The Awakening ch.07

    In the town of Brooksville in Northern California in the lodgings facility called the Brooksville Bed & Breakfast a man has been staying for quite some time. This man is now, as dusk approaches, searching the woods in search of his query. This man doesn’t look as out of place as others to the south who had been searching the same woods. He was wearing basic blue jeans and a long sleeve shirt. The jeans were not as normal as they looked for with in them is a secret pocket that concealed a special gun complete with silver bullets. This man had short brown hair and matching brown eyes. This man was none other than Rick Richardson of the Order of the Knights of the Golden Cross.

    Some time back he had been ordered to this region to hunt down skin-walkers a breed of human eating curse were-wolves. He had originally gone to the home of a Jeff Jones who according to the files was the son of a fellow order member. For the sake of security protocol and the fact that his targets were apparently further north than the town of Pine Ridge in which Jeff was living, Rick moved to the Brooksville Bed & Breakfast which was a quaint old fashioned two story house. Before leaving his residence Jeff had told Rick about a possible local were-wolf that was different in its description than a skin-walker, a creature named Versa. As such Rick had called his old partner Mike King a great werewolf hunter to look into the situation.

    Thinking back on all this has kept Rick focused as he creeps through the underbrush on a small ridge towards the sounds of a Skin-walkers’ feast. The site before him is horrible; it seems he is too late to save two people whose bodies are now being cooked. The cry of a small girl grabs his attention; a small girl in a pink jacket of maybe six years of age is tied to a wooden poll embedded in the ground just inside a small cave. He can only watch and wait while hidden in the brush as a male skin walker walks up to the little girl and tares off the hood to her jacket exposing her brunette pony tailed hair.

     This man hisses at her saying, “If you scream you will die like your parents.”

    He turned to his clan members after examining the girl’s face and as the girl cried he said, “This girl will do, we should start her transformation soon.”

    An old hag like Skin-walker walks up to the crying little girl and says, “You are lucky. These others are food, but you will become one of us, and this will all be funny to you then and you will be happy, maybe even call me mommy”

    at this the hag laughed maniacally while the little brunette girl cried for her mommy.”

    “I am your mommy now” hissed the hag, she pointed at the corpse and said, “That was food, is food. Time to start your change, trust me you will love this.”

     She called to one of the clan who was eating the little girl’s mother arm, “bring some of that for our little baby girl, she needs to eat her ex-mother’s womb to begin her transformation”

     as the younger skin walker tore out the shriveled womb from the cooked corpse Rick upon the ridge was about to start his attack when a man with a very long black pony tail and a long black trench coat stepped out of the clearing and walked casually towards the gathering of skin-walkers. This caused them to postpone what they were doing as the hag stuffed a rag into the girl’s mouth to keep her quiet while she went with her clan members to examine this intruder.  Rick watched curious as the Skin-walkers surrounded this man who despite being surrounded didn’t seem concerned at all.

    Rick watches as the skin walkers chanted to this intruder, “What have we here, what have we here, a little man a little man who wants to die this night.”

    The trench coated man speaks to them calmly saying, “You are skin walkers correct? The eaters of human and beast flesh?”

    They all hiss back to him as they start to dance around him in one large circle saying, “yes we are, yes we are little human little human and who are you, come to join our feast, we already have had two, but there is room for one more.”

    “Yes one more” they all hissed in unison.

    Rick counts about twenty Skin walkers in all “Gathering all together in a circle just made you demons easier to count.” Rick thinks to himself,

    However his thoughts are cut short as the skin walkers once more speak to the man, “Before you die tell us why are you here, you are not dressed for the woods, yes tell us now.”

    Rick had noticed the man wasn’t dressed for the forest and had come out of a direction filled with thick bushes.

    The trench coated man speaks to the skin walkers saying to them, “I have come to kill you if you must know and all of you will die before this night is over for I can not tolerate your presence not now at least.”

    Rick’s thoughts are echoed by the words of the hag skin walker, “A werewolf hunter.”

    She steps back from the rest as to Rick the circle becomes a blur spinning around the lone standing figure, who still doesn’t show any signs of fear.

    “Either this man is crazy” Rick thinks, “or has one hell of an ace up his sleeve.”

    The hag hisses at him, “You have come to kill us?”

    “Kill us, kill us he thinks he will kill us” the rest sing back.

    “With what will you kill us? You have no weapons, we smell no silver or iron on you, you can not win!” the hag screams at him.

    “Can not win can not win” the dancers hiss.

    The hag bends over and changes form, an apparently painful change. Rick can hear her bones break, her muscles snap, and reform as her face distorts into a hideous muzzle more like an Hyena’s or a baboons than an actual canine. Her arms became longer and more muscular covered in brown fur, her bare legs and feet also become muscular but shorter than her arms, her finger nails and toe nails have become yellow gnarled claws. Her ears have become a mockery of a canine’s ears, long for her head but thin like two pointy pieces of cloth. Rick sees that as the hag hisses at the stranger again the rest of the blurry circle became brown and furry apparently changing as well.

    The hag said to the stranger, “You see now why it is you who will die.”

    As she said this the rest had stopped dancing around him and now twenty of these monsters stood around their apparently defenseless opponent.

    As they approached him they all hissed in unison, “food, food, food, we shall feast on your flesh, and drink your blood.”

    The stranger held out his hand and said, “One moment I have been suppressing a laugh this whole time.”

    “What?!” yelled back the hag, as to Rick’s surprise he bursts into laughter that changed into a sound like an African wild dog or Jackal would make. He turned to them as his eyes started to glow a dark blue.

