Spoiler! :
“My love, my beautiful love-–”
“Quiet, Eschar! My father will hear!” The beautiful Roseanne puts a hand to her lover’s cheek, glancing over her shoulder for signs of a following shadow. “We must retreat to your quarters, my prince–-”
“Cut!” the director snaps, standing up and staring at the people in front of him. “Cut the stupid, people!”
“What, wasn’t I good enough for you?” The actress rolls her eyes and sets to work taking her uncomfortable dress off so she could relax in the shirt and slacks under it as she says, “I’m tired of this! I’m trying my best, but this is the hundredth time we’ve gone over this scene! Can’t we take a break already?”
“I agree with Cynthia. This is the hundred-and-third time we’ve done this, and it’s not about to change.” The actor sighs and unbuttons his costume’s jacket, hoping for a chance to breathe. “To tell the truth, I have a meal to get home to. Wife and I had dinner planned, but doubtless she’ll have walked out on me again. This is ruining my marriage,” he says; there’s no point in muttering.
“Innit, though?” Cynthia laughs harshly. “Come on, you spaz. We’ll catch a flick before the theatre closes.”
“You can’t just walk out?!” The director takes a threatening step towards the two.
“Uh, yeah, I can.” The actress rolls her eyes. “Didn’t you read your own contracts? We can walk out whenever we feel like. Innit so, Damian?”
“I would certainly call these ‘extenuating circumstances’,” Damian says, looking around at the set. “I guess a movie sounds nice, though.”
“It does, especially compared to your piece of bad news.” The woman pushes her dark hair out of her eyes and walks out of the room. She barely pauses to pick up her purse, and doesn’t seem to care if anyone follows her or not: Cynthia doesn’t worry.
“That woman is a piece of work.” The director sighs and looks at his main actor. “Well, aren’t you gonna go? We’ll pick up tomorrow and try one more time. One more!”
“That character,” Damian says as a curse on his way out. He doesn’t mind that he’s going out in full costume; it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, and this time the costume is somewhat more normal in appearance. He deals with the director on a near-daily basis, and once a week, something like this always happens. Whether it’s him or Cynthia or one of the other actors, something always goes off like a firework.
Cynthia is waiting for him by his car, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, bright eyes sparkling in the light from the lamp over the studio door. He always parks close to the entrance, in the same place, so he supposes she would know where his car is every day.
“Don’t you have a vehicle here?” he asks, looking around the parking lot.
“Nah, my brother’s a hot-rodder. He drops me off at the gate in the morning on his way to find some other thing that’ll make him money.” The actress shrugs and sets a hand on the red chassis of the old Ford. “This beauty, this would never be a hottie,” she says, tapping her fingers on the metal. “She’s too heavy for speed, but you’d live if my brother and his chintzy thing drove you off the road. He couldn’t cream this thing if he tried – er, total it,” she adds in response to his uncertain gaze. “You know. Wreck. Ruin. Fire and brimstone and all that good stuff.”
“If you say so. What – er, flick – did you have in mind?” Damian asks.
“Nothin’ in particular, just something new. Maybe that monster flick that came out this last week. You driving?” She nods to the car and grins, and Damian can see how white her teeth are as the light glints off of them.
“I’d rather not. If your brother’s a hot-rodder, would you know how to drive?”
“Hell yeah! I’ve been waiting for a chance to handle a baby like this for years – can I?” Cynthia stands up straighter and holds a hand out, and her co-worker gently drops his keys into her palm. Snatching her hand back, she nearly jumps over the hood of the car in her eagerness and, hardly pausing to open the driver’s side door, slips into the seat comfortably.
Damian blinks and picks her purse up from the hood of his car, opening the passenger side door and putting it on the seat beside him. The young woman starts the car as he closes his door and one thought flickers through his conscious mind: She’ll cream my car even if her brother couldn’t.
It’s dark outside, a nice night, as the young woman backs the car out of its space, but she still floors it to the gate. Nothing will make her hold back, the man guesses. She’s used to driving in the dark, having handled more than one drag race where the winner went home with a half-busted car, and she had to drive one of the others home – if they bet ownership.
“Have you ever been in a race?” she asks, the lights of the city streaming by the windows.
“Never,” he answers as he holds on to his seat. This is his car – my car, he thinks. She’s tossing around my car like it’s air.
“Good idea. Your Cherry – mind if I call her Cherry? – she’d never make it up against any of my brother’s babies over the years. And imagine if you went for pinks – oh, I’d hate to lose a doll of a car like this.” Cynthia shudders and, rolling down the window, rests her left arm on the door.
“I – uh – where are we going?” Damian asks, staring out the windshield. “Which theatre?”
