A Desperate Struggle

The air in the living room was thick, not with the scent of Clara’s lavender perfume, but with something primal, something that clawed at the back of my throat and made my teeth ache. My own teeth. I could feel them, longer than they should be, sharper. A desperate struggle. That’s what this was. A grotesque, agonizing struggle against the very thing I had loved most in this world.

She was magnificent, a beast of shadow and moonlight, her fur the color of a storm-bruised sky. Her eyes, once the soft pools of hazel I’d adored, now blazed with an amber fire that promised only oblivion. She paced, a predator in my home, the home we had built together, brick by loving brick. Each step was a silent thunder, each flick of her tail a coiled threat. A low growl rumbled in her chest, a sound that vibrated through the floorboards and into my very bones. It was Clara, and it wasn't.

My own breath hitched, ragged and shallow. My arm throbbed, a dull, insistent ache that had been blooming since the moon had crested the horizon. The bite. I’d been so focused on her, on the impossible horror of seeing her alive, of seeing her this way, that I’d barely registered the searing pain when she’d lunged, a blur of teeth and fur. A mistake. A fatal, perhaps eternal, mistake.