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 Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 12:35 am
It had begun several weeks before. At least, that’s when it seemed as though everything had begun. What had happened was that Shehk had been having breakfast with her two ‘personal trainers’ (slave drivers?). Decebal and Marianne had been having a strange discussion at the table. Shehk had been trying to follow it, though unsuccessfully.
“Do you think she’ll get it?” Decebal had asked, out of the blue.
“You’ve been here for over twenty years an you haven’t got it.” Marianne replied quickly. Shehk looked from the vampire to the Cleaner.
“Got what?” She piped in herself. She was sadly ignored.
Decebal laughed and took another bite of food before he answered Marianne. “In case you’ve forgotten, I have a good excuse for not having it. Why don’t you have it?” Marianne barked with laughter.
“Because can you really imagine that wanting to settle in me?” she dismissed the idea of it with the same sort of mirth one would a really pathetic joke.
Shehk had asked several times what ‘it’ was as the conversation continued from that point, just to be ignored. It hadn’t been very fun and part of her wondered if she should have been vaccinated before she went out to see her now-father. Nonetheless, it had been a one-time exchange that Shehk wouldn’t figure out the results of until several weeks later.
In fact, she’d completely forgotten about it until that morning. She had walked into the kitchen rubbing sleep out of her eyes, stretching out her arms above her head. She’d spent quite a long night doing lots of letter writing and for her efforts she had less than three hours of rest to show for it. Pushing the limits of just how little sleep she could put into her body was wrecking it more than the actual physical work aspect of it. Part of her wished she’d actually allotted more time for sleep, another part of her wished that she was still sleeping at that very moment without fearing Marianne would come upstairs to wake her up. Either way it had been a long night. When she walked into the kitchen she yawned, cupping one hand over her mouth. Chatter began near instantaneously.
“She got it.” Marianne said coyly, looking over to Decebal with a wry grin. The vampire looked less than pleased.
“Dammit, she got it. Guess I gotta pay up.” He said, though he didn’t do much more than shove his plate of food over to Marianne. It seemed reasonable to pay the Cleaner in food rather than monetary things. Did Marianne actually have possessions? It was a short-lived thought.
Shehk had paused, giving them both a really long look as the exchange died down. What had just…? “What the hell is ‘i- OH MY GOD, WHAT THE HELL?” Shehk’s inquiry died as she coughed a few times, a large billow of moisture and haze oozing out of her mouth without much prompting. The pricolici frowned, swallowing another mouthful of the stuff down unintentionally out of surprise. In turn, more of it puffed out of her nose. She looked utterly ridiculous.
She wondered for a brief moment if dragons felt that way with smoke. T-..she wasn’t breathing smoke, was she? Oh jack! That would have been utterly and completely horrible! It would have meant that she had fire in her!! Shehk planted herself at the table with a whine of confusion and slight distress. Expected with the unexpected development in her physical state of being… and the cryptic referrals to what was going on.
“One of you broke meeeeee. What did you dooooo?” she half accused, half asked, coughing up another mouthful of fog as she did so. Oh godddd, she was dyyyiinnngggggg. She’d caught something and now she was going to diieeeeee auuugghhhhhh…. She was exhaling mass bodddyyyyyy, suuggghas;fkdfadhfdf;ldf. While she was being dramatic in her worries, it was a reasonable line of thought; outside of the fact that nobody else was panicking along side of her in her death throes.
In fact, Decebal seemed completely amused by her and her plight. Then again, that vampire thought everything about his freshly adopted child was humorous. But her blind panicking, albeit not as bad as it could have been, was still amusing. Very amusing.
Possibly more amusing than it should have been.
“Shehk. It’s fog.” Decebal said simply after a minute, leaning one elbow on the table. Shehk’s expression seemed to relax greatly and she slumped in her seat. She sighed and another billow of the stuff puffed out of her mouth. Fog? She could handle fog. Mostly. It was hard to see through, at the very least.
Wait.
“Why am I-?, “ she puffed out another few mouthfuls of the stuff then coughed, frowning. It was starting to hurt her lungs a bit. “Why am I breathing out fog?” she asked again, this time without the interruption, with a pout. “Did I catch something?” she asked, slumping in her seat. Marianne just laughed at the pricolici, like everything about the situation was just hilarious; including how little the girl knew about what was going on. There was still another 98% about that forest alone she needed to learn about. “You caught the bug!” she cackled.
