Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Jay and the Americans – Come a Little Bit Closer

Lost, wasted, and alone in a Mexican party town over Spring Break, Jay is flattered by the attention of a local girl. But as he begins to sober up, he begins to find there’s something not quite right. She’s a little too skinny, a little too strong, a little too hungry, and there’s something lurking behind every kiss.

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Jay felt his stomach lurch as he hunted the street ahead. Macondo seemed designed to disorientate and distract pedestrians, at least once the sun went down. The road wound between resorts and then bars and clubs and restaurants so you couldn’t see from one end of each block to the next. Neon flushed the roiling crowds. Traffic crammed the street, taxis and share cars mostly, even a massive pink limousine, with delivery drivers on motorcycles weaving between them. Those on their feet had to cling to the sidewalk. Music thundered from every passing doorway, changing genres from step to step, dance to rock to house to country, overlapping with criers trying to coax customers into their venues with promises of cheap drinks, wet t-shirt contests, and live DJs.

“Guys?” Jay said, in a voice so small and slurred that his friends wouldn’t have heard it even standing right beside him.

Jay turned to find shelter in the annex of a nightclub with a line of young people, mostly Americans like him. Desperate, he searched the backs of dozens of heads. He couldn’t see Ethan, he couldn’t see Adrian, a couple of times his heart leapt with hope but he was quickly disappointed. He failed to spot any of the other guys he’d come to Mexico with on Spring Break. Macondo, the dirtier, more cutthroat alternative to Cancun, thronged with Americans with the same idea along with other tourists and Mexicans both there to either work or party. Faces laughing or talking or sullen or looking just as drunk as he felt. Even as he tried to stay out of the way he was jostled and bumped by people passing in both directions.

“Hey, move it.” Someone thumped into Jay as they tried to exit the building behind him.

“Hey!” Jay protested but the guy and his girlfriend had already been swallowed by the crowd.

One of the club bouncers moved to see Jay off. He was Mexican and almost a head shorter than Jay but his arms and chest bulged beneath his black t-shirt. Rather than risk confrontation, Jay let himself slip back into the river of people on the sidewalk. Jostling, he almost tripped over his own feet and was only kept upright by the weight of bodies around him.

Jay was pretty sure the guys must have slid into one of the bars or clubs he’d already passed. They’d been on a makeshift pub crawl, jumping from drinking spot to drinking spot. Service laws being what they were in Mexico, or at least here in Macondo, the bar staff kept slamming them with beer and shooters. The bar girls were like hyenas, they’d divided them up and plied them with alcohol he couldn’t even identify. He’d had water pistols of what he’d assumed was vodka, tasteless but burning like petrol, shoved into his mouth. They’d fed them jello shots from between their breasts and thighs, and even from their mouths. This, of course, on top of jugs of cheap draft beer and trays of normal shots. Trying to count how much he’d had to drink would have been an impossible task. Getting drunk in Mexico was a balancing act though. Sweat pasted his t-shirt to his body. As much as he drank, he also sweated it out much faster than he would have done back home. His head swam in an unfamiliar way and his stomach felt queasy and slick.

Seeking peace so he could think, Jay turned into a side street between two resorts. He passed a convenience store and a couple of doorways but they fell away along with the light and noise of the main road and he heaved a sigh of relief. Rooting in his pocket, he fished out his phone. At a glance, he could see he had no messages or missed calls. In a group of almost a dozen guys, all drunk, crammed into one of the hot, sweaty, overcrowded clubs, he doubted anyone would have noticed he was gone. Flipping open the group chat they’d been using, he tapped out a quick message asking where everyone was. It took most of his concentration to get the letters in order.

Jay stared at the screen, willing it to respond, as his feet carried him blindly forward. When no one wrote back he spammed the chat with several eggplant emojis, hoping one of the guys would feel their phone buzzing in their pocket.

“Come on, come on,” Jay muttered.

Jay realised he’d stumbled off the sidewalk and into the street. Fortunately, the road didn’t lead anywhere except behind one of the resorts so there was no traffic. The crowd on the main road was well behind him. Looking back, he saw the lights and neon and mass of people. He also spotted two dark figures that fell in behind him, moving away from the convenience store. Locals, by the look of them, their faces hard as they passed in and out of shadows. Jay worried that they were deliberately following him. Maybe he was going to be mugged. He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and picked up speed. The other men trailed him, neither speeding up nor slowing down.

