It's Him
My bike skids to a halt on the leaves as I pull up at the old Rogers House in the woods, and I let it fall to the ground along with my helmet that I rip off of myself as I stomp my way up towards the stairs on a mission. "Steve! I know you're in there, I can -" I start yelling before a scent on the breeze catches my attention. Slowing to a stop just before the steps, I turn my head in the direction the smell is coming from only to see a mound of dirt that looks like it's been recently upturned. That's odd... A creak coming from the house forces my attention to snap that way, and there's the person I came to see. The person who says they can help me with my wolf side, that we're family now whether I liked it or not, and then said they would kill me... He stands there on the porch with his arms crossed, in the same outfit of jeans and a tight long-sleeved shirt from that first day out in the woods with Kate looking for my inhaler. He's just staring at me, waiting.
"You said you would help me!" I yell, anger bubbling inside me. Other than that night in the woods with the Hunters, he hasn't done a single thing to help me. The only thing he's done is threaten to kill me if I played the game, because I can't control my new abilities and the volatile emotions that come with them. "You said you would help me, and you haven't done a single thing to do so!"
"Yeah." Steve says, his body tensing before he launches himself off the porch to walk up to me, arms swinging at his sides. "I was waiting for you to realize that your little friend... What's her name? Kate? She can't just google 'werewolves' and figure everything out for you. It's so much more complicated than that."
My fists clench at my sides, resting against the outside of my upper thighs. He's really starting to piss me off, mentioning Kate like that. "So, help me! I have to get information from somewhere and it's not like you are exactly forthcoming with any." I grit out, teeth clenching hard enough that I can actually hear them grinding against each other. "The only thing you've done since saying you would help is threaten to kill me if I played at the game, and I have to play the game."
In no time, his eyes are flashing a glowing ice blue and he's grabbing me by my hoodie, his hand fisting the material roughly as he draws me up and closer to him. He's glowering down at me as he towers over me, and I gulp because I really didn't realize just how big he was compared to me. It's like he is a giant made out of rippling muscles that struggle to stay within the confines of his clothing. "You are not playing in that game."
"I have to." I squeak out in a small voice. Steve growls and releases me before turning around and running his hands through his short light brown hair, seemingly to regain his composure. I stumble back, and he turns to face me again. "Think about what could happen." He almost begs me. "You're out on that field and the aggression starts to take over, and you shift in front of everyone. Your mom, all of your friends... And when they see you?" He looks down and calmly grabs my helmet, looking it over in his hands for a second. Then suddenly I see claws glint in the sunlight filtering down through the tree branches, and he's puncturing my helmet and ripping streaks through the plastic and nylon. "Everything. Falls. Apart." He emphasizes his statement by making direct eye contact with me and tossing my helmet over. I catch it, fumbling for a second while looking at the damage, before I look back up and he's gone. Like smoke, he's vanished in the breeze.
Groaning, I start to pick up my bike. I don't know what exactly I was expecting by coming here, but it wasn't this. I'm nowhere closer to figuring out what to do and how to control myself, and I can feel an actual migraine coming on from the stress of it all as I walk my bike in the other direction from the house. The wind picks up again and I pause, catching a particular scent again. My head turns back towards the pile of earth to the side of the old, ruined house, and I can't help but think back to that day in the woods when I realized the other half of the body was missing...
Time to call Kate...
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"What did you find?! How did you find it?! Where did you find it?!" Kate comes barging into my bedroom, gasping for air as she rattles off her multitude of questions. I just sit there looking at her as I lace up my lacrosse stick in preparation for the game tomorrow. "And yes, I've had a lot of Adderall, so..." She finishes, calming down a bit. Rolling my eyes at her, I set my gear aside and give her my full attention so I can tell her what I found. "I went to see Steve, and I think he has the other half of the body buried by his old house. I could smell blood, and it looked like there was fresh dirt."
"That's amazing" Kate exclaims with a smile before realizing what she just said. "I mean, that's terrible..." She thinks for a second, her brow furrowing and a small pout on her face as she does so. "What are we going to do, exactly?" She finally asks, confused. "We're going to get your dad to nail Steve for the murder somehow, and you're going to figure out how to help me play lacrosse without shifting. Because there is no way I'm giving up lacrosse."
