When my mother disappeared, the hope of the tribe was not for her safe return. When her body was found in the woods several days later, you would think spring had finally come after a very long and harsh winter.

It made me angry, watching everyone put on the appearance of mourning, while I could see beneath that lie, see how everyone walked a bit more lightly, how peace shone through their eyes even as they schooled their faces into frowns. They smiled at me, as they had never done before, and though I knew those smiles were meant to seem sympathetic I could only read them as joy at being rid of her. The women all took me in their arms, which they'd also never done. Of course that was because my mother would never allow it.

Her body was not taken west to the caves where all the dead of my people were sent to rest, but to the south where she was placed in a hole in the earth and covered with stones. All the people came to our house to offer my father condolences. But I saw the lie even more profoundly in him. If he wept, it was from a greater relief than even the rest, or maybe from remembering her as she was before the first time she went into the woods.

She was carrying me in her womb then, but only halfway through the pregnancy and I had yet to become too heavy for her to work. A chicken had escaped from its pen and run into the woods. It was forbidden for anyone to go into the woods alone. Even the men went in groups for the hunt and were careful to stay together no matter what.

But I guess my mother thought she could catch the chicken before it led her too deeply into the trees. She was found stumbling back to the village through the gardens bleeding her life out along the way. She was torn open from her face down her neck and across her breast. There were savage wounds down her arms and back.

Somehow she survived then. She was kept in the wise woman's working house where her wounds were tended and prayers chanted over her daily to Ekaralonis, the goddess of our tribe. She lay unconscious the entire time, and it was thought that I was dead within her. My father would sit at her side, stroking her hair and mourning her former beauty as her wounds healed into horrid scars. Part of her face was gone, and her arms and back would bear the marks forever. The wise woman told my father that although my mother's wounds were healing, there seemed to be a poison in her body that no medicines could counteract. She did not think my mother would recover.

After some weeks my mother woke, but her eyes were empty and she didn't speak. She would never speak again. I moved in her womb, but even that brought no reaction from her. She continued in the wise woman's care, and was made to walk and lift heavy containers to restore her muscles in preparation for labor. My birth was difficult, and again it was feared that we both would die. Had our wise woman not been so skilled in her craft I surely would never have seen this world. I was named Ekara in thanks to the goddess.

When I was laid in my mother's arms, she at first stared through me as if I weren't there. But then something awoke in her. She sniffed my whole body over then clutched me to her. When the wise woman tried to move me to my mother's breast, she pushed the old woman and knocked her down. When my father tried to see me, she held me tightly and screamed at him, her eyes crazed and her twisted chin dripping with saliva. It was feared that she would kill me rather than be parted from me, and so they cautiously let us be. After some days, when it was determined that the wise woman could do nothing more for us, my mother was gently led to my father's house, and she seemed content to stay there.

Even as I grew, my mother would allow no one else to touch me, and would not allow me away from her ever. It seemed she always had a hand on me, holding my own, or her arm around my shoulders, keeping me close to her at all times. We lived with my father, but my mother completely ignored him, except when he brought us food. She and I slept together in a bed, and my father alone on the other side of our one-room house of grasses woven through a frame of sticks.

Hoping to stimulate my mother's mind to wakefulness again, he would speak to us constantly across the small fire in the center of the house, telling stories, news from the hunts or trading and skirmishes with neighboring tribes. My mother mostly ignored this altogether, although sometimes she would grow frustrated with him and scream wildly to silence him. But I loved the sound of his voice across the room, and I learned to calm her when she had these episodes. In time the unintelligible cadence of his voice became recognizable words, and in more time I learned to mimic them. That is how I learned speech.

I remember once my father had been away, and returned with a little doll for me, and wine traded from a tribe in the far south. He gave a little to my mother, and she was calm and pleasant for hours, smiling and cooing at me like other mothers did with their children, and we played with the doll. My father went to sleep happy that night, and my mother kept glancing at him as we played. Then she put the doll in my hands, and set me aside. She crawled out of our bed and across the floor to him on her hands and knees.