At the end of the block a set of stairs wound down to the beachfront. Jay was hemmed by buildings and tall fences. The only options were the stairs or back past the two potential muggers. He staggered down the steps and hurried into darkness.

There were no lights along the beachfront, just what reflected back from the resorts. The hotels of Macondo were built along a promontory of land surrounded by a thin strip of sand imported from Australia and other parts unknown. Jay stumbled into deck chairs and umbrellas cluttering the beach. Waves clapped against the shoreline. The two locals were no longer following. He wrestled the phone out of his pocket and swiped it open again. A couple of guys had seen his message and barrage of emojis but hadn’t responded.

“Come on, you assholes,” Jay said.

In desperation, Jay messaged Ethan and Adrian separately then immediately tried to call them. Reception hadn’t been great around Macondo, often it got overloaded. Either way, the calls seemed to go through but rang and rang without answer.

“Come on!”

“Hey, man, watch it!”

Unseen in the blackness, Jay nearly stumbled over a couple laying on the beach. He’d managed to kick sand on their half-naked bodies.

“Sorry, sorry!” Jay staggered toward the top of the beach.

Drunk as Jay was, a growing part of him just wanted to go back to the hotel and go to sleep. He’d been sharing a room with two beds with three other guys and working a complicated juggling act whenever one of them thought he had a chance of bringing a girl back. But wandering the beach, he was lost as well. He wasn’t even sure what side of the shoreline he was on.

Like a moth to a flame, Jay was drawn to light and noise. A set of stairs led up to another resort property. Jay found himself suddenly in the middle of a sprawling open air nightclub full of music, strobing spotlights and pulsing bodies, without even realising where he was going. He stared, bleary. The resort had set up dancefloors and bars around a couple of pools. A DJ booth overlooked the end of one pool and spring breakers danced in and around the water.

Jay circled the dancefloors. None of the security noticed that he had wandered in from the beach. He tossed up whether to stay or to head back to the hotel. Eyes on the girls in the pool, he found a table to prop him up and decided to hang out for a while. It seemed entirely possible that the other guys might wash up here eventually.

Predatory eyes flashed in the darkness as a young woman, also on her own, searched for men by themselves. She dressed like the other club goers although her clothes didn’t fit well. Clothes that would have covered the next-skinniest woman in her surroundings like paint hung loosely from her impossibly thin frame. A microskirt graced the tops of her fleshless thighs. A tiny, neon yellow top exposed the concave of her midsection. Skin clung to the bones of her arms, her legs, her collar and her neck. Thin lips pressed against her teeth. Shadows found the hollows of her face and etched the shape of her skull. She spied on Jay for several minutes before making her approach.

“Hola, you all by yourself, handsome? Tik.”

Jay jolted, surprised as the girl appeared beside him. She seemed to have stepped out of the shadows from thin air but that wasn’t necessarily her fault, he was half-asleep on his feet. The girls in the pool, the music, the strobing spotlights, it all felt like part of a dream. All that noise and motion crashed back down on top of him.

“Sorry, what?” Jay said.

“You are handsome, you want to give me a drink?”

Jay hesitated while his brain caught up. “I’m Jay.”

“Esmerelda, tik,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “Esme, I am called.”

“You wanted a drink? Yeah, sure, okay.”

It took Jay a few moments to find the bar on the far side of the pool. Esme, the girl, pressed so close to him he couldn’t get a good look at her. Most of the partygoers were American, white, black, brown Americans, but going by her appearance and broken English she was Mexican. Black hair was pulled back behind her ears and her skin was dusky. She was a whole head shorter than he was. And she was skinny. Really skinny, dangerously skinny, he realised. He’d been distracted by her skimpy clothes and her breasts and the way she flicked her hair, but her arms and legs and stomach and face were almost skeletal. Skin clinging to bone. Her ribs pressed through the flesh beneath her top. And yet a couple of times when he stumbled, still drunk, he found her hand pressing on his hip or the small of his back to right him with surprising strength.

People massed around the bar, six deep. Jay squinted as if trying to understand the path forward. He worried he might look too drunk to serve. Cocktails slid into plastic cups and bottles of beer were thrust across the bar, covered in clinging ice.

