Blood of Gato

"What are you going to do?"

William's voice trembled—tight as a bowstring. He watched as Milagros slowly opened the refrigerator. The movement was graceful, almost tenderly feminine, yet there was something in it that pricked the skin with unease—predatory, deliberate.

Cold air slid out in a pale mist, carrying with it a faint, cloying sweetness—like caramel melting over a green apple. Beneath that softness lingered another note: sharp, metallic, too familiar.

Milagros reached inside and drew out a parcel. The paper was mottled with stains, as if sin itself had seeped through.

"Feed you," she said quietly. No smile touched her lips. Her voice brushed over the air like a silken ribbon—smooth, alluring, but with a diseased undertone that made his stomach tighten.

With slow precision, she unwrapped the package. Inside lay meat—red, fresh, threaded with crimson veins from which thick, living blood oozed in lazy rivulets.

William instinctively stepped back, yet his gaze clung to the sight as if bound by a string. Something inside him twisted awake. A faint whisper bloomed at the back of his mind, intimate and obscene: Smell it… it's good… you need it.

"That… that's what I think it is, isn't it?" he managed, his throat dry as dust.

She lifted her eyes. For a flicker of a second, he saw in them not madness but the serenity of someone who knows. Something ancient and patient lived there.

"Yes," she answered softly. "From my private reserves."

A thin blade flashed. A droplet of blood trembled on its tip, sliding down like a drop of dark wine.

She stepped toward him—one measured footfall after another. Each one echoed in his chest, a heartbeat against a coffin lid.

"No… No, Milagros, I'm leaving. Let's forget this, all of it. It's insane, it's wrong—this is madness!" The words stumbled out of him. His fingers reached behind, grasping for the cold brass of the doorknob. But the air seemed thicker now, congealed, resisting his movements.

"William," her voice came soft as breath, "you feel it, don't you? That fire under your skin. The hunger waking in your bones. Don't deny it—it isn't shame. It's nature."

He froze. His hands trembled. His teeth clenched, yet the scent smothered every protest: metal and sugar, blood and sweetness, a delirious symphony of hunger.

"Maybe you're partly right…" His own voice was foreign, guttural, "…but I'm not going to eat human flesh."

Milagros tilted her head slightly; in her eyes shimmered not anger but grief—a sorrow worn too long.

"Then go," she whispered, smiling faintly.

For a heartbeat he didn't believe her ears—or hers.

"You… you'll really let me leave? Just like that?"

She nodded, that same quiet, unfathomable smile. Then suddenly her pupils widened; her breath caught like a snuffed flame.

"Damn it… they're coming," she hissed, eyes darting past him.

Instinct trumped sense. William turned—reflexive, doomed. Cold hands closed around him from behind, strong and boneless as fog. The chill of her skin seared him like dry ice.

"Forgive me," Milagros whispered, her lips near his ear, "but you must finally understand what you are."

He struggled, breath tearing through his throat, but her arms tightened—unyielding as iron. One hand gripped his jaw.

There was a sharp crack—his mouth forced open. A bead of warm blood dripped onto his tongue, and lightning shot through him, violent, ecstatic.

She pressed a piece of meat between his lips. Her fingers were slick—salt, sweat, something feral.

"Chew," she breathed, a command wrapped in tenderness, "feel it breathe inside you."

He fought, gagged, growled—but then the taste overwhelmed him. The heat, the copper tang, the pulse of it. His body betrayed him. His teeth sank down. The flesh disappeared inside him.

Milagros released him, touching his cheek with something that might have been affection—or pity.

"There," she murmured. "Now you see."

"Good," she murmured, "see? It's not so terrible."

Her tone was that of a mother coaxing a hesitant child to take his first bite.

William stood there swaying, eyes glazed—not from horror, but from a strange, unbearable ecstasy. The room around him had dissolved into fog. The taste… it was perfect.

Milagros stepped back, watching him with quiet wonder, the same way one might watch a flower slowly unfurl in time-lapse bloom.

The trembling in his limbs subsided. The taut muscles that had been pulling him apart just moments earlier now softened, sigh by sigh, as if a wave moved through him, carrying away resistance. That terrible roar inside—the one that had lived somewhere behind his skull—had finally gone quiet.

"The voices…" he whispered, half to himself, as though discovering words for the first time. "They're gone."

