Chapter Text
In the troubled times since the millennium’s passage, a home invasion is not out of the ordinary. With the weight of strange and changing stars bearing down on them, the open void above that looks out onto an unfriendly night not kind to mortal souls, humanity has grown ever more violent, more reckless, more impassioned and inflamed by alien desires. The much-quoted protection that the ruling hand – or tentacle, or other incomprehensible limb – of Royalty provides against the uncaring dark and loneliness of the universe has seemed to wane. People have lost themselves. Their minds have become twisted, some in ways more violent than others.
No, all in all, the scene that Homicide Detective Will Graham looks upon now would, should, be simple enough. And it might have been if the victims were human.
The waveforms of splattered blood that mark their glorious arcs over floor and wall are not arterial red but ichor green, in all the shades and hues that the iridescent fluids of the Royal lines can show to mortal eyes. Those of their own kind might perceive far stranger wavelengths. Not that the eldritch lineage is particularly strong with this couple. The subtlety of the abnormalities of form and anatomy reveal them as being thin-blooded, much watered down. As close to the mortal masses as makes no difference, particularly when compared to those ancient and powerful Gods who have ruled the Kingdoms of Men for nine hundred years past. These beings would not have lived much beyond their twelfth decade if they had continued on uninterrupted.
At least their killer is human, revealed in spots and splatters of red dripped from minor wounds, in the drying mess of semen. Will Graham has one small blessing in his gift of empathy; even if he tries he cannot connect with the minds of Royal lineage. Not that he has ever made many attempts to try. They do not think in the ways of mortals, and he has no wish to start foaming at the mouth and shouting nonsense syllables or babbling in ancient tongues as his mind breaks itself in two trying to comprehend that which no-one has ever been meant to comprehend.
He walks through the steps of the crime, reading actions in the fall of a corpse, the spewing spoor left in a bullet’s trail. This unsub has some familiarity with the oddities of the Old Ones, knowing which chants would deactivate the warped soapstone statue that stands as a guardian above the threshold. A distress beacon, briefly used, then disregarded. The perpetrator has been watching them for some time.
“This was not a crime born from hatred, not in the way it might seem,” Will says, standing now before the body of Mrs Marlowe– human enough to have only a human name. “This man isn’t a Restorationist, he has no strong political views at all. And it must be a man, and a strong one at that. Even using cold iron bullets, they didn’t go easily.” There was a struggle on the stair. Emerald blood smeared in abstract patterns over walls, steps and banisters.
“These acts… they were almost worshipful, in some way. He’s yearning after something. He doesn’t despise their bloodline but he wants to stand over it, have mastery over it…”
The sweet spot of concentration that his recitation requires is shattered, suddenly, by the noisy creak of an opening door and new, unfamiliar footsteps. He re-orientates, re-enters the here and now. The living room of the small suburban home is filling up with strangers in dark jackets, three letters stamped over their shoulder-blades in English script and Runic. They are from the FBI. It appears these two Godlings were more important than the mix of their blood would make them seem.
“Everybody out,” a heavy-set, dark-skinned man shouts. Or… perhaps not a man. There is an ink-stained, woody quality to his flesh that is not quite human, despite features and body language that are not uncomfortable to look upon. Will Graham tries, briefly, to read him through the solidity of his shoulders, the irritation sparking in the backs of his eyes, the powerful, decisive punctuation of sharp stabs of his fingers directing Virginia PD out of the house. A naturally impatient man, forceful, feeling emotions deeply but not easily showing them, and most importantly, comprehensible.
Whatever Royal blood this man has is like that of the Marlowes’; far back, watered down. Safe.
Satisfied, Will makes to follow the crime scene technicians out the door, only to be stopped by a thick, muscular arm across his chest.
“Not you,” the minor Godling says. Glancing down so as to avoid meeting his eyes, Will notes the patch on his jacket that identifies him as Agent J. Crawford. “You’re Will Graham, right?”
Will nods. He hopes his downcast gaze is interpreted merely as an appropriate degree of deference to one of the Blood, not as fear, or worse, something approaching the truth. Those who come from Elder stock have a deep fascination with humans who think in unusual ways, be this the creativity of the artist or poet, the brilliance of the scientist, or the difficulty in understanding other people that has always been Will’s personal… delectability.
His empathy, acute as it is, works better when analysing the past. In the moment he can easily take in too much information, run into difficulties processing, become overwhelmed, lose himself. His sense of self has always been a little insubstantial, subject to the whims of his abilities. To Royalty, this would make him perfect prey. He has swum beneath their radar for this long, through being careful and a good dose of luck, but he knows it cannot last forever.
“I’ve heard about you,” J. Crawford muses. He has a deep voice, rich, with an edge of strange timbres that ought not come from mortal throats. “They say there’s no-one better at interpreting a crime scene, at getting inside the head of human criminals.”
“I’m sure they say a lot of things,” Will replies, deflecting.
The Godling makes a thoughtful noise, a hum that vibrates through Will’s chest. “I should introduce myself,” he says suddenly, pretence at changing the subject. “My name is Jack Crawford, and I head up the Behavioural Analysis Unit at Quantico. My team handles crimes against the Royal line, by humans or by others of the Blood. If the whispers of the rumour-mill are true, I could use someone with your abilities on my team.”
He says it gently, with the illusion that Will has anything like a choice. The pressure of his arm, still lightly resting over his heart, even through layers of clothing is slightly too cool to be natural. There isn’t much for Will to deliberate inside his head. His future has just narrowed down to a single straight line.
“What would you want me to do?”
----
Skip ahead some two years. Will Graham gazes out into a darkened room at half a hundred bodies, only some of which are warm, and only a few of which have the standard number of limbs, or eyes, or internal organs. Some of the students have gazes that glow red or green or amber as they follow his slow pace back and forth, flick to the images projected onto the screen behind him. Teaching is a small part of his job working for Jack Crawford, but one of the parts of it he likes the most. He doesn’t have to think, just speak knowledge into the air and let it take root.
It is a quiet and peaceful moment in time, and like all good things it cannot last. The lecture is over, the lights come up, the ranks of trainees with varying amounts of Elder blood flowing through their pulsing vessels begin to file out, discussing in a low buzz like insects or radio static. He can feel the weight of eyes on him as he packs up. A mortal in the FBI is an oddity. Although many here could be said to be related through their lineage, nepotism is not the right word for what goes on. Merely that they are of the ruling class, and what else is to be expected?