“Uh, what would you like?” Jay asked. “You want some shots? Beer, or, like a wine cooler?”

“I never drink, wine cooler,” Esme said.

“Alright, well, what do you want?”

“Forget drink, why don’t we dance?”

Without another thought, Esme steered Jay away from the bar and toward one of the dancefloors. Young bodies pulsed and wound around one another. Faces pressed together. Hands ran across hips and backs and butts. Esme forced him around in a half-circle then jostled him backward before tossing herself at him. Although he was a little dazed, he laughed and let his hands rise to her midsection. There wasn’t much for him to find and his hands groped at the air before coming into contact with skin.

“Come a little bit closer, tik,” Esme whispered beneath the pounding music.

Jay couldn’t think of another time a woman had thrown herself at him like this, literally. With hard angles and surprising strength, she almost left bruises as they danced. She pressed her breasts against the lower curve of his chest. They felt soft enough but, as he touched her sides and shoulders and back, he felt nothing but skin and bone and sinew. In spite of all that, Jay rested his chin briefly on the top of her head and thought about kissing her. Her face turned toward him. Colour and shadow flashed across her features and the hollows and bared teeth made it look like a skull. He hesitated for a moment, a thought cutting through his slowly sobering haze.

“Hey, I don’t want to-, I don’t know if you-, but I didn’t want to pay you for anything,” Jay said.

“Hooker?” Esme said. “You think I’m a whore?”

“Oh, no, no, I mean-,”

“I’m not a whore! I saw you standing all alone, I thought, you’re my kind of man.”

“Really?”

“Whores don’t kiss on the mouth, do they?”

Jay couldn’t answer that with any certainty. He was convinced, however, as Esme pulled his face to hers. He could have wrapped a hand around her bicep and felt his thumb and fingertips touch but he wasn’t sure if he could have pulled away if he wanted to. Her mouth mashed onto his with such heat and such hunger that his doubts were washed away. As little of her that there was, he crushed himself to her and kissed her back, feeling his blood run. That seemed to encourage her further, harder, hungrier.

“Closer, come a little bit closer, darling, baby.”

Esme’s words sounded almost mechanical. Like she was repeating the words from a script she’d read. But her bony limbs wrapped him so tightly it felt like she was desperate for his warmth, although the night was still muggy and she had plenty of heat of her own. His body responded. He knew she could feel it too, and felt a mixture of shy embarrassment and pride. A feather touch graced the front of his jeans.

“Do you have somewhere we go, tik?” Esme said.

“Our hotel, my hotel, I have a room,” Jay said, and he had to wrack his brain for a moment. “The Hacienda.”

“That is close.”

“Is it?”

“Shouldn’t you know, tik?”

“Sure, it is.”

The two of them left the open air nightclub via the proper exit rather than heading down to the beach again. It led them back to the street. Jay took a few moments to reorientate himself. Esme was right, The Hacienda was literally next door to the property they’d just emerged from.

“There you go, right there,” Jay said.

Sweat dripped down Jay’s back. Esme pushed herself close to him. He worried what he might do or say if his room was already occupied by the guys he was staying with. But just bringing a girl back to the hotel, one who had picked him up and not the other way around, was already worth some bragging rights.

Jay flashed his room’s keycard at the front desk as they walked inside. The primly dressed receptionist gave Esme a disapproving glare but said nothing. Compared to the pool complex, and the street, the hotel’s entryway was glaringly bright. Air conditioned air chilled the sweat on his skin.

“Which room is yours?” Esme asked.

“Fourteen-oh-eight.”

“Let’s go, tik.”

The girl stayed close on the ride to the fourteenth floor but she left the elevator ahead of him. Jay had started to sober up with all the dancing. In the light of the hotel hallway, he saw just how skinny she was for real. Bone thin limbs, so skinny the joints almost looked swollen. Nodules of her spinal column stood out down her back, exposed by her short top. There was a tattoo behind her right shoulder of a tiger and even it looked wizened, as if it had been sketched onto her when she had more available flesh and then shrunk down as she lost it. When she glanced back at him, beneath the curtain of her hair, her face wrapped too tight across her skull. He’d known she was skinny but failed to realise just how extreme it was when they were dancing in the darkness. Drugs was his first thought. It had to be drugs or some kind of illness, maybe an eating disorder, but there was no way anyone healthy could possibly look like she did.