Kate has a smile beginning to form on her face, and it's kind of terrifying. I know that look, she has an idea. "What? What are you thinking about?" I ask her warily, leaning back a bit to make some distance between the two of us. Kate's ideas weren't always my idea of a fun time... Afterall, my transformation into a werewolf can be attributed to one of her great ideas. "Well, Dee, I hope you weren't planning on getting much sleep tonight, because we have a body to dig up." She grins, waggling her eyebrows at me as she sits on my bed beside me. My eyes widen and my head is already shaking 'no' before she even finishes her sentence.
"Oh, come on. What better way to find out if you're right? If we dig it up, and it turns out to be the other half of the body, then there's our evidence for my dad to arrest him!" Kate says, giving me her best puppy dog eyes. "Kate, no! What if he catches us? If he is the killer, then that makes this so much more dangerous!"
"Dianna, that also means that he's the one that bit you." My best friend points out, and I pause in my denials. She's right. If Steve is the killer of whoever that body used to be, then that means he's the one that bit me and turned me. That means that everything happening to me is his fault. Anger rises in me as I look back into my friend's eyes, and I nod. "Let's nail him for this."
We both get up and head out to her car so we can head to get the supplies we'd need. Turns out that her dad still has shovels in the shed out in their backyard from her mom's gardening days, and despite my hangups about gardening tools being used for this task... I didn't exactly have any better ideas. So, we got the garden tools from the tote bag in the shed - small, triangular shovels with short green handles - and we headed out to the Rogers House to wait. Night fell while we watched and waited for any sign of Steve being present, and the only thing we had to really occupy our time was chewing the Big Red cinnamon gum that Kate loves so much. "It burns so good..." Is all she had to say for herself when she pulled out yet another piece to unwrap and pop into her mouth. Eventually, it was time for us to try to do what we came here for. There was not a single sign of Steve, and the time was encroaching on midnight, so it was now or never and we needed to get this done. We needed answers.
"Hurry up!" I whisper, crouch walking quickly to where I saw the mound of dirt while keeping an eye and ear out for any possible danger. "I'm coming, shut up!" Kate whisper yells back at me, carrying the shovels as she sprints over to my position. I wince at the sound of leaves crunching underfoot, but figure the damage was done as we come to a stop at the 'grave'. "This is it." I mumble. "Well... Let's get started." Kate says, dropping the shovels on the dirt before kneeling down. Following her lead, I make my way to my knees and wrap my fingers around the handle of one of the shovels before I start to dig.
It takes us what seems like forever before we start to make actual progress, and I sit back and sigh as I look around for any signs of Steve coming back. "This is taking too long." I say with a groan, cracking my knuckles as I drop the shovel. "Oh, I'm sorry. I don't hear you coming up with any better ideas?!" Kate whisper shouts at me, rolling her eyes without stopping her task. "You're the bloodhound, here. If only that meant you could dig like one too."
"Kate, I'm not a dog." I look at her incredulously, because what the fuck. She just looks over at me with an eyebrow raised as if to ask if I'm sure. Huffing, I start digging again. It doesn't take me long to get frustrated and let out a small growl before I drop the shovel and just start using my hands, and since the dirt is so loose still anyways... I hate to admit it, but maybe I am rather doglike. Quickly, I fling dirt out of the hole we've created. Kate ends up just stepping back to let me do my thing with a slight smirk on her face, and I try to ignore her as I basically finish the job in record time. "Shut up." I growl, my hands catching on what appears to be some kind of thin rope or twine tied in knots around a tarp. "I didn't say anything." Kate chuckles, hands up in a surrender position. "You didn't have to, now help me." I grumble, trying to untie the knots so I can get a look at what's hidden in the tarp. The scent from before is much stronger now, the metallic tang of blood in the air even if it is stale. "Did he have to tie it in like a million knots?!" Kate grumbles, fingers flying as we try to hurry. Eventually, we get enough untied that we can pull the tarp back to get a look at what lies beneath, and it's not what we were expecting.
"AAAAAAAAHHH!!!" We collectively scream as we scramble out of the hole like we've been burned. "What the hell is that?!" Kate shrieks, looking to me. "A wolf!" I send her a glare, because I know she's not that stupid. "Duh! But I thought you said you smelled human blood?!" She retorts, flinging a handful of dirt at my side. She rolls her head on her shoulders, trying to relax a bit after that jump scare, when suddenly she freezes when her eyes catch sight of something. Following her gaze, there seems to be some sort of plant not too far away from us, with a cluster of small purple flowers atop a thick green stem and dark green leaves cradling the petals. "What?" I ask, confused at the sudden interest in the plant. The dark-haired girl glances at me before looking back at the flower. "I think that's a type of wolfsbane." She says, head tilting as she crawls closer to it. "What's that?"