At least true Royalty, the purer lines, have little interest in the vocations of mortal culture. He won’t find any of them here, and the weak-blooded are not so much of a threat to him. He lies within the aegis of Jack’s protection, which is some small comfort. Will is too valuable to be consumed, even if he is not always of much use when their crime scenes are the result of Godlings warring against each other. Some are close enough to human to read. Others pass the line into incomprehensible.
Speaking of that particular individual, here he is now. Jack Crawford steps from malleable, ever moving shadows into warm electrical light that throws strange highlights from his skin and makes odd colours bloom like an oil-slick. He looks serious, and so Will knows that another crime is waiting for them outside these walls.
“This case is slightly outside of our usual remit,” Jack explains, as they walk the echoing corridors of the Quantico facility. It is an odd building, warped in unnatural ways, full of passages that lead nowhere, or loop back on themselves defying the simple perception of space that mortals are bound to. Every corner is a breeding pool for strange shadows and lesions on walls that weep blood, birthing whispers on the edge of hearing. It does not bother Agent Crawford, and Will has learned to get used to it.
“How so?” he asks, accepting the thick folder Jack hands him.
“This is all human on human crime,” Jack explains, “seven girls taken over as many months from college campuses around Minnesota, and now an eighth missing just this weekend. It just so happens that one of them was a member of a Royal household, and the Lady would rather like to find out who stole her.”
“Member of a household,” Will scoffs. “You mean a pet.”
“If you want to put it in those terms, yes,” Crawford replies. He looks at Will a little strangely. Sometimes Will forgets how unusual his upbringing was, roaming around the country from state to state, slipping through the cracks, having little truck with society of any kind. He should be used to the way of the world by now, and yet somehow these things still send a frisson of unease down the back of his spine.
Still, things are better than they once were. After the Restorationist riots at the turn of the previous century, some small concessions were made – though many of those revolutionaries were broken in mind and body as punishment for the depths of their temerity. The Old Ones have been amongst them now for so long that their blood penetrates an ever greater proportion of the populace, offering these weak hybrids their own form of protection. Now it is only the pure who still rule, who still rightfully ought be called Royalty, and who operate by their own rules and own laws without recourse to the mores and preferences of their subjects.
Will can understand this. They have power, and this means they do as they want. It does not mean – as is true for so many – that he has come to accept it, that he does not yet feel the sting of it every day. But he knows he will never speak up. He doesn’t have the courage to be a Restorationist. Knows that to evoke the attention of a Godling is to sacrifice his own life, his own mind, his own autonomy. He must be interested in his own survival first.
“So we have patronage for this case,” he says, flicking through the photographs and documents and drips and drabs of evidence he has been presented. “I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to these girls’ families.”
“The comfort will be in catching their killer,” Jack replies, with a warning tone. Will is pushing it, and he knows it.
“What do we have so far?”
“Not much.” Jack says. “No bodies, no evidence, nothing. He takes them on the Friday so no-one reports them missing until Monday. Whatever he’s doing, he needs the weekend.”
“For the sake of argument, I’d ask why you’re so sure these are murders rather than abductions.”
“We both know what’s more likely.”
Will nods. “And there’s no sign that more than one person is involved. That this isn’t some kind of flesh-trafficking ring.” A recognised problem, more so with the resurgence of so many millennial cults, eager mortals caught up in religious fervour for the Gods that rule their world and lives, willing to pay ridiculous sums for suitable sacrifices.
“We’ve considered the possibility, of course,” Jack tells him. “The girls all look alike, and at first we thought they were all virgins. Further investigation illustrated otherwise. A cult would have made sure.”
“A serial killer then.” Will sighs. At least this one has a pattern, some reason running in the back of his head, even if it wouldn’t make sense to most of humanity. “He wouldn’t need to keep taking more if he still had them somewhere. And we’re sure he is human?”
“If he wasn’t, he’d have no need to hide,” Jack replies.
“Unless he’s more human than not,” Will argues. Ignores the flicker of anger, of sorrow, of the bone-deep sense of unfairness that lurks leviathan in his belly, in the centre of him. True Royalty can still hunt as they wish. Their lesser cousins must petition for the privilege, and may not get it at all. “He might not have the right. Be aiming above his station.”
“Perhaps,” Jack allows. “But let’s hope for all our sakes that that isn’t the case. We want you to be able to get as deep into his mind as possible, solve this as quickly as possible.”
Jack leads him into his office, to the pin-board with the collages and photographs laid out geographically. Will has to step around the antique desk to get to it – oak upholstered in tanned human skin, a relic from a previous Bureau Director rather closer to Royalty than the owner it has now passed to. He examines the most recent victim.
Elise Nichols. Supposed to have returned home to her parents to house-sit and apparently never made it. She looks so very normal, so very natural and human. It always makes Will angry, when people prey on other people. They have enough enemies in their rulers without turning on each other.
“We focus on her,” he says, returning the photograph to its rightful place.
“They all have the same eye colour, the same hair colour,” Jack says, “roughly the same age, the same height, same weight. So, what is it about all of these girls?”
“It’s not about all of these girls,” Will replies, looking from one to another to the next, trying to see what it is their killer sees, divining his psychology from even such small clues as these. “It’s about one of them. The one that’s special to him. The one that means something. The others are as much camouflage as they are repetition of this… sacred act.”
“Then is he working up to this sacred act, as you call it, or re-living it?”
“The goal, the one that’s most precious to him… she wouldn’t be the first or the last. She’ll be hidden in amongst them. He’d hide how special she was. I would. Wouldn’t you?”
He almost wishes that this would be it, that the relatively simple, uninvolved analysis would be all that Jack needs from him. That he could return to his classroom, remain detached and aloof from all the messy, fractured emotions that are sure to come from a case like this. When it’s humans killing Godlings he doesn’t need to try and disassociate from the emotions afterwards; he luxuriates in them, lets himself pretend he was one of those with the will to do what they do, to slay the monsters in the dark. When it’s something like this, as he knows from his days in Homicide, the borrowed feelings are poisonous, sickening. He doesn’t want to be the sort of person that they are, that his empathy forces him to become if only for a short while.
“I want you to get closer to this,” Jack is telling him. “Otherwise the fallout is going to hit all of us and it’s not going to be pretty.”
Will has never been in a position to refuse him.
----
There’s a grieving family, a welter of messy emotion, and then, surprisingly, an actual crime scene. The reasons are not yet clear why their killer returned Elise’s body, but it gives Will something to work with and that’s more than he was expecting from this trip. He can stand in that room and slip into the mind of a man who does what he does not from a place of hate but rather from all-consuming love. A hungry, possessive love, stripped of all boundaries of propriety, existing merely as need. He puts his hands around her throat and the life passes from her into him and he owns her. She can never leave him.