Shehk leered back at her. “What’s ‘the bug’?” She asked, hoping that this time it would garner at least an answer of some variety. She’d settle for it not even being a good one! “Will one of you pleaaaseee tell me what’s going on? Because unfortunately for myself, I’m not a sexy mindflayer named Riley, so I can’t actually pick up on what you’re thinking.” Decebal gave her a look at the name and Shehk waved a hand dismissively. “Riley. Classmate who took my final exam with me; I rather like her, I’ll have to introduce you sometime if I get a chance.” She pricolici shrugged a bit before she stretched out and leaned on the table.
Decebal shrugged a bit, but didn’t comment on Shehk’s friend.
“The ‘bug’, as we call it, is the habit of about 60% of the people who spend prolonged amounts of time in the fog to walk out coughing it up.” He explained, reaching out to tap Shehk on the forehead. Marianne smacked the back of Shehk’s head in a very Agent-Gibbs-esque manner, garnering the Pricolici’s attention in the form of a frown.
“What th-“ she started talking, but Marianne began to speak, interrupting her. “The fog out there is alive, pricolici-not-a-pet,” she teased, “Some creatures simply have it pass through them as though it is nothing. Any race that doesn’t breath habitually tends to be ‘bugged’ less often than the animals that run around all day every day, such as you do for any and all purposes.” Marianne reached out to flick Shehk’s forehead, but the pricolici ducked and swatted the hand away with a light grin. However, the grin was short lived as her brain went to work.
“So basically that living fog is attributed to me breathing fog out all over the place?” Shehk coughed once in punctuation to her inquiry, another billow to follow. “That’s….hard to wrap my head around it.” She said, idly wrapping her fingers in a lock of her hair. She sighed pausing to look at the color of said hair. Hmmmmm….That…had been a fog change as well, now hadn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t as hard to wrap her head around her head around, as she would have liked it to be.
Never the less, with that in mind, she just looked between the pair. For a long time she didn’t speak until her next question struck her. “What does that mean, anyways…that it’s ‘living’?” She inquired. Was there something about that which was extra special? Not that it would have been horribly unique in context. The whole forest reeked of ‘extra special and disastrous’ to her. The kind of forest she imagined humans would see in a ‘horror’ (she didn’t see the problem) film and wander into while the audience yelled DON’T DO IT!!! Something akin to that, really.
Most denizens of Amityville Academy probably hailed from a similar such place as she had as well. It seemed a bit cliché, actually.
Decebal seemed to immediately have the answer the pricolici was seeking; “It just tends to be in places that it shouldn’t be naturally, it feels out of place. That sort of thing.” He explained. “It’s capable of coming indoors, but also tends to act like it is purposely avoiding certain things.
It has ‘habits’. Maybe even ‘memories’.” He explained using finger quotations. Shehk ‘hmmm’ed thoughtfully, then nodded. “That makes enough sense. But why do people start…” she coughed out another mouthful again and frowned. Looked like her body finished her question for her. Marianne grinned, reaching out to play with the pricolici’s hair. Shehk swatted her hand away with a fierce stare. “Just stop thinking about breathing fog out and you’ll stop.” The Cleaner said. Shehk frowned, brows knitting together. “That’s like trying to not think of a pink elephant.”
….
…….
That had been the strangest party ever. But good times. That memory didn’t stop Shehk from looking at her milk suspiciously before taking a sip. She was pretty sure nobody had slipped anything into it. At least, she thought was pretty sure nobody had. Hmmmm. Well, maybe it would make for a fun trip. There was a pause as she waited to see if anything happened. Hmmm.. no pink elephants yet. She downed half of it before sighing again.
This time, no fog billowed out of her mouth.
Shehk paused, making a face.
“..Why is it so selective?” she asked. Decebal shrugged at her. “Could be any reason, truly.” He expressed. The pricolici grumbled a bit. “Well then… I think I gotta take a day to figure this out…” she mumbled, crossing her arms. It…would be an interesting little trip…fog with no pink elephants. Hmmm.
Decebal looked at Marianne, then to Shehk…then to Marianne again. “Might as well let her work her distraction out of her system if she’s going to get anything done today.” He said, “Though I think a full day is going to be a touch long.” He added as a final note. Marianne made a face, displeased. “I can only have her until sun down as-is.” Shehk had noted that Marianne always vanished as the sun went down. She wasn’t sure why, however. “If I can get her around Four…” Shehk made a face, and then looked at the clock in the kitchen. It was about 6 hours until four.
