She stood outside wearing dark clothes, nearly invisible, surveilling the starkly lit pool. Piercing shards of light danced off the water's surface, playing erratic patterns on aging glazed tile. Children were laughing and happy. Music was playing on the radio. The sounds of their cavorting came through the plate glass windows muted, muffled; remote.
She was outside and apart, as ever.
She'd long ago stopped wishing otherwise, knowing that even a mere wish poses danger. A wish can become a desire that longs to be quenched. Being not ouside risks detection, and being not apart means vulnerability. A solitary predator who feeds exclusively on the most feared animal under the sun cannot afford these longings.
She cannot love, she thought, because she's not human. The beast cannot abide a lazy Saturday afternoon chucking steaks on the grill or roasting marshmallows on green sticks at campfires while singing mirthfully pointless songs; it can perceive no joy in pink baby blankets or ice skates or trips to the zoo. Even the most superficial forms of human love elude her, forms that leave humans flush with a bloodless passion she can never feel or share.
The darkly sober little girl with the ever watchful eye and preternatural calm that often suggests wisdom far beyond her apparent years can be hurt, though, can't she? Oskar taught her this. She'd reluctantly allowed him to draw her slowly away from herself, from her beast; he'd shown her that she is not the beast itself whose demands circumscribe her existence, that she was apart and outside it. He'd shown her she was still very much alive. She'd felt herself dying again when she'd feared he'd flee.
She still cannot guarantee she could have survived his rejection. She wasn't sure she'd have wanted to.
She could not explain why she was surveilling the pool. Oskar was there; this was all the reason she wanted or needed. She could not admit even to herself what her heart desired, what it had tentatively planned. Not her beast - her heart.
He was the only child in the water when four others entered and ordered all the other children to leave. She could not hear what they were saying, could not smell them, but the girl knew Oskar had been tormented by bullies before she'd fled Blackeberg, and the predator always knows when prey is being isolated from the herd.
The largest one had a weapon and was brandishing it at Oskar.
She had originally intended simply to monitor, not to intervene in any way. This is what she told herself, that she dared not allow her presence in Blackeberg to be known.
The discomfort she felt when the largest one submerged Oskar's head was remarkable in its depth and its immediacy; she was unaccustomed to being concerned with the welfare of others.
When Oskar lost his air, her discomfort vanished.
Everything vanished.
The beast wasn't asserting itself. This was new. There was a pressure in her throat making breathing difficult. A tightness pulled across the back of her neck and across her shoulders. She could feel her face contorting painfullly with a rictus-like grimace. Her hands balled up tightly into fists.
For one astonishing moment, unique to her entire long experience, all she could see was an opaque haze of swirling bright crimson.
A new darkness had emerged in Blackeberg, an ancient beast born when giant lizards still ruled the world. What crashed through the plate glass window was neither natural nor artificial; it was something other, from an unknown place, from somewhere outside of time.
Did Jimmy even have time to look up and see the cavernous maw of teeth framed in coal black hair blurring towards him in a hard, flat trajectory not a yard above the water's surface? Did he have time to note their size, their number, their unbreakability with their dull primordial ivory colour and ancient black veiny ridges? Could he look up high enough to catch a glimpse of the obsidian eyes, glistening and glinting windows into an unnamable lightless abyss?
Jimmy never heard the echoing boom of Eli's entrance fade.
Nothing with red blood and ears can hear this creature's cry and not understand that eternity is calling, that the comfortable oblivion promised at the end of a natural span of years is very far from the worst eternity can offer. Ten thousand keenly missed Saturday afternoon barbecues were in that scream; dreams and loves gone from thirty thousand pink baby blankets wailed; seventy thousand nights of yearning to see just one more sunrise, to be a murderess and denied the comfort of human company no more shrieked in bottomless rage that this is one price that cannot be paid before its time.
Oskar may be lost soon enough to time, fate or fortune, but not tonight. Not like this. Not to these animals.
Conny's mind had no time to freeze before a primordial onyx claw finished what Oskar's pole had started.
Martin saw. Martin heard. Martin may even have had time to begin pissing his pants; he certainly had enough time to start trying to run away. The wind beneath Martin's wing mirthlessly blew out all the campfire songs and roasted marshmallows that he might have enjoyed. The last things to go through Martin's mind were shards of his own skull bones as he was dashed against the pool's hard concrete and ceramic edge.
Eli found herself at the edge of the pool, watching Oskar's head bob up and down in the water, senseless. Had she waited too long to act? If she had to, could she revive him? If not, would it be too late to...?
In that moment, the pool did not exist. Blackeberg did not exist. There was no world, no earth, no sky, no stars. There was no Eli. The universe winked into nothingness, and the very fabric of reality itself lay hidden behind Oskar's closed, unmoving eyelids.
In that moment, Eli learned the lie that was her belief that she could not love.