The flesh in the furnace

respected the fierceness of things as small as spiders, the puppet looked pitifully ineffective. Wolf was strong, designed to overcome creatures his own size, designed to kill them for the pleasure of the audience. Noname had been designed for life, nothing more.
        Samuels had stopped screaming. His fists flailed weakly now, even missing Wolf's wings as often as he made contact with them. His entire body kicked and spasmed, almost like one of a pair of lovers.
        Noname leaped onto Wolf's back, between the long, dark wings where the creature was vulnerable. He endured the savagely flapping membranes that pummeled him on all sides, slipped. an arm around the vampire's throat, drew backwards with all his might, pulling the beast's fangs from the old man's neck and also cutting off blood to Wolf's brain.
        
        Ignoring the contestants as Noname and Wolf rolled across the floor in their frantic contest, Sebastian knelt beside Samuels. The old man's eyes were open, though they seemed glazed. There was blood all over his face, and his throat was a ragged mess.
        "Sorry…" Sebastian said. He was crying, and he felt his head ballooning with a sense of inadequacy.
        "Sorry."
        "I Can't-"
        Samuels tried to get up. He slumped back, his head bouncing once on the floor, and he was dead. He had died not understanding what was happening to him. Perhaps he had imagined that the rejuvenation treatments that he took once a year in the city would preserve him forever against accidental death as well as against the natural decay of his flesh. Or, more likely, he had long ago forgotten about death. Here, alone in these woods, he was not a witness to the mortality of friends and relatives. He saw only the trees, and they appeared to persevere, to stay the centuries, growing larger and larger, sometimes suffering drought and other times a late spring, but always holding to their place in the world. He saw, too, the flowers that bloomed every summer, fresh after a long winter's sleep.
        There was no predator of any import in these forests, and what small animals did die had the grace to use their burrows as a final resting place, out of sight and out of mind. After a lifetime of hermetic existence, perhaps Ben Samuels had come to think of himself as being as immortal as the trees, as the land, the earth.
        Sebastian turned just as Wolf finished with Noname. The vampire had nearly shredded the puppet that had attacked it. Noname was dead.
        The idiot's chest tightened. Suddenly, he hated the Furnace and Bitty Belina and everything that he had done these last five years.
        Wolf flew.
        Sebastian dodged the dark body, but by the time he whirled to confront it from the other direction, it was upon him, claws hooked into his shirt, its head level with his jugular vein.
        He felt its claws rending the flesh beneath his shirt. Warm blood ran down his belly. He grasped Wolf's head in both hands. A low, ugly snarl rumbled in his throat, worse than any noise the vampire had made.
        Wolf bit his fingers. _
        He didn't notice.
        He literally tore the puppet's head from its shoulders. Wolf's doll-sized mouth worked even after he had been decapitated, as if he could reach out from death and respond to this indignity perpetrated upon him.
        Sebastian wrung the torn neck until the blood stopped running. He threw the remains down. And as quickly as the rage had come, it passed, loneliness settling in its place. The loneliness brought exhaustion, and he sank to the floor, his chin against his chest.
        He sat there for a long while. Then, slowly, he rose and began the now familiar ritual of disposal of the corpses..
        He tried to re-create Noname. But now that he knew how to work the controls of the Furnace, he could not call forth any twisted creatures. If Noname was brought to life, he did not recognize him.
        He slept.
        
        Two days after the murders, Sebastian found the Holistian Pearl in the pocket of the coat he had worn that night he left Springsun. It was a darker gray than he had ever seen it. He had heard that when a Pearl became black it was still not dead, though living only subliminally. He rolled it back and forth between his fingers, watching it grow lighter and lighter, just as it had in Pertos' hands so many times before.
        When he thought of Pertos, he thought of Ben Samuels