When she reached his bed, she sat back and pushed at his shoulder. He turned over, and gave a surprised smile on seeing her. She suddenly rocked forward and kissed him, but drew away just as quickly. He stroked her ruined face, and she leaned forward to kiss him again. I heard him saying her name over and over as she pulled away his furs and climbed on top of him. His hands were in her hair as she began to kiss him all over his face and his neck, grunting and sighing, and he was still saying her name.

But then he cried out in anguish, sat up and pushed her away and struck her across the face. My mother backed away on her hands and knees, and I saw blood pouring down my father's chest. She sat back on the floor with an astonished and hungry look, and wiped the blood from her chin. She looked at the blood on her fingers before sucking them clean, and licked it away from her lips. She stared at him as a wolf stares at a rabbit and he sat with a hand palm out to her, and then pointed her back to our bed. She came back to me and held me close, kissed the top of my head and I could feel the wetness of my father's blood on her mouth. She was asleep in minutes. Neither my father nor I slept that night, though, and my mother was never given wine again.

When I began to walk, my mother had a more difficult time keeping me close to her. I was curious about everything, and wanted to see the world away from her, wanted to play with the other children I could only watch outside our house. She became sad then, all the time, and would weep when I would pull away from her. She would shake her head and hold me so tightly I thought she would squeeze the life out of me and I would struggle out of her grasp and she would throw herself down and wail. And then one day I realized I could run.

We were in front of our house, and I saw my father approaching. I ran to him. I ran with such glee I thought my heart would burst with the excitement and sheer joy of it. When I reached him, he was laughing and he caught me up in his arms and tossed me into the air and caught me again. It was the first time I had ever embraced my father. My mother ran to us screaming wildly and pounded my father with her fists and pulled at me. But he caught her with one arm and drew her into our embrace, letting her pound at him all she wanted. I turned in his arms and said "shhh, shhh," to her. My father also said "shhh" to her, and she calmed then. I put my arms around her too, and we both held her and said "shhh" as her sobs trailed away. She looked at us fearfully, but seemed to understand that this was good. We thought things would be better then.

After that my mother allowed me to play with the other children, but she would follow and watch with suspicion. The other children were frightened of her, but very accepting of me, and a whole new world opened up to me in their company. My best friend was a boy named Mudi, who said that he would marry me when we were grown. The boys and girls all played together, whether it was parenting dolls or pretending to hunt. We played a game of rolling stones on the ground with sticks and I was very good at it. But one day a girl hit the stone up into the air and it struck me, and I sat down crying at the pain of it. My mother rushed the little girl and hit her so hard that she bloodied her mouth. No one would play with me again after that, and the days of confinement to the house and my mother's side returned until my mother died.

It happened when my father was away. One morning in my ninth year my mother took me out of the village and sat down with me at the edge of the woods. She held me beside her and rocked us from side to side while making low noises that sounded like she was trying to sing. The world around us was so quiet, and the motion and her humming so peaceful that I almost fell asleep leaning into her there. When she suddenly stopped and grew quiet I looked up at her and asked if she was well. She was staring into the woods, and seemed to have forgotten that I was there with her. Then without a sound to me, she rose and walked into the woods.

I didn't know then that no one was supposed to go into the woods alone. I watched her go deeper into the darkness between the trees until she disappeared from sight. I thought she would return soon, but she didn't. I waited all day for her. Only when darkness was approaching and I began to be afraid that I would be lost did I go back to the village. I went to the wise woman, the only other person I really knew, and told her what had happened. I slept there with her that night, and the next morning the hunting groups went into the woods to search for my mother. It wasn't until some days later that the hunters brought what little was left of her out of the woods.

