Her shadow traverses the surface of the cold bricks like a silent wraith in the night. Silent; no trace of its passing. Senses keen on the zephyr of the night, wafting with it the scents of a population numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Chimneys skewer the blanket of dark, leaving punctures in the form of a thousand burning stars. Chimneys that lie dormant, and have done so for years, yet still carbon scores the rims leaving the sight sooty to behold. Halcyon before the storm, dark clouds mar the pristine horizon, looming with the spectacular power they hold within their bellies. The sweet scent of rain already pervades the air, mixing with the rising heat from day warmed tiles to form a near tangible essence. The starlight blends with the artificial rays emanating from curved streetlamps, and the ambience is enough to make out parked cars in driveways. She, however, could see much farther into the heavy gloom that settles over the cityscape like an asphyxiating blanket. Her eyes could make out the pristine little houses with their pristine little lawns surrounding like a moat of green. Glass and brick and steel and mortar; these pathetic façades will not hold her back.
Footfalls like the dropping of leaves in Autumn, none will hear her passing. The lonely hour is as quiet as a tomb, no cars mar the street with their passing, no fumes creep their way from the windows of houses. She approaches one such window, perched upon the gutter above. The metal sighs under her weight, but is lost in the sounds of the night. She breathes in the stink of the human dwelling and it sets her hair on end. Musky and heavy, it wafts up from the crack under the pane. A crack easily exploited. Two steps; a push and she is inside. It’s a kitchen and it has been cleaned recently enough to leave the faint taste of pine in the air. The clock on the wall watches her with its cycloptic eye. Hands point right from one another, as if holding an accusatory finger. She doesn’t care, for judgement is a realm foreign to her. Judgement is for the pious and well-to-do. She is neither.
The scent of sweat draws her through a doorway, carpet underfoot muffling the sound of her steps. A door ajar; a room beyond. She salivates as she nears, pads soft on the floor. Silent, as the wraith, she stalks her shadows cast in the light of the full moon. Drawing close to the wall, a figure draped in cotton lies before her. Unmoving save for the gentle rise and fall of an indistinct mass in the centre.
There was no time to scream. Barely time to even awake from the slumber cycle. Sharp. Pain. Hot. Steamy scents pervade her nostrils as the coppery taste of blood fills her mouth. She bites down again, and again. Tendrils of flesh snap and tear from one another with each clamping of her powerful jaws. Claws involuntarily tear at cloth and skin alike, ripping both to shreds barely recognisable as their prior forms. Canines sink deep within pink flesh, and the quivering warm meat slides down her throat. She moans with the sensation, bringing her close to ecstasy. Her fur is matted with sticky blood, and she licks it clean with her tongue. Like sandpaper against the broken skin of her prey, she laps the juices of her labour, and without a sound, disappears into the night. None would know of her arrival nor departure that night. Merely hours later and she is home once more, her head cupped gently in her masters kind hand.
