Misha and I drove a short way through the city in his truck, parking at one of the many parking garages where Misha could flash some Employee ID badge at the guard. From there, it was just a short walk down the street light lit streets that had already begun to grow thin of people as we made our way toward the meeting place. A short walk that should have been easy and simple, but I couldn’t find real comfort in.
Every werewolf had some Miracles and some downsides to those Miracles even if they weren’t obvious, it was the way of being born with wolf blood. Some could influence the emotions of others, some possessed strength several times that of others, had fur thick as steel, or a half hundred other possibilities. I was given the Miracle of my senses by the Wolf Gods, and while that had already been a problem I also bore the curse of Lykaon to make it worse. My senses more powerful than half-one and a desire for weakened flesh made for a horrid combination I had only found in one other.
When I was younger, and only half myself, the streets of Richmond had always been fun during the day — busy and feeling like a real city despite how simple it was. The night had been silent and empty, with none of the bustling life and only a vague sense something might have been hidden where one couldn’t see.
Nowadays it almost felt overwhelming even at night.
The city lights shone in a half-hundred colors and shades I didn’t know existed before, I heard the sound of talking and music that echoed distantly through empty streets, I smelled the filth and food and gas that permeated the air. A rat tore around in a trashcan we passed, someone had pissed on a wall we walked near, a series of cigarettes had been smoked on a corner we stopped at.
It was so much, and that was only the mundane.
My senses, so much like an animal's own, saw more than what half-ones considered mundane and to the things beyond. The ghost wandering aimlessly with their death wounds that send shivers down spines, the eldritch figure in the dark a dog barks at, even the spots where the world grew weak. My companion Hunter had had trouble seeing those things outside of his wolf form, even sharing the gift, but as I’d trained myself and been taught in werewolf arts I’d come to see it clearly.
It was scary as it was beautiful, and as Misha and I went through the empty streets I could see all the city’s memories. The memory of a fire from the Civil War still burned on the horizon, a murdered man walked with a glowing red wound on his stomach, a woman who died of a heart attack had yet to realize she was dead and continued to act out her final moments. All things I did my best to ignore, not wanting to act as a medium and not wanting to seem even stranger than I was.
After a while we made our way into our meeting’s building, and I stepped around a batch of twisted ground where rotten hands grew from, even knowing I didn’t need to. All I cared about was the comfort of being in the building, whose dim lights and well warded rooms were always devoid of death.
Misha walked past the security guard, an older woman who sat reading some paperback book with a shirtless man riding a horse on it, who looked up only briefly as we walked past. She recognized us, or at least knew we were coming, and merely pressed a button under her desk that opened the elevator doors of the lobby.
A short ride later, we were sitting in The Lady’s waiting room. An empty secretary’s desk sat on one side of the room and the wooden walls were filled with various paintings of countrysides and mountains. The marble floor shone softly under the fluorescent lights that were embedded in the ceiling, and echoed softly with the sound of Misha’s tapping foot.
The Lady always kept people waiting, and probably for a variety of reasons she could have listed off given the chance. I thought it was mostly about being a bitch, but I also guessed I couldn’t really make an open judgment on that. My life was in her hands, and as far as I cared that meant I needed to put up with whatever mental games she wanted to play. As far as she cared I was some dangerous criminal they needed to keep an eye on, and I wasn’t about to seem like I was fighting her.
Both of us sat on a leather couch in the waiting room, mindlessly scrolling our phones in silence. I was half curled up on my cushion, leaning against the arm, while Misha sat back with his arm across the top. I was trying to read the news with some difficulty, a task Misha had encouraged me to do, and Misha as far as I could tell was reading some novel while a video played in the corner, a small mess of noises coming from his earbud.
The clock chimed nine at night and I was just about to give up on the niceties to knock on the door when it finally swung out. The wolf bringing me to spring to my feet, my excitement was less rewarded, and more quashed, as I saw one of the members of the covenant step out.
Knives was a werewolf of average height, with short blonde hair in a pixie cut, who smelled like oil and sandalwood on top of their natural scents. Most times I saw them they were wearing coveralls or tank tops, though today they were wearing a black blazer on top of a white button down, with a pair of loosely fitting slacks.
