The Mosquito Women (Patreon)

They rise from the long grass beside the river as the merchant and his men go by, one leading an ox laden with bags of rice, dried herbs, salt, and spices, and clay pots full of what smells to the hunters like liquor, strong and good. The beast shakes her head in irritation and flicks her tail to clear the flies from her dark haunches. The first hunter, the wind stirring her mane of coarse black hair, looks to her older sister and emits a low, questioning whimper. Bared fangs are the answer.

The hunt begins. They break from the grass at a run, two sleek, pale forms faster than any man has ever moved, streaking downhill toward the track that runs beside the river. Their dark manes fly. The hair on their legs, their bellies, and the backs of their arms flattens against skin with the speed of their passage. The men do not see them. They do not hear. They smell of fish and shit and incense, sweat and bile and unwashed skin.

The ox is more observant. She catches their scent. Her eyes roll in sudden terror and she sidesteps, dragging her driver after her and spilling bags and crates onto the dirt track. The merchant cries out. His guard knows enough to look upwind, not at the beast, and his hand is nearly to the hilt of his sword when little sister grabs it in her own and jerks him from his feet to crack him like a whip. Joints give in sticky sequence. He hits the ground, breathless, and she rams a slim, hairy arm down his throat and pulls his tongue out, stuffing it into her mouth as big sister discards the merchant, a spray of blood flying from his ruined throat, her own chin and neck slick with his gore, and flits upstream to drag the ox’s driver back to shore from where he splashes in the shallows. She squats to crush his spine between her jaws. They leave the ox to run on wild into the night, still lowing in terror. Her blood is poison to their kind.

The humans call them the mosquito women, malarial creatures who haunt the swamps and riverways, preying by night on caravans and foolish travelers. It is said that they snatch babies from their sleeping mothers’ arms and bed down in the muck with pigs to suckle blood from their bulk while they sleep. Some of what is said holds truth, but more often it is fiction. No hunter would drink from a swine.

They bring the dripping sweetmeats, held against their bellies, back through the waving grass and over the mud flats in the lee of the peninsula which stretches far out into the flat, dark water. The moon is full. The sisters go on three legs through the shadows, pausing only once to rest and lick the worst of the night’s gore from one another. Their tongues are rough as sharkskin, long and pointed. Rasping flakes of crusted blood from hairy little teats and graceful necks.

On into the pine forests, swaying in the night breeze, moths thick in the moonlight drinking from the summer flowers which grow here and there in clearings where decades of fragrant dead needles give way before moss and upthrust stone. They reach the wooded hills and make their way up slopes of shale and tangled roots where deer, eyes golden in the moonlight, watch them pass and spring away into the dark when the wind blows past them, carrying the scent of blood. Their white rumps fleeing quick among the trees stir the little sister to part her jaws, a serpent’s killing fangs unfolding in her canine gaps, but her elder nuzzles her and emits a low, chuffing grunt of warning. She wines back an apology, ducking her head, and they carry on.

Their mother is waiting for them. In a network of dry caves half-hidden by hanging roots, the mosquito women make their home. They are born three to a litter, dark-eyed and alert from the moment they slip bloody and dripping into the world. Only one lives to adulthood, her mother’s milk and the blood of her sisters nourishing her until she is strong enough to hunt. This whelping’s victor lies curled in their mother’s arms when the hunters reach the inner cavern, black as pitch to anything without their huge, light-eating eyes. Four times their size, huge with stored fat and thick muscle, she greets them with hungry relief, sniffing the backs of their necks as they crawl atop her bulk to proffer their gifts, clawed hands sinking into soft, pale fat. Her nostrils flare. Her great black mane stiffens. She parts her jaws and takes the chunks of brain and kidney, lung and bowel, savoring the rich, dark tissue which sustains her in her great old age.

She no longer has the stamina to hunt, but she is strong, stronger than any of her children. Two winters past, before they left their last den and came north to this one, she tore eight men who came to kill her daughters limb from limb, hunting them through the dark tunnels until the last two fled. One she caught at the mouth of the cave, scalding her hands with sunlight as she dragged him back. The other turned, wide-eyed, to watch her crush his shrieking comrade’s head between her jaws. When the petty lord of that province sent his armies to roust the women from their cave, they found only bones and old, dried blood.

The sisters nuzzle their young sibling, tasting the acrid glands behind her pointed ears, sniffing her anus and the nape of her neck where the milky smell of infancy still lingers. In a few years she will join them for their hunts beneath the moon, but for now she only cracks an eye in mild curiosity and yawns to show them her indifference. The little hunter roots for a great breast and drinks, pale red milk spilling down her chin. Outside, the wind howls. The night birds cry.

The time may come, the mother knows in the dark, instinctual tangle of her thoughts, when there is nowhere left for them to run. Towns and cities rise out of the earth. The forests vanish in great swaths of felled trees and churned earth. The humans breed and grow and spread like lice. But tonight there is blood and ravaged flesh and the warmth of her pups pressed close against her, perhaps someday to leave her side and bear their own rapacious young. Only the passage of the years will tell what waits for the mosquito women, and their dam is patient. She has lived a long, long time.