A Feast [Happy Late Thanksgiving]

She moved like a wraith through the snow, with skin like ice, and two ruby eyes the color of blood. They glinted in the fire of the burning homes, alight with a cold inhuman malice. Her hair was filled with frost from the subzero November temperatures, sparkling like diamond, and every shallow breath billowed out into white clouds, but the woman with no name was dressed for summer. A white sundress trimmed with black lace.

The shadows danced in the glow of the flames. There were shapes in the snow, but no bodies, no blood, barely any sign of a struggle. Just clothes, coats and hats and furs, like the people had just melted into the air from the heat. Soot and embers mixed with the falling snowflakes, collecting in her hair, and a razor-thin smile stretched across her face.

"What do you think you're doing with that?"

He was a bear of a man, almost seven feet tall, with a grizzled windburned face and a coal black beard peppered with salt. The ax in his hand, notched and scratched but honed to an incisive sharpness, looked more like a toy in his hands than a weapon. Even through his winter layers, you could see and feel the power in those arms. They were like tree trunks.

His face was contorted in rage and fear. She could almost smell it on him, the sharp scent of sweat and smoke that clung to him like perfume. He stared at her, three yards between them, gripping the ashwood shaft of the ax so tight that she thought it might splinter.

"Strigoi...!" His voice rumbled like a boulder down a mountain, strained with the loathing and helplessness of a cornered animal. He took a step back, ground his teeth, and spoke again in a stressed English. "Demon!"

Witch. Monster. It wasn't anything new to her. She took a step forward.

He bent his legs, sucked in his breath, and launched himself forward. For such a gigantic man, he shot forward like a bullet, roaring like an animal. The ax was a silver blur in his hands, and his howl seemed to shake the entire forest to its core.

But she just slipped past him like a pale shadow. The steel seemed to sing as it sliced through empty air, and the man was thrown forward by the momentum of his charge, stumbling through the snow as the head of the ax buried itself into the ground. He fell to one knee and turned his head.

She stood there over his shoulder with that same ghostly smile playing across her lips. Before the death knell could even register in his mind, her hand shot out, grabbing him by the head with a superhuman strength. "Yes," she answered, soft and meticulous, "I am a demon." His eyes were as wide as an owl's, and even though he could've turned, could've fought, could've fled, his limbs wouldn't move. Her hand was as cold as a corpse's. "I'm a hunter, just like you, and I have to eat, just like you."

Killing intent filled the air. It was like all the oxygen had been suctioned out to only leave the cold.

"I'm hungry."

There was a sound like crackling ice.

The man began to shake, and then he began to scream. His skin twisted, melted, unfurled around his bones like a ribbon, disassembling before her eyes. His body folded in on itself, congealing into a liquid mass of blood and skin and muscle, and began to absorb into her palm like a black hole. She threw her head back and closed her eyes, her lips parted in a sick morbid pleasure.

When it was all done, there wasn't a trace left of him besides the ax buried in the snow. She closed the hand into a fist, steam rising from between her clenched fingers, her knees almost buckling. There was a rush up her arm that spread through her, tingles that started at her fingertips and raced down her spine, a high that was better than drugs or sex. Hundreds of memories surged through her head all at once. A boy in front of the fireplace with his brother and sister, a teenager stalking through the woods with his father, rifles in their hands, a young man embracing a woman in the rain, that same man holding up a baby girl. Flashes of another life.

And now that life was hers.

The woman with no name sighed and uncurled her fingers. There was nothing left. She'd absorbed everything he was and everything he'd been. His memories, his experiences, his talents, his secrets, his entire existence, they were all hers now. Him, and the rest of the village.

She sighed with the relief and turned to face the flames.