Chapter One: Another Kill

The hunt ends tonight.

Soon he found his next kill.
    
A bent stranger bundled awkwardly in an old rug and bath-towels wearing a saggy fisherman’s hat. A homeless vagrant; no one would notice them gone.
    
Twine sunk into the shadows of the bridge and silkily made his way across the river.

A cry exploded from the stranger when the large force of Twine’s body-weight catapulted into him; the bridge’s weak-body rattled during the struggle. Then silence, and the vagrant was dead. Twine had accidentally made a messy work on the neck - blood pumped out of the human’s vessels rapidly, leaking into the cracks of the stone-floor. He remembered the importance of a clean-up for next time, but right now there was no time to waste, for it was likely that after that cry, the city would be on high alert again. So he fed on the vagrant’s corpse hurriedly, until their entire body was dry and thei brain was completely dead.

He sunk back into the shadows once more afterwards, and fled to his resting place.

However, two people were already waiting for him.

Luckily, Twine’s eyes had spotted the pair by his grave. They had dug it up and were bending down to look at an open coffin - which made Twine scowl. How dare they disrespect his final resting place like this?

Ah -- they may be body-snatchers.

Though he had a satisfied hunger by then, Twine slithered forth in the shadows of gravestone to gravestone, getting closer and closer to the first person. During his progression up the wide grassy space surrounded by forests and an empty church, Twine thought of how he would take down the closest human. The human was tall, muscular and broad-shouldered man, wearing a lumberjack’s shirt and a series of equipment Twine wasn’t accustomed to on his back and around his thick leather belt. He would take a little while longer to take down; the man wasn’t like that vagrant or the skinnier, shorter man talking to him. This man screamed power.

Twine leapt off the ground to the human, his fangs aimed for the neck. But the man wheeled about with a large metal cannon in his hands which he flipped onto his shoulder. In an instant, out flew a silver-armed grappling-hook the size of a wardrobe to Twine‘s body. It forced Twine’s arms to his sides and sent him straight down as if it were an anchor.

Grunting heavily, Twine struggled to break out of it, but his body was left paralysed in its tight grip. Twine was perplexed; was the problem something to do with the material? Was it magic?

“Looks like we have the reward in the bag,” said the human.

“Father will be proud of me,” replied the weedier one.