Kate stops and looks at me with concern before her face turns blank in an 'are you serious?' manner. "You know, you really suck at being a werewolf." I roll my eyes at her as she gets up and goes to pick the plant, only to find that the roots seem to be tied to what looks like the same twine that the tarp was tied closed with. She pulls on it more and the dirt around us starts to shift as more of the twine is uncovered in a spiraling motion wrapped several times around the grave of the wolf. I watch her unravel the pattern in interest, wondering why in the world Steve would do this, before I glance back at the grave and nearly jump back again in fright. The dead black wolf we had previously seen wrapped up in the tarp was no longer there, and in its place was the body I saw that night in the woods. The top half of a man who must have at one point been in really good shape, now decomposed and rotting away. The once pale blue eyes now glossed over with death, and his short and neatly shaven black hair atop his head and along his face where a beard might have once grown is now dull and lifeless. "Katie..." I gulp, and she comes up to me with her arms laden with the rope and flower. "Oh." Kate breathes out as she sees what I'm staring at, flinching slightly. "Well, there's the body."
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"Did you see the way he looked at me?!" I squeak out.
We were in Kate's Jeep; she was taking me home after we just got Steve arrested. When the body turned human, we called her dad, and he quickly got a team together to come out and investigate. The evidence was more than enough to take him into custody, though, so when Steve showed up that morning he was very quickly put into handcuffs and put into the sheriff's car without hesitation. The look he gave me in the process as we stood off to the side while pictures were being taken for evidence... Well, if looks could kill, I'd be dead a thousand times over. Kate had felt brave enough to get into the car with him in order to ask questions, not that he gave her many answers, before Clint had dragged her out by the back of her jacket.
"Yeah, that was scary." She glances over at me while doing a pretty poor imitation of Steve's face, and we both bust out laughing before I wheeze a bit and return to looking at my google searches on my phone. "I can't find anything on wolfsbane being used for burials." I say, continuing to thumb at the screen to scroll in search for any clues. "Just keep looking. Maybe it's some sort of ritual? I don't know, there has to be something." Kate says, and I cough to try to clear my throat as a sudden wave of dizziness comes on. "Maybe they bury you as a wolf, like a religious thing? Or maybe it's like a special skill, something you have to learn."
"Yeah, I'll put it on my to-do list. Right after figuring out how in the hell I'm going to be playing this game tonight." Shaking my head, I try to think straight as the feeling gets worse. My throat starts to burn and I swallow thickly as I get irritated. What the fuck is happening now?!
"Maybe it's different for male werewolves, or something? Like maybe there's different types? That would be so cool." Kate continues, not paying any attention to me as she tries to puzzle out why the body was a wolf one second and human the next. "Okay, stop it!" I snap at her, gritting my teeth and grabbing onto the door to try to calm down. My body feels like a fire has been lit within it, anger scorching to the surface as my breaths begin to saw in and out of me. There seems to be a floral scent in the air, and whereas I didn't think much of it previously... "Are you okay?" Kate asks, glancing at me with concern as I look around the interior of the vehicle.
There. Her bag. I open it up and sure enough there's the rope, and now I can make out in the daylight that there's multiple petals woven into it and not just the main plant at the end. "You kept it?" I growl, unable to breathe properly as I fling it back down and shift in my seat. "What was I supposed to do with it?" Kate asks, giving me a weird look.
"I can't breathe..." I gasp. It feels almost like the night of the full moon, when I shifted. My body starting to do everything of its own accord as my vision changes and I struggle to stay in control. "Pull over!" I turn to glare at Kate, and she swallows thickly before doing exactly as I say. The clarity in which I can see tells me that my eyes must have been glowing a brilliant yellow as she swerves off the road. The car jerks to a stop and then she's grabbing the tangled mess of rope out of her bag and bolting out to throw it as far away from me as she can get it. "Okay... There we go." She says, out of breath. Kate turns around, but it's too late. I'm already gone, tearing off into the trees as the shift overtakes my willpower.
"Oh, shit."