Uh, Crude Language. So... PG14. But I'm pretty sure you guys under 14 will read it anyway. Lol. Hope you like it.

  When Kevin got the call again, it was 2 am.

“Someone better be dead,” he growled into the phone, the winter chill biting into his bare flesh. His eyes were wedged close, but shot open as soon as he heard the reply.

“Your brother most probably is.”

“.”

“That's the worst reply I've ever heard off a brother of a highly-probaby-deceased,” Tao said coldly, “anyway where the are you? I called, and you should've come straight back.Or which part of 'identify the ing remains' did you not get?”

“Wait, can't you do it?” Kevin rubbed his eyes painfully. He really didn't feel like going back to Pemberly and facing his mother's whines.

“Are you ing kidding me?” Tao exploded into the reciever, “he's your bloody brother! Aren't you in the least bit concerned that he might have been ripped to pieces by some kind of wild animal?”

“I...” Kevin winced at his tone, pulling up the covers, “... am concerned. But I kinda expected this as well. I mean, it's been two years...”

“I don't care if it's two ing eons, just get your insensitive turd-bucket down to Pemberly!” Tao concluded and the call was disconnected in one brusque slam. Kevin sighed, and slumped back into his pillows, staring at the ceiling.

He wondered why he felt nothing.

Then, he pulled himself off the mattress, pulled up his jeans. He buckled his $10 belt, pulled a sweater off the chair and pulled it over on the way to his car. Fortunately, it started. As he engine roared to life, he caught himself in a flashback; back when he was eleven.

What happened to your brother, Kevin?

He left home.

That's sad, why did he leave?

He had a big fight with mum and dad. It was big enough to make him pack and leave.

What was the fight about?

Equality.

Equality?

Mum and dad never loved him much – and he got tired of pretending that they did.

Every parent loves their child.

Some just don't.

*

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have hit him.

I used to have a classmate – his name was Changmin. He was one of those tall quiet kids who sat in the back, constantly pushing their horn-rimmed glasses up their bridges just to have it slide down in two seconds. He was one of those slower ones.

Shy, with an inferiority complex.

One day I saw him reading a book on insects. I even still remember the name of the cover – Entomology. He was nine-years-old.

I didn't know why I did it. I didn't know what made me do it.

I grabbed the book from his hands and tossed it into the dirt. I didn't say a word, not a taunt, not even a challenge – but I just stared him in the eyes. The whole time, he was staring at his newly-empty hands, as though the book was still there. Then, he looked up at me.

His eyes were vacant, yet piercing. I felt threatened, challenged.

I wasn't a bully. I wasn't a prick. But something snapped inside of me. I punched him across the face until his nose exploded with blood.

Two years ago, I was lying on the bank of the icy shore, exhausted. Weak. My legs frozen to the point that I knew in two hours, they would be gone. My arms were almost blackened and my breath reeked of blood. I was just lying there, when it appeared.

The wolf that had helped me.

She was so beautiful, like a white shadow from heaven, a kind of light glowing from her pure immaculate fur. Her gold eyes gleamed like honey in a glass, and when she watched me – I felt my cold melt halfway. Then, two more wolves appeared by her side. They were equally magnificent, but darker, far more menacing, watching me warily as they skulked in a circle around me. There had to be more than three, but I was too weak to turn.

The largest of the three was gray, more like a giant Siberian Husky than a wolf from the wild. It's muscles bulged when it walked, its fur reeking of wood, blood and snow. I was so tired, but I trained my eyes on him.

Trained them so hard, without blinking once.

He bared his incisors and pounced.

*

Tao stared at the bloody mass on the table, eyes vacant. His fingers shivered even though there was no draft, clenched onto his tightly-crossed arms as he sat in a foldable chair. The forensic surgeon – Dr Siwon Choi, was hunched over the unrecognizable corpse, gingerly extracting tissues from torn flesh. Tao had seen dead bodies before, but this one made him sick.

The stomach was ripped right apart, entrails and blood dried on blue flesh. He couldn't tell the right eye from the left, and the nose had been ripped clean off. The mouth was frozen apart, the ghost of his last scream still etched upon them.

What monster, Tao shivered, was capable of doing this?

“What makes you think it was an animal?” Dr Choi had asked him a little while ago, slapping on rubber gloves.

“What the hell kind of human could do this?” Tao had lightly smacked a palm against the wall, his headache worsening.

“It's true that the tears are grotesque...”

“Tears? The guy was ripped apart. His guts and god-knows-what were splattered within kilometres of radii over the whole bloody forest. I'll give you this, doc. Grotesque is a much too subtle word for this. I've seen Siberian tigers tear each other up, but they don't open each other up and... what are you thinking?”

“The damage may be monstrous,” the doctor slipped out of his coat and rolled up his sleeves a bit higher, “but the hatred depicted by the murder can only be described with one word.”

“Human.”

Animals don't hate like this. Tao smoothed a hand over his fringe tiredly.

There's a murderer out there.

*

Remember the wolf I told you about? The wolf who lunged at me?

He was the beta.

*

At 4pm that Thursday, Tao was told that the corpse didn't belong to Kris.

It belonged to a teenager who had gone missing from his home two weeks back. He'd disppeared one night – some friends had invited him to sneak out for a hunting trip, but they no-showed him when their truck crashed into a ditch on the way to the forest. The boy's parents woke up to his empty bedroom and rifle case. Today, they woke up to a dead son.

Kevin came back today, as he said he would. But the starkness of his personality pissed Tao off, and it took all of his willpower not to punch him in the face. But there was something in Kevin that reminded him of his brother, apart from their strikingly similar looks.

Vacancy.

He's seen animals like that. Before Kira, they had a wolf like that – her name was Kina, which stood for 'China' in Hawaiian. Luhan and Tao had lured her out of a Chinese hermit's house two miles out of town in the mountains. She had been quiet, and the hermit had told us all that made him call the centre was the fact that he couldn't afford her eating up his poultry. She was a lone wolf – but she wasn't aggressive, just wary.

The first few months she was nice, sweet even, with her beautiful fur that always seemed to glow. Everyone at the centre admired her, she was truly majestic. But then one of the guys, whom she was supposed to have been used to, went into her pen to clean up. Immediately, she pounced.

If Tao hadn't shot her, he would have been killed.

Turns out, Kina had gone crazy sensing the alcohol the guy had taken last night. As he lowered the gun, Tao was overpowered by a sense of self-hating guilt. The guy lost his arm, and Kina was hit in the neck.

As Tao walked over to look at her, heaving and whimpering in her own pool of blood, he stared into her eyes one last time.

Do it, they seemed to whisper, do it.

He shot her in the heart.

But not only animals with vacant eyes can be dangerous.

Humans too.