And Blue Skies From Pain by Stina Leicht

skull.
    Detective Inspector Haddock.
    All at once, revulsion fought with need. It’d been at least eight months since heroin had surged through Liam’s veins. Eight months of forced sobriety, mind-numbing fear and nightmares. Eight months of yearning. The monster raged from the darkest corners of his mind in a series of machine gun thoughts. Find Haddock. He’ll have the smack. Rip his throat out. We’ll take what we want. Think of it. A fix. We need it. We can kill him. Kill him now.
    Liam licked his lips. Heroin will keep the pain —grief— away. Catching himself before he could yield, he shook his head. I’m done with the killing. Done with the smack. Done with you too, you fuck.
    The monster didn’t answer, but Liam knew the creature waited in smug silence. That the monster was awake again was bad enough. What was much worse was the queasy knowledge that this wasn’t the first time he’d run across Haddock’s scent in recent weeks.
    Can’t be, Liam thought. I did for him. Haddock is fucking dead.
    A sigh whispered on the back of the freshening wind. Liam’s ears pricked. The snap of a twig brought him to sharp attention. Sensing movement to his left, he turned and spotted a large white shape as it flitted behind a tree trunk.
    The monster whispered, Prey, and the word sent a shiver of anticipation through Liam’s body.
    A low, mournful horn note stretched across the night sky and then dissipated, leaving a residue of foreboding. Liam sensed the white shape in the woods as it started and then froze. Liam and the monster inside him joined in the listening. When the call wasn’t repeated Liam dared edge sideways, moving in silence until he spied a beautiful white doe—the largest he’d seen in his life.
    She was graceful and delicate regardless of her size. Her eyes, nose and hooves were an inky black, and her coat darkened at the tips of her ears and at her hooves. Wary, the doe stood twitching—perched on the edge of flight. He held his breath, listening to his heart slam inside his chest. When there came no new sign she relaxed and resumed grazing. He inched a wee bit closer while the monster whispered a susurrus of bloodlust, restless for the pursuit. Determined to keep control, Liam set his jaw. The desire to lose himself in the giddy freedom of speed built up in his muscles.
    In the distance the horn sounded a second time.
    Kill her, the monster thought. Now!
    As if hearing the creature, the doe bolted. The monster sprinted after, slipping the bounds of Liam’s will. The horn blared a third time—louder, longer and closer. It sang of murder and terror and—
    The hunt.
    The monster’s blood burned with the desire to shred flesh and rip sinew. Liam rode along—dizzy in the flood of sensation, unable to stop the creature occupying his body and not wanting to, even if he could. Unseen others may have joined the chase, but he’d spotted her first, and the monster was fast. The others were too far away to catch up. The creature plunged into a dead run, ripping through foliage and darting around the trunks of trees the size of black taxis. Before long, the monster-Hound came to a stream and inwardly shrank from the sight of it, slowing. The doe shot down the path at the water’s edge. The stream was ten or fifteen feet across and didn’t appear deep. Yet, Liam knew this for an illusion. Something moved in the false shallows. A premonition of death hung on the air, and the monster kept to the far side of the path—away from the water—as it continued on.
    Liam lost sight of the doe when the trail took a sharp bend to the left, circumventing a huge deadfall. Again, the monster slowed. The hunt was drawing closer, and Liam could make out baying hounds and short horn blasts interspaced with the crash of rapid-flowing water. Glancing to his right, he saw the stream had joined forces with a second body of water. The monster wasn’t far from the fallen tree when a sharp cry and the crunch of broken forest