As if sensing Jay’s hesitation, Esme moved backward and kissed him again. It felt just as passionate but there was something off about it as well. Something lurking in her kiss. She pressed her breasts into his chest though and his resolve, or something else, firmed. He reminded himself through his lifting alcoholic haze to make sure none of the other guys’ valuables were laying around the room in plain sight and to kick her out before he fell asleep. Things had happened so suddenly, and she was so insistent, that she had to have some other angle. He wasn’t that special.

The two of them moved to room 1408. All the corridors looked the same and without the signs at the intersections Jay almost certainly would have gotten lost. Part of him hoped they would arrive at the room to find it already occupied by the other three guys he was sharing with. He hadn’t thought to check his phone in some time. There was no way he’d just send Esme away, it’d be too embarrassing and, in its own way, emasculating, but he was feeling less and less enthusiastic about this happening as he sobered.

Unfortunately, when Jay’s card beeped and they swung the door open the room was dark and quiet. He had to insert the card into a slot by the door to make the lights come on. They revealed two unmade beds with more blankets and pillows occupying the floor, surrounded by a sea of open bags, dirty clothes, beer bottles and other trash. A thick musk of male bodies and antiperspirant clung to the air. The smell almost overwhelmed his senses in spite of the balcony door sitting partly open across the room. The bathroom overflowed with damp towels and half-used toiletries. The lights inside the room were as harsh as the ones in the corridor. Esme flitted forward and switched them off, leaving only a single lamp illuminated between the two beds. Her feet flew across the chaos on the floor with ease.

“Come closer, lover, what are you waiting for?” she said in those same, almost mechanical tones of seduction.

Jay felt their teeth click together as Esme trapped his mouth with hers. Something pulsed at the base of her throat. With that same inexplicable strength, she steered him toward one of the two beds. Sheets that already smelled of sweat and pool chlorine bunched around him. With hooked fingers, she grabbed his t-shirt and yanked it over his head. He tried to run his hands across her body but there was little for him to grab onto. She had no ass to speak of, no hips, no stomach. Her breasts were too soft and pillowy, her bra had to be heavily padded. For a fleeting moment he wondered if she might be trans but then she took his hand and guided it beneath her tiny skirt. He could feel the moist heat of her through her panties and that dispelled that notion. And yet, he felt less and less certain about what they were doing.

“Hold on a second.” Jay pushed her backward.

“Just lay back, lover, tik,” Esme said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

Esme pressed him against the mattress and his head hit the headboard. She stripped off her top and bra. As Jay had suspected, the chest she’d been pushing against him was mostly padding. She had almost no breasts at all, her chest was as fleshless as the rest of her.  Nipples jutted like pencil erasers from the vague and wasted outlines where breasts must have been before she lost so much weight. His eyes moved on from them quickly, searching her arms and the rest of her body for signs of drug abuse. He found nothing, no scabs, no scars, she was simply dangerously thin. He felt bad for rejecting her at this stage but he was less and less sure that he could go through with this.

“Wait,” Jay said.

“Just let me have you, tik.” Esme pressed down on him, all bones and sinewy strength.

“No, fuck! Get off of me!”

Esme was strong but she weighed almost nothing. Jay grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her upright. For a moment, the two of them regarded one another. He could almost swear he saw rims of orange glowing in her eyes, like an animal lingering outside the light of a campfire. Her lips parted, and her mouth widened, and suddenly her jaw almost unhinged. The base of her throat rippled as something forced its way up from below.

A spike of bone almost as long as Jay’s forearm exploded from the back of Esme’s throat, past her tongue and teeth, and jutted from her mouth. It ended in a razor tip and hollow point like a giant hypodermic needle. Pink muscle ran in ridges along its length, slick with spit, making it look vaguely, bizarrely, like some kind of cross between a weapon and a sex toy.

“What? What the fuck?” Jay shouted.

Fingernails like gnarled brown claws dug into Jay’s arms, sprouting from the ends of Esme’s fingers. She couldn’t speak around the spike but made some kind of weird, wet howl. Lancing forward, she aimed at Jay’s throat. At the last second, he rolled aside and shoved her skinny frame in the other direction. The spike speared the pillow and ripped through it before embedding itself in the headboard.

“Fuck!”