   This caused the whole clan to step back as the hag said, “What is this? What are you, a vampire of some sort? It doesn’t matter we are many and are big and strong while you are one and little.”

    To their surprise this was met with even more of this high pitched laughter as the stranger said to them, “yes you ARE many, but BIG, not a single one of you would beat six feet even if you stopped hunching over like some B-Movie cavemen.”

    Rick had to suppress a laugh at this comment but the stranger’s comment resulted in the hag growling at him saying with scorn, “How dare you insult us you filthy vampire, for that we will rip you apart slowly!”

    “Slowly, slowly” the rest hissed as they started to approach him a bit
cautiously.

     The stranger stopped laughing and a broad smile crossed his face as he said, “Vampire? You are truly pathetic, such large noses and you still can not smell better than a human. Can you not tell I am something far greater and something you should truly be afraid of?”

    “Fear you? Us?” the now monster hag said mockingly which resulted in the rest chanting “fear, fear it, is you who should fear, food, food, you are food.”

    The skin walker hag followed up with, “So tell us before you die why should we fear you, hmmm?”

    Rick’s curiosity grew as well because of these comments, as the stranger smiled and said, “I shall do better than tell you my little snacks I shall show you why YOU SHOULD FEAR ME!!!”

    His last words came out of him as loud as thunder causing Rick to turn as pale as a sheet for a moment and the skin walkers to step back in surprise. Which was soon followed by terror as the stranger’s body was enveloped by blue flames and a fourteen foot tall black bipedal fox or wolf like creature stepped out of the flames which departed soon after. He said to the surprised skin walkers.

     “This is why you should fear me. For I am Rhuen and you are all going to be food for my mate Versa.”

    After two skin-walkers jumped at the creature that was to Rick clearly a Dire, all Rick could see was a sudden upheaval of dust like a tornado had appeared out of no where. When it cleared all the skin walkers where dead; all badly mutilated, a bunch where in a pile where some where apparently crushed together, four where cut in half and the leader was in this giant beast’s mouth. He watched as this creature which had revealed it’s self to be none other than Rhuen sent a stream of light blue energy from his claw which wound around the slain skin walkers tying them together and forming rope. Rhuen then picked up this morbid parcel of bodies which transformed back into people wearing coyote skins, tied it around his shoulders like a bloody back pack and marched off into the woods to the south.

    The little girl watched the entire thing from the cave; she watched this man change into a giant dog creature, which then killed all the smaller dog creatures then magically made rope to carry them off. As she watched all this, another man (who unknown to her was Rick) came out of the woods nearby but this man had short brown hair and brown eyes, not at all like the other guy she had tried to scream to but the mean old lady had put a rag in her mouth before leaving her in the cave. This man untied her and told her every thing would be okay now he was here to help her.

        The little girl cried about the ugly monster people killing her mommy and daddy, and how the mean lady tied her up and said mean things to her and put a rag in her mouth, she told the man all this while he was untying her from the post the skin walkers had tied her to.

    He told her, “it will be all right little girl I am going to take you to the police in Brooksville they are going to take care of you, you just tell the Sheriff there a man named Peter Jones that I found you lost in the woods and that your parents were killed by a cult.”

    The little girl sobs and said, “But mister the monsters killed them, and my mommy said I should never go with a stranger.”

    “Its okay” he said, “Your mommy was right but don’t worry I wont hurt you I am going to take you to the police and don’t worry I will go inside the police station and make sure you are taken care of okay, but I guess if we are going to trust each other we should know each other’s names mine’s Rick what is yours.”

    She said, “Alice”

    “Okay Alice” Rick said, “Come along now.”

    Rick couldn’t help but think as he took this poor little girl Alice out of the forest and to Brooksville, “That was Rhuen that really was Rhuen, and he said Versa was his mate. that’s the creature that man down in Pine Ridge was going on about, the case I had called my old partner Mike to look into to assess if their was really a problem, I sure hope Mike left before Rhuen showed up, Mike may be a good werewolf hunter but he is reckless and this is not something you want to be reckless with.”

    Rick left Alice with the police at the station in Brooksville but Peter wasn’t there and he didn’t have the time to wait around for this rookie in the order to tell him about Rhuen as he doubted he was trained enough to know about something like that.

   In fact he doubted that even Mike knew about Rhuen, as his cell phone rang the voice on the line said, “Brother Rick this is Brother Keene. I have been issued to tell you that your current mission is being called off and that you will need to come to the Vatican as soon as possible. A situation has arisen in the Middle East that we require your assistance on; I can not discuss the specifics over the phone for security reasons of course. An electronic plane ticket has already been ordered for you for a flight out of the Las Angelus air port in seven hours.”

    Brother Keene commenced to tell him the specifics of the flight plan, what gates to go to and such.

    Rick told him, “No problem, in fact the mission was just finished before you called.”

    With that he hung up the phone imagining the look on Brother Keene’s face and wishing he had remembered to set the phone to vibrate, had Brother Keene called back at the clearing he would have been in real trouble.

    Rick thought as he walked out of the police station and looked down at his watch, “Damn If I am going to make that flight they booked me on I will have to leave now, too bad though I really wanted to warn that rookie Peter about Rhuen. Doesn’t matter from what I am told he doesn’t attack people unless provoked any way and Mike should have been out of here by now. I would think Mike would have enough since then to mess with something like Rhuen anyway.”

   Rick got into his little blue corvette and drove off down the road out of Brooksville and off to catch his plane out of there.