She tapped her chin, thinking about something.
“I……..I’ll see what I can do in that time frame. After that, I think I should head outside anyways.” Not everybody was going to give her the luxury of derping it up like a derp derka and she’d come to recognize that sometimes she just had to do something when she wasn’t 100% up for doing it. Yes. That wording exactly. She sighed, scratched the stapling in her face and then nodded momentarily. “Can’t spend the whole day working out the fog breath.” She laughed a bit.
Shehk coughed a few more times. She nodded once before she excused herself, not even waiting to actually eat. She saw Decebal serve up her plate for himself before she headed up the stairs to sit in her room.
By the time she came back downstairs again, there would be fog flooding the upstairs and Shehk would have come down with a bad case of the hiccups.
Just a Cough: END
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Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 3:20 pm
Shehk had quickly discovered that her attempts at letter writing were completely bogus. She was beginning to understand why it was Decebal had such a problem with her ability to write a decent one in his second letter to her after she’d made an attempt to write back to his first one. She would just start writing out word vomit, anything that came to her mind while she was writing, and send it off without a second thought about what it was she was sending to people. It had been horrifying to come to this realization. Looking over her current disaster she couldn’t even count the number of tangents she went on. Did her earlier letters look like this too? Horrifying. Utterly and completely horrifying! That’s what it was!
The pricolici, still in pajamas from having been allowed a few hours of rest between being dragged home by Marianne and beginning this ‘lesson’ in being a ‘proper’ humanoid-being, pushed away her third attempt to write the same letter. She sat there, staring at it and folding her arms, leaning back in her chair.
“This one isn’t much better than the last one, Decebal. Don’t even bother trying to read it to fix it. I can already see all of the problems. They’re as plain as fog outside.” She dismissed it to the vampire who was looming over her shoulder. He quirked a brow at her, but didn’t smile in the least, just moving from his position of looming. Shehk could feel the shaaammeeeee from the look she was being given by him, so she didn’t make eye contact with him. There was something about being ‘SHAAMMEEDDD’ by the vampire that outweighed any other shame she felt ever.
“Well, what is wrong with it?” he asked her. Shehk grumbled underneath her breath.
“Everything is wrong with it.” She answered begrudgingly, waving one hand. She scooted the letter across the desk and crumpled it up in her hands, tossing it away from herself and towards the already overflowing recycle bin. The vampire walked across the room to pick it up, uncrumpling it before he took some time to look over it. His expression changed through several evaluating looks as he read it over. He probably read it three or for times before he crumpled it up again.
“You’re right. That’s pretty bad.” He confirmed, chuckling a bit at just how much badness was in that letter. The vampire probably never even thought that his ward could possibly be that bad at writing a letter ever. Decebal added it to the pile of failing notes that was slowly assembling under Shehk’s care. Shehk would be going through an entire forest of trees at the rate she was going in her attempts to write to the boy who had rejected her. Had she ever written a love letter before? Decebal was going to guess the answer was no. Before Shehk could put the pen to paper again to start over, the vampire scooped her up and threw her over one shoulder.
Shehk shrieked as she was suddenly kidnapped from her task. “Hey! I’m writing, I’m writing!” she protested. “Well, we’re going to do a small activity to help you improve on that writing you’re doing. This requires a different…perspective.” He said. Shehk made a face at him. “We’re not asking Marianne to help me write a love letter, are we?” she asked, seeming appalled by the idea entirely. The man grinned. “No. We’re going to do something a bit better.”
Shehk wasn’t sure she liked where this was going as Decebal carried her off down the stairs.
“Hey! Hey! Where are we going??” she shrieked, as they didn’t just go downstairs, but they started walking out the front door as well! Decebal didn’t answer even as he passed through said door and continued on, marching out into the fog. The pricolici felt pretty ineffectual as she was carried for about 10 minutes by the vampire, kicking and flailing, with him treating it like she was no big deal to handle in her fit. She growled as they emerged from the fog and Shehk found that he’d carried her, kicking and screaming, all the way to the town.
Boo!
“Why are we-?” she was baffled, wondering how they’d gotten from point A (the house) to point B (the town) in terms of perspective fixing! There was nothing in the town to actually get a perspective on!
