Danger!
Timmy was pretty sure kids weren’t supposed to be in this part of town. Good kids, at least. It was probably okay for wicked kids like him. It was night, too. …Only, was it a school night? It’d been a while since he’d been in a regular one. The School he went to now sometimes had classes after dark, because there was a lot of stuff you could only learn how to do when the sun wasn’t in the sky. Shadowy alleys and dirty streets weren’t nearly as bad.
It all smelled awful, though. It was a mix of Dirt and unwashed bodies, and smells from all the stuff that came out of people — including blood. The blood was what he was sniffing for now, because the thing Timmy was chasing had leaked out a bunch of it as it ran. It didn’t smell like regular blood, either” too sharp, like it had been mixed with bleach. That was good, though. He could track it better that way.
Timmy thought he was gaining on the thing he was hunting. That was good, and bad. Good because it meant it was getting weaker, and bad because it was one of the things who could think. A dumb animal would just run until it fell over, but anything smart would figure out that it’d have a better chance if it turned around and went after Timmy, as hard as it could. At least, that’s what Timmy would do — and this thing was as smart as a teenager, right? So Timmy had to worry about that.