Scream: Wrath Unleashed by Jade Gretz

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Scream: Wrath Unleashed ANIMATION

Tendril of Tides

They said the lighthouse had always been a thing of appetite: glass and iron drinking the light until the sea went hungry. By the time Scream arrived at the cliff road, the town's appetite had curdled into rumor, and rumor into prayer. A bent congregation of fishermen hovered by the pier; they watched her as if she were a storm, as if the wind might answer for her.

The lighthouse itself crouched at the lip of land like a waiting tooth, its white enamel stained the color of old bone. The keeper's cottage, a squat, salt-bleached thing, leaned away from it as if embarrassed by its own proximity to the tower. A single window guttered with candlelight.

Scream could smell it before she saw it. Not the salt or diesel or kelp — all of those were expected — but an undercurrent: the metallic tang of something hungry and gleeful. It tasted like coin in a dead man's mouth. It tasted like laughter that had been stretched thin and wrapped about a throat.

She remembered laughter like that. She remembered the constant, small wars in alleyways, in cold rooms with bright chrome. Her origin was a serrated poem of shove and bite, a chorus of hands that clutched and were clutched. The memory felt like a mirror cracked at the edges; to look into it made her want to tear at the glass.

The keeper on the porch was a man of thin shoulders and too many hands. He held a lantern that burned steady despite the wind — a small candle haloed in polished brass. He looked up when she approached. Where other men squinted at the sea, he watched the land as if fearing it might move.

"You shouldn't be here," he said. His voice had been scoured by sea and time. "No one comes here on good reasons."

Scream's host — the figure she wore like a skin of silk and shadow — smiled and let the lips gesture for her. Seduction, she thought, was not always a lullaby. Sometimes it was a scalpel.

"We follow bad reasons," she said. Her voice threaded through the dark like a silver fish. "They call me Scream."

"Names are nonsense," the keeper said, but his eyes found hers and did not flinch. His hand tightened on the lantern. "I'm Ward."

"Ward Holloway?" the symbiote asked. She tasted the syllables. They were old salt and older secrets. "You light the way."

"I keep the light for whatever will let you die slow." His laugh came out small and sharp. "You hear about the fragment?"

"Yes." Her hunger ticked, an insect beneath glass. "You infected the town, Ward. People are afraid."

He snorted. "The town's been afraid of itself a long time. I only... gave it words."

"Words that bite?"

"Better than silence." Ward's jaw contracted. A vein raised like a coiling rope at his temple. "What do you want from me? You lot come, you press and pry, you pretend to be cleaner than the stain. You ever think you're as hungry as the thing you chase?"

It was a fair question. Scream considered it and did not blink. The symbiote had been birthed at the edge of violence and fed upon rage; but that rage had not remained thin and pure — it had become her, married to voice and thought. This made her both hunter and hunted in the same breath.

"I want the fragment," she said. "And I want you to stop smiling when children don't come to the shore."

Ward's mouth twitched like rope. "The fragment's more of a rumor than a thing. It isn't worth the trouble."

"It drifts like oil," she said. "It will find a seam."

"You sound like someone who knows seams." He studied her as if trying to recall a dream. "You and I—"

"Don't compare us," Scream said, and tasted blood at the memory — a memory of a city alley in which teeth had been counted and currency had been measured in screams. The echo of Carnage fluttered in her mind like a moth against a pane. She had torn away from it, once; that separation had been both salvation and wound. She had learned to call the scratches by other names — hunger, need, protection. But the fragment they chased wore the old laugh like a cloak.

Ward's hand brushed at his chest where the lantern's light made him a carving. For a moment, his shadow looked not like a keeper but like someone turned inside out, ribs folding like railings. "You can't undo what you're cut from, Scream. You can only... arrange it."

She knew the way his words fit together — a temptation to complacency. There was seduction in that, a gentle theft: accept what you are, an
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