The vampire held up a finger, putting it to Shehk’s lips as he put her back on her feet.
 “Stay.” He instructed carefully, pointing at the ground where he had sat the bare footed pajama-clad girl.
“I’m not a dog, Decebal.” Shehk replied, her tail twitching and shifting from foot to foot anxiously. The ground was really going to hurt her feet if she stood there long enough.
“Sit. Stay. Rollover. Good girl.” He went through hand motions for each command as he grinned, before he turned, and without another word, booked it off into the fog. Shehk immediately protested this course of action. She wouldn’t give him the chance to run off. Having been carried off in her bare feet, her canine body was needed. In the most fluid of motion she shifted, jumping into the fog to run after the vampire in a rage.
Decebal couldn’t have possibly been that fast of a runner. Certainly she’d felt like she’d been on his tail not too long before, but after 10 minutes she had to stop running. The fog was beginning to thicken around her and even with her glowing eyes she couldn’t see that far ahead of herself. Her ears flattened at this realization, she began to growl. Shehk knew she was being dragged into one of the vampire’s horrible little schemes. There was no other explanation for what had been going on.
All she’d wanted to do was write a decent letter!
Shehk didn’t waste her time pacing impatiently because of Decebal. Instead, she lifted her rotted away snout to the air and sniffed, hoping to catch the scent of blood, pine, and an old wood-burning fireplace. What she got for the effort was a nose full of fog that tried to suffocate her. She couldn’t pick up the scent of the trees, other creatures, anything! She couldn’t even pick up the scent of where she herself had been. She was suddenly trapped with no idea what direction to move in.
What was wrong? She’d travelled through all of this before! Why wasn’t it working now? What sort of magic had been pulled over the woods?
Decebal had been planning this all along, hadn’t he? He lived in the middle of a trap for the senses and knew it. It was too perfect of an opportunity for him to not have wanted to do something of the ‘fool Shehk’s senses forever’ variety. The mere idea of it all pissed Shehk off on a special level.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a voice speaking above her.
“I told you to stay.” It sounded like Decebal, only fueling the unhappiness that the pricolici had right then.
Shehk growled in the direction of his voice. “I’m not a dog. I don’t ‘stay’ because I don’t do tricks.” She snapped back at the voice that seemed to move carefully through the fog, making sure to stay out of sight. The Pricolici finally began to pace, her tail flicking as she did. She was getting irritated far too quickly and was not in the mood to entertain whatever idiocy the vampire had in store for her.
Decebal chuckled. He didn’t have quite idiocy in store for her.
“No. I said stay. Why are you so afraid of just being where you are in your life? Look back at who you were even a month ago. Are you still that person, Miss Shehk Strigoi?” he inquired, leaning over to prop his head in the palm of his hand. Shehk could tell the vampire was up somewhere above her, most likely in a tree based on how far above her it sounded. The fog barely let the light of her eye-glow illuminate it, making her position near impossible to track. Even the vampire seated above her had a few problems.
“I am not that mutt that showed up on your porch a month ago, Decebal. Why are we having this conversation?” She growled demandingly
Decebal clapped at the answer he was given, possibly in an attempt to make her keep getting riled up.
“Very good, Shehk.” He spoke her name like one would when they were baby-talking to an animal. “But why are you no longer that person? Tell me every thing you’ve done to yourself that has turned you into something new.” He ordered with a grand wave of one of his hands. Shehk paused, her brain now struggling to come up with a good answer to the question he was posing to her. Shehk’s ears flicked once the entire time.
After a long pause of thought, Shehk looked up into the tree, seeming peeved again. “I don’t know.” She said plainly, the only answer she’d been able to come up with.. It had taken a while for her to come to that conclusion at that, so it wasn’t for a lack of trying. “I don’t feel like I’m any different now than I was when I woke up that morning I came to stay with you. I’m the same person.”
The vampire seemed to sigh at this answer, massaging his temples a bit. He spoke back to her slowly, pacing his words carefully. “Therein lies both your solution to this mess you have gotten yourself into, and your problem that caused all of it. Do you simply like not knowing?” he inquired. The question annoyed the pricolici. Shehk barked up out of the fog at him, sitting up there on his throne of pine above the fog, picking through her psyche like it was a small children’s book that he’d read several times. She could barely even make out the shape that she only assumed was his.