Jay wedged a knee between himself and the girl before kicking out and shoving. Esme was launched sideways and crashed into the lamp between the two beds. Both its cover and lightbulb shattered, throwing sparks. The room plunged into darkness.

Rolling to the other side of the bed, Jay jumped to his feet. Pale light filtered in from the balcony door but he couldn’t see Esme or where she’d gone. He’d kicked off his shoes and socks, and she’d taken his shirt off, so he staggered through the dark in dishevelled jeans. Desperately, he tried to remember where the lightswitch was. He slipped on discarded blankets and clothing.

“Oh, fuck, fuck.”

Groping, Jay found the lightswitch and slapped it on. He worried the girl, or whatever she was, was right behind him. He spun and smashed his back against the wall. Esme wasn’t behind him, however. As his eyes swept the room, he couldn’t see her anywhere. Panting, he tried to catch his breath. His heart heaved.

“Where are you?” Jay asked. “What are you? What the fuck are you?”

The room wasn’t big enough for Esme to disappear so thoroughly. Two beds and bedside tables across from a cabinet with the TV mounted on top of it, some sheer curtains beside the balcony door, junk all over the floor, but not even a table and chairs. He checked, quickly, that she hadn’t slipped past him to the bathroom. The only real option was that she was hiding beneath one of the beds.

“Where the fuck are you?”

Jay eased forward so he could see the gap between the two beds. Esme wasn’t there. Grabbing the end of the mattress that the two of them had been using, he hauled it aside. It crashed against the wall. Underneath it, he could see through the frame that she wasn’t hiding there either.

“Where are you?”

Moving to the second bed, Jay kicked it aside with his bare foot. The mattress didn’t shift far but he couldn’t see anyone or anything lurking beneath it. Jay felt dizzy. Remembering the spike, he started to wonder if he’d imagined it all. Maybe he’d been drugged, wandered back to the room to sleep it off, and dreamed the whole thing. With sudden inspiration, he checked his arm. Esme’s fingernails had dug into his right bicep hard enough to draw blood and he could see the parallel lines marked in red.

Movement came at Jay from behind. He spun to see Esme, still topless, wearing nothing but her skirt, flinging herself at him. The pink spike jutted out of her mouth without wobbling, firmly rooted in place. She grabbed at him and led with the spike, trying to hit him in the chest. Together, they fell onto the second bed.

“No, no! Get off me!”

The two of them wrestled and grasped far more violently, far less sensually, than only minutes ago. Esme’s throat spike speared holes in the mattress beside Jay’s head. It was obvious to him, in his panic stricken brain, that she was some kind of vampire. A bloodsucker, a human mosquito maybe given her impossibly thin frame and needle mouth. There was no time to think about how such a thing could be possible. Part of him tried desperately to come up with a way that information could help him. Most of him was only concerned with staying alive, moment to moment, second to second, writhing and trying to fight free of the creature on top of him.

Esme heaved Jay upright. Out of frustration, she stood and hauled him around before tossing him across the room with her impossible strength. Jay flew into the cabinet, crashed and hurt his hip, and tumbled to the floor. He scrambled upright again as she advanced. Pointed brown claws grew from the ends of her fingers. Jay grabbed the TV mounted to the cabinet. It tore free with surprising ease, a cord snapping. He raised it and swung, and brought it crashing down on top of Esme. She took the blow on an upraised arm then pulled the TV from his grasp. It hit the glass of the balcony door hard enough to leave a spider web of cracks then clattered to the floor in pieces.

“Stay away! Stay away!”

Backing across the room, Jay kicked pillows and bits of clothing off the floor at Esme. He grabbed a couple of bags off the top of the cabinet and hurled them at her. She batted aside the pathetic missiles with ease. Jay’s hand came to rest on a can of deodorant left on the corner of the cabinet.

Esme lunged in Jay’s direction, claws raised. Shaking the can, he aimed and fired a spray directly into her eyes. Sandalwood and citrus filled the air. Esme threw her head back, swallowing his spike in a gulping motion, and screamed. Hands flew to her eyes, and she was careful not to blind herself with her own claws as she scrubbed at them. Jay darted closer and tried to hit her again but he knew it wouldn’t last. He had to use the distraction while he could, to either run or to kill her.