Without my mother to fear, the village children befriended me again. But I was behind them all in education, and they sometimes teased me about the things I didn't know, although my closest friends were always kind to me and helped me to learn. One day, Mudi shot one of his toy arrows into the woods, and I ran to retrieve it for him. I heard him calling for me to stop, but I ran ahead of him unheeding. At the edge of the woods I did pause, remembering the last time I had seen my mother there. I was afraid of the woods, but it seemed that something within called to me. I started into the trees, but Mudi caught up to me then and pulled me back.

"You must never go into the woods," he said. "There are monsters in there."

"Did the monsters kill my mother?" I asked.

He blushed with embarrassment as he realized that he might have said something hurtful to me.

"I don't know," he answered. "Probably."

I held my head up then defiantly.

"Someday I will go into the woods and kill the monsters," I said. "I will practice at hunting, with your bow and your spear, and then I will kill the monsters. Then no one will be afraid of the woods anymore."

"But when you are a woman, you will not have a bow or a spear," he said. "I will marry you and you will take care of our house, and our children, and tend the animals and the gardens with the women. And I'll keep you safe forever."

I was shocked at this. I had become quite obsessed with Mudi's little toy weapons, and loved our games of hunting and war more than any other activity. I considered.

"Maybe I can do all of that after I kill the monsters," I said.

Mudi looked as if I'd hurt his feelings, and I took his hand.

"Don't worry, Mudi," I said. "Then you can marry me."

He kissed me then, and for the first time I felt as if I belonged in this village.

In my twelfth year, things began to change rapidly. The older boys, including Mudi, were now sent with the men to learn real hunting and war. The girls my age began to menstruate, and were given the rite of womanhood. They stopped playing with us then. They were sent to the wise woman to learn secret and mysterious things, and when they were near us, they would talk in whispers, and say cryptic things and answer our questions only with laughs.

None of this happened for me, though, and I continued as I was with the younger children. The older girls became haughty with me, and teased me that I had not joined them. One day I told a girl named Nila, who had once been my friend, that she thought she was better than everyone because she was so pretty, but that she was really just a cow.

"Poor Ekara," she replied, looking down her nose at me. "If only your stupid mother hadn't chased that chicken into the woods, maybe you'd be normal." Even sneering, she was still pretty.

I wanted to hit her, but instead I ran crying from the insult to Mudi's house. No one was there, but leaning against the wall were the real bow Mudi had been given, and real arrows with sharpened stone tips. I grabbed them up and went to the chicken pen, and I shot a chicken through its neck. It lay still, but the other chickens began to squawk loudly and flap around the pen.

People came running, thinking an animal had gotten to them. A woman approached just as I pulled the bow back to shoot another arrow into the chicken, and she batted the bow downward. The arrow went through my foot, pinning me to the ground.

Now many people were gathered around me, and the bow and arrows were taken from me as my father worked at breaking the arrow and lifting my foot from it. I just stared at the dying chicken, watching the blood pour from its neck and make a meandering rivulet through the dirt. I watched its eyes grow cloudy and still, and felt my vengeance satisfied. My father carried me to the wise woman's house where she cleaned my foot, rubbed salves into the wound and wrapped my foot in woven fabric. I was silent through it all.

"Ekara, does this not hurt you?" she asked.

I shook my head. I had no pain at all. After that I had no pain ever. When I fell during games with the children, and scraped my knees, when I fell out of a tree once, when I burned my finger in the fire, there was no pain. I hadn't lost all sensation, though. I felt these things happen, they simply were not unpleasant.

In fact, my capacity for pleasure seemed heightened, my senses all sharper. Foods with even subtle flavors tasted rich to me, and rich foods overwhelming. I could smell things that others couldn't, could tell who was near me by their scent. I could taste tiny animals in water, feel them wriggling on my tongue, and I could tell from smelling water if it was safe to drink. My eyes adjusted to darkness immediately, and even with my eyes closed it seemed I could sense where objects were. The people once again regarded me with suspicion, and I withdrew from everyone, setting myself to caring for my father's house to fill my time.

