
There was a hint of a smile on Castor's lips, a malicious thing that turned his angelic face wicked. "See? You should let me take the lead more often."
The other priest—or whatever the hell he was—scoffed, reaching for the twin blades sheathed on either hip, pulling each one from the scabbard with his opposite hand. "Let's cut him up and send the pieces back to the haggard old bitch one at a time."
The hunter swallowed audibly, taking another step back toward the ledge. He looked between them, and any plans he might've had about continuing to fight for his quarry seemed to dissolve. He pulled a gun off his belt and fired a grappling hook at the nearest building before leaping off, the hook barely catching on the ledge as he disappeared.
"That's what I thought," the golden-eyed priest sneered, turning back to me. He strode over, crossing the rooftop in a few long strides, and bent down to study me. "Now, what have we here?" he asked, nudging me with the toe of his boot.
I snarled and snapped my jaws at him with what little energy I had left. He brought his boot down on my skull hard enough that I blacked out for a second when my head bounced off the roof.
