Blood of Gato

William stood at the brink—no, not just nervous, but at the very edge of what a human body and mind could endure. Inside him, the Beast clawed, thrashing against the rusted bars of his consciousness, and outside—stood the wendigo.

"Tear me out! Drag me into the open, boy! I'll shred that whore into ribbons of meat!" The Beast thundered, its voice reverberating like iron chains struck against bone. It gnawed at William's thoughts, battering the walls of his mind with a rabid hunger, like a caged predator that had scented blood.

And then—the laughter. Low. Wet. Crooked, as if the sound itself was grinding marrow into dust.

"When I finish your entrails, little toy, I'll split your corpse for pleasure… Ah, kitten, isn't that what you were born for? To feed, to entertain? Pure use, pure meat."

She slipped through the trees like pale lightning, her body a smear of white against the starless forest. Her claws sparked in the air, and the world lurched—then drowned in pain. One eye ignited in fire as a talon plunged through it. William tried to scream, but his tongue was already gone—ripped from his throat. What emerged was a fountain of blood, choked silence where a human cry should have been.

Every move of hers was whip-fast, impossible to follow. He couldn't defend, couldn't breathe, couldn't comprehend. It wasn't a fight—she was playing. A predator savoring the thin slivers of time before the final bite. She stretched the torment like silk across glass, smiling as she toyed with the fragile thing that dared to call itself a man.

The Beast seized control for fleeting instants—claws tearing shallow lines across her flesh—but they were nothing, less than mosquito bites to this nightmare. At any second she could take his head the way a gardener plucks a wilted flower.

The truth crushed him: inside, the beast devoured him; outside, the wendigo dissected him. He was their toy, raw meat pulled between two hungers. Human. Helpless. Dying.

He tried to howl, but only a rasp bubbled blood through his throat. His prayers were whispers trapped in a collapsing skull:

God… please… save me. Not from death—just from her. From him. From what I am becoming.

The wendigo slid through the darkness, gliding as if her feet never kissed the earth. Her eyes glowed with the frozen cruelty of the void itself. Her grin promised not death—but eternity of mutilation. A slash, and his guts spilled from his back, dangling like ornaments on the skeletal branches. Another strike, and half his face crumpled, smeared into a laughing mask of ruin.

She taunted him with cruel intimacy—her claws resting soft as fingers on his shoulder, then raking down with a lover's sudden sharpness. She pressed her body against his broken frame, recoiling only to strike again. Her breath was frost; her touch, knives.

"You want this, don't you?" she whispered, lifting him by the throat with one elegant hand, dangling him like a doll. With the other, she traced slowly downward, deliberately, toward his pelvis. "Say it. Tell me. Let the last truth of your pitiful life be your hunger."

He could not. He would not. And when her claws cut into him there, agony detonated through his body, tearing his sanity into blood-choked shreds.

The Beast howled and laughed inside him, drunk on carnage.

"Yes! Yes, I adore her! Let her split your flesh, let her bathe you in the ecstasy of ruin! Tear the chains off me, boy—let me out—and together we will dance with her in what's left of your corpse!"

Amidst the chaos of screams, the shattering of nerves and bones, one memory surfaced. Letecia's voice. Soft, implacable:

"In this world, only the strongest survive."

William shut his one remaining eye. No.

No.

NO.

"They're stronger than me. Both of them. They will break me, defile me, puppeteer my corpse. But I—" His thoughts blazed white, drowning pain in fury. "I DON'T WANT TO DIE. I WILL NOT DIE."

Fire flooded his veins. His blood boiled like molten iron. His body convulsed, then hardened, bursting with grotesque new strength. Bones snapped, reformed, knitted thicker. Muscles pulsed, inflating with obscene life. His torn flesh rethreaded itself, wounds sealing with unnatural defiance.

The Beast roared, the wendigo laughed—but William drowned them both with a sound that was no longer quite human.

He screamed, not with a throat but with the cavern of his being, shaking the night itself:

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

And then—gathering the shreds of strength left to him—William lunged forward, his body breaking space itself with momentum. His fist drove into the wendigo's skull, bones in his own hand splintering with the force. Crack. A geyser of black blood exploded across the night. Her head snapped sideways, and for an instant—just one—she lost her grip on him.

Teeth bared, William glared with his single remaining eye, now glowing with a sickly, burning green light. A sound erupted from his throat, not speech, not human, but an animal bursting from flesh:

"RRRRRRAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH!!!"

