Voracious - Alice Henderson [108]
She did think of it. But the road was darker than the one he painted, filled with the wraiths of his future victims. Perhaps he could overlook her saving lives as a whimsical facet of her personality, but she could never overlook his murdering innocent people. And what of guilty people? she suddenly thought. Do they not count? You’re not very broken up about the guys who tried to attack you. But murder in the defense of someone else in no way made up for all, or even a majority, of the creature’s kills. She knew that.
“Stefan,” she said, watching him closely. “Those men you killed near the cabins. Did you do that so you could be the one to kill me?”
He didn’t answer right away, looking up and down the path. The breeze blew his hair across his face, and he moved it aside with his hand. Then he met her gaze, the red flash gone from his eyes as they returned to green. “No.”
She waited for him to expand. The burbling song of the river filled the silence between them. “Why did you then?”
He exhaled. “I killed them because they were pathetic swine,” he answered, his tone so abrupt it surprised her. He was angry. The muscle in his jaw clenched. “People like that kill and break things because they’re stupid, bored, and impotent. They have no concept of the power, the wonder of life. They seek only to take it away because they themselves can’t feel it. They seek to destroy people from the inside out but don’t even have the consciousness to understand why.” He fisted his hand. “I killed them because the world was no more the poorer for it. And those who enliven the world would be freer for it.”
She stared, unable to find words. “It’s terrible, and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’m glad you were there that night.” She stepped forward and took his hand. His skin was hot under her touch.
“Let me tell you something about death,” he said. “Humans have shaped this world to revolve around them. They talk of the tragedy of earthquakes or floods. But natural forces aren’t tragedies. What humans forget is that they are just another animal that can drown, or freeze to death, or yes, even be eaten.
“They’ve hunted all of their natural predators nearly to extinction. They’d like to believe they’re invulnerable, on top of the food chain. And what has this mentality done for them? Disease, overpopulation, war. Humans aren’t separate from nature; they’re a part of it. Everything they do impacts the very natural processes they’d like to ignore.
“Humans are meat for the predator as surely as cows are meat for them. Without natural predators, overpopulation is inevitable. Thousands of years have shown me this. I’ve seen the world grow from a few pockets of people to cities, to civilizations, to one continuous stream of concrete and roads, towering buildings, and mass destruction wreaked with the push of a button—nature plowed under and destroyed in humanity’s wake.
“I am not the monster. My prey is the monster.”
She stood silently, his words striking her. He gripped her hand tightly when she tried to back away. The scariest part was that he made sense to her.
He looked down at their hands, then brought hers to his lips. “My name,” he said, lips brushing her fingers, “is not Stefan.”
She gazed back, puzzled.
“That’s just the name Noah knew me by in Vienna.”
“What is it then?” she asked, forcing herself to talk, to crawl up out of the tumble of thoughts his words had left her with, struggle to act through the veil of delicious energy between them.
He laughed. “Practically unpronounceable. But it’s not Stefan.”
She thought again of the sheer sense of ancient she’d felt that night on the road and wondered what the name could be, what culture he was from—if he was ever human, as Noah had speculated, sometime long, long ago.
They stood there together in silence for several minutes, and Madeline’s mind raced over everything that had led up to this moment. Her escape into the backcountry from her tiny town of gossip