The next day the two of us piled into Andrew’s derelict looking truck, tossing our limited bags into the bed and sitting side by side on the singular bench seat. It was a strange truck, to say the least, and even buckled in and with Andrew’s slow driving I — for the first time in my life as a werewolf — felt unsafe to be in a moving vehicle.
The outside of the car was painted a dull red and white, with half of it being rust and worse, with even a werewolve’s healing making me feel like I’d get tetanus whenever I touched it. The door was jammed, forcing me to use all my strength to open or close it, and the floor had a six inch hole in it that Andrew covered with a chunk of plywood board that jumped around with each bump on the road. Even the seats and windshield didn’t look particularly safe, with the bench being torn in places showing the padding underneath and the windshield cracked in three separate places.
The only thing that seemed new in the car was the radio and speakers, which were built to let you play music from your phone or charge it. Andrew had put on some music a while ago that was some sort of classical, and we’d been listening to it for a long while in tired silence. I nodded along to the music for a while, trying to keep focused on it rather than the lack of conversation. Silence was boring, after a while I tried breaking it by asking, “is this like Mozart, or like, Opera or something?”
“What?” Andrew asked, frowning as he looked over from the window he half-leaned out of.
“The music,” I said pointing to the speakers, “is it Opera? I haven’t heard this before.”
“It’s the Dark Souls soundtrack,” Andrew answered slowly, giving a small laugh that made my face heat up in embarrassment. I looked out the window, nodding with a noise of acknowledgement, and he told me, “it’s a good game, let me know if you want to check it out.”
“I will,” I said hesitantly.
I’d not played a lot of video games truth told, and honestly I wasn’t even sure what game he was talking about. My dad thought those sorts of things were a distraction from important things, or trivialized a lot of problems he’d dealt with in the supernatural world. I honestly thought that he was under the impression that if I played a video game that put a vampire in a positive light I’d be running off to become one, or stop hunting them out of pity.
A bit ironic, all things considered.
Maybe I should have taken up Andrew on his offer, learn games and get his help with that sort of thing. It would have made me look more human, it would have made me look a lot better overall to other people if I had hobbies like that.
“I think I’d like to try a game,” I admitted, even as Andrew started to pull into a gas station.
“Try a game?” the man asked, giving a small chuckle at the thought, “you mean like a video game?”
I nodded, slamming my shoulder into the door as we both got out of the truck and I told him, “sure, but also like… maybe that roleplaying game Knives was talking about. If you still want to help me, I understand if you don’t.”
“Sure,” the man shrugged, pulling out his wallet and handing me a few bills, “we can talk about it more when we get back, I didn’t bring my books. For now, how about you head in while I fill up, grab us some lunch. I know this place, they great chicken strips and potato wedges, one of those mom and pop type stores. Just get a large box of each, a couple sodas. Trust me there’s going to be more than enough to split.”
I nodded and went in, suddenly conscious of how I was dressed and how strange it probably looked.
As a purist wedding, the theme tended to be “best clothes, if clothes,” which translated to at best semi-formal for most people by mortal standards. Andrew looked fucking amazing, wearing a pair of black pants with a red buttondown shirt and black vest. More than likely better dressed than anyone there was reasonably going to be.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly sure how I looked. I was wearing a purple dress that came to my knees and was puffed out by a large amount of thin skirts. My chest was shown off by a very blocky looking square cut, and the sleeves were short, and puffed to nearly the size of my head. It was unlike anything else I’d seen, and I wasn’t particularly sure if that was a good thing or bad nowadays.
I ordered the food as Andrew had told me, and picked out two drinks before walking back to the truck. Andrew had finished filling up, and was currently sitting behind the wheel struggling to turn it on for himself.
“The hunk of junk truck giving you trouble?” I asked with a laugh, setting the food in the middle of the bench and taking my seat.
“This is not a hunk of junk truck,” Andrew said, whispering something to the truck as it finally turned on with a coughing purr, “this is a 1962 M100, Cannibal, this is a classic truck. It just needs a little love and care, you know?”
“This thing’s older than my dad,” I snorted at the undeserved praise, trying once more to be a bit funny,“what made you want to drive this thing around? Cheapest one at the junkyard?”
Andrew smiled at the attempted joke, and he left me in silence for a long time as we turned onto the road. After a while of letting it rest, I worried I’d insulted him, before he asked, “do you know why I think Tara and Knives wanted us to talk, Cannibal?”
“I figured they just thought you were nice,” I answered, honestly not sure myself. Andrew was the one who constantly called me cannibal, but he was still more social with me than most of the werewolves.