The roar wasn't his anymore. The Beast howled through his vocal cords—its cry stronger than his own.

He struck again. And again. Each punch shattered his own bones, stripped his skin raw, but each break reknit instantly, every fracture healed only to break anew as his fists crashed against her pale body. He pounded until her once-spotless white hide was streaked with crimson, until the dirt beneath them pulped into a swamp of gore and mud.

The wendigo staggered, hissing, baring fangs sharp enough to split granite. Her claws blurred, slicing through the air—then through William's shoulder. Flesh tore, a hole the size of a fist yawning there, bone glimmering in the dark. But he did not falter. His eye burned hotter, a green-gold inferno, and his teeth elongated, scraping against one another with a predatory shriek.

They collided again—beast against beast. Predator against predator. Flesh against nightmare. The earth writhed beneath their fury, trees cracked like bones, the forest shook with echoes of shrieks and roars. Each clash ended in a spray of blood, each grapple left scraps of meat behind.

William, frothing, seized her jaw with one trembling hand, the other clawing into her ear, and bellowed as he tried to tear her head apart at the seams. The wendigo shrieked, driving her claws deep into his chest, ripping ribs aside, but he would not let go.

She staggered back, skull cracked, face ringing with the sound of breaking bones. And then—she laughed. Not with joy, but with madness, her chuckle splitting into fragments of hysteria. The sound drilled needles into William's spine.

"Oooohhh… delicious! You can still bite? Still?!" she croaked in delight, dragging her forked blue tongue over the blood dripping from her split cheek. "Come then! Break me! Break me if you think you can!"

She lunged. The forest froze into a single instant. White shadow cut the night—then her claws pierced through William's chest. Rrrrip. Snap. Bone caved like wet wood. One lung collapsed in a spray of blood that erupted from his lips in a steaming torrent.

His body shuddered…but it did not fall. Already it was reacting, mutating. The punctured lung spasmed, collapsing and reforming, fluids sucked back in. Blood wriggled like serpents, reversing their spill. Ribs groaned as they knitted themselves anew. He was refusing to die.

In response, his arm arced and came down, smashing into her temple. The force made the air flare—but the wendigo only smirked, a torn gash marking her skin.

"You'll have to hit a thousand times harder, little worm, just to scratch me…" she rasped—and slashed again.

Her claws raked across his stomach, all the way to the spine. His insides flooded out, spilling like coils of rope, steaming on the dirt. William's roar boiled into the woods, no longer distinguishable from a beast's howl. Even as his organs hung loose, his body writhed, pulling them back in, blood crawling like sentient tar, knitting form to form.

Every second he was changing. Muscles writhed beneath his skin as if swarms of insects burrowed there. A broken arm reformed not as it was, but thicker, swollen like an abomination, bone hardened, lengths grotesquely reinforced.

The Beast shrieked inside him:

"YES! Rip her apart! If you want life, then TAKE IT, PIECE BY PIECE! Split her spine! Crack her skull! MAKE HER A DOLL!"

William snarled through blood, choking on rage, refusing to give up the reins. He dug iron fingers into her shoulder and bit—fangs erupting full—and tore away a chunk of her alabaster flesh. Black-hot blood sprayed across his jaw, bitter as ash, coating his teeth and tongue.

"HAHAHA!" the monster shrieked, a screeching joy splitting her voice as she jerked, sending him crashing into a tree. His skull smashed, the bone concaving with a wet report. One half of his face split, an eye bulged from its socket and slithered free.

William toppled to his knees. His body crumpled. But still—it did not die.

William's body sagged, his skull half-collapsed, blood streaming in black sheets down his chest. By every law of life, he should have been finished—slumped meat on the forest floor.

But something—someone—refused.

The eye that dangled from its torn socket shivered… then wormed back, veins twitching alive, dragging the globe up the cord of its nerves until it burst wetly back into place. His shattered jaw ground against itself, bone slivers writhing like worms as they rethreaded the skull. Every stitch of destruction only fed the mutation deeper.

The Beast howled inside, its voice no longer separate but echoing through the caverns of William's skull as though it were his own.

"Look at you, boy. You think you're William. You think you're human. But listen—listen! Every bone you break, every wound you drink back into flesh… you're not healing. You're BECOMING."

