“Oh, bunicul.”

“Hush. There’s more you must consider. These polyphyletic creatures know that you’re the enemy now. They know that you are out here in the world, a threat to them. But they don’t know about me.”

“About you?”

He lowered his gaze and stared hard at his hand upon hers. She looked too, as a tremor shook his hand. He gritted his tobacco-stained teeth, but would not stop.

Slowly, his fingers straightened, thickened, and a soft white fur sprouted along the backs of them and all the way to his wrist. His fingernails began to lengthen. He broke off then, collapsing back in his chair, his breathing labored.

“Grandfather, stop.” She leaned across the table to him.

He pressed his hand to his perspiring forehead. It was his normal old hand again, liver-spotted, etched with blue veins. His hair, she only realized now, was whiter than she remembered.

“Whatever comes,” he told her softly, “we will hunt it together.”

"EPIPHANY" PT.2

Yvonne Navarro

— 11 —

The first time she kills another human being, all she can think afterward is that it was nothing like the rabbit.

It is the first week of December and some of the people in town, most likely the ones with kids, are already starting to put out Christmas decorations. Mooney is a week away from completing her first semester of college, and although she’s technically four months pregnant, she looks like she’s a lot farther along, six months at least. She hasn’t gone back to see Dr. Guarin, but she isn’t feeling good anymore, either. She’s eating fairly decently — her belly isn’t affecting her ability to catch small animals at all — and she’s not nauseous, exactly, but she’s … something. It’s a feeling that’s in her head and her heart; it grows a little day by day and nothing she can think about will shake it off.

Then she wakes at a quarter to four in the morning with the complete certainty that if she doesn’t change how things are going, the child inside her is going to die.

When she looks back on it later, there was never any question about what she needs to do. Months ago she mastered the art of moving silently without even trying; the trailer is in total darkness but she slips on some clothes and is out the door without so much as making the old floor creak. There is a three-quarter moon outside but the changes in her DNA have enhanced her night vision; it’s as if God Himself has flipped a light switch on the desert. She sees everything, in every direction, from the peeling paint on the wood siding on the north end of the trailer to the faint movement of the scrub grass up the road and to the right that signals a scavenging coyote. In fact, even though it’s at least three hundred feet away, she can smell it — it has blood on its muzzle from something it killed and ate, probably a pack rat, only a few minutes before.

But the coyote holds no interest for Mooney tonight. She has gone beyond that.

Driven by need and guided by instinct, she moves into the cold desert night, circling behind Mother Gaso’s trailer and heading southwest. The Mexican border is only slightly over twenty miles away but she feels no fear as she eases through the winter-dead grasses, slipping from mesquite tree to mesquite tree, passing like a shadow despite her size. It takes twenty minutes at the most and then she catches the scent of humans. It drifts on the still, chilled air simply because it is so out of place to creatures, like her, who can pick up such things. There are two of them, and they are heavy with the smells of unwashed flesh, dirty clothes, and cheap snacks, the kind that can be carried easily but in reality give no nourishment to a weary body and only serve to drive a man’s thirst to maddening proportions. Mooney lifts her head and inhales more deeply — they have run out of food and water, and now they are sluggish with the cold, surprised by the elevated climate that drops the nighttime temperature to only a few degrees above freezing.

When Mooney strikes, she goes for the male.

It is not a loss of control, of something that happens out of desperation and the body overriding everything else in order to feed itself, as happened with the rabbit. She knows what she is going to do before she makes her move. She even plans it, choosing the male because the female is more likely to run rather than try to come to his aid. Her hair and teeth are not the only thing that has evolved more and more with the passage of time; in the last couple of weeks she discovered it was no longer necessary for her to break her prey’s neck to disable it because her bite could do exactly that — once her teeth sink into something’s neck, it’s pretty much all over. It’s a handy new skill and one she appreciates, reminiscent of the disabling effects of a Mojave rattlesnake’s neurotoxin, even if she is a little disconcerted at the thought of how much venom must be going into her meal in order to so quickly incapacitate it. However much it is, it’s spontaneous — no conscious thought, no evaluation, no preparation, and she herself is immune to it. Strike, feed, and it’s over.

Just like with the man who is her first human casualty.

Mooney is fast enough to be little more than a blur coming at the two Mexicans. One moment she’s watching them from thirty feet away, the next she shoves them apart hard enough to send the female tumbling ass over head into the grass. Mooney snaps her mouth closed on the male’s neck and her fangs hook instantly into his carotid She feels a hard pulse from somewhere beneath her cheekbones and the fist the guy is sending toward her head stalls in midair as he goes first rigid, then limp in her arms.

