Their lips parted and met like rivers colliding, and what followed was a kiss full of teeth and unsure tongues, though Clio nor Three seemed to care about their own lack of finesse of the natural union.

Hungry, yes, feast, Clio’s darkness seemed to say, and his stomach nearly growled. He let it stretch, take over, until he was no more.

“Clio … your eyes are glowing,” Three murmured when they finally pulled apart, seeming only slightly concerned by the appearance of them. He was far too entranced, caught up in the scent that the darkness knew it was emitting.

Clio needed to pull Three deeper into that hypnosis. He needed to ensnare Three within the tangle of his web so that he could not breach through the trap Clio weaved. He was prey, all wrapped up like one of those pretty birthday presents that he’d seen with bright ribbons and bows on television. 

And when unwrapped, Clio could eat.

Clio shifted back, and in the next moment, the lab coat and his uniform slid off of him, and he willed for Three’s own garments to do the same.

Scent filled Clio’s nostrils when Three’s sex was laid bare. The Darkness rolled forward, destroying the bits of Clio in its wake, its goal sinister and overwhelming. It was beyond ready to take what it wanted. No one, and nothing, could have reasoned with it to hesitate, not even Clio.

And it had been famished for far too long.

“Be still,” the Darkness hissed, purring once more as he knelt to the floor before Three. He licked his lips, and took Three into his mouth.

Upon licking up what the Darkness so desired to consume, he released a guttural, inhuman shriek in rapture while Three, too intoxicated by the pheremones the Darkness oozed from the heat of his flesh in waves, as well as remaining in a stupor from his last given order, wasn’t frightened of Clio’s disturbing behavior. 

The Darkness pursued more. 

What followed next were more kisses, touches, until they were both on the ground, Three panting over Clio until they were lined up like a clean, uncomplicated puzzle, with Three nestled between the arched traps of Clio’s legs. 

The Darkness crowed in euphoria, throwing his head back as he released a guttural cry.

Then, the older boy penetrated him. The Darkness preened at the fullness, the heat, but mainly the pleasure, all the while still working on spinning that tangling, unseen, continuously-cast web to capture up his prey.

For the Darkness, while receiving a taste of what he wanted, was not yet satisfied. 

But he did not have to wait any longer.

Finally, with Three releasing inside of him, he consumed everything he wanted.

It was only a few minutes later when Clio drifted back to himself in short spurts, until he poured back into awareness all at once. 

He blinked, taking in his surroundings in unclear, hesitant stages.

For a moment he attempted to stay gone, away from himself, as he did not fully understand the strange, colorful setting that he found himself in. 

Not colorful, for it was just one color, really. Just the one. He was so used to the empty, white spaces of the realm of the PCA. The walls, furniture, and scarce decor all lacked any element of vividness.

So to see such brightness all at once, spread out before him, was nearly jarring to Clio.

For the room was now painted red.

The blaring siren from afar still lit the space with on-and-off crimson, but it was far more than that. The room continued to stay the color even when the light disappeared. The red was uneven and obviously ill-placed. Puddles of red sat in unshaped, odd pools on the floor.

While trying to make sense of what he was seeing, Clio absently felt something in his mouth, something tough and gristly, though satisfying, so he swallowed it unthinkingly, wiping his mouth, which he found to be wet, all while blinking slowly into awareness. When he peeled his hand back from his face, he realized that the wetness there had been red, too. 

Clio knit his eyebrows together, staring at his red hand, which matched his red-dampened arm, and his red-dampened uniform. 

Before he could puzzle all this further, he noticed Three lying on the ground while Clio sat over him. The other boy was rolled away from him, onto his side.

“Three?” Clio asked hesitantly, wondering if the other boy was sleeping. He shouldn’t let him sleep, though. They should move somewhere else. 

Three, the reddest of all, didn’t move.