Milagros smiled softly. As though what had just happened were nothing out of the ordinary, she reached out and smoothed a lock of hair from his forehead with gentle fingers.

"I told you it would help," she said, her voice almost tender. Then she turned back to the refrigerator and began wrapping the remaining cuts of flesh with practiced motions—calm, deliberate, professional.

Tiny droplets of blood clung to the white plastic counter—dark, viscous, glimmering like molten mercury.

William stared at her hands as they moved. Something in him began to boil—no longer bestial hunger, but fury, disgust, and self-loathing, all knotted into one choking lump.

"Jesus... why did you do that?" he rasped, clutching his throat as if he could tear the swallowed thing back out. "Why the hell did you make me?"

He doubled over, shuddering violently. Yet the nausea never came. Instead—there was warmth. A sweet, heavy warmth spreading through his chest, thick as honey. His body didn't reject it. It welcomed it. It wanted more.

Milagros rolled her eyes, exhaling sharply through her nose.

"That's your gratitude? After I shared my private stock with you? You're exhausting, William."

"Where did you even—" He broke off; his thoughts tangled, scattered. "Where did you get this?"

"Bought it," she said lightly, without looking at him. The answer landed like a cigarette stub flicked into gasoline.

He turned toward her, disbelief written across the pale sheen of his face. The light shadowed his jaw, catching the faint gleam of canines—just long enough to flash.

"Bought it?" he hissed. "In what store, exactly? Do they have a butcher's counter marked 'office manager thigh, 20% off'?"

A sly grin tugged at the corner of her mouth.

"Hunting for food is a luxury these days. We aren't savages, darling. It's 1990. For creatures like us, there are special farms. And markets. Entire systems set up... legally—well, by our standards."

Her words crashed into him like slabs of lead.

He stood by the sink, staring at his own reflection in the metal, warped and uncertain. His voice came out hollow.

"Farms?" he murmured. "You mean… farms that breed people?"

She laughed—a sound smooth as velvet yet cold enough to frost the inside of the room.

"Exactly. Haven't you ever wondered what happens to all those poor missing souls? Millions every year—'abductions,' 'runaways,' 'lost children'... Humanity adores its own stories. They make such convenient masks for the truth."

William felt something move inside his palms—fear made flesh, crawling beneath the skin like insects searching for an exit.

"That's insane… and no one tries to stop it? To find them?"

Milagros let out a laugh as soft as silk sliding over a blade.

"Oh, William. You're still so beautifully naive. Do you really think the government doesn't know? If they wanted to, they could burn those farms down in a single night." She leaned back against the refrigerator, arms folded, eyes gleaming. "But there's always demand. And as long as something can be bought, someone will sell it. People have always been currency. We've just made the trade… more civilized."

The air between them felt electric, humming with the quiet horror of comprehension.

William stared at her, and for the first time, understood that the taste lingering on his tongue was not just flesh—

—it was complicity.

He looked at her as if his gaze were made of ash — weightless, drifting, poisonous.

"You talk about them like livestock," he said through his teeth. "But they're people. They feel pain. They have families. Dreams."

"Dreams?" The word left her mouth half‑a‑laugh, half‑a‑sigh. "You read too much. I've heard all that before — the sermons about families and children and the sacred right to life. Convenient nonsense they feed to sheep, so they'll stand in line and not bite the shepherd's hand."

She pushed off the refrigerator and started toward him. Her steps were light — too light. The sound of her feet on the tile was soft, padded, feline. Somehow, that quietness was more terrifying than any scream.

"But I'm not a sheep, William." Her voice dropped to a low whisper, almost tender. "I'm a wendigo. And you — you're a therianthrope. You just don't want to admit it yet."

He turned away, chest heaving. His fingers still shook. Inside his head, something uncoiled, slowly, like a tight knot coming undone — the boundary between him and whatever lived beneath his skin beginning to blur.

"We kill and eat not because we enjoy it," she whispered, now so close he could feel the warmth of her breath, "but because it's the only way we survive. That's not evil, William. It's a law. A balance."

"So what then?" His voice was hoarse, refusing to rise above a murmur. "I'm supposed to live off human flesh... every day?"

The kitchen air had thickened, heavy as a storm about to break. The dull bulb above them caught a flash on the knife's blade; for a moment, a dark thought passed behind his eyes — to throw, to smash, to wipe it all away.