Jay looked past Esme to the cracked balcony door. Dropping the can, he barrelled forward and tackled her around her naked and seemingly frail chest. As soon as he hit her, she came alive with thrashings of unbelievable power. She was strong but still weighed almost nothing. Lifted off her feet, she had no leverage to make the most of that terrible strength. Jay withstood a couple of clumsy blows then slammed into the balcony door. Rather than shattering, the glass in the door separated into several large sections and fell outward. A couple of sections hit the ground and smashed, scattering shards of glass that cut him around the feet and ankles. He was too amped up to care, heaving Esme across the balcony.

The balcony wasn’t a big one, with only enough room for a couple of chairs to one side. Jay crossed it in a single stride. He hammered Esme into the railing. Warm, salty air billowed around the two of them. They were fourteen stories above the ground, music and noise filtering up from far below. Given that the balcony faced the ocean, there was little to see at that time of night. A vast expanse of lightless black beyond the dimly lit pool and gardens directly beneath them. Unlike the resort next door, the pool was abandoned at that time of night.

Esme fought, screeching wordlessly. The needle shot from the back of her throat again. Jay felt its razor tip grace the side of his neck, a scratch like those inflicted on his feet by the broken glass. He slammed her into the railing again and felt the top of it bend. With desperate muscle, he lifted the thrashing creature higher and threw her over the side.

Scream muffled by her spike, Esme fell. Her thin, flailing body dropped into darkness. Jay didn’t see her land. He staggered sideways and grasped another part of the railing before he fell over. Glass crunched under his bare feet and he winced at the sudden pain. When he finally managed to look over the railing, he couldn’t see anything. A fourteen story fall. No one could survive that. Nothing could survive that, he tried to reassure himself.

“Yo, what the fuck?” A voice surprised him.

Jay turned. Broken glass glittered both inside and out around the frame of the shattered balcony door. The rest of the room was in disarray, mattresses knocked loose, bags scattered, and the TV ripped free and busted. The three guys he’d been sharing the room with, Ethan, Adrian, and Brock, crowded the hallway with eyes wide.

“Jay? What the fuck did you do, bro?” Ethan asked.

Before Jay could form an answer, he was distracted by a loud, leathery, clapping sound. With horror, he spun from the doorway. Another piece of glass cut his foot and he didn’t even notice.

Rising out of the darkness, Esme looked like some terrible and demented angel. The throat spike jutted from between her lips. Two enormous, batlike wings grew from her back. Tawny skin stretched across their elongated frames, human skin, her skin. Across her left wing, he could actually see the tiger tattoo from her back all distorted and distended and stretched out of shape. Each wing was at least as long as she was tall and held her in the air with easy, powerful beats that sent wind gusting across the balcony.

“No!”

Clawed hands seized Jay by the shoulders. Before he could think, he was heaved off his feet and up and over the railing. He screamed and kicked without thinking. The ground dropped away a dizzying fourteen stories below. Esme’s hands clutched him like the talons of a giant bird.

Jay’s hotel room with his three friends inside it, their stunned faces, shrank into the distance. Lights spun and spiralled and shrank as well. Jay couldn’t tell where they were going as they sailed through the darkness. He fought back without thinking, striking at the hands gripping him even though if Esme dropped him he’d be flattened on the ground below. The vampire squawked at him around her spike. They flew out over the ocean, diving, descending. Esme’s wings flagged as she was distracted. He cried out and hit her again.

One of Esme’s hands released its grip. The other tried to hold on, gouging Jay’s shoulder with its claws. They were definitely over the water. Waves crashed below. They spun through the air and the lights of shore, the lights of the resorts and the neon colours of the street, flashed in and out of view. Jay grabbed at the wrist holding him. Squeezing, he threw his weight back and forth until she released him.

Jay spiralled into darkness. A scream choked in his throat from the sudden acceleration. He had no frame of reference for just how far they might have flown or how high above the waves he was but he seemed to fall for a long time, blind, the water below just an inky void. He started to think that maybe trying to get free was the wrong decision when suddenly the cold surface smashed into him from below. It hit his legs and stomach first like a bus, punching upwards into his chest. His face slammed the surface, water filling his sinuses and pain exploding through his skull. Suddenly, he was deaf as well as blind as he spiked through the water to an unknown depth.

