Wonderful Pain

Chapter 26: Monster

Here it is. After months and months and months, here it is.

~SarcasticSheDevil

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Chapter 26

He screamed.

He could feel the wind tearing through his hair, his fur. He felt the waves crest, almost as if they were rising up to meet him, as he hit the water. It felt as if thousands of icy needles were stabbing into his body, so cold was the ocean. And yet, he did not feel that pain.

The pain that he felt was of a different kind.

He sunk to the bottom of the ocean slowly, but he did not die – he did not need to breathe.

He felt the pressure enveloping him, trying to compress him down into a seemingly microscopic particle – but even though he felt it, his body could not be crushed.

He sunk into depths that no being but the sea creatures that lurked and thrived in the darkness could survive.

And the whole way down, he screamed.

His thirst could never be sated. He could never be satisfied. It was always there, as if the flames of Hell themselves were devouring him from the inside out. The last time he had tried to Shift, he had not become entirely lupine.

Instead, he had Shifted into a monster.

His skull, his jaw, grew, extended, to make room for the long, curved fangs that exploded from his mouth. He grew in height, in size, his knees bending backwards, black, matted fur sprouting from his entire being, his arms remaining shaped like a human’s. His hands, instead of turning completely into paws, grew wicked claws from his fingertips. He had a tail, but longer than it should have been, thinner than it should have been…with less fur than it should have had. It looked like a snake, the way that while he stood, it lay curled around his feet.

His eyes turned completed black.

His range of vision extended.

He was half wolf, half man, have demon from the depths of Hell.

He had raised his head to the moon that night, but instead of howling,

He had screamed.

*     *     *

Theo P.O.V

We ran for hours. For days. For what might have even been weeks upon weeks, but it was hard to tell. You could barely see the sun through the tops of the trees, so dense were the woods. On the occasions when we would near civilization, we knew we had lost the scent – and we had to backtrack constantly, trying to find where we left off, trying to go back and to make sense of clues that were constantly fading and then reappearing in the most unlikely places.

It was a while before we realized that John had no idea where he was going, what he was doing. Before, we had assumed that he had had a plan; it was unlike John to barge into things. He always had to have things neat and organized in his mind.

However, this was not some party that he had to put together. This was not a project, not an essay, not some type of homework assignment from school. This was much, much different.

And all of us were unprepared. Including, so it seemed, John.

Everything blurred together. The trees flying past, birds crying out and fleeing to the skies as we approached. We spoke little, and thought even less. All our minds were focused on one cause. One cause that seemed to be impossible.