He surfaces with the awareness of eyes upon him. Will is constantly attuned to the weight of a hundred different types of gaze, from coldly assessing, to a simple student crush, to distaste and dislike. This gaze is friendly and familiar. He turns his head to see Beverly Katz waiting at the threshold.
She is one of the few Godlings he likes. Beverly has a blunt honesty that fosters an easy friendship and allows little pretence. Her Blood is stronger than many in the Bureau, and yet she is somehow down-to-earth despite it. She seems to rather like humans, not regarding them particularly as prey or pet or pest but simply as another species, and even a vaguely interesting one at that. In this, she is similar to the only other being of Royal lineage – and near to pure Royalty at that – he has met that shares this outlook; Alana Bloom. Both of them have chosen names that are human, without the subtle layers of inherent meaning that plaster so many of the appellations their kind choose. Although when it comes to Alana, it is probably better not to draw any real conclusion from that. Royalty has many reasons for what it does, and only some of those reasons make any actual Gods’-damn sense.
“I’m starting to think you do that on purpose,” he says.
“Gotta keep you on your toes,” she replies, brushing something that isn’t quite hair away from her many sets of eyes. “I found antler velvet in two of the wounds. Thought you might be able to use the extra evidence in drawing up your picture.” Another way in which she is unlike most of her kind; she sees his abilities through the lens of the factual, as opposed to most of these creatures whose connection with what is real can be tenuous at the best of times. Will is used to them assuming that his empathy is merely a shadow of some of their own abilities, a human kind of magic. Perhaps some of it is, but the evidence must be there first. He needs a basis, a strong foundation to build upon.
“Yeah, thanks,” he says, then is interrupted by a Godling he likes rather less than Beverly.
“Deer and elk pin their prey, okay, put all their weight onto the antlers to try and suffocate a victim. That’s how they would kill like, a fox or a coyote.” It’s Zzzzeller, whose single pair of eyes are the shattered-mirror orbs of an insect, who clicks when he walks, and who, frankly, is just as irritating as a buzzing fly.
“Ruminants are herbivores. They don’t have prey.” The ‘idiot’ at the end of the sentence is implied. This from Jimmy Price, another of those rare humans working for the Bureau. Despite that he and Zzzzeller bicker it’s in the way of family or close friends. Will is consistently surprised that they get on as well as they do, considering Zzzzeller’s normal distain for most mortals. There’s some story behind it, but he isn’t exactly one to pry into the pasts of others, not when he’s given any other choice.
“The velvet isn’t part of the murder,” Will says, before any argument can really get started. “At least, not the initial part of it anyway. It has healing properties. He likely put it there on purpose when he returned the body. He wanted to undo as much as he could, given that he’d already killed her. Whatever he did to the others he couldn’t do to her.
“This is an apology.”
----
Will finds another dog running loose in the road on his drive back to Wolf Trap that night. He’s a skinny mutt, staying well out of reach until Will finally entices him in with food. Dogs remain popular with mortals; less so with those of the Blood. Animals generally tend to react badly to Royalty, become frenzied, sometimes attacking with no heed for their own safety. Some instinct in them recognises things not of their own reality and knows they should not, by all rights, exist.
Will can sympathise.
Keeping such a large pack of abandoned strays is sort of his own little rebellion, his way of saying ‘fuck you’ to the majority of the unnatural things that rule his world. Oh, he’ll admit that some of them are nice enough like Beverly or Alana, or even Jack when Will is being generous, but the fact remains that the true-bloods, the real Royal line, are above the law and make good use of that fact. Will has seen too many horrors ignored and swept under the carpet in his time to have much sympathy remaining for any of the Elder kind, even their thin-blooded get.
He names the newest mongrel Winston.
----
That night he has bad dreams. This is not unusual, not for him and not for any of human stock. He’s not sure he or any other of the mortals he has ever talked to have experienced what might be called ‘good’ dreams. It’s a popular Restorationist propaganda that once upon a time humanity had the ability to sleep quietly through the dark night, that it was only with the coming of the Great Old Ones that things became this constant struggle, this cycle of waking and falling back asleep and sweating and half-screaming.
The reply, of course, and commonly accepted fact, is that the reverse is true. Without the protective aegis of the Elder-kind against the void there was no such thing as sleep, only a period of hallucinatory terror that punctuated the space between the sun’s setting and rising. Will supposes that theory and conjecture are not actually particularly helpful. His nights are what they are. At least sometimes they give him some vague and sibylline clues as to his latest case.
Something of that ilk happens that night, but he does not realise its true significance until later. The precise placing of Elise Nichols on her back, rising up, is a glimpse of a future kill displayed in a Minnesota field just for him. A flash of that which is to come, un-interpretable in the present moment, as these things so often are.
The next day, back at the Quantico building, Jack gives him another of his patented pep-talks. Will tends to think of them more as threats. He’s confident that Crawford isn’t even aware that he’s doing it, but it is plain enough in his body language, in the timbre of his voice. Godlings are predators, and their instincts are to act as such. This mysterious Royal Lady must be putting on the pressure, for Jack to be so adamant, so nearly desperate.
Will explains what he has managed to pick up, the love, the sorrow, the adoration, the complicated mixture of emotions that differentiates this killer from most other human serial murderers. As a profile it both tells them much and not enough. The red, red walls of the bathroom throb around them like the beating of a great heart. Water, or some other liquid, trickles on the edge of his hearing, not quite heard. That slight irritation of something you can’t quite be sure is there. Will grits his teeth, on edge.
Used to be he would separate himself from the emotions of the criminals he profiled, back in his days at Homicide, by reminding himself just how different his real feelings were. But there’s so much that under very different circumstances would be normal and positive that it’s proving hard to do that now.
“We’ll find him, I promise you that,” he says to Jack mostly to provide an excuse to leave the room. It closes in around him, has the hint of properties that make his eyes water, his head throb, his vision warp in and out like someone about to faint, half-drunk on heat or tiredness or incipient ill health.
The corridors outside are not much better, but in movement he can persuade himself that his shifting perspectives are mere illusions, rather than the insult to the real that they are. That the darkness clustering at the edges of his vision is not growing, hungry shadow, or his brain buckling under the unnatural pressure of this confluence of bloodlines like a deep-sea diver with a fault just starting to show in his suit.
Escaping, at least for a little while, he still has a job to do. Will makes his way to the lab, atmospheric with bubbling beakers and archaic, arcane instruments in a way that is half considered effect and half genuine function. Zzzzeller and Price have already begun the autopsy, and Beverly has news of her own to report.