“The Lady wants to see Misha first,” the werewolf said, yawning as they rubbed their chin and walked to an espresso machine in the corner.
“Well, wish me luck, darlings,” the man muttered, chuckling as he pushed himself to his feet and walked into the office, closing the doors behind him.
Knives looked after him a moment, frowning as they waited on their drink and muttered “prick” quite enough a human would have trouble hearing it. After a few minutes, and a little bit of cursing as they messed with the machine, they walked over to the couch with two cups and sat next to me.
“Figured you’d want one, cannibal,” the werewolf muttered, sipping their own drink. “You fucking slept this week?”
“Not well,” I admitted, sipping the drink with a sigh. A few seconds of silence passed, and I quickly tried to continue the conversation as I said, “I need to meet up with a friend, Misha and I are heading out there to talk to him after this. I think he said something about my birthday, or some job he needed done, or at least I think…I guess he said something, you know?.”
“Your birthday is coming up?” Knives asked, chuckling slightly at the fact for some reason.
“Two weeks, yeah,” I agreed, nodding slightly. “I’m turning… twenty-one, I think?”
“You think?”
“I lost track of dates a little when I was with the purists,” I admitted with a small shrug, “I checked the calendar though, and it should be twenty-one. Truth be told, I thought I was with them for at least a few years longer than I was.”
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Knives nodded a moment, furrowing their brow and sipping their drink before they said with some shock, “I didn’t think you were that young.”
“Feels weird sometimes,” I agreed, not sure what else to say to the point.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment, until eventually the werewolf finished their drink and rose to their feet, crushing the cup and tossing it in a trash can as they started toward the elevator. The werewolf only turned back toward me for a moment as they waited for the elevator to open, as they told me, “I need to get to a party. Watch yourself around Misha, cannibal, okay?”
I was left alone once more, and a long while later my mentor came back out rubbing his eyes and gesturing me in. Not wanting to ask, I rose to my feet and walked into the room while Misha closed the doors behind me.
The Lady’s office was large, with a ceiling that might have been two stories tall in an average building and the walls alternating between granite ordained with paintings and windows that went from floor to ceiling. Richmond’s skyline was on full display here, at night a collage of lights and colors that looked morbidly beautiful, with the ghost fires of downtown shining a white glow on the horizon. The Lady’s desk sat at the end of the long walk along the marble floors, in front of a massive organ against the back wall that sat under a painting of a young woman I had yet to figure out the identity of.
While not fully evident to mostly half-ones, to me The Lady’s nature was strikingly non-human in appearance. Her skin was too translucent and pale in a way my eyes couldn’t fully grasp the colors of, her fangs long and jagged so they rubbed against the inside of her lips in a strange way. If she were still, I might have almost mistaken her for a few hours dead corpse of a woman around my age rather than a monster of unknown centuries. Not helping, she wore a suit that looked freshly pressed, with the top few buttons undone and a bit of blood on her collar, giving the vague impression of modernity.
The Lady peered at me approaching with cat-like eyes the color of blood over her blackened sunglasses, drawing a deep breath from her cigarette in its holder through black-painted lips. It smelled horrible, and the sour smoke seemed to fill the entire room without failure. A new indulgence of hers probably meant to stop her from smelling blood, and to keep everyone around her safe, I still knew the stench hurt me more than her.
I wasn’t allowed to complain though, and instead held my head high and kept my composure as best I could manage.
I took a seat in a leather backed chair before her, and we remained in silence as she watched me for a long while. It wasn’t until she straightened her black on black suit and leaned forward on the mahogany surface of her desk she spoke, asking me in almost a languid purr, “Are you ready to make your…offering, dear morsel?”
I nodded silently, holding out my hand timidly, only for the vampire to gently take it in hands that felt like an ice sculpture. A long nail traced my palm, before slowly digging into the skin and drawing a thin line of blood. Thinly trickling out, The Lady didn’t let it heal before she leaned forward and clasped her mouth over the wound, suckling it softly. I cringed slightly at the strange feeling, the blood drawn slowly from me into her waiting mouth feeling pleasurable as it was discomforting. When she finally finished, The Lady pulled away with a gasp, running her tongue along the cut once as she returned to her normal position. A tingling sensation came from the saliva, and it closed the wound faster than even my healing as a werewolf would have allowed.