By my sixteenth year, I still had not joined the women. The others my age were now marrying, and one day my father quietly explained to me that I could not be a wife because I wouldn't bear any children. The tribe elder had decided that I would train with the boys at hunting, and if I proved myself competent, I would join the hunting groups and maybe go to war, and live as a man. This pleased me very much. I would have my time hunting after all, and I thought surely I would at last become a woman and then I could marry Mudi. For training I was assigned to the hunting group that he now led, and I was happy to spend so much time with him again. But Mudi looked at me as if he couldn't see me, and some weeks after my training began he was married to Nila. At their celebration, I sat in the shadows behind everyone, so that no one would see my tears.

When I gained full status as a hunter, my father took a new wife and I built my own house. I was also given a woman to fill the function of a hunter's wife. Her name was Velis, and she was a few years older than me. Her husband had been killed in battle with another tribe. She had been with him for several years with no children and so was deemed as barren as I. She lived with me in my house, and for several months went about her duties quietly, rarely speaking to me at all. I could tell she was afraid of me.

"Velis, you and I are both disgraced women," I finally told her. "We should be friends. You could have been given to a man who would hit you. I promise you will always be safe here."

She was more comfortable in my house for awhile, until one night I had too much wine and I tried to kiss her. When she slapped my face, I remembered what had happened between my parents on that long ago night, and I was so ashamed. The next day I pretended that I couldn't remember what had happened the night before, and I abstained from wine after, so that I wouldn't try that again. We never did become friends.

When the weather was good, I spent my days in the woods with my hunting group. I had been afraid to go into the woods at first, but the excitement of the hunt and the joy of our tribe when we brought home good game soon allayed any fears. Still, on every hunt I looked for the signs of monsters. Never did I see anything but animal tracks though. We were supposed to stay clear of any predators who also stalked the game animals in the woods, but I knew if I ever saw one I would kill it.

On one hunt, as the group attempted to flush a rabbit, I slipped into a small ravine, fell many feet into the bottom of it and twisted my ankle when I landed. It didn't hurt, of course, but the ankle wouldn't function for climbing up again. Mudi called down to me to stay where I was while the group came around to an easier passage to bring me out. I listened as the group moved away from me to the far end of the ravine, and then I was alone there in the woods. Although the group was very far away, I could still hear them with my very sharp ears, and was comforted.

Then I heard a twig snap further down inside the ravine, and thought there must be an animal. I was feeling guilt at ruining the hunt, and thought that if I could bring something home I would be redeemed. I moved slowly and quietly along the bottom of the ravine toward the sound, but heard no familiar rustling in the undergrowth. Then, seemingly from nowhere, a man was standing before me. He was not one of my tribe. I had never seen him before. His clothing was strange, and the way he wore his long hair. His skin looked as pale as ashes.

"Who are you?" I asked.

He only smiled as he walked right up to me. He moved very quickly, but made no sound. When he reached me, he sniffed the air between us.

"What are you?" he asked.

He spoke my language, but with a strange accent. His words came in a slight lisp caused by two of his teeth, which were much longer than the others, and very sharp. I was paralyzed with fear as he continued sniffing at me.

"My hunting group is coming," I said, "and they will kill you if they find you here."

The man smiled at this, and laughed softly. His eyes were cold, and he stared into mine without blinking.

"What strange thing are you?" he said.

"I am Ekara, of the people of Ekaralonis," I told him.

"People? Surely you are not of these human people?" I did not understand what he meant by this.

"Of course I am," I answered. I could hear the hunting group getting closer now, and hoped this man would leave if he could hear them too. But he continued his strange sniffing of me, and leaned in closer.

"You are a ghoul," he said, but cocked his head quizzically. "No, no that's not it."

He stared into my eyes again as if he could see into my head through them. He smelled like wet leaves decaying on the forest floor in autumn, and I found that I liked the smell. Then he leaned even closer, and very slowly he kissed my mouth.