“I…I lived in the woods for a bit,” the man answered, confusing me as I looked over to him, “after I became a werewolf, I ran off and lived in the woods from when I was about fourteen to eighteen. Tara was actually the one who found me, she saw me transform while I was hunting a deer down, ran after me two miles trying to get me to stop.”
“You were a Purist?” I asked, confused by the fact no one had told me if so.
“Not a Purist, didn’t even know about them,” the man admitted, sounding almost nervous to tell the story, “knew about werewolves before, but didn’t really know any. No, I lived by myself for a while.”
I nodded, frowning as I looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant, and slowly I asked, “what made you run away like that.”
“I’d rather not talk about it, not now,” Andrew told me, sounding hurt as he continued, “but, while I was out there I found this old abandoned hunting cabin in the woods, was shitty as fuck, rundown and rotten. It had one of those pump wells that tasted like metal though, and plenty of animals nearby, and I lived there for a while. It was near this farm; an old guy ran it with some seasonal workers. He saw me a few times in my human form out in the woods around his place, apparently caught on that I was living there. He tried calling the police a couple times, but I could just slip into wolf form and they never really found me.”
“Didn’t even find your cabin?”
“It was pretty well hidden, and I slept in wolf form then so things didn’t really look like I was living there,” Andrew brushed off, surprising me slightly at the familiarity of the story thus far, at least in terms of living conditions. “Anyway, one day a few years into living out there he catches me down at the pond fishing with a spear I made. I was tall when I had my transformation, but still grew out of my clothes even barely eating anything. I was just in a pair of ripped and stained jeans, not even shoes anymore, it was miserable. He says he’ll stop calling the police if I at least accept some help, and I figure give him the chance. He brings me back to his farm, gives me some clothes that his son used to own before he died, boots and everything. I get a nice home cooked meal, and he doesn’t complain when I refuse to spend the night.”
“I doubt I would have trusted him,” I admitted, shaking my head at the story, almost feeling like laughing. “That was the sort of guy we always figured was planning something bad while we were in the Purists.”
“I thought the same thing, figured I’d be halfway through eating before he’d either call the police or be confused that a drug wasn’t working,” Andrew admitted, breaking out into a laugh as he rested back in his bench seat. “A few days later I go back down to that pond, there’s a note there telling me to check the barn. I go to the barn, he’s set out a fishing rod, sleeping bag, lighter, even a fucking tent and shit like that. I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth so I take it, set the tent up in my cabin for a bit more protection from the elements. One day I’m out on that pond fishing, he comes out and joins me, invites me to dinner again. He asks about why I live in the woods, is patient when I take a bit to answer, doesn’t push when I turn down a job from him the first few times. Before I know it I’m going down once a week for dinner, and I still try to get down there every month or two now that I’m at the Covenant.”
“And that’s why you drive this piece of shit truck?” I asked, still finding a little humor that the story led to this as I leaned against the window. I was starting to get a vague idea of why Tara and Knives wanted us to spend time together, but I still wasn’t sure it was going to help in the long run.
“This truck was in his barn,” Andrew admitted, smiling as he slapped the outside of the driver door. “It’d belonged to his dad, he and his son were going to restore it. His son died doing some human war, and he never got around to finishing the job so it fell into worse condition. After The Lady helped me settle into a human life and I got a job at the bar I was able to start saving up some money. I spent a while just borrowing cars or hitching rides, but a couple years ago I decided to save up and ask him if I could buy this thing. I thought he’d say no, and instead he gave it to me for free. Knives thought it wasn’t even worth scrap, but I’ve been talking them around on the idea. I built a new bed for the back, all wood with my own staining, and replaced the engine, then added in the radio. I have a new ignition I need to put in, new seat belts, cleaned up the wheel some, new tires and cleaned the moving parts down there really well. Everything from here on out is just cosmetic pretty much.”
“Cosmetic,” I said almost sarcastically, “like floors and windshields.”
“Ah, give her time, she’s going to be a beauty,” the man shunned me, patting the door once more, “things are ramping up anyway. The money The Lady is giving me to keep you out of trouble is going to help me not need to wait quite as long between getting parts.”
I smiled at the enthusiasm, and hesitantly took one of the chicken strips from between us as I chewed it. I’d not eaten fresh chicken strips since I’d become a werewolf, not counting frozen ones poorly heated, and my enhanced senses made them taste so much better than I remembered. The wolf wanted to eat it with feral abandon, but I forced myself to eat slowly despite the gnawing hunger in my stomach. I was afraid of eating too much, us sharing food made that complicated, and I kept my eyes staring at the man beside me with hesitant suspicion.
