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My taxi driver is a vampire.

You can tell by the rings of red around the centres of his eyes and the cold pallor to his complexion, but also the nubs on his forehead where a set of horns used to rise, curling like the shells of snails. The Council enforced the Horn Removal Bill to make the creatures docile and easier to control. Without the horns, they were easier to kill, and with them, virtually unstoppable. All it would take now is decapitation, and sixty percent of civilians walk the streets armed with ceremonial machetes. I sold mine for an ounce of cocaine back when everyone was trying it, but the shit wasn't worth it.

He only asks where I am headed. He won't drive into Faceless territory, so I only ask that he take me as close as he can. There is a picture of his family on the dashboard, a wife and a child who have had their horns removed as well. I throw an extra credit into his account on my way out of the car.

The Faceless guard is missing a few fingers and smells like rotting garbage, but he watches me cross into his neighbourhood. Some of his kind wear clothes when it gets cold, but most of the time they are naked and bare, humans-looking things that haven't been finished in the belly of creation. The only feature they do have is a red ring that drapes over their shoulders and collarbones. It looks like a scar tissue from a distance, but Gaia help you if you get close enough to inspect it.

Faceless will leave you alone as long as you don't provoke them, though some are more easily pushed than others. Old legends are what make them fearsome to women and children of any kind. In the Old Wilds, the Faceless Men would come to your camp at night and get a rise out of chasing you through the woods before consuming your flesh. They've always left me alone, but I suppose we aren't too different.

Their desires now aren't much different than back then. They protect their own kind fiercely and eliminate whoever poses a threat, all while getting sick thrills out of sick things. I only know one creature who had seen a Faceless smile with the necklace of teeth it wore and lived to tell.

I look back once at the guard, and he nods with his smooth skull.

Wendy lives among them, a stranger they avoid but tolerate, the only one of his kind. He squats above a feeding den which has always been the least conspicuous place for some reason. I press the doorbell seven times until I see his shadow through the frosted glass door. He leans on the banister as he hobbles down the stairs.

His milky eyes greet me first. He sways more than usual, his cloven feet tapping on the concrete as he does. "You don't see many people with a face like yours in these parts."

"I don't think they like me anymore than they like you. Can I come in?"
Wendy lives simply, with a pile of straw below the window and a pile of bones on the opposite side of his studio walkup. The Faceless give him leftover bones when they're done feeding. Some of the femurs still have pieces of muscle stuck to the surface.

"You haven't visited in a long time," he says to me, watching me watch the Faceless from the window. A few children are playing games below. "You only visit when you have a lead."

"It's been slow, but it happened again. Last week the cops killed a bunch of lycans after a family of fey was found skinned and gutted in their home, but I saw the reports. It was him. He left his mark."

"The Big Fuzz doesn't like to take out families. He always took the kids when the others weren't looking, and he never left bodies."

"You're right, but they found his handprint in the house, on one of the walls in the kitchen. Even if he didn't peel off their skin, he put the hit on them. I saw the picture."

"Fuzz never got along with lycan scum."

"He must have had a change of heart, or he did it to get to me, but that's not the point. He's back in the city and he has muscle."
Wendy sighs and hobbles over to the window until he is standing next to me. Eons ago, he must have been something to look at, but time has worn away at his physical form like a rushing river can eat away at a bolder. His twisted limbs and antlers, and a face that only Gaia herself could love, has left the past to be forgotten. So much for The Devourer of Souls.

"I tell you every time you come to see me that he will never come back to me," Wendy explains. "I'm of no use to him now, not since I've been stripped of all I was. We don't want the same thing anymore."

"I need something."

"What you need to do is get out of town and hope that life somewhere else offers something better. Even if she's still alive by some dark miracle, she's gone."

I catch my reflection in the window. Like Wendy, I don't look as I did centuries ago, but at least I can change back. Long talons scratch beneath my facade of a human skin, begging for escape, but there will be time. With us, there always is. "If he lives as long as you, will he decay too?"

Wendy snorts. "Don't count on it. I was fueled by legends, and when they died, so did my power. He is something else entirely." He pauses, then cocks his sinuous neck to regard me. Side-by-side, he is a good foot shorter than me. "You're going to do something stupid, aren't you?"

"No, because if I do something stupid, that means that I will fail. I'm not letting him slip away again. This is it."

...

In a world of nightmares, there is a place for everyone. The vampires and lycans serve, the Faceless preserve their way of life, fallen gods like Wendy irk out a living the only way they can, the witches serve the dark magic that lives between the light, and the Fuzzy Man claims treasures for his own gain. He came from the same belly of creation as all of us and has as much blood on his hands as any creature that purged the land of humanity.

He also has her.

Wendy can't do much, but points me to someone who might, someone who has eyes on all creatures and knows who cavorts with who. Most witches spit at my kind when they pass me on the street, something to do with old vendettas and broken promises. In neutral territory there is a card den where they gamble with baby vampire teeth and share sex stories over chalices of blood.

They all bow down to Blair.

I've met her once before, long ago when rules were still being established and she was still pretty enough to lure lycans into getting close enough to drain. Time hasn't hurt her as much as Wendy, but her hair has greyed and her unscarred skin has wrinkled slightly since our last encounter. She holds court in a room above the card den, where she can watch everything with her one good eye. The other one was torn from its socket by a vampire with a grudge, an injury that also involved tearing most of her left cheek to ropes of scar tissue.

"You haven't changed much," she tells me. She only smirks on the right side. "How long has it been?"

"Long enough. Wendy sent me."

She scoffs. "That reject is going to be a pile of bones and sinew by the next full moon."

"Fuzz is back in town."