“Delicious, as…always, my darling morsel,” The Lady muttered, wiping the blood from the side of her mouth with a handkerchief.
“Can we get to the questions?” I asked, closing and opening my hand in discomfort before wiping it clean on my jeans.
“Can we get to the questions?” she asked back, running her tongue along her fangs with a soft nod. “How have you been…adjusting to your life among the civilized? It’s been…ten months, has it not?”
“More or less,” I agreed with a nod, keeping my hands folded in my lap hesitantly. “Without incident, I would like to add.”
“Without incident,” the woman agreed, nodding absently, “how many people have you… murdered? Counting all those you had no need to kill, or…surrendered, let’s say.”
The question sent a brief chill down my spine, and I knew she was trying to get under my skin. She knew the fucking answer, and so hesitantly I answered, “none since my trial.”
“None since your trial,” The Lady chuckled, shaking her head at the thought. “How many…in totality.”
I nodded, knowing I was going to need to answer as I forced through my answer. “I stopped counting around fifty. I don’t know, maybe…seventy, eighty? I can’t be sure.”
“Seventy or eighty,” The Lady chuckled as though it were some joke. “How many…hearts, have you eaten of your own kind?”
“Four,” I answered honestly once more, “one of a fellow Purist, three from werewolves trying to stop us. None since the trial.”
“Four,” the vampire muttered, sounding impressed by the figure, “How many of those did you cannibalize?”
She was trying to get a fucking reaction out of me, make me snap or seem like an angry monster. I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure, and with a sigh I told her, “We ate a little of everyone we hunted. It was easier with the wolf’s instincts to do that than not. We…we never fucking ritualised the eating, if that’s what you’re asking, we didn’t fucking butcher and cook them. Is there a point to these questions?”
“Didn’t butcher or cook them,” The Lady chuckled, rubbing her chin a moment, “I just want to make sure your…answers, didn’t change. You haven’t…partaken in half-one flesh since, have you?”
“No,” I answered without hesitation, my stomach turning at the idea. Honestly, it was a fact I was glad of, as I’d worried I wasn’t regretting my time with Purists enough as it were. “I’ve…I’ve started thinking about what I did more and more the last few months, and I regret it more and more.”
“Regretting it more and more,” The Lady observed, forming rings of smoke with her burning cigarette. “What did you purists…hope to gain?”
She fucking knew the answer to that, though I closed my eyes a moment and answered, “the Purists are a group of werewolves dedicated to upholding the old ways of werewolves. We…they follow the wolf gods, the ancient traditions, and seek to avoid pretending to be half-ones.”
“Avoid pretending to be half-ones,” The Lady said, taking a long draw of her cigarette. “How?”
“Forgoing civilization, half-one morality, and…” I stopped myself only a brief moment, before slowly continuing, “living as you desire, no matter the consequence to the half-ones.”
“No matter the consequence to the half-ones,” The Lady said, shaking her head in seeming disappointment. “You like that…phrasing, don’t you? Half-ones.”
Fuck, I forgot to actually use the mortal terms for that sort of thing in front of her. I sighed, and slowly answered, “old habits die hard. Half-one, it’s just a…well, term for humans. It’s insulting I guess, but it’s just what we called them — humans are only half a werewolf will ever be, so they’re half-ones. I…I didn’t mean to say it-”
“So they’re half-ones,” The Lady seemed to agree, nodding slowly. “Well, you seem to be…the same as before, all things considered. I’ll schedule you a meeting soon to discuss…particulars, but you’re free to go with two more questions.”
“Shoot,” I said, nodding as I straightened myself.
“Shoot,” she nodded, “has Misha kept your relationship…professional?”
“He’s a good friend, but he’s never done anything weird,” I said, furrowing my brow as I wondered why she’d ask that. Had Knives said something about him?
“He’s a good friend,” she agreed, “and how old were you when you joined these… Purists?”
A final twist of the knife, an answer she fucking knew and was only asking to try and get a reaction out of me. Like she was looking for an excuse to kill me, or just really liked the idea of making sure I felt like shit for the rest of the night.
I didn’t give her the pleasure, and tried to keep myself composed as I answered, “a little under six years ago, when I became a werewolf. I was fifteen when they found me. As you already knew.”