He ate a few of the chicken strips and some of the wedges, and I ate two of the strips without much vigor. I didn’t want to steal his food and start a fight, as could happen when not dealing with mates. Well, I didn’t think it happened as often outside the Purists, but I couldn’t be sure.
Even if I was still hungry, I didn’t like the risk. I didn’t want to get into a fight with a friend.
I was just sipping my drink when Andrew finally picked up the box of potato wedges and held them out to me, asking, “you ever had these? They’re delicious, you should try one.”
“Oh, I don’t want to be a bother,” I brushed off, forcing a laugh like it was a joke I’d eat more.
“Not a bother, I’m full anyway,” the man told me, “help yourself, eat what you can. It’s probably going to go bad anyway if we just leave it in the car for the wedding. I doubt the Purists really have a fridge we could use for the leftovers.”
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“They don’t,” I admitted hesitantly, taking the box from the man.
Permission granted, I began to eat in full force as I scarfed it down, only holding back the wolf a little even as I occasionally asked the man if he was sure he didn’t want more. The potato wedges were as good as Andrew had promised, and the remaining chicken strips were as good as the first few. By the time I finished, I was starting to feel almost painfully full as I put the empty boxes together between us in the truck.
The mountains were coming into view by the time I was done eating, and I gave Andrew a few more basic instructions as we made our way closer. A beautiful sight, imposing as it was magnificent, the mountains had been something I’d loved as a half-one and called home as a werewolf. Earning their name for the blue haze across their horizon, the Blue Ridge Mountains were simply perfect examples of natural wonder.
“I used to have trouble eating too,” Andrew told me, smiling as he leaned back in his seat and checked the landmarks we passed, “even once I started getting once a week meals I had trouble eating enough. When Tara found me I was fucking skin and bones, just like you, maybe a little worse off even. You could count my ribs and the bones in my hands. It was a few years before I was looking healthy again and eating three meals a day. Knives started making breakfast for the pack to help me get back on a schedule and Tara taught me to cook different dinners a few nights a week…I’m not a good cook, but I can do things that are mostly premade”
He was trying to help.
He’d gone through a lot of the same things I had, he’d gotten better, I hadn’t even realized he’d been similar. It was…I hated to say a sign, but it was a sign that maybe I could get better one day. Maybe one day everyone would treat me normally. I could live a normal life, do everything I’d wanted to do, not live like an animal. Gods, maybe one day I could genuinely do something completely human with my life, and not feel like I was pretending.
That did just leave one question, and as we turned through the mountain roads, “how old are you?”
“Twenty-six,” the man answered, before seeming to catch onto why I asked as he admitted, “I was almost nineteen when Tara found me. It took time to get this good, but I had a lot of people helping me. You’ll get there eventually, just keep trying.”
Great, seven fucking years and he had someone tethering him to humanity during that time. Maybe if I was lucky I’d be in my forties by the time I was starting to seem normal, if I didn’t get myself killed acting like a Purist first.
It was not something to think about now, and I tried to remain focused on the road around us instead.
The Blue Ridge mountains were smaller compared to a lot of ranges, though heavily wooded and often coated in thick fog. Even the lighting could be unreliable, and often roads could remain either painfully lit or feel like only a spotlight of light hit them. That meant that, for as good a place it was for werewolves to hide, it was also somewhere where it was easy to get lost or miss your stop if you weren’t familiar with it.
“There’s a small road coming up on your right,” I said suddenly, clicking my tongue as I kept an eye out for the spot, “we’re going to hit a flatter part of the road, and you’ll see a small clearing in the trees with a wooden post by it.”
Andrew nodded, and the man leaned forward in his seat as he slowed down enough to look for what I was talking about. The road flattened, only for a few hundred feet, and the entrance I had remembered so well came into view.
Barely looking like an entrance, even as someone who knew what it was, it was a ten foot gap in the trees that went down a side path. The grass was nearly a foot tall and the branches and bushes hung out far to make it look abandoned at best. All the same, and only with some grumbling that Andrew turned down the road and started to carefully follow the trail.
It was a long trip, and one needed to be slow going down it to avoid being stuck or worse as it followed along the opposite side of the next mountain. The road was thin and without rails, and from my passenger seat I could look down a sheer cliff to our right and see at least a dozen vehicles we and other purists had driven off through the years. Andrew didn’t seem to notice that fact, or perhaps for good reason didn’t want to, and instead stayed focused purely on what was in front of him.