“Three!” Clio cried rushedly, as the memories of the dire situation caught up with him. He needed to tell Three about what he had seen in the lab, as well as to warn him about the cruel truth of the PCA. They needed to do something…

But as Clio shook Three’s shoulder, the young werewolf fell to his back, and was once more still.

Clio’s eyes immediately dropped to Three’s chest, to the odd shapes drawing his eye. What he saw didn’t make sense, and instead felt more like a bizarre illusion, a trick of the light. This couldn’t be Three’s actual body, if what he was seeing was true. Three’s actual chest was hidden away, beneath this one, safe and untouched beneath this weird mockery of Three’s body.

For the shape didn’t make sense.

Glistening dark red, Three’s entire chest cavity was caved in, becoming an odd, gaping hole, right in the nest of his two naked pecs. The flesh surrounding the wound was organically jagged, but looking into the wound … It was too dark to look into it. But that blackness seemed to go on forever. There was emptiness there, he saw numbly, where a heart perhaps should have been.

Clio’s fingers were jittering rapidly as he moved to shake Three’s shoulder. “Three?” he whispered.

Three didn’t move. His eyes were wide open, though, framed in pain and fear, and seeing nothing.

“Three,” Clio continued, as though he were talking to a conscious person, perfectly capable of response. “Where’s your real body?” he continued in a whisper, holding himself deathly still aside from gently nudging his friend. It was only near the end, when his voice cracked on the word ‘body,’ that his entire frame shuddered and released a terrible, hacking sob.

He whipped up from the ground as the horror set in with the reality that the disfigured Three on the floor, with the gruesomely bizarre gaping wound with its missing vital organ—its heart—was in reality his friend’s actual body. The awful understanding came piece by piece, and when the connection was finally fully made, Clio was sobbing in ragged, awful gasps, desperately wiping redness onto his uniform. Blood, he now knew, as realization set in.

He had killed his friend.

Clio was near-screaming, shuddering as he tried to deny it to himself, his hands flipping up to grab his head.

Only to be stalled by an intruding obstacle that kept him from gripping his scalp. There were two obstacles, arched and protruding from him, smooth as wood. 

What is that?

Stunned into confusion enough to cease his cries, Clio turned unthinkingly, to see if he could catch a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the cell wall, though something moved behind him, further distracting him.

Three?

But it wasn’t Three. It was yet another scene he didn’t understand. 

Wings curved behind him, pale and translucent, tight across arched bone, and when he stretched them, he could nearly see through the veiny skin. They were covered in slime and far too large, and far too much to understand.

Clio’s shrieking picked up again, and he swatted at the wings desperately in fear, worried that some type of animal was on his back, like one of the bat creatures he’d shaded in a coloring book with Miss Geneive. 

But, bizarrely enough, whenever he touched the wings, pain erupted through his senseless slaps. It took him a moment to realize he felt the wings.

He folded the wings up, the muscles worked easy as a leg or an arm, though Clio was still unprepared for the idea that he could control them, that they were a part of him. 

Only when they were folded, minimized in size, did Clio also notice a tail. As pale as his flesh, it curled in the air behind him, swaying gently, as though it were a separate animal that was confused itself. Clio could feel the base of it, just above his buttocks.

Flexible and dexterous, it arched behind him, fading color near the end, and ending in a sharp-looking point, like the barbed tail of a stingray.

It moved forward when he unthinkingly wanted to see it closer, and snapped back when he no longer did.

Swallowing, Clio touched his head once more, his horns, then dropped them.

Then he ran.

He sobbed as he ran, wishing for nothing more than for this nightmare to end, knowing he could no longer process more horror. He was turning into some type of monster, this much he knew. What he needed to do now was figure out how to stop it. 

He needed Agent Jackson. Agent Jackson would help him, the only one, he was sure, who could. Agent Jackson knew everything, he constantly said so, and he would help Clio. He would know what to do. 

As he ran, he’d hoped to leave the wings and horns behind him, and yet like parasites he couldn’t shake, they followed him, attached to him in ways he instinctively knew would be difficult to un-attach. All he could do was will-them away and run.