A few feet away the woman is screaming but Mooney isn’t sure if it’s because her companion is being attacked or because she’s landed nearly on top of a sprawling prickly pear cactus, the kind with two-inch purple spines; they are buried deeply into one side of the illegal’s flesh from shoulder to hip, and every time the woman tries to free herself, they just push deeper. Mooney would be annoyed at the constant bawling except that this is her first human meal —

— and it is exquisite.

The man’s blood fills her mouth and coats her tongue, and it’s like everything good she’s ever eaten rolled into one fantastic flavor. She has no idea if it’s because this is her first time or if it’s because she didn’t realize until now, this very moment, that despite her ingestion of animal blood, or maybe because of it, she and her unborn child were slowly starving. She can also taste him, what he is in his very core — refried beans and pork tamales, corn tortillas, roasted poblano peppers and homemade mole sauce, the fiery salsa that he has always loved.

He will never taste it again.

It seems like only moments before Mooney is finished and the man’s body is motionless in her arms. She lowers him easily to the ground and studies his face, which is as still and waxen as the high, bright moon above her. His mouth is slack and his eyes, slitted open a quarter of an inch, stare at the sky. Does he see something now that she knows nothing about? Perhaps someday she’ll know, when her own time comes; for now, Mooney leans over and draws her hand down the front of his face to close his eyelids just to make sure he isn’t looking at her. She feels guilty but in a distanced sort of way, like the way someone feels a twinge of regret when they see the soft, gentle gaze of a cow but sit down to a bowl of beef stew at dinner that evening. For her, the distance between the two is just a lot less. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand but her skin comes away clean — there is no telltale red stain, and certainly nothing resembling the gore depicted on television or all the famous vampire tales. Good; she would hate to be so stereotypical.

The woman’s screams have faded to miserable sobs interspersed with a high-pitched wheeze every time she tries to move. Mooney walks over and looks down at her, sees the way the barbed spines of the cactus have embedded themselves deeply into her body. The woman has her eyes squeezed shut as if she can’t bear to see any more than she already has, or perhaps she believes she is about to die and doesn’t want to stare death in the face. She is wrong on both accounts; Mooney is satiated and has no desire or need to harm this pathetic Mexican woman — she’s really more of a girl closer to Mooney’s own age. Mooney circles her, studying the tangled mess of cactus pads, but she can’t see any way to get the woman free without puncturing her own skin in hundreds of places.

“I’m sorry,” she says at last. “There’s nothing I can do. If I had gloves …” She doesn’t finish because the woman obviously doesn’t understand her and the sound of Mooney’s voice is only making her more panicked. Even if she did understand English, she would never believe she wasn’t slated to end up just like her dead partner. Pulling her from the massive cactus trap would probably cause her enough pain to make her go insane, and then what? She would flee into the desert and die anyway.

Ultimately, Mooney walks away and leaves the woman to whatever nature and the desert night have planned for her.

— 12 —

Her face fills out and she gains eight pounds overnight. When she looks in the mirror before class the next morning, her skin is glowing with health. She feels as good as she did after the first time she vomited at school, but this time she’s not hungry. She has come to think of herself as the counterpart to the snake god that so many ancient Native Americans revered; maybe, like that powerful, dangerous entity, she only needs to fully feed every so often. The people of Sells have no idea how lucky they are as the days pass and Mooney remains full and peaceful, content to go to her classes and stay in her bed in the deepest, darkness hours of the night.

Ten days before Christmas, she knows it’s time to feed again.

She sees the Chief of Police’s car go screaming past on Highway 86 in the morning before her first class, hears more sirens somewhere south of town as she heads into the classroom. With no tall buildings or trees to break it up, sounds — a dog’s bark, a coyote’s yipping, the scream of a hawk as it dives for its prey — carries for miles out here. Her fellow students in geology and micro economics grow more distracted as the morning progresses, sneaking peaks at their cell phones and texting until the economics teacher orders them all turned off. When class is over, Mooney gathers her books and thinks about going to sit in the sun, intent on taking a nap until her business management class starts at one o’clock. There are only five other students in her current class and the one-word comment that a dark-skinned girl whispers in her direction as she and her friend push past Mooney is as clear as though it were announced over a loudspeaker.