Eventually and suddenly the trees opened into a small valley, a junkyard of cars and rust that stretched for a few hundred feet in all directions.
There were what felt like a hundred cars from the previous century in the clearing, almost all covered in dust and rust with grass up to their doors. Andrew parked in one of the empty spots at my instruction, we climbed out of the truck and grabbed our bags from the bed while I regained my bearings.
Andrew looked concerned and kept looking in every direction as though something would sneak out to attack us, sticking close to my side as he hesitantly asked, “where did all these cars come from?”
“Around?” I shrugged, not really sure what else he wanted to hear. A confession of repeated murder and theft was probably a bit weird, “some purists keep cars and they break down or get abandoned, and sometimes we stole a car and never used it again. Sometimes someone took a wrong turn, but that happened even less than you’d think.”
Andrew nodded slowly, letting out a small “ah” at the thought as we started toward one part of the clearing. I was already feeling my instincts take over, stepping around a few pot holes and avoiding getting my feet tangled in the grass, the familiar ground memorized from the years. Andrew was less lucky, tripping, stumbling, and nearly falling a few times as he followed behind me until we eventually reached the edge of the clearing.
I looked around for a moment, before spotting an old wooden post with an iron bell on top sitting beside a tree. With a small smile, I gripped the molded rope that hung from it and pulled five and then two times. Five times to get the attention of whoever was on watch, if anyone, and twice to announce the number of people to expect.
After waiting a few seconds to make sure no warning shot was taken to let us know to wait, I started to lead Andrew up the trail to my former home.
The purists had very few universal traditions, and even less that were ever carried exactly the same between packs. Most had a lineage of mentors and allies that shared commonalities and passed on tradition after tradition from the old days of our kind. My pack had held onto a method of marking paths and hidden areas by clawing trees in various ways, supposedly a several hundred year tradition.
Usually it was circles for safe havens, triangles for dangerous areas, squares for potential hunting grounds. For paths though the process was different. Almost every other tree in a good few miles around us would be marked with Xs that obscured the true path. If the lines were carved to the left, it was meaningless, if the lines were carved to the right, it marked a part of the real path.
It took some training to spot the difference, and even halfway knowing the path it was a headache to stare at them too long. A good twenty minute walk through the woods, down a path a truck could have once just barely been able to get through, and we made it most of the way without issue.
That issue came as we were just approaching my former home, when the once familiar scents started to come back to me.
Rot, decay, mud, blood, all the natural smells of the world gathered together with the scents of cooking meats and too many people gathered around. They were scents of home, and yet those scents suddenly felt foreign as I came close and made me want to throw up.
It was horrible, and I was glad we’d not decided to wait to eat until we got here.
Underneath the smell was another, flowers and natural scents I’d long grown used to, and a smile crossed my lips as the wolf perked up.
Scout sat on a rock outside the part of the holler we called home, wearing a pair of ripped and stained jeans and nothing else. Her long black hair was tightly braided, with thin mountain flowers tied within the braids, and her hands and feet were stained black with mud. My former packmate let out a small chuckle as she saw me and walked over, taking a moment to stare in disbelief before pulling me into a rib-cracking hug.
“Thought that would be you, Bloodhound, always showing up last,” Scout laughed, resting her hands on my shoulders, holding me in place as she took a half step back and scrunched her nose up, “You smell like a tamed mutt though, what did they do to you?”
“I’ve been adapting,” I admitted with an awkward chuckle, taking a long moment to look around at her and the holler “I have to admit, I forgot how…dirty everything is here.”
“Well, we have you for a couple days, let’s see if we can’t get some dirt under your nails again,” Scout told me, even as she turned and started leading us along the holler path. “All the guests are down at the wedding now. Wounder’s already down there entertaining our guests, Hunter’s been sulking around worried about running into you.”
I nodded as I followed, slowly taking in the area I’d spent so long in with a shocking amount of surprise.
It was…it hadn’t changed a bit, but something about it felt different.
The holler here had a walking path that was about fifty feet wide, before changing to a sharp incline up the mountain on either side of us, and was largely filled with various items and trash before we even reached the cabins. A make-shift grill was made out of an abandoned fridge and had a fire raging in it, with chain link fencing stretched over the top and a wild hog laid across that. Two sets of tires stacked and with boards laid across the top acted as benches, a few broken patio chairs sat in a pile, and the fifteen foot square of rocks marking a sparring arena were black and brown with old blood.