“I found a shaving of metal on her dress,” she tells him, the double-pair of bat-wings on her back flickering in and out of reality with her excitement. “Which, considering we found no usable prints and no skin or other parts of the killer we could track, means it’s our only lead.”
“Then we should be looking at plumbers, steam-fitters, tool-workers,” Will suggests, crossing his arms over his body, fragile meat protection. He’s not even on the same scale of psychic sensitivity as most of the Blood, but for a human he can pick up a lot, and the lab is too heavy with the spoor of death and violence to make him comfortable. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Air ghosts in mysterious currents without discernible source.
The shadows seem more present today than is normal. The inky folds of the body-bag between plastic and flesh have a hypnotic power. They whisper inside his head, and Will finds himself fixing upon them, staring into nothing, this small cousin of the great void, the space between stars. He stares and all else recedes into the darkness. He is being enveloped by a vast and creeping cold.
Within it something pale rises up. A corpse whitened by death and drained of all blood, hanging, draped in her dress and the falling curtain of her hair from lolling head. There is something behind her. Something wild and desperate.
The antlers pierce her as smooth as sliding through air itself. Like hooks they hold her and she is swiftly soaked in crimson thick and dripping. She tilts her face upwards, slowly, slowly. She is no longer herself, but something both more and less. Something of the void.
Abruptly Will Graham blinks and finds that he has been let free. That whatever mindless malevolence or semi-benevolent God lurks in the dark places of the FBI has given him a vision of a true thing. Clearer than the circuitous prophecy of his dreams. His mouth opens and words come out, although he is not entirely certain that this is of his own accord.
“She was mounted on them,” he says. “Like hooks. She may have been bled.”
“Her liver has been removed,” Zzzzeller notes, ungloved, chitinous hands plunging sticky into the autopsy gash from clavicles to pubis. He claims he can pick up clues that way; Will privately thinks he just likes it. “He took it out, then put it back in again.”
“Why would he cut it out if he was just going to sew it back in again?” Price asks.
The epiphany rises up from the back of Will’s mind like a behemoth dripping from the sea. He suspects he has known it for a while, at least since the confrontation with Jack in the bathroom, but has not been quite able to put it into words until now.
“There was something wrong with the meat,” he tells them, with the bitter taste of raw blood at the back of his mouth, and a great and gaping hunger mirrored in his heart. He thinks he might have some dim glimpse of how Royalty might feel. Becoming their prey is not such an unlikely fate out of numberless, horrible ways to die, but that is not cannibalism. The Elder kin cannot be counted as human.
Cannibalism, real cannibalism, is something else entirely, and all the more horrifying for it.
“She has liver cancer,” Zzzzeller replies, the abilities of his lineage useful for once.
“He’s eating them.”
----
This world is strange and flat. Even after so many years it fits ill, gravity-heavy, constant sparks from buzzing electrons scraping over hide hidden in the spaces between photons, staid and solid and only partially malleable. It has been changed as appropriate, as much as it can be. Not quite enough. Still. Entertainment enough to be found here that he has not chosen to leave.
The lesser kin, warped stock wherein codified script of mortality presses odd against ghosts and echoes of brother-sister-selves, are fit enough to survive in this half and half world – they are it, more or less. Never suffer the psychoses of slave and servant-beasts. And his sibling-conquerors – though adapted best for the environments they once called home, confluences of non-Euclidean geometry outside of what their subjects understand as space and time – withstand the touch of this dimension well enough. They have the minds of predators, the bodies of sleek, wet, changeable things from deep waters. They have mixed their blood with human blood.
Spirit of curiosity, experiment, amusement, instruments of will, colonisation… Many reasons why. Not a choice he has yet made.
Warping the world does have curious effects on pure mortal minds, and that does interest him. Has made it his habit to observe them, in the reduced avatar or fragment of the utter self he uses. Allows them use of his false-name; Hannibal – ‘Grace of the Master God’. Consumption is in his nature, be it souls or flesh or pain, but for his patients he makes the attempt to rein this in. Basking in their pure and untainted anguish is rewarding enough in itself, without supping, and tainting the purity of the cup.
Franklin is one of those broken human delicacies. Whatever he might have been in another place and time, here the constant pressure of living in a world which as it must seem to him is cracked open in a hundred weeping rents, that looks up every night on a foreign, alien sky, has made him entirely neurotic. Human finds himself unable to socialise, overcome by both desperate attraction to and fear of Hannibal’s own kind. So many moments experienced through shuddering breaths of fear. Surrounds him like a piquant perfume.
Therefore fascinating to watch the flickering pattern of the neurons in his human brain, change them through usage of simple words. No need to resort to application of power. Yet he does try to harden this one and all his patients against the world they find themselves in, for it is of intellectual interest. A puzzle. Is it indeed possible to cure any of these people?
Perhaps merely keeping them stable is the best that can reasonably be hoped for. If so, he may politely state that in this he excels.
From the present moment, past streams back and the web of possible futures opens up. Something else to get used to, this singular progression. An hour passes and that which happens coalesces with each second as the universe reforms into a different shape. By the end of it, Franklin has made the air heady with sweat and anxious pheromones, and Hannibal scents from it deeply as he escorts him out. A hunger rises within him, but is content with the existence of the pleasurable ambience the man’s stress leaves behind. Franklin is at base harmless, and does not deserve to be devoured, no matter what artistry of taste lurks inside his weakened, fragile mind. That is a fate reserved for those unworthy of merest existence, wounding and worsening the world with their presence.
Another with Royal blood waits behind the door, sensed before it is reached. Hannibal’s thin-blood seeming shell with stable muscle, bone, flesh is yet utterly under his control – difficult sometimes to remember it needs something so simple as the molecule oxygen – so does not react when seeing the man with recourse to light and optics and electrical signals traversing nerves. Amusement spikes internally when the man mistakes his identity. Evidence of skill in creating his disguise. And proof, even could he not see it with the self sitting quiet in spaces between atoms, that this is a real thin-blood. He tongues curiously at a mind alien with attenuated mortality, undetected by its simplicity.
“Oh, Doctor,” the little Godling says, apologetic once its fault has been exposed. “Sorry. I’m uh, Special Agent Jack Crawford, FBI. May I come in?” He produces relevant identification, down to burned, raw sigils extremely unwise to attempt to fake, so Hannibal has no obvious reason available to refuse him. It strikes him that he has a certain familiarity with this name.