He stumbled through the halls naked, dressed solely in his bloodbath, traipsing mindlessly as he grasped onto the scent of Agent Jackson.

His senses were stronger, he noted numbly, the thought too unimportant to make it to the forefront. Sounds were too loud, now, but he ignored them as well. The sight, the noise, the smells, and the newness of it all were just distractions that attempted to keep him from his goal, and he couldn’t allow them to let him.

He did sniff the air, though, multiple times, finding himself capable of being able to detect Agent Jackson’s vis and follow the scent. There was something off about the scent, he decided, yet ignored that, too. His capacity for dealing with any other issue had reached its threshold, and he felt filled to the brim, incapable of noticing even the most blatant of discomforts, such as that he was naked and he needed to avoid PCA guards.

There were people chasing him, he considered distantly, though he was somehow faster than them, now, and he left them far behind.

Shots rang around him, at him, yet those too were low disturbances he could not find himself to care about. 

He ran out of the building eventually, and though Clio had never been outside before, had never let the moonlight cool his skin or watch trees sway among a twilight breeze, or feel the grit of the textures of the world around him, he didn’t care.

All of those things simply didn’t matter in the face of what he had done, and what he had become. 

Just find Agent Jackson. Everything will be okay once I find Agent Jackson.

He ran into a new building, swiping his stolen task-watch, and continued on the trail of the scent. 

He noticed, again distantly, that this building seemed much worse for wear. He noticed small, patchy fires, and ignored them. Parts of the ceiling had fallen in, crushed against the ground, as though the plaster had been hit from above. Though the destruction, and the danger of it was evident, Clio simply didn’t care.

There was a loud noise that shook the ground, and Clio saw fire erupt through a hole in the ceiling, though he didn’t pause to wait through what felt like an earthquake, and only glanced at the fire. A bomb, perhaps, he decided absently.

Finally, he made it to a door he felt that Agent Jackson was somewhere behind. The door was already half-open, and he pushed it aside.

The room immediately reminded him of a version of the lab he frequented to meet Dr. Connors and his team, though far smaller. There were the same gurneys, the same beeping medical equipment, and similar monitors. 

The room was empty of people, though, apart from some motion around a single medical bed at the far end of the room. 

Otto was here. He stood over a man who lay upon the bed, facing Clio, though obviously distracted with his current task, too engulfed to notice Clio’s entrance.

A mound of gore, wet with the goo of blood, was crushed between his hands as Otto tore from it with his teeth in near-angry bites, munching and swallowing, munching and swallowing. He was … eating something that had been inside of the man on the hospital bed, the scene mimicking the one that he had just left.

Otto was eating Agent Jackson’s heart, the same as Clio had eaten Three’s.

Clio snapped, the feeling of wrongness with Otto’s presence enforced, and he rushed forward, shrieking, not in fear, but in warning. His wings stretched behind him as he drew himself up to make himself bigger than his opponent. “Get away from him!” he bellowed.

Otto’s head snapped to Clio, and upon spotting him, he released an inhuman, animalistic growl, the scream of a predator, that rumbled threateningly. But then he dropped the muscle that he had been feasting on, stepped back, and shot into the air on wings that hadn’t been there the last Clio had seen him. He vanished through one of the many char-rimmed holes in the ceiling, until Clio once more could neither sense nor see him any longer.

Agent Jackson.

Clio raced forward, picking up the scent, though stumbling to a stop immediately when he noticed, with a guilty wave of relief, that the person Otto had taken life from was not, in fact, Agent Jackson. The dead man on the bed, with the horrible gaping wound in his chest, was merely someone who shared a strikingly similar appearance with him. There was a similar smell, and a similar face, but it was not him. 

“Clio?”

The voice had come from behind him and Clio spun around, letting out a gaspy cry of relief when he realized that the person behind him, towering enough to fill out the open threshold, was Agent Jackson.