“What, you think I play back seat bingo or something? Dame, if I know you, you’re damn nervous.” She glances at him and shakes her head. “Nah, we’re heading to a place out of town. Shows a great few monster flicks, a bit of adventure. Action stuff.” Cynthia shrugs, twitching the steering wheel a bit to the side, and slowly lets up on the gas pedal now that they’re in the middle of figurative nowhere.
“You watch a lot of monster films?” He’s edgy. His fingers are tapping on his leg; strained music plays inside his head. This always happens when things aren’t about to turn out right.
“Sure – hey, before it gets too late, you wanna see a trick? It’ll kill you.” She grins sharply and her teeth seem even whiter in the shadow. When he looks unsure, she laughs. “Come on, just say ‘what the hell’, goof. I swear it’ll get that bad news director of ours off your mind.”
“Fine, what the hell. Is it a car trick?” he asks curiously, somewhat afraid for the Ford. He’s had it for three years and nothing bad has happened to it yet.
“Not at all. My daddy taught me this when I was just a little girl. It’s what got me into the industry.” Pulling the car over on the side of the road, the young woman steps out smoothly, leaving her co-worker waiting for the rough stop.
Maybe, he thinks, this woman is just magic with cars. Still holding on to his companion’s purse, absent-mindedly, he opens his door and clambers out, looking sceptically at the girl he has come to think of as more of a friend than a younger annoyance.
She stands in the grass on the roadside, city lights at her back and city smog surrounding her. The moon shines down, its full light reflecting off of her body as it filters through the foggy air, and she stretches, warming up.
Damian winces when a bone pops back into place quite audibly and Cynthia’s form recoils in pain. She falls to the ground and he takes a step forward, considering yelling for help, but soon enough she gets back on her feet.
This is not Cynthia. Her shape is half-made, twisted; as he watches, she drops to all fours and starts loping towards him. She isn’t the smooth, sleek she-wolf of the movie theatre; she looks more like Daughter of Wolfman, her face somewhere between human and canine, her four-legged steps graceless.
“Amazing,” Damian breathes, holding a hand out to the malformed wolf-woman. As soon as she gets close enough, she promptly snaps out and bites it off, the bones crunching against her teeth, under the power of her jaw.
Oh, her teeth, her jaw, so dangerous, so beautiful, so glorious. A rhapsody, an ode can be written to those teeth. They’re sharp and jagged and white like mountains, glimmering in the moonlight as she advances, the hand discarded now.
The man isn’t shaken out of his rapture by the she-wolf’s violence; instead, he says again, “Amazing. Danny said you died out a century ago.”
“You should never believe the immortal.” The words come out of nowhere and appear inside his head, but Damian knows his co-worker’s voice. He has been listening to it for days. “They tend to... lie. I don’t.”
The she-wolf launches her bulk at him and knocks him to the ground, standing above him. Her front paws dig into the soft earth by his shoulders, and she growls into his face. Her breath stinks of his blood; the dark red droplets are still slipping off her white teeth, falling on his skin.
“I know immortal lies.” Damian smiles and reaches up to pet the wolf-woman as if she’s simply a playful dog. Both of his hands, one recently re-grown, dig into her fur as she lowers her head to his throat. “I am afraid, though, that I can’t let you kill me. That would be somewhat detrimental to my health.”
His re-formed hand moves up the misshapen wolf’s body to her head and closes around her snout in an iron grip. “You,” he growls, “picked the wrong damn wraith to mess with.”
The wolf named Cynthia’s eyes widen, and she tries to back off and pull her head out of his hold, but his other hand reinforces the hold. His fingers dig into her back – past the fur, past the skin, and right into the muscle – as he slowly and agonizingly crushes her snout, crumbling the teeth against each other and sending shards of bone through his own skin. He would much rather be over with this kind of thing quickly, but it’s always fun to watch their reactions.
“No. No! You can’t be a wraith!” The she-wolf struggles and protests the brutality of the treatment as her fur begins to wither; she attempts to howl her fright and anger, but only a few damaged whimpers come out. “You’re normal!”
“You wish,” Damian mutters. As the life slowly dims from her eyes, he retracts his hold and leaves the rapidly-aging wolf to die, rolling her over onto the grass. Standing, he licks the bittersweet blood from his fingers and picks bone fragments out of his skin with his own teeth, the energy of a new life coursing through his veins. The years of life he has stolen from Cynthia are another new start for him, another half of a century of insurance before he will commence aging once more.
He does this every time the years start catching up to him. Murder, rinse, repeat. Cynthia is simply another means of buying time to him.
The man kicks aside the woman’s useless purse from where he has dropped it, wandering back to his car. He slips into the driver’s seat and turns the key.
The car starts smoothly for the first time since he got her. “Good girl, baby,” he murmurs, turning around the head back to the city. “Good girl, Cherry.”
Love to see some more if you decide to expand on this.
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