Ah. The woman who came close enough to almost unmask him. A pity, about that one. Might have made good follower, good worshiper.
Hannibal has his own, rather specific, reasons for remaining hidden. Secreting away the truth about his essence, the richness of his Blood, hunting in darkness when any mortal and many thin-bloods might be his prey by right. If the circumstances of his flight from Europe had been different… But is of a past made solid by the workings of this place, thus beyond even his skills to alter.
“You may wait in the waiting room,” he tells Agent Crawford, so he might conceal what ought be concealed. Would not do to leave obvious clue lying where it will be seen, make man realise his ‘crimes’. A possible future obvious enough to be easily averted. Inconvenient, to kill him. Sloppy. Unworthy of him.
Still, his instincts are for chaos, in possibly futile attempts to create unseen and unpredictable outcomes. Unable to deny them any more than he could deny his self. Well, could, but would no longer be self, but some other new self that he might not like as much. Very dull. He leaves the Wound Man drawing near the top of the pile of his art, a mere sliver visible. Mayhap this Jack Crawford will see it, pull it forth, have awareness dawn on him like the rising of a diseased star. Perhaps it will go un-noticed. These are two known futures. Only the resolution of the universe will concrete which one.
Deliciousness of the scenario is too wonderful to resist.
“Please, come in,” he says when he is done, inviting Crawford into his office. He cannot deny his curiosity as to the man’s purpose here. “So, may I ask how this is all about me?”
He is careful never to be clumsy with words, although pure concepts come more naturally to the workings of his mind.
“You can ask, but I may have to ask you a few questions first.” Although thin-blood looks and sounds confident and assured, Hannibal has licked deep enough into his head to perceive he has been distracted by his sumptuous surroundings. It is true, Hannibal is a collector, and since coming to the New World has amassed sufficient resources to indulge his tastes. Objects of worship from scores of pre-conquest cultures are displayed around the room, arranged in certain fashions to prompt confluence of primordial energies, give shadows life and colour and motion, make this place a comfort and succour to those who in any part are not of this world.
A pity that many of his patients find it uncomfortable at first, but their simple psyches can be reconfigured to accept it with only little prompting. It is not a remedy that can be sustained for longer than the span that they stay within the places he has claimed; else he could go into business as a miracle-worker and heal the psychoses of a nation of humans.
“You expecting another patient?”
“No. We are all alone.” The better if events require blood to be spilt.
“No secretary?”
“I find that those of our kind intimidate my patients. And I have not yet found a human who both suits my exacting requirements and has sufficient mental strength.”
“I suppose that’s a common problem in your line of work,” Crawford says. Hannibal inclines his head slightly in agreement.
It is then that the Agent notices the table in the corner. Flicking back the protective sheet of new-born-lambskin – an unfortunate effect of the many artefacts that anything which has the appearance of life left in this room has a tendency to make that seeming into reality – reveals his more recent work. And one old one, half-hidden.
But, as seemed more probable, thin-blood is characteristic of his kind and Jack Crawford sees but does not see. Even humans sometimes more observant, if only because if they are not watchful they know that some seemingly inconsequential thing may still result in their deaths.
To put the matter to a final rest, one way or the other, Hannibal says, “I’m beginning to suspect you’re investigating me, Agent Crawford.”
“No, no,” the man says, laughing. “No, you were referred to me by Alana Bloom. In the Psychology Department, Georgetown.”
Ah, this piques his interest. Alana (Atgyatmalkath is closer to accurate, but still constrained) is ally-kin, friend so much as that human concept can be applied. Interests and spheres of influence aligned. Both curious about workings of servant-race, she more affectionate to them than he thinks seemly. But nearly/not-quite pure-blood, half-ascended, so can be allowed her foibles. Rumours though, he had heard, and silenced rude mouths later in quiet places. Rumours that she has allowed intimacy with humans, mind to mind, true self to self. Unlikely. Human would not survive process, and that would displease her.
Still slander, which is more appropriate to mortal perversions of underground pornography rings than to those of the Blood, who ought know better.
The joining done to start the Bloodlines had nothing of intimacy about it. Mortals might label this sexual, but they are unable to understand the nature of Royalty, and thus do not comprehend. Not breeding so much as reshaping. No touch of inner truths. No trust that vulnerable moment will not turn to advantage taken and minds, teeth, claws tearing the lesser apart. No. Royalty does not share with lessers. Royalty takes.
“Most psychology departments are filled with personality deficients,” he says. “Dr Bloom would be the exception.”
Small talk thereafter for some time, preamble to actual request Crawford has come here regarding. Form matters little; it is a concept long polite in human society, unfortunately adopted by the lesser of his kin. Needless, but he suffers through it for propriety’s sake until the heart of matter is reached.
“I need to you help me with a psychological profile.”
“May I ask whose?” Hannibal says.
“Will Graham.”
The pause of a moment long held, as the world tilts upon its axis. Syllables hang heavy in air and spin out new possibilities and are glorious. Force is made manifest in dimensions outside of limited four. A talisman and prophecy, a name of Power, and the inevitable now set into inexorable motion. The universe solidifies around its new reality and is changed forever.
“It would be my pleasure,” he replies.
----
In a manner now replete with familiarity from repetition over multitudes of occasions, circumstances, meetings, Hannibal dons a camouflage appropriate to this introduction. Knows it must be fit to fool this new and curious mortal, who sits so heavy on the fabric of reality and future events. Practise in so doing has not been only in human clothes; his own existence is camouflage of a kind, for true self cannot fully manifest on this plane no matter the expense of energy. Must project this body-shell, or other body-shells describing facets of What Is into shallow world of short-lived beasts. Still, while he does wear this avatar, he means to follow the mores of the society that surrounds him. Was stylish creature back in Sea That Is Not, so must be stylish here too, when limited to mere four limbs, to pale, smooth, easily pierced skin.
Now he armours himself in drab; browns and soft khaki and cream. He is blending in.
Most of the Blood who are not truly Royal cannot make seemings with such accuracy. Control over form is less, dictated by circumstance of birth and melding of genetic code read poorly. Not so for himself. This flesh carefully shaped, showing off his skill at sculpture to any who might divine his secret. How close does one look? To see what he is? Or think, like foolish Jack Crawford, that only an unfortunate thin-blood. Most satisfying. Hiding in plain sight. Will it serve to trick Will Graham too? Perhaps not. Must be some reason the signifiers of momentous fate surround this mortal’s name.