She smirks again. "Two hundred years ago, you came to me to tell me that he'd taken your lady friend after all the other humans were killed. You've been chasing him this long? Is this even about her anymore, or is it about revenge? Is she even alive?"

"If she was dead, he'd flaunt it to get to me. We both know what kind of dark magic he's been given by Gaia. If he wanted to, he would keep her alive. Revenge is high on my list, but I won't give up on her."

"No," she muses. "Your people are a persistent bunch. Selfish fools. You're right, though. Fuzz is back. Wendy isn't what he used to be, but he knows his old friend's habits. Fuzz was here two nights ago for a game of canasta. He isn't what he used to be either. Some lifeless lycan held the cards for him. I heard about the fey murders and the lycans the cops killed for it, but he told one of the barkeeps that he was behind it."

"Why did he do it?"

"Who knows why that bastard does anything. I remember when he would just pull children out of the forest and walk them up those demonic stairs." A shiver runs down her spine. One of her attendants suggests a shawl, but she refuses. "Not much scares me, but sometimes at night I think about how many people and creatures he's killed to be living this long. When you're as old as us, there's plenty of human blood on our hands, but we shouldn't be killing each other to further our own lives. Isn't that why we took the world as our own?"

"Where is he, Blair?"

"If he hasn't gone back into the Wilds, he's holed up with the lycans. They fear him enough to serve him now. Some of the dealers overheard that he's got a warehouse by the river. I suppose he came here because he knew Wendy would send you to me." She has one more thing to say before I can leave. "Why did he take her anyways?"

"Because he wanted to ruin my life."

...

I have two legs and two arms now, but there was a time when there was more to me. When the Fuzzy Man was stealing human children from the woods and luring them up misplaced sets of stairs, I too lived in the woods with my comrades. We weren't as easily provoked as the Faceless, but curious. I liked to watch the humans light fires, not to study their shape or to push them into the flames. I could never explain why.

She had begun as a mountain climber. She'd scaled the north face with ease and only a few clips and a length of rope.

The others warned me to be cautious. Some of them had seduced humans before and it ended with the fragile creatures dead or rearing with weapons. I had trouble playing the part of a human myself, but I did it anyways, if only to get closer.

She knew I was different, but she accepted it. She looked at my true hand and touched the tip of each talon.

I'd warned her that the world was ending.

"What will happen to my family?" she asked.

"They will die or be enslaved."

"What will happen to me?"

"I won't let anything happen to you."

...

The lycans let me in without question, but that doesn't surprise me. Perhaps he knows I am coming, but that isn't much of a surprise either. The fey murders and the bloody smear of a handprint and the bragging at Blair's den had one purpose: to put me on his trail again.

A lot of the buildings along the river are warehouses, but only one has his scent, an aroma that is hard to catch in the wind but one that reminds me of metallic-tasting water and chemicals that no human could have ever created.

The cutting room floor inside is empty and devoid of anything, except for the feeling of dread and discourse. It is dark, almost as dark as it was ages ago, long before we all walked the human streets like we were normal things. A few memories surface of no light below the forest canopy and trees blocking out the field of stars. I remember one night in particular, the night that left me bloody and broken on a pile of sticks and stones while her screaming got further and further away.

"Where are you?" I ask out loud.

A dry voice responds from all around me. "Everywhere."

The pictures of the fey family suggested he hadn't fed on them. When gorged on the lifeforce of any entity, he was whole and he was present, but starved of life, he was smoke in the air, clinging to anything he could.

"Why would you appear to me in this state?" I say.

"I'm not an idiot. The more physical I am, the easier it is for you and your kind to kill me."

"So you are afraid after all this time?"

"Afraid? No. Cautious? Always."

"Then why are you back? Why kill the fey family?"

"Because I knew that would be the best way to lead you to me. As difficult as I am to find, as much as I float between the realms, you make yourself just as elusive. If you knew it was me, you'd come running. You did." He pauses. "There is a reason. She's died."

My breath hitches. "How? When?"

"A month ago, at her own hand. We were in the north and she was staying in an old cabin. She said she liked it there when it was snowy, but I returned one morning from the hunt to find her in the bathroom. She'd opened her arms from wrist to elbow, and there was no way to bring her back. Her spirit was long gone."

I feel no human pulse in this form, but I feel a deep ache in the chest of the creature below. She'd been alive all of this time, for two hundred of the longest years I've lived, and my searches had been in vain. Nothing worked. I am too late.

"I suppose I didn't exactly owe it to you to tell you," he continues. "I would never owe anything to the likes of you and your people. I'd only heard through rumors that you still wore human skin. Did you always hope that you would find her? Save her?"

He is here to flaunt, then, but I see more.

I remember the smoke that had surrounded us in the forest, the smoke that wrapped around her wrists and neck and held her down. The Fuzzy Man emerged from the fog and told me she would be his, that I would not get to enjoy her when all other humans had been killed or enslaved. I'd ruined his life long ago, taking something of his and returning the poor child to their parents. The loss had made him sick and angry. He would do the same to me.

I reach into the smoke around me, grasping for any physical form with a human hand that grows talons. I feel him between my fingers, the creature that feeds on the life of every being but could never bring himself to feed on her in two hundred years, and in grief could not bring himself to feed now.

"I always hoped to find her," I say. "I always hoped to tear her from you and destroy whatever form you took. What kept me going all these years was knowing I could do it, knowing I would end this game with the upper hand, and I still have. You had her for a long time, Fuzz, but when did you realize she'd never love you like she loved me?"

I feel him between the talons then, right where I want him. I can do it. I am ready.

"You will never destroy me," he whispers, and as a gust of wind rips through the warehouse, he is gone.

Blair might have been on to something. Would it be tit-for-tat for the rest of time with us?

Time was all we had.