Gravity - First place Winner: RSHunter 
The Full Moon Challenge

       I remember my first kill.

       The taste of shredded flesh and warm blood in my mouth, the smell of earth and trees that surrounded me—all the details stayed intact even years after it happened. You never forget your first, and it never lets you go.

       They used to blame it on the moon. Insanity, they said, was what the moon brought upon them. In their own primal ways, humans have always been attuned to the forces around them, and though they might not have technologies to prove the seemingly unexplainable attraction, more often than not, they had been right. The moon is, after all, the great force that generates tides, the heartbeat of the oceans.

       And the moon calls to blood just as she calls to the sea.

      I could feel it coming, hours before sundown. It brewed under my skin like a storm threatening to destroy my being, but I knew it wasn't the time yet. Not until tonight. Restless, I drove around the city and found myself in a place I used to know as a child, a place down the hill that was never rebuilt after a landslide that happened ten years ago. It looked like a wasteland now with dry, cracked soil and few plantation short of wild grass and thorns.

      The sun sank slowly under the horizon, and then swiftly, suddenly. Pain doubled me over in half. My senses grew sharper, headier. Everything inside me rebelled against the remaining thoughts in my head that made me human. The resolve I'd made all day almost crumbled. Part of me even wished that the hunter had killed me. I had seen it in his eyes that he was ready to do it, even if becoming a monster was still just a possibility.

       But I had to do this. Once the virus was transmitted there was only one choice left for me: change. If I didn't change—if I couldn't do it, I would die. That was the way it had always been. Lycanthropy selects the strong and eliminates the weak. I had fought to survive all my life, and I wasn't going to throw it all away even if it meant I had to abandon my humanity.

       I watched in strange fascination through the haze of pain as my skin stretched and my bones rearranged, lengthening and distorting. A steadily quickening drumbeat played somewhere faraway, like a primal rite to my unbecoming. I saw the moon ahead of the dark hue, silver and full. As the beats rose to a climax, I realized that they were my heartbeats, and the rushing sound of water was from the blood in my ears, and the primal cry was my howl.

       The pain stopped abruptly. I lay weak on the dirt, too overwhelmed by my new form to figure how my limbs worked. And then the rushing sound in my ears faded, replaced by the surging in my veins and the pulsing moonlight that cast over me.

       It was time to hunt.

       His scent led me to the place where I last saw him. He saw me coming. He raised his weapon almost in time, too, but at the last minute he looked right into my eyes and hesitated. I would wonder what he saw then, after I woke up naked and covered in blood in the woods, and I would still think of it years later, with every kill that I made and every live that I saved in desperate effort to redeem myself. Those eyes would continue to haunt me, because I would never know if I had done it because I wanted to survive or because I relished the scent of his fear and wanted to bask myself in it.

       But right at that moment, the moon called to my blood, and I tore the hunter's flesh until there was nothing left of him but the remains of his bones and his blood on my fur.

       You never forget your first, and he never lets you go.   

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