Thus arrival in Crawford’s office experiencing mostly curiosity, anticipation, something not quite akin to unease, and so he settles down to wait. Thin-blood provides him with a cup of abysmal coffee barely seasoned with slight dash of blood from whatever animal died on their sacrificial altar this morning, and Hannibal has no intention of consuming such lesser tribute. Drinking it is pretence, raising to lips and spiriting away fluid into void where tiny, mindless entities will lick it up gladly.
Then finally moment comes, accompanied by frission of air, all shadows in the building thrilling at human’s passage. Self shudders with it, pangs in sympathy, knowledge of something special. He fixes attention in all means and modes of sensing on the door and the mortal who passes through it, sparing Hannibal a quick glance quickly dropped, hanging coat from chair’s back. Will Graham (future warps as name even crosses across the gulf of his mind) sits sprawling and open despite the acrid bite of nervousness that seasons the air.
“You didn’t tell me we were expecting company Jack,” he says, his fingers twitching against his knee.
Visual inspection only – any using basic senses given to human bodies – would not immediately show that Will Graham is something special. Appearance is scruffy and unkempt, not unusual for a mortal, and particularly not for one in position this man occupies. Clothes basic, masculine, outdoorsman, lower-class, colour hunter green. Earthy; forest hue showing attachment to the nature of his home, with little liking for the sharper tones more in fashion amongst Eldritch-kind. A swiftness to his thoughts that Hannibal finds immediately appealing; sharp bursts of electricity flickering between neurons. Although he will not lock a gaze his eyes still track, taking in details with little effort.
“This is Hannibal,” Agent Crawford says, making introductions. “He’s a psychiatrist. I’ve asked for his help in drawing up a profile at the request of the Lady. She’s… concerned about the speed at which we’re progressing.”
“Don’t send a human to do a Royal’s job?” Will asks, with a certain wry sarcasm.
“She wanted a profile of you.” Crawford is apologetic. Hannibal watches as every muscle tenses in Will’s body. Human head turns towards him; scent of fear floods the air for the first time.
“He’s here to get into my head?” Fight or flight starting to kick in, and wisely when faced with a superior predator, Will Graham is tending towards flight. “No, no Jack, you promised! No-one poking around up there, no-one messing around with who I am, you promised!”
“Mr Graham.” The words must come swiftly else have crucial first meeting soured forever. Though might be amusing to watch the man flee, hunt him down through unfamiliar maze of this geographically implausible building… Still, unwise. This is too important to leave to chance. Initial impression will echo into future, close some paths, open others. Impossible yet to predict final outcome, must merely manoeuvre in optimal fashion. “I am not that kind of psychiatrist.”
“No?” He is half on his feet, an arrow cocked on the trembling bow-string of his body. “You’re of the Blood aren’t you? That’s what your kind do.”
“It is my personal belief that such mechanisms are crude at best, and butchery at their worst,” Hannibal replies, speaking both truth and lie. Contingent on vagaries of self, of circumstance. What is true now is not always true, and vice versa. He draws the fingers of his thin-blood shell along back of what would be Crawford’s chair were they all seated, turning his gaze away to seem less threatening. Input of lesser senses is merely ghost in the back of larger self’s mind. “They are not to my taste. In that regard you have nothing to fear from me. If you feel yourself disinclined to trust my word, consider that I am a friend of Alana Bloom, whom I believe you know.”
A slow nod. Tension eases slightly.
“My methods are much like hers, or that of any human psychiatrist. Simply talking.”
“I would have thought you’d find that too mortal, too constricting,” Will says, some of his bite coming back.
“I like a challenge,” Hannibal replies mildly. “But I believe there is a case that requires discussion between you and Agent Crawford. Please, allow me to stand back and observe for the moment. An interview can come later, if I believe it’s necessary. I assure you this is mostly a formality.”
Will breathes out; long shudder, exhalation driving tension purposefully from his body. It lingers on the air before it dissipates, signifying purged emotion’s strength. He sinks back into his chair. Composes himself, and turns his mind to thoughts of their killer.
Hannibal considers the facts Jack Crawford has briefed him on whilst the pair talks. Considers factors setting human apart from most of kin-creatures, little dull scrabbling insects swarming over planet’s surface, fit to enact will of betters and that is all. Unique mind, thin-blood Agent says, working in unique way. Able to assume the point of view, very self, of any of his own kind. Mutability not often seen in this world, in these beasts, in any mind of mortal flesh. Sketched normally onto the real as brief and static images soon wiped clean, not so this Will Graham.
Less clear if the man can apply the same trick to less familiar selves. Will himself has avowed not. Finds the eldritch, disparate, multitude of minds that makes up the Blood too different to fully comprehend. Hannibal has his own suspicions. Does not, would not, fit entirely with weight and significance gained in all of space and time most easily seen stretching forth from this point. No, he would not be so limited. Rather that Will Graham is afraid to wander too deep into weird and strange. To put his mind and sanity in danger, to risk losing his own mundane point of view.
Lacks ambition. Strange. Opportunity presented by own self-ness to be great and do great things, so why deny? Why be afraid? Why pretend anything other than what you are – and somehow not change self into tiny ordinary mortal by doing so? Destiny too great to pretend otherwise, too great to avoid.
No, cannot be allowed to hide forever. Cannot be allowed to cower and make mockery of what might be, to choose lesser path and let universe crystallise it. Therefore Hannibal’s course of action is clear. It falls to him to expand Will Graham’s mind, spur to full potential, shape into something glorious, terrible and majestic. And after that?
Well. Has missed his cults and followers, abandoned with the Old Country he once ruled. What better for a God than to win a new Prophet?
----
Will is not entirely sure what he feels about this Godling psychiatrist Jack has recruited. He hadn’t been what he might have expected, if he had actually been given the chance to expect anything at all. He’d been… polite. Not friendly, more naturally aloof, but it wasn’t exactly in an arrogant way. The fact that he knew Alana – and Will had called to verify that and been treated to a recitation of the being’s personal and academic virtues that left him feeling slightly off-balance and unsure if he was jealous – was a positive mark in his favour, in terms of his likely attitude towards humans.
That doesn’t mean he trusts Hannibal though. Not yet. It’s hard enough trusting human strangers with his ability to read them, worse when faced with an unknown and potentially malevolent creature whose thoughts and motives are impenetrable. Although the psychiatrist seems to be a thin-blood, judging by his appearance and by his lack of much in the way of inhuman characteristics. There are his eyes; dark, maroon pools without pupil, iris or sclera, and swept over occasionally by milky nictitating membranes, and there had been something a little off about his mouth, or rather what lurked behind his lips, but otherwise nothing. Considering one of Will’s fellow lecturers is composed of a horde of buzzing flies that assumes the shape of a man, Hannibal seems rather ordinary.