Jay floundered, kicking and striking out in all directions. Luckily, he hadn’t been knocked unconscious by the fall. He felt bubbles stream past his body. After a few moments of confusion, he powered toward the surface. He was a good swimmer but he hadn’t taken a breath before he landed and his lungs started to burn. For a few long, terrifying moments, he paddled and paddled but couldn’t find the surface. Pushed and pulled by strange currents, he started to wonder if he was swimming in the wrong direction.

Jay’s head broke the surface. He gasped and gulped at the air, choking on some brine along with it. Weak as he felt, he had to kick and paddle to stay upright. For a minute he trod water, recovering. He was still almost blind in the darkness but noise echoed off the water. Turning and searching, he saw the shoreline again as he bobbed in the gentle waves.

After catching his breath, Jay began to swim and kick toward the shore. Fortunately, the water was gentle and the current didn’t fight him. It took more than ten minutes to reach the breakers. Every so often, he scanned the sky for anything human-sized on giant wings but saw nothing. Maybe Esme’s senses were no better than his and she’d simply lost him in the void of darkness.

As adrenaline sapped from his system, Jay began to feel the cold and exhaustion. Surf broke around his ears. He pulled himself upright and felt sand and rocks underfoot. Cuts on his feet and claw wounds on his arms and shoulders also drained his strength. He staggered up through the shallows and onto the beach itself.

Exhaustion gripped Jay. The beachfront was dark but his eyes had adjusted as best they could during the swim and light reflected from the nearest resorts. Nearby, a man and a woman walked along the top of the beach. For all Jay knew, it was the couple he’d interrupted earlier.

“Please, help me,” Jay rasped. “You’ve got to help me.”

The girl laughed. “Have you been swimming?”

Jay staggered too close for the guy’s liking. He was bent almost double, dripping wet. Placing one hand on Jay’s shoulder, the other tourist shoved him backward.

“Fuck off!”

“Please, help me,” Jay said.

“What are you on, asshole? Go to fucking bed.”

With another shove, he planted Jay’s ass on the damp sand. Jay was too exhausted to fight back. The girl laughed again and the two of them hurried on.

“I’ll help you, lover, tik,” a familiar voice said.

From behind the pole of one of the beach umbrellas, Esme appeared. Even as skinny as she was, there was no way she could have concealed herself behind the pole and yet she made it work somehow. Her wings and spike had retreated. She only wore a thin strip of material around her waist, the microskirt. Jay jolted and tried to pull himself upright.

“Help me!” Jay raised his voice, rough with salt.

“I told you to fuck off,” the other man’s voice floated back to him.

Esme was suddenly on top of Jay. Clawed hands forced his exhausted body to the sand. She climbed higher, thin, strong thighs gripping his waist. To a passive observer, they might have looked like another couple taking advantage of the darkness for a moment of risky passion.

“I told you, you’re my kind of man, tik,” Esme said. “I want you, you don’t know how bad I want you.”

With a retch, the spike erupted from Esme’s mouth again. She slammed it into the crux between Jay’s throat and his shoulder. His heart thundered. Agony wracked his chest. With incredible power, he could feel the blood being sucked through his veins. His extremities turned numb. What little light he saw shrank to pinpricks and then disappeared, again, into blackness.

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Sean: This is the first short story I’ve written based on my book, Tik. It’s been a while since I revisited it but I just love the creatures, the aswang. Of course, you might wonder just what are Filipino creatures like aswang doing in Mexico? I mean, to know that, you’d have to read it, wouldn’t you?

Its became a bit of a cliche but I’m a real sucker for an action set piece or other piece of cinematography that’s set to a piece of music, the more incongruous the better, and have been ever since I watched Michael Madsen slice off a cop’s ear to ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ by Stealers Wheel in the film Reservoir Dogs. I really wasn’t a fan of The Kingsman, for example, I can’t stand ‘Chosen One’ narratives and it was all a bit too cute for me, but yes I’ll admit the ‘Church Fight’ scene set to ‘Free Bird’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd is 100% worth the price of admission (I’m also a massive Skynyrd fan).

This is absolutely true, the first book I ever completed, unpublished, obviously, had an entire sequence set to ‘Radar Love’ by Golden Earring. As in all the lyrics were in there, it was a car chase and that song was playing on the radio throughout, and the action was all timed around the song itself.

Also just realising that both this story and the last one I released feature winged humanoids. That’s another trope I’m a big fan of, total coincidence doing two in a row.

Next Track: The Cranberries – Zombie