And I wanted him to, even as I knew that this was very wrong. I had long since accepted that I would never have a man, but this man... he wasn't even of my people and yet something sleeping within me had awakened, and uncoiled itself, and wanted nothing more than to touch this foreign man.

"Ekara!" Mudi's voice rang out through the ravine behind me, and I whirled around, suddenly more afraid of my own hunting group than I was of the stranger.

The group came crashing through the undergrowth toward me. I turned quickly, but the man was gone. I scanned the ground for his tracks, but there were none. It was as if he hadn't been there at all. I felt a hand on my arm then, and I was spun forcefully around, and Mudi slapped my face with an open hand. His face was violently angry.

"I told you to stay where you were!" he shouted. "You do not go alone in the woods, ever! You do not disobey me!"

Two men carried me out of the woods and back to the village, and Mudi did not speak to me again that day.

Once again I was in the wise woman's house, being doctored for a hurt that did not hurt.

"What is a ghoul?" I asked her, and she stopped her work and stared at me, seeming to consider something she hadn't before.

"Did someone call you that?" she asked. I shook my head. "You shouldn't listen to talk of such things," the woman said.

"But what is it?"

"It is a person who is possessed by a devil," she answered.

"Perhaps I am, then," I said. "Could I be possessed by a devil?"

"Anyone can be possessed by a devil," she said. "But I think your only trouble is the tongues of spiteful people, and you should pay them no mind."

The following day Mudi came to me full of remorse.

"I'm sorry I hit you," he said.

"It didn't hurt," I replied.

"I know," he said, "which is the only reason I allowed myself. I know I can't hurt you." He raised my face to look at him, and his eyes were soft now, and there was sadness in them, but I felt cold inside. I couldn't see the little boy I had loved anywhere in him.

"No," I said, "you can't hurt me anymore."

The following year, a neighboring tribe pastured their animals in our gardens, and we went to war. Despite my pleading, I was not allowed to go and had to stay behind to guard the village with the men who were not fit for fighting. The war groups were gone for a week, then they returned victorious, and with prisoners in tow.

There was a great celebration, and the foreign men were tied to stakes while the children danced around them and shot at them with their toy arrows. I watched all of this quietly. The sight of foreigners had brought with it the memory of the man I had met in the woods, although these men were not like him. I had begun to hate my people since that day. Their insults to me were too many now.

I stared at the men, lost in these thoughts, and decided I wanted to see them up close. I was curious now about other people, and had begun to think that maybe I could find another tribe, another way of living with people who hadn't known my mother and wouldn't curse me with her memory. I stood and approached one of the bound men. I examined his clothing, the color of his hair, the shape of his bare feet, and of his eyes.

The man spit on me, and something that had been held back inside of me my whole life broke open then.

I grabbed the man and pulled him forward, and his wrists broke as they came out of his bonds and the stake came out of the ground. He lunged then to escape, but I clutched his hair, and threw his head down so that it broke open on the stake. Then I sunk my teeth into his throat and bit down hard, crushing his larynx between my jaws. I felt his blood spurt down my throat and over my face and my shoulders.

The people had come running to stop me, and they were on me now, but I threw them all off easily, and backed away holding the man by the neck with only my teeth. The weight of him felt like it would pull my teeth out, but they held, and I dragged him away from the people. They all stood staring at me in horror, some of them trying to coax me to let the man go.

With the man's neck still in my jaws, I grunted warnings to them. I had my prize, and I would kill anyone who took it from me. I crouched down to the ground with my prey and stared over him at the people. I saw my father standing nearby with Mudi.

"Go to her, Mudi," my father said. "She will listen to you."

Mudi approached slowly, and held a hand out to me.

"Come away, Ekara," he said softly. He picked up a child's toy bow where it had been dropped and held it out to me.

"Do you want this?" he asked. "Do you remember when we played with these as children? You can have this one."

I dropped the man, and Mudi moved in closer, crouching with me across the body.

"Good, Ekara, that's good. Come away."