For the moment at least, Will doesn’t expect he’ll be seeing him again anytime soon. Hannibal had promised to give a favourable provisional report back to the concerned Lady, and both he and Jack Crawford had given their words to at least try and persuade Her to be content with just that. He would find the fact that he passed whatever bullshit test of character a Royal finds most appropriate reassuring, if it weren’t for the fact that human sanity is fairly low down on the list of their kind’s priorities. In fact passing it probably means he is just as unstable as he has always feared.
These are not thoughts he is comfortable dwelling on, so he puts them out of his mind. There is an entirely human killer out there that he is meant to be catching, and that takes priority.
Neither he nor the rest of the FBI team have much time for further investigation down the lines his current deductions have taken them. Not before Jack is storming into the lab with a report of another murder, one that breaks the monthly pattern. Although it might not seem like it, this is a good thing. If he’s speeding up he’s also getting sloppy. He’ll be making mistakes, and those mistakes will get him caught.
The fact that it has cost another young girl her life turns his stomach, it does, but in so many years in this environment, he has become used to that sensation. Few of the Royal lineage give a care for the loss of human life, and he knows there will be no sorrow or sympathy coming from those corners. If anyone is going to care more than a passing fancy of ‘oh, too bad’ about the killer’s victims, it will have to be Will Graham, and that’s not an easy burden to bear.
Getting to Minnesota is something of a production. Previously enough time had elapsed that flying was quick enough to serve their purposes. Since their killer has increased his speed, now so too must they. The basement of the Quantico building is tunnelled into rock, a rough-walled cave network with strange acoustics and as wet with damp as though built by the sea. They descend into it, bringing light with them in the form of flickering pitch torches, making the dark dance.
Will and Jimmy are not best adapted for either this environment or the method of their travel. Will still has scars on him where the serpent’s maw of the portal took its toll from his flesh. But a true-blood is pushing them, and they are driven to desperate things.
A thin spiral of steps leads down to the final cave and forces them single file. Will can hear a low moan rising up from the deeps below. The wet, shuffling of some vast creature. Wind stirs softly against his face, all too easy to imagine as breath. He follows the dark smears of Beverly’s wings in the air and fights the desire to close his eyes entirely.
The sacrifice they have brought with them (no, he will not acknowledge its existence until he has to, it’s safer that way) is pushed to the front when the cave opens itself up before them. It trembles and makes feeble, animal, sounds, its eyes rolling fitfully. The Royals breed them somewhere, Will knows. Raise them alone, never seeing light, never interacting with another of their species. They are feral. The Lady – a mockery of a patron – provided this one.
Will does not look away when Jack makes the cut on the man’s arm to spill blood and call the beast. Shoves his empathy way down to avoid any sudden, illogical temptations to see the shattered mind. Calling this creature human anymore would not even be accurate, so far has he been broken. His death might even be a mercy. That does not mean Will feels nothing at being forced to see it.
The beast comes, winding and hungry, from the darkness. Not truly a snake, it is covered in bluntly waving vestigial limbs, stumpy and malformed. Its head is nothing but mouth, vast, gaping, baring rows upon rows of teeth like the blade of a saw. It has the tiny, white, blind eyes of something that was born never to see the sun.
The sacrifice disappears into it swallowed whole. The throat far behind the fangs convulses and starts to open, black and faintly liquid. Muscles spasm and pulse. Secretions dark as oil and sizzling like acid splatter the uneven stone at their feet.
Now Will closes his eyes. Now he cannot bear to see. There is a fitful moment where stinking breath hits his face like a punch and pressure closes in all around him, a moment when all sense of up and down become meaningless, when proprioception fails and he has no idea where any part of his body is. Then it is over. He is out, and the richer feast than usual seems to have sated the beast enough that he is in one piece as well.
He opens his eyes to the wan, sickly light of a corn-field in Hibbing, Minnesota. They have arrived.
----
The latest kill is a woman impaled upon the antlers of a severed stag’s head, the animal’s tongue lolling out purpled and dark, its blood staining the earth around it and trickling from its nostrils, caked and attracting flies. The victim is naked. On display. Arched backwards and trailing limbs into the hot, shimmering, late summer air.
There is a lurid symbolism present in this corpse that was not seen at any of the other murders. Even if their killer, this ‘Shrike’ as some rag of a human newspaper has named him, is deteriorating, this doesn’t feel like him. The emotions behind it are too different, and yet past the surface there is nothing for Will to latch on to. This scene does not fit, and the dissonance is uncomfortable like a tight band round his chest, constricting his breathing.
Corvids circle in the air, always returning no matter how many times Zzzzeller and Prince try to chase them off. There is something not quite natural about the birds. Too big? Their feathers too black, their crowing mouths opening a shade more than ought to be possible? Some instinct in Will is murmuring into his ear that there is an eldritch influence here. It might not be the killer, because there is still the ghost of a something here for him to catch, as slippery as it is. But Royal magics, Royal trickery and bending of what Is into what Might Have Been, or what Might Never Have Been…
He is uneasy. There is a sacrificial aspect to the way the woman is laid out, but no God-markings, no little idol either hand-carved or bought mass-market at the temple shrines. It’s as fake as the rest of this. A mask. A seeming. Something pulled over the face of something else to conceal specific purpose with specific purpose. This isn’t the Shrike, but it’s someone who knows his work well. Not a copycat, not exactly, because this isn’t a copy, more like… a critique.
Yes, that thought fits. This is an artist conferring judgement upon a colleague, or rather someone simply in the same line of work because this makes plain the killer thinks himself far above the original.
“He took her lungs,” Zzzzeller says, to add to Will’s analysis. “Pretty sure she was alive when it happened.” It’s unseemly that he sounds almost pleased about that, Will thinks. Bites down on the futile admonitions that want to escape his lips, knowing they’ll do nobody any good. Zzzzeller is a little Godling with no care for any human he doesn’t personally know, and has the same likes and dislikes as any of his kin.
It’s not comfortable, being prey. Having to watch every word and act in case they decide you’re next. Sometimes Will wants to scream because the pressure is too much, it’s like being buried alive, drowned in the deeps of an ocean too vast and desolate to bear. But he knows where that road leads, and the screaming would never stop, and he’d die anyway. So.
It’s the little things like that, just like that. That one comment sending his mind spiralling into a tangent of bile and hate he’ll never act on, how the fact that he even acknowledges that there is something wrong makes him an outlier amongst happy slaves, and then he has to remind himself how lucky he is, compared to some, or he really will do something he’d quickly regret.
