Theatrical Muse Reboot - #72 - Trust
I couldn't really work my left arm. There was an old injury there, and I'd say it flared up and gave me trouble, but in retrospect that isn't really a fair assessment. 'Flared up' makes it sound like it acted on its own accord, which wasn't what had happened to me. No, in this case, my problem was mostly that someone had put a silver fucking spike through the soft part of my shoulder. I couldn't quite get the mechanics of the joint to function properly, constantly grinding against the silver, and I couldn't pull it out because I'd bleed to death. There's an irony in there somewhere, a werewolf worrying about bleeding to death, but at the time I really wasn't in a place where I could appreciate it. I'm not sure I could be said to appreciate it even now. Some ironies pass away unremarked.
I'd learned a long time ago how to push the mind-numbing pain around until it was just 'numbing', and I'd managed to function almost well with one arm and a mostly-clear mind, nevermind that the silver that passed through my body kept me from shifting pretty securely. No matter how much one manages to put the pain into the back of their mind, there's no ignoring shearing your own arm off. I'd made it this far mostly on willpower and dogged determination, and I'd thought it was going to take me the rest of the way to where-ever it was I needed to be.
I was, of course, wrong.
I had drug myself down the stairs into the living room to a sight I never thought I would see. My brain kept skipping over it, refusing to process what my eyes were busy reporting to it. The living room was a mess, pieces of furniture and guitars and blood all over it. I wasn't entirely certain what had happened in there, but I could make a good guess of it--I've seen a lot of violence in my time and I know what I'm looking at most of the time. The fight that had been in there had been recent, and violent in the way only werewolves can really achieve.
Of course, it was also easy to figure out what had gone on because the combatants were still in the room.
Tim is not a small man. I've said that a million times and I feel like there will be a million times more I will need to say it before this is all over. He towers, and he towered even then, blood over his hands up to the elbows. He held something in his right hand that I recognized immediately out of some sense of primal revulsion rather than actual recognition--silver has a particular way of catching the light, even covered in gore, and when you're so terribly allergic to it you learn to recognize it pretty quickly. You learn to smell it, even over the stink of the silver already in your body. At his feet was a dark, crumpled form that I knew, even though I didn't want to recognize it, I knew exactly what it was.
It was Jack's body, still and already smelling of death.
Judging from Tim's condition, all the blood on his hands and throughout the room was Jack's blood, too. That's the funny thing about werewolves; we have a lot of blood in us. They give you some bullcrap about the average human containing so many pints of blood, and you know that's probably true for humans, but werewolves regenerate very quickly and we make more blood almost as fast as we can lose it. Almost. It takes a lot to kill a werewolf, even with silver. We're designed not to go down easy. But it occurred to me, in this slow sort of creeping horror that was oozing up through the numbness I'd cloaked my mind with, that if there was one person in the world who'd know how to kill a werewolf without any magic or special tricks or anything but a silver fucking hunting knife he must have been carrying with him for years, it'd be Tim. Something sunk down through my chest and made a cold, hard ball of iron in my stomach. I could hear the tears and emotion I couldn't feel choking my words up into an incomprehensible mess as I spoke. "I...what? Tim? What....we /trusted/ you? How could..."
His laugh was cold, and alien. "I know. And it was so easy, wasn't it?"