"Not every day," Milagros answered evenly, as if explaining a diet. "Only when you want to. But at least once every three weeks, you must. Otherwise your beast wakes up starving, and no amount of willpower will stop it."

She sighed and turned back to the sink, rinsing the crimson film from a plate with small, meditative motions. The red spiraled down the drain in slow ribbons. The world seemed to shrink to that soft sound of water.

"And if you're thinking you can just buy it," she continued, almost absent‑minded, "forget it. No one will sell to you. You're new. Alone. The market doesn't trust strangers. And the price…" she gave a delicate laugh, "…over a thousand dollars a kilo."

"What?" William spun toward her, half shouting. Rage and disbelief tangled in his voice. "For that money I could buy an entire cow!"

Milagros's shoulders moved in a small shrug. "Cows are cheaper. Humans are bespoke. A delicacy." She smiled faintly. "There's poetry in it, don't you think? Human flesh costs more than gold. Six billion of them crawling on this planet, and still — scarcity gives flavor."

He pressed a trembling hand to the wall, eyes squeezed shut. Everything she said resonated with a dreadful sense of logic — a truth that smelled of rot. Laughter threatened to rise in him, but his throat was full of mercury.

"So if I got this right," he rasped, "every three weeks I have to either kill someone, rob a morgue, or dig up a grave. Perfect. Just fucking perfect."

Milagros set the plate aside, turned, and said with a hint of amused cruelty:

"There's a third option. You can eat one of your own kind — a Phenomenon. That'll satisfy you for three months."

Her eyes gleamed with private irony. "Of course, finding someone like us is hard enough. Finding one who'll let you eat them? Impossible. I tried once. Well..." she glanced down at her hand, flexing her fingers like remembering, "…you can see how that ended."

She stepped forward. Moonlight from the window grazed her face, revealing a delicate network of veins pulsing faintly blue beneath the skin. Her beauty had something fundamentally wrong in it — like perfection stretched over a skull.

"Christ... this is utter madness," William muttered, fists clenched so tight that his nails drew blood. His breath came in ragged bursts. "Why can't we just eat animals? A deer bleeds too, doesn't it?"

Milagros looked at him with the gentleness of someone explaining death to a child. Then she smiled — a small, terrible smile.

"Because, love… the soul isn't in venison."

Milagros tilted her head, eyes narrowing as though she were giving the question genuine thought. Then she spread her hands in a small, graceful shrug.

"We could," she said. "But if all of us fed only on deer, there wouldn't be room left on Earth for humans. And besides"— she began counting on her fingers, slow and deliberate —"animals feel too. They suffer. Or do you only care about the kind of life that looks like your own?"

William said nothing. Anger knotted in his chest — anger at her, at himself, at the hollow ache of the logic he couldn't quite dismiss.

"Listen," Milagros said more gently, stepping closer. She placed a cool hand on his shoulder. "The world is a chain, and we're one of the links. Remove us, and balance collapses. Humans are locusts. They devour, multiply, scorch the soil. We..." her voice softened, "we are the correction. Not good. Not evil. Just equilibrium."

She smiled faintly — a sorrowful, almost tender smile — and her fingers drifted to his neck, brushing the skin so lightly it felt like the promise of a chill.

"So be grateful," she whispered. "You were born a predator, not prey. A killer, not carrion."

William stared at the floor. Even his shadow looked wrong — stretched long across the tile, warped, as if it belonged to someone else. Somewhere between her words and his silence, he realized he couldn't remember the last time he'd blinked.

Milagros's voice lingered in his skull, each sentence settling like sand against bone.

You live and kill until someone stronger kills you...

The thought was monstrous — yet there was a rhythm to it, a primal coherence that touched something raw and old inside him.

He drew a slow breath, as though surfacing from underwater. When he finally spoke, his voice came quieter, steadier — but it didn't sound entirely like his own.

"Fine," he said. "You're right... maybe. Let's change the subject, all right? Enough talk of blood and meat. I came here for a reason." He looked up, his pupils still faintly dilated. "We were supposed to meet Letecia. To form the mental link."

Milagros wiped her hands on a towel and nodded with a calmness that felt almost domestic, as if the horror of the last few minutes had been nothing more than idle conversation.

Only the faint twitch at the corner of her lips betrayed her — the subtle, private smile of someone who knows she's just won another round.