He reminded me of someone calling a dog off of a rabbit. I stared at him, and he was nothing to me. No, not nothing. He was the face of every wrong the tribe had ever done me. Over his shoulder, I saw Nila with Mudi's son in her arms, glaring at me with hatred.

I lunged at him then, grabbed him by the hair and snapped his neck and threw my teeth into his throat. A moment later something cracked across the back of my head, and I collapsed onto Mudi's lifeless body.

I was in a house, and bound tightly to a bed. I had regained my senses, and I could hear weeping outside, and the tribe elder with my father and the wise woman, speaking in whispers.

"...too dangerous."

"Help her...the same devil that had her mother."

"It is decided."

Within the hour, the house filled with people. My father kissed my head, and the wise woman said prayers over me.

"Father, please..." I said, but he turned from me and sobbed into the shoulder of his wife.

Two of my hunting group came to the bed with long ceremonial knives of metal, and these they plunged into my chest together, in rhythm, nine times. I felt my lungs fill with my blood, and when I coughed, the blood welled up out of my mouth and I felt its warmth spread over my throat and into my ears, and heard it drip off of the bed to the ground. The wise woman stroked my hair until the world went black.

I awoke to scraping sounds somewhere above me, followed by thumping noises. A scrape, and then a thump, a scrape, and then a thump.

I knew I was wrapped in the earth. My nostrils were filled with it, and when I tried to open my eyes bits of soil poured into them. I could taste strong spices on my lips. The soil around me was loose, and I could move a little, but not enough to free myself.

The ground above me seemed to be getting lighter, though, and then I felt hands on me, pulling me out of the ground. I sat up and wiped the soil from my eyes, and blew it out of my nose, pinched my nose and blew through my ears. I felt my chest where I had been stabbed with the knives, and the flesh had healed, although I could feel tiny pebbles under the skin where soil had healed into the former wounds. Then I looked around me. It was night, but the full moon was rising, and although it wasn't very high yet I could see very well. There were large stones scattered on the ground to one side of me.

"I'm here, Ekara," someone said behind me. And I knew the voice.

It was the man I had met in the woods so long ago. He helped me up, helped me to brush all of the soil away. I was dressed in a white linen tunic, now stained all over with earth and with funeral spices which went up in a cloud as we brushed at them with our hands. The spices colored the palms of my hands red.

"Am I not dead?" I asked him.

He only laughed, the same laugh that had met all of my questions at our first meeting. There was another grave under a pile of stones beside mine, and he pointed to it now. There were no other graves here, and I knew that my mother was under there.

"I believe those are yours," he said.

When I investigated, I found my spear and my bow there, with a quiver full of arrows.

"They were under the top of the rocks," he told me.

So I had been given the hunter's burial, although the weapons had been placed up among the stones and out of my reach underground.

"Did the people know that I might rise?" I asked.

"It would appear so."

I threw the weapons aside and began to remove the stones from my mother's grave.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Help me," I said. "Hurry!"

We threw all of the stones off, and then I dug in the soil with my hands. It had been so long. Could it be? But any hope of finding my mother alive crumbled along with the bones I soon pulled from the ground.

"I will go and kill them all," I said, but the man shook his head.

"It would be best if you left that all behind you now," he said. "You were never one of them."

"What am I, then? What am I that I do not die?"

"I don't know," he answered. "You are a strange little creature, and I don't think there has ever been anything like you. You are partly human, true, but also partly like me."

"Are you a devil?" I asked.

He laughed loudly now. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I am a devil."

"Do you possess people?"

"I do. If I bite a human, my venom spreads through them, and they will long for me forever. If they escape me at all, that is. And if they do escape, they will return to me because they must."

"Why would you bite a person?" I asked.

"Because I feed on human blood." He said all of this casually, not at all worried that he might frighten me.

"And do they die then?"

"Yes. Would it bother you to kill people?"

"Not some of them," I answered, and he laughed again.

