Title: Alone in the Night

Author: Nameless Quill

Rating: M (or R) I do not understand these new ratings

Disclaimer: None! For once I'm putting something up that is mine and mine alone. oh, that's liberating to say.

Author's Notes: I'm still not sure if I want to keep this as a small one-shot or do something with it. Ah well.

The cold claws of winter slinked through the bare-bones fabric of her nightshirt and sunk into her skin. Samantha turned and glared at the nothingness around her, at the street lamps sickly yellow light, at the dead cars parked on the street, and at the inky well of the night sky. She couldn't believe she had come out here on a promise of a kiss, and now, alone, her mind started it's now-normal routine of berating her for her foolishness and hopeless dreams of ever-after. Her Prince wasn't coming. Standing here proved that. All that tonight offered was a frozen body and a broken heart. She sighed and turned into the street, wanting only to return to her bed and hide forever. As she stepped off the curb something made her take pause, look, and grasp at herself even tighter.

She wasn't alone out here tonight.

The thought came and went through her mind as quickly as a heartbeat and with another flash of time her mind began to offer up rationalizations. Her imagination was running wild; a cat was around, she heard a rat, there's nothing there. However hard her conscious tried to peel her from the grip of panic, her instinctive mind, the one heralding back from when humankind lived not as the predator, but as prey, froze and started whispering fearfully to her. Run, go now, faster. Run! It kept murmuring, pleading with her to follow its commands, it's begging. And Samantha was a girl who lived on dreams; she ran.

She tore down the street, her shoes getting soaked in the puddles from last night's rainstorm. Her lungs tightened with every panting breath she ripped from the air and her heart hammered against her chest like a out-of-control drummer. She kept her eyes forward and her thoughts intent on the run. If she made it home and discovered it was only her imagination, she could live with the embarrassment. For now she only wanted to run. Needed to. It was her only goal in life at this moment.

And the goal of someone else. She turned a corner and heard it. The footsteps pounding on the pavement that weren't hers. The breaths that weren't hers, that inhuman growl that was not hers. Something was pacing her, tracking her. No, her mind whispered, something was hunting her. She tossed that revelation aside in hopes of something more logical to come in. A keening whine rose up and encircled her, slamming into her ear-drums with its pitch. She reached up to block the sound out and stumbled, falling and landing painfully on the asphalt. She screamed when she landed and scrambled to get to her feet again.

It was no use. Whatever had stalked her now found her and she was ripe for the taking. It moved around her, a shadow in the shadows, a emptiness where there should be something there. She couldn't see it; there was nothing at all for her eyes to take in except that she was utterly alone. She pulled herself up, and bolted again. Into the clawed grasp of her pursuer. She wriggled, kicked, bit, and swore to fight free but wound more and more into the thing's eerie embrace.

It drooled onto her; the wetness seeping onto her shirt and making it stick to her skin. The feeling made her skin crawl and she tried to pull away. The creature held her tighter and then, without warning, shoved her back onto the road. Her last thought was that the moon had finally shown itself. It was fat, and full, and dripping with blood.