Words come out of his mouth that are relevant to the case, despite the turmoil within. He speaks on automatic. He has become good at that, over the years.
“So this is a copycat?” Jack says, and Will nods, standing, not quite remembering having crouched for a better look in the first place.
“The human we’re looking for has no interest in field kabuki,” he spits.
“Human? You think this girl’s killer isn’t?”
Will shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know, I can’t quite… see him. Maybe just a touch of the Blood, maybe a lot more and I’m just seeing a glimpse, a, a photograph of the face he was wearing when he did this. But I can tell you more about our killer just because of how much this isn’t it.”
He goes on, lists the second house or cabin for the kill room slash antler room – the two one and the same – and the daughter whose innocent actions have become the trigger, the sacred act of consumption he can’t quite bring himself to carry out on her so he externalises and eats and is never full. It’s all good, he knows it’s good, and in that moment remembers with a flush of sickening emotion the dream of Elise Nichols, laid out just like that and ascending into the darkness of the future and realms where he cannot follow.
He was seeing this, he understands that now. Not that he can think of any way the dream would have been helpful in preventing this, or in solving this case. He shudders and lets it go. Just another gift or curse from the Night and the Void, utterly useless and better forgotten.
“Can you tell me anything about the copycat?” Jack asks.
Will shakes his head, already preparing to leave and hopefully by a more standard route than the one they arrived by. “If he’s of eldritch stock there’s not much I can do, you know that. You need to ask one of the Blood for their opinion. Maybe Hannibal. He seems competent enough.”
Thankfully this seems to be enough to pacify him. At least, he turns back to the Science Trio processing the scene, and Will can wander off to where the field meets the road, sit down on hot tarmac and allow the pulsating, sickly sun to warm his face with its rays. Although the ghost of a headache lurks behind his eyes, it is enough to keep it at bay for now.
----
His sleep that night is characterised at first by a familiar dream of a lake of blood lapping around his ankles as he stands casting a line into the foul waters. Dead fish bob to the surface around him, washing up on the shore splitting bellies full of wriggling black worms and scuttling white insects like living marble. He whips the rod out, letting the fly sing through the air, falling with a gory splash. It is unpleasant, but it has come to him enough that it has lost most of its quiet horror.
He has hope for a relatively settled night, therefore, before the creature appears.
It ought not in itself be so terrifying. It is simply a stag, dark as a shadow, plumed with raven feathers, crowned by sharp and deadly antlers straight and tall like spears. It is watching him, and Will knows it is watching him, and it knows that he knows that it is watching him. It lowers its head towards him as if to charge, but does not move.
Will looks at it, and something within him recognises something about it, and trembles. He does not want it near him. It is ancient, and wise, and terrible, and it has a meaning that is clear to no conscious part of him. Danger, danger, says the speed of his heart racing inside his chest, and he only does not run because he does not want to provoke it into chasing him. Its leg raises and its hoof paws the ground with a great, hollow knocking.
Will wakes up, and realises there is, in fact, someone knocking on his door.
Stumbling out of bed in a mess of stale sweat, he elects to ignore the chaotic tangles of his hair and his state of undress – stained, ratty shirt and boxers. Whoever it might be either knows him well enough not to care, or is a Godling and therefore is unlikely to think this anything unusual for a human. Though disorientated, he is sure-footed in the unfamiliar, dark, room that smells of old blood and incense. When he yanks the door open, light momentarily blinds him.
Will blinks his vision clear and is surprised to see Hannibal waiting patiently at the threshold.
“Good morning Will,” the Godling says politely. “May I come in?”
Will drags a hand across his face, unbalanced. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“Jack was called away for business elsewhere. Acting on your previous advice, he has enlisted my services. I understand we have several construction sites to visit while we are in Minnesota. It shall be our adventure.” He smiles, and it very nearly hits the mark. Something about his face, Will thinks idly. The angles are strange, sharp. Like someone assembling a human who has only seen one in pictures; a good job, but not quite there.
“May I come in?” Hannibal repeats.
There are some of Royal lineage who, like vampires in old stories cannot enter without an invitation. Will nods and steps aside, letting the being past him. Into the darkness.
When Hannibal’s own shadow passes over him he feels a sudden heat in his bones, quickly passing and leaving a chill in its wake. He tries not to shiver, is not sure he succeeds. His dream of the stag is still fresh in the back of his mind.
Hannibal, as it turns out, has brought food with him. The tote-bag he was carrying conceals a number of Tupperware containers nestled between changes of clothes. Will can’t deny a certain curiosity. What Godlings eat can be very varied, and not much of it is also fit for human consumption. From what little he can see though, this stuff looks… almost normal. That would bear out a theory of Hannibal having little of the Blood in his veins.
“I am very careful about what I put into my body,” he explains as he unpacks. “Which means I prepare most of my food myself. A protein scramble, to start the day. Some eggs, some sausage.”
“And safe for a human to eat?” Will asks, warily taking the tub.
“Of course.”
It does look good. Smells it too. Will always finds himself hungry in the mornings, after all that tossing and turning and sweating and getting up to pace out nervous energy and nausea before he can go back to sleep. He pokes his fork into the mixture, spears a sliver of sausage, a little heap of scrambled egg. Lifts it to his mouth, chews, swallows.
Knows immediately that he shouldn’t have done so.
There is something dark and alive in his belly. His hunger leaps, ravenous as a wild beast and utterly unfamiliar. His vision swims, now hawk-sharp, now blurred like looking through a veil of tears. Saliva pools on his tongue as he feels the compulsion take hold. His hand moves of its own accord, he cannot get enough, never enough, the food is life and he needs it, he needs it. He is half choking on it with his speed.
Hannibal watches him, and splits his face in a smile with sharp, sharp teeth.
“What’s in this?” Will sobs between bites, as his fork scrapes the sides of the bowl, then his hungry fingers quest after any little scrap of flesh or fat or juice that remains, licking residue from his hands. “What have you done to me?”
“Why, it’s human of course,” Hannibal replies, still smiling, one half of his face lit starkly in the light that streams in from the motel window, the other lost to the shadows. “You really should be wiser than to accept food from those you do not know, dear Will. The pact is struck now.”
Will’s head is swimming, the hunger still clawing at his throat. He looks down at his own hands, the skin over shaped muscle of his forearms. Feels his mouth water, wants in some far off way to lift his arms up and sink in teeth and rip and tear and devour. He is weeping, soundlessly, tears rolling down to drip from his chin.
He loses consciousness.