He shook his head, snarling through the slurry of gore in his mouth. "N-no… I'm not… I won't…"

But his voice was not his. The growl beneath it bent in dissonance, two voices overlapped. One was his. One was something older.

The wendigo smiled with cracked teeth, bone jutting from one cheek. "Ohhh, sweet little child… look at you! Look at us!" Her claws spread the air wide, gleaming like hooks. "Already you stink of me. Already your blood writhes with hunger. Why fight it? Why not enjoy the inheritance?"

She slashed again—the claws ripped up his chest, splitting sternum, prying his ribcage into a shrine of meat. His heart bulged, exposed, pumping crimson strings.

And he—he stepped forward instead of falling. One mangled hand closed around the heart she had laid bare. His own heart. And for a moment, William stared at it pulsing in his palm, his body both broken and standing, trembling but alive.

The Beast whispered, too close now, too soft, too intimate:

"Crush it. Crush what's left of 'human.' Give me the body. Let me love her as an equal. Let me sing her song of flesh and ruin."

William roared—not yes, not no—something beyond language. His jaw split wider than a man's should, ripping into his cheeks. His teeth sharpened as if remembering a shape long hidden. His body cracked as he lunged, tearing into the wendigo with beastlike fervor.

They twisted together in the dark, blow for blow, rip for rip, predator and evolving predator, blood raining like warm night rain around them. Her claws gutted him. His jaws tore her shoulder into ribbons. Her fingers drilled into his spine, snapping the column. His bones resnarled like snakes, bending outward to stab her skin.

The forest itself trembled under their tide. Trees shattered and toppled, their splinters flying like spears. The dirt churned into rivers of red.

And as they struck, William saw her face—and then his own, flickering, distorted. For a heartbeat her white, horror-lashed body and his twisted, mutating form became a mirror: her grin frozen into his mouth, her shadows in his eyes.

"Stop… stop it," William gasped through the slurry of blood and broken teeth.

The Beast chorused with him, indistinguishable now:

"No—finish it. She's you. You're her. End it, and you'll be what we are meant to be."

The wendigo stopped laughing. For the first time—her face creased, frowning.

"You're becoming… interesting, boy…" she hissed, her voice a blade dragged across bone. "You're burning yourself away for a fleeting spark… but in the end—I am still stronger."

She launched forward again. Her claws ripped across his face, tearing half his cheek free with a wet spray. Flesh swung loose—yet in the same heartbeat William's fist smashed into her jaw so hard her skull snapped sideways and teeth scattered across the asphalt like snow-white gravel.

Blood. Steam. The stink of iron. Their war devolved into pure animal frenzy.

She shredded him into ribbons—he regenerated, each tear pulling itself grotesquely back together, forming denser, harder, meaner. He hammered her with blows that shattered his own bones on impact, each fracture healing only to shatter again. She mended too, her own wounds knitting with a monstrous pulse as though the grave itself refused to claim her.

Back and forth. Rend and devour. Flesh sprayed in chunks; organs spilled and crawled back. They were no longer fighting like beings—they were engines of carnage locked in an endless circuit, their blood mingling until the ground beneath became a swamp of red.

They crashed, rolled, snapped, bit—through the forest, through trees that splintered under their bodies—until the chaos spilled them onto an open clearing. It wasn't until the stench hit William's nose—sweet and chemical, sharp as knives down the throat—that he realized where they were.

A gas station.

The low groan of the wind dragging a loose sign. The empty ring of metal swings. His own heart, booming too loud in the cage of his skull.

And then—the hiss. A claw stroke carved deep into the concrete near him, sparks showering. One of the pumps shuddered, tubing shredded open, and gasoline fountained out in a torrent, soaking the earth and drowning the air in dizzying fumes.

William froze for a single instant, the savage haze lifting just enough. An end. A way to finish this.

The wendigo tilted her head, dragging a claw down her own breastbone as though mocking him, her grin freezing cold. "Why stop now, little worm? Are you tired already? Or are you waiting for me to claim the last strike?" Her voice was dry crackle, like firewood splitting. "Don't tell me you're going to die boring."

But William was already moving. With a roar, he ripped the nozzle free, and gasoline gushed, spraying into the night, a choking fog of living fire waiting to be born.

The wendigo staggered in the miasma, her movements sluggish as the sting of fumes entered her lungs. He seized the moment, hurling the liquid over her pale frame. The fuel cascaded down her corpse-white skin, dripping in rivulets, pooling beneath her feet.

