Another day of getting up to fight; For sleight_of_fate

[silentstrigoi]

Hemlock Grove was a small, backwater town in Pennsylvania, not really notable for everything since the Steel Mill in town had closed. Well, that was before Friday night, which came with headlines about a dead highschool girl. The bottom half of her body was still unaccounted for. The local sheriff were grudgingly chalking it up as an animal attack

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[sleight_of_fate]

Industrial towns on the downward slide tended to draw monsters, in Rhys's experience. Just something about the emptiness, the desolation seemed to cast a pall over these places that made them entirely too appealing to predators, Rhys had tended to notice in his years of drifting. So when a particularly bizarre death caught his eye, easily picked up from the local papers...it sounded like it might be worth staying a few days, hanging around to see if he could pick anything up

[silentstrigoi]

Roman waited a little while in the shadows, trying to see if it was someone he recognized, make sure that he was actually ducking past the yellow tape and heading for where the girl had been killed. He swallowed, his heartbeat thrumming in his throat as he watched the strange man move around in the shadow of night. He was sure he'd never seen him before, and in a town like Hemlock Grove, that made him new, different, a stranger. Had he killed her? He wanted to know, and there was this part of him that wanted to ask what it had been like. He swallowed, tongue flicking over full, dry lips, before he finally moved

[sleight_of_fate]

Rhys's skin suddenly felt like it was going to crawl away and try to hide without him at the voice, and his head snapped around, braid flying. That little something else inside him curled in caution, freezing and waiting as he stopped and turned slowly.

Younger than him, but that blood-borne warning still whispered in the back of his head, and Rhys set his shoulders, feeling the weight of both his knife and his gun in his coat. Not going for them yet, not looking for a fight, but willing to defend himself. Because the younger man's question made him think that he wasn't talking to the killer, either. Probably. Still someone- something- to be cautious of, though, and something about those eyes made him look away quickly, gazing around at the trees instead.

Voices carry in the stillness of the woods, and Rhys's is quiet. "No, but thinking I might get an idea of what did," he said, rubbing his palms across his jeans as though that could remove the crawling feeling of unease left behind by the imprint of violence.

[silentstrigoi]

"You said what. Not who."

Roman points it out after a pause. Sure, maybe the man's talking about the sheriff's claim that it was done by coyotes, but Roman would like to think that neither of them here are that oblivious. He tilts his head and he watches him, takes a few steps closer, and the way he moves isn't threatening; he's tall, with almost half a foot on the man, but the way he moves is just slightly gawky, like he's just coming out of a growth spurt. There's still that tinge of something not quite right about him, however.

He looks at the scene of it, the little shed set out near the edge of the forest, in the dirt and surrounded by a lightly grassy field. The structure now decorated with the remnants of bloodstains and yellow police line that flutters in the slight breeze. Roman swallows, tilts his head to the other side as he looks him over.

"Who are you? You're not from here."