"Perhaps I could try to make you fully like me, then, if you'd like. I have lived for hundreds of years, and no one can kill me unless they put a piece of wood through my heart, or drain me of all my blood. Humans are too weak to do these things."

"Could I stay with you then?" I asked.

"Forever," he answered. He was moving closer to me now. He put his arms around me, and his scent pulled me in like it had that day in the woods.

"I think I would like that," I said.

Then he kissed me, and then we were pulling each other's clothing away, and falling to the ground between the two graves, and he began to make love to me, which I had never done before and found myself hoping it would never end.

It felt like the nights of harvest in the village when the wise woman would give us the drink that allowed us to see the soul of the earth, when the drums were loud and became our heartbeats, when we danced until we all knew that we were the goddess.

But he was not the goddess. He was all of the people who had ever lived before now rotting in the caves and in the earth and happy to be returning to the body of the universe.

He brought my lips to his neck, and told me to bite. I did this, but it was so much different than biting the foreign prisoner, or Mudi. The blood that now flowed into my mouth seemed to carry an ancient power with it that coiled through my veins like a serpent through underground passages. I looked past him and saw the face of Ekaralonis in the stars.

She looked like my mother, and she was weeping. I felt myself drawn up into the sky with her and I began to know things that the wise woman could never have dreamed. I saw places where there was no vegetation, only bare earth for miles, and yet people lived there. I saw vast expanses of water which I knew to be the ocean, although I had never seen it, and people in vessels upon it far from any land. Then I saw the earth before there were any people at all, only great beasts. I saw beasts who were just becoming men. Then I saw people forging strange things of metal which seemed to move on their own. I saw people living in great shining villages of metal. Then I saw the whole earth once again with no people on it. All the people who had ever lived were dead, and the earth slowly crumbled every trace of them to dust.

All of this was in the blood I took from him, and as I drank deeply I felt two of my teeth begin to grow, pushing further into his flesh, letting more of the blood come out of him and into me. As I floated on time and power I thought again of the people of my village. What did they matter? They were of no significance to all I had just seen. The earth would not miss them.

"No," a woman whispered into my ear. "It would be the death of your soul."

I pulled away from his neck for a moment and turned my head, saw my mother's bones in the earth beside us, scattered among the stones.

"I don't have one," I told her.

"Hmm?" he murmured then, and kissed me.

"I will go back," I said. "And I will kill them all. Will you help me in this?"

"Maybe," he said. "In time." He smiled down at me. "I did kill a woman of your people once, if that satisfies your vengeance for now. She escaped me once, but returned many years later. She was a miserable woman, and I took away her pain. I took away her pain forever."

I bit into his neck again, and he was still making love to me. As I now drank even more deeply of him, he tried to push away.

"That is enough, Ekara," he said, but I didn't stop. I couldn't.

It seemed that he could not pull himself away from me either. I sucked at the wound in his neck, and pushed my new teeth ever more deeply, and he cried out, whether in pain or pleasure I couldn't say. He was pushing himself harder inside me, but trying to pry his neck from my mouth. I held on tightly, though, and continued to drink from him until his movements weakened, then became feeble, and then he lay still. I pushed him off of me and stood.

The moon was high now and its light bright enough that I could see him fully as he lay unconscious on the ground between my mother's grave and my own. He was more beautiful than any man of my village. For a few moments I studied the light of the moon on the contours of his muscles. Even lying still and helpless he looked powerful. I knelt beside him and stroked a lock of his long hair where it lay over his chest.

Then I picked up my spear, and I drove it through him so that the wooden shaft pierced his heart and stuck him to the ground. In the moonlight, I watched as his body began to flatten, and his flesh began to peel away like ashes peel away from a burning log. Within minutes, he had disintegrated entirely, and all that was left of him was a dusty substance blowing away on the gentle breeze.

My spear fell to the ground. I put back on my funeral dress and picked up my spear along with my bow and arrows, and I set out across the plains, circling wide around the village, to the woods.

I moved quickly, and I did not make a sound.