She snarled, lifting her claws. But he dropped low, dug his claws against the pavement—hard—and struck stone against stone.

Sparks. First one. Then another. And another.

Her eyes widened. "Don't you dare—!"

It was too late.

The world bloomed flame.

The blaze took her in a single heartbeat, wrapping her thin frame in whips of fire. The stench of burning flesh filled the air, searing sharp and sweet. Fire lapped at William too—tongues of heat crawled across his skin—but merely kissed him, not consumed.

She screamed. Not a wail of predator, but a howling undoing, sliding high, shrill, human.

"Fuck—!" The sound ripped out of her in rage, but cracked, shifted. The second cry rose thinner, pocked with shattering panic: "AAAAH—NO—NO! Please! Stop!"

Her monstrous figure convulsed, thrashing, clawing her own burning body, but the gasoline clung, eating her alive. Pieces of the mask sloughed away in flame. The towering fiend shrank, twisted, bones splintering backward, bending toward human shapes. Her spindly limbs shortened; her chest caved only to reform; the grotesque melted down into naked fragility.

A girl writhed where a monster stood. Her skin blistered, her veins glowed red as if magma ran beneath. Blood boiled and hissed in her arteries, bursting in small explosions. Pale lips cracked wide with shrieks, then babbled into begging.

She clawed at the ground, one arm stretching toward William, childlike, trembling, wholly lost. Her eyes were no longer cold fire—they were terror. Pure. Animal. The fear of a creature desperate to cling to existence.

"Please…" she rasped, voice split into shards. Her charred fingers curled weakly toward him. "Help me… don't let me… I don't want to die…"

Her words were faint, almost inaudible—but the naked sob in them cut sharper than any claw.

Inside him, the Beast laughed, a wet, feral cackle that rattled along his bones. Its tongue seemed to lap the walls of his skull, savoring the moment.

"Finish her! Tear out her throat. End it here and feast! She's nothing but prey now—soft, burning, tender meat. Can't you smell it? Charred, but sweet. You deserve it. You earned the kill. Claim her. Consume her."

William staggered in the fire's grip, his own skin blackening and curling like ash—but something in him twisted, cracked. He saw not just a beast in the flames. He saw himself. Himself, when the thing inside would tear at his mind, eating reason piece by piece.

And a thought rose through the agony: What if she too was a prisoner? Not a monster—but a cage, holding something human that still begged for life?

The Beast roared, rattling against his skull like chains tearing free:

"Lies. She is what she is! You waste breath on mercy? She'll gut you the moment you falter! END. HER."

But for once, William's own voice strained louder, hoarse yet steady—even as his flesh bubbled away in flame.

"If… if you are like me…" he rasped, blood steaming on his tongue, "…then you deserve a chance. And I'll make this choice. Not as a monster. But as a man."

And with a snarl that was both his and not-his, he lunged—not to rip, but to save. The fire peeled his skin raw, blinding him, searing muscle clean, but he ignored it. He gathered her burning form into his arms. Her body was fragile now, feather-light, writhing in convulsions, and though his own skin smoldered and cracked, he did not release her.

He stormed forward, bursting into the station's restroom, the door shattered off its hinges under his shoulder. The stench of rust, sewage, and mildew hit like rotten fists, but he barely breathed as he lowered her trembling frame to the floor.

Then he raised one broken fist and slammed it into the wall. Plaster split. Pipes burst. A screaming geyser of water blasted out, drenching them both.

Steam swallowed the room, a screeching hiss as fire devoured its last breath. The blaze sputtered, writhed, and died. All that was left was smoke, dripping water, and the trembling thud of his own heart.

Now she lay before him—not a creature, not a predator—but something painfully human. Breathing ragged, her thin chest rising and falling. Burnt, broken, alive. Her lashes—absurdly long—trembled. And then her eyes blinked open, marred by smoke and tears. No hunger in them. No sinister glint. Only fear. Pure, human fear—and the tiniest seed of fragile hope.

The Beast growled inside, guttural, disgusted:

"You fool. Now you've damned us both. Show mercy to a wolf, and tell me: what will she do when her fangs grow again?"

William stared down at her, soaked in blood and ash, his green-gold eye gleaming through scorched flesh. He clenched his jaw, muscles trembling, caught in the jaws of decision.

Empathy—or Abyss.