That was only the beginning, and things just slowly felt worse and worse as we walked farther along the path. The cabins, shipping containers loosely fitted together with a makeshift-door and an old rv, barely even registered as homes to me anymore. That was to say nothing of the community cabin, an actual one room building where once Hunter’s mom’s pack had lived. They’d outfitted it with weak solar panels for lights that no longer worked long before I was a werewolf, and while it had once been somewhere to live the massive hole in the roof meant it was now rarely used for more than storage and occasional lounging in its disrepaired state.
In between all three of them, stacked on a series of rotten or rusted shelves and tables, was a collection of bones. Full skeletons with flesh still clinging to them falling apart while tied upright to poles, human skulls stacked in pyramids, and even the skulls of werewolves who had died in their wolf or hybrid forms. Our only blessing that there were no ghosts — never killing where you made your Covenant a basic rule of life.
It felt…wrong.
I couldn’t explain it any other way except that, that something about the display that I had seen almost every day for years felt wrong. A part of me wanted to throw up at the sight, and Andrew looked as close as I did to doing so as we both avoided looking towards it. Something about everything just couldn’t sit right with me, and I couldn’t explain the pain in my chest as I followed Scout to the rv.
“I take it you remember the layout,” Scout chuckled slightly, shaking her head as she let us in and leaned on the door frame. “Chaser’s here, she’s staying back in the old community place with her pack. We have a few camps of packs down the river, they shouldn’t give you trouble though. Everything else is about how you left us.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling nervously as I looked her over, “everything seems so…different, from how I remember it.”
“You seem pretty different yourself,” Scout commented, almost sounding upset with the idea as her smile briefly faded. “Look, I’ll see you two down at the wedding, Hunter got too many pigs so I’m tending the one up here while it finishes. You just drop your bags off here and whatever, I’ll see you whenever I get down there.”
I nodded, and briefly stepped in for a hug before Scout turned her back on me and left without another word. I stood there a long moment, arms still out stretched as I processed the action, before I slowly turned back to Andrew as I forcibly composed myself.
“Lovely place, provocative decor,” Andrew said, sounding like he was trying to be a little nice with the sarcasm as he looked around. After several seconds he sat his bag on the cleanest and least pest infested section of the rv, and asked me, “so we’re staying here tonight?”
“Sorry it’s not exactly a hotel,” I admitted with a sigh.
The rv was long abandoned, mold and grime clinging to almost every surface and the rotten stench of it filling the air. The windows were long broken, with bushes growing in through them, the bed was bare with an old mattress and no coverings or blankets, and the roof looked half ready to collapse as it softly sagged.
I had thought this was luxury less than a year ago, and I almost laughed in sheer disbelief at the fact. I thought that this had been better than my fucking room in the Covenant, and I couldn’t even tell why. Everything about this felt wrong, nothing felt like home anymore, everything just felt…wrong.
There was no other way to phrase it, it just felt wrong. I’d lived like this for five fucking years, and I’d liked it here, the rv was the place me and Hunter could go to be away from others. It wasn’t as nice as our shipping container, but we’d never thought of it as more than a little cramped and uncomfortable.
“I’ve slept in worse, the effigy of skulls notwithstanding. No sign of roaches at least,” Andrew told me, walking over to the mattress and looking down at it with a frown, “is that blood?”
“All mine if it makes you feel better,” I said, wincing as the sight brought back painful memories. I tried to ignore it, and so I told him, “it’s more comfortable than it looks. Purist beds aren’t meant for human sleeping, we tend to turn to wolf form and cuddle for comfort and warmth.”
“Tara’s going to get a laugh out of that,” Andrew told me, shaking his head with a smile.
I nodded, honestly surprised by the nonchalantness of his reaction as I told him, “it’s fine if you don't want to. I know it’s probably more than a little weird, at least for normal people.”
“Eh, it’s fine, believe it or not Tara had a long talk with me before I left that covered some of that. She tends to get a little over prepared when helping me plan for anything,” Andrew said, seeming almost humored by the idea before he told me, “ready to go to this wedding?”
“Yeah, I think I am,” I lied, gulping at the idea.
This was starting to feel like a horrible choice, and I was half-tempted to ask Andrew if he wanted to turn tail and run. We could have gotten a room at a hotel, hid out in the nearby city for a couple days. Go back, pretend that the wedding had been nice and I’d had fun. No one would think I had panicked, no one would know I was weak.
I needed to do this though.
I needed to do this for my friends.
It was the last time I might have gotten to see them while I was still alive if I had to go through with a duel.
