THE HOODED MAN // OPEN

[REAPER]

[align=center][div style="max-width: 500px; text-align: justify; font-size: 9.4pt; line-height: 1.4;"]The mutated lion stiffened gradually, different muscles along his back and shoulders drawing taut against bone, coiling beneath inky fur and patches of hairless skin where eyes and mouths parted for a taste. Their heartbeats quivered like insects in a web, sending ripples through his senses, saliva pooling in his jaws. He saw, simultaneously, Moon's slack, decaying body, and two figures with blood slipping through their veins. He could taste it over his tongue, sweet and cloying, before thickened ash settled at the roof of his mouth. Atticus. Kill him now. Finish it.

"Get ready to see a lot more of me, Feathers, because I'm not lettin' you leave till Hell freezes over." Moon was dead, but in one gaze he was alive, overlapping the image of his stiffened body, eyes hollow but bright. The heartbeats behind him thudded away, dinner bells clanging, pulling him away from a tired face and dead memories.

Even gone, Gabriel could haunt him. Reaper, the ghost, was haunted, chased by death when his purpose was to bring it and disappear. Simpler times.

The lion dropped the corpse, pinioned wings folding back, the eyes along his legs beginning to bleed out of onyx into alizarin. The mouths splitting down his neck and sides bared yellowed teeth, long pink tongues tasting their scent in the air, the siren call of blood and flesh. Smoke furled from his head in a hazed halo, and he turned to face them both, features flat. A gravel-scraped laugh rolled out of his throat, harsh and humorless. "I will be once I've picked your bones from my teeth."

He shifted to pace around the empty grave, wings dragging lines in the dirt as the many mouths along his body snarled. "Why? Little mouse, I don't answer to you."

The lion disappeared, and reappeared beside Atticus, lunging for the jaguar's throat, attempting to bowl him over.