I was running through the woods, chasing. The scent of blood led me, stars guided my path.
I was bleeding from my arms - little scratches from the twigs. The leaves whispered with every breeze, their voices tingled my spine.
For a moment, I thought I had lost my wounded prey, till I stepped on the thick red mud - soiled with blood.
He couldn't have gone too far and I didn't think he had the energy to keep fleeing.
I closed my eyes and tried to listen. The whispers turned into giggles and laughter. My first hunt, and possibly, my first failure.
I concentrated. All my senses were heightened from adrenaline, but I was no super human - or maybe not even a human, yet, limited by this body I occupied.
Trapped in my own skin, I grew frustrated.
This wasn't as graceful as the way Mary did it. I was just a brute, a hungry hyena following the trail of the soon-to-be dead.
Things had gone wrong when I couldn't land a decisive blow.
It was in the public toilet by the road that ran along the forest at the edge of the city. I was inspired to hide in a cubicle with a kitchen knife I had stolen from home.
Pathetic. Stealing from my parents.
And silly. It's not like mom wouldn't to notice and casually shrug it off when she eventually did.
Yet, at this point, this was the best I could do.
I wasn't seeking to enter the promised land; the land was mine already - given.
Then I heard a rustle and a grunt. Resisting the urge to open my eyes, I turned my head toward the direction from which the sound came. Once I got it right, I opened my eyes and started walking toward it.
I carefully swept through the unruly grass and wild flowers, the unkempt hair on the scalp of the earth. I went on like that for a minute, then realized I must have passed the source of the sound already. It couldn't have come from this far away.
I looked around yet I saw nothing.
At another rustle, my senses twitched.
It was coming from above.
Holding onto a suitably large branch like someone riding a dead horse, there sat a man that I had stabbed half an hour ago.
He saw me, and saw that I saw him.
Nowhere to go now.
I slowly approached, careful this time. I just had to be sure I got the job done this time.
Moonlight flickered once on the blade of my knife. It still had sticky blood on it. I wiped it clean with the sleeve of my shirt.
Things were going to get bloody anyway. I had a clean set of clothes hidden in the toilet where I first found my prey. All I had to do was end this man, go back, and get changed.
Just like how people swap their faces when they leave their home.
"Please! Don't kill me!"
The man pleaded, his voice desperate.
I didn't particularly feel good about it. I was about to commit a murder.
I thought about apologizing, then dropped the idea.
It was probably better not to engage. Any sympathy would lead to hesitation, which is how he found the chance to slip away from me back in that stinky hole.
The man tried to climb higher, but bleeding profusely from his side, he could hardly move anymore. I wondered whether he would naturally bleed to death if I just left him alone.
I couldn't afford that.
So I moved in haste.
I got to the bottom of the tree and realized he was at least two and a half meters off the ground. I couldn't jump high enough to drag him down. Neither was I good at climbing.
It sucked to be me.
"Please… I'm begging you… I don't want to die…"
Didn't I say that before too?
Without Mary, I would have died back then - or did I?
It didn't matter.
I needed a way to get the man off that damned high horse. It didn't please me that I had to look up to him.
Scanning the area, my eyes well adjusted to the darkness and aided by convenient moonlight, I found a relatively thick branch at a reachable height that I could snap off.
So I did what I had to do.
The branch was a bit longer than a meter. With this, I could smack the man - preferably on his wounded side - until he lost the grip and fell.
Before I did that, though, I invested some time in clearing the area where he would fall. I didn't want him to bang his head on a stone or something and die before I could take his life myself.
The man was sobbing and convulsing in pain. He saw what I was doing and he knew what was coming.
Once ready, I swung the branch in my hand to hit the man. I missed his wound, but by the way he screamed in pain, it seemed I hit him hard enough.
This was going to work.
I continued to smack him again and again, my accuracy increasing each time.
Is this how Roman soldiers felt when they whipped an innocent man two thousand years ago?
At first I was disgusted at what I was doing. My body told me what I was doing was wrong. Then came pleasure - a rush of adrenaline as I started to sweat, much like running on a treadmill. But after that went on for a while, there came frustration.
'Why won't you fall? Just fucking fall and let me kill you already.'
I cursed under my breath.
And then I hit the bull's-eye.
A sharp twig sprouting from the branch landed right on the man's bleeding wound. He squealed like a pig getting its throat sliced, lost his grip, and fell to the ground.
From the way his body was twitching and groaning, I knew he wasn't dead yet.
Praise the Lord for my luck.
I flipped him over with my foot and pressed his chest with my knee. He gasped and choked, dirty spit splashing on my face.
But at this point, I wasn't really annoyed.
The fact that I was really going to kill a man for the first time hit me hard. My hands were shaking. I tried to strangle him, but my trembling arms had no strength. I felt like my body was rejecting what I was doing. It was telling me to stop. 'Don't do it - don't do it to another living thing. This is wrong.'
And I heard the clicks.
Not the rustles of leaves and grass on the ground, but clicks on a solid surface.
Just like that time.
I looked up and there stood Mary, looking down at the man, standing a step away from his head.
She offered me a kind smile and said, "I will guide you."
"No. I can do it myself," I said, determined, resolute.
"I didn't say I would help you; I said I would guide you."
Then threads appeared from her fingertips - fine strands of fiber that floated in the air like her silky hair.
With an elegant motion of her hand, she looped the thread around his neck.
"Hold each end."
I did as I was guided. To my touch, the threads felt incredibly soft. But the blood starting to drip from the man's neck told me that to him, it wasn't as pleasant.
"Ask his name," she said, her voice calm and procedural, but not mechanical.
"What… what is your name?"
"Will you… will you let me live if I told you?!"
The man tried to make a deal.
Absurd.
"Tell him that he will live," Mary said, mentoring me like a mother holding a baby's hand to teach him to walk.
"He will?" I was confused.
"Yes. He will live."
"How? Are we going to let him go?"
"No. But he will live," Mary continued, placing her palm on my head. "In your dreams."
I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I had faith in her words, so I repeated.
"You will live. Tell me your name."
The man let out a sigh of relief, a relief he had never felt before.
"It's Jude Oscar."
Mary let out a single syllable of laughter, and asked me to proceed.
"Pull the threads."
"What she commands shall be done," I thought to myself - and complied.
The man's eyes went wide and his face distorted at the greatest betrayal in his life.
The loop around his neck dug into his skin, and without much resistance, the flesh and bone gave way.
His severed head rolled from the neck and plopped to rest on its left ear, eyes still open.
As I sat on the man's headless torso feeling numb to the core, Mary leaned in, gently held my head by placing her palms on each side of my face - as if to assure me my head was still attached - and gave me a light kiss on my crown.
"Well done, Jonas."