“Like hell I do! I just…” she answered before she forced herself to be still, sitting down. “Why does it matter?” she asked, sneering a bit. Her tail thumped against the ground occasionally, seeming quite vexed.
Another laugh broke up the atmosphere. “Because you’ve been spending a lot of time this break trying to compare your past to your future. I want to you to see your perspective on what is going on, pup. You’re chasing yourself in a circle of woe.”
Shehk was getting riled up again. “I’m a pricolici! And I’m not chasing any woe! I’m chasing a goal!” she barked and stomped a single paw. Decebal grinned wryly. “And what is the pricolici made of?” he knew exactly which of Shehk’s sensitivity buttons to press, jabbing his finger into that particular open wound without a thought about it. It was questions like this that made Shehk’s head throb. She growled, but hesitated to actually answer the question. “a-A dead werewolf…” she mumbled underneath her breath. The vampire probably would have grinned if the entire situation hadn’t seemed so damned depressing to him. “How often have you thought about that?” he asked in the same voice a therapist would have asked ‘so how does that make you feel’ while in a session with a patient.
The pricolici wanted to growl, but found herself losing the will to do just that while following that line of questioning. “A..lot…” she answered. She sounded almost ashamed of this fact.
“Why?” Decebal asked.
Shehk stomped her paws a few times, pouting. “Because I failed at living!” she growled. The vampire smiled, “Well, I did too at some point. But it wasn’t as though I’d really been able to do much about it. Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches and see what happens from it.”
“What do you mean?” Shehk’s canid brows furrowed together as she asked.
“I’m as dead of a human as you are of a werewolf.” He answered. “So why does what you were matter? Be what you are now and be a good one. You’re focusing too much on your past. Instead of analyzing your mistakes and moving on, you’ve forced yourself to obsess with them. “ Decebal leaned his back against the trunk of the tree he’d seated himself in.
Shehk’s ears flattened back at the vampire’s ‘speech’. “Well I can’t just move past that sort of failure, Decebal. All I can do now is survive.” She grumbled, not really willing to renege so easily on such a subject. The vampire sighed, propping his legs up on the branch of the tree with himself. Another grandiose gesture with his arms followed as he spoke, “Then why are you here? Did you want me to tell you allll about what kind of person you were as a werewolf? I’m not obligated to tell you anything. In fact, if I told you anything I could get in trouble. Worse? YOU could get in trouble! But I’ll have you know you didn’t die because you didn’t take risks. You were much more gutsy in life and it saved you a lot of pain.”
Her head began to throb as it practically flung the information right out of it, doing everything it possibly could to not get anything new shoved in there...or old, rather. “S-shut up….” She groaned. Her paws reformed as hands as she clasped them over her head. There was no way her paws were going to give her the relief she needed from the pounding.
She tried to massage her fingers into the flesh of her head as though that would help the situation at all. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear about what I was before. I want to be what I am now.” She groaned, doubling over. Force it down, force it down. Decebal had some sort of magic ninja power that enabled him to completely decimate her psyche. Sometimes Shehk had to wonder if he secretly had some sort of natural ability that involved ‘Hi, I can has kill you via brain’.
“I want to be what I am now,” she repeated it, “and I don’t care about what I was before, dammit! That’s why I never wrote you back. All you wanted to do is dredge up ancient history. I’ll never be who I was before even if you told me everything. There is no point in any of it!”
Decebal grinned as the pricolici snapped at him for his attempts to intrude upon her mental facilities.
“That’s why I haven’t been trying to tell you anything that could cause lasting damage.” He said in stride, “But I feel like you need to take into consideration what it is you’ve told me and think about it on the way home.”
The vampire’s voice trailed off in a Doppler effect as he spoke and it soon seemed to Shehk that she was alone. Alone and in the middle of fog that served as a trap for her senses. Shehk groaned a bit, forcing herself to stay up on her feet as she began walking, her feet complained in pain against the ground as she stepped on particularly spine-y pine needles, the occasional rock, and a few sticks.
However, despite her protests against his methods, she at least took the walk as time to sort out the thoughts that the vampire had just planted into her head. She had come out here for some reason, though she wasn’t entirely sure her goal had been to grow as a person. Was she limiting her own progress by being afraid of her past? But…how long had it been since she’d thought about it last?
The realization that many a times she’d said her motivation was to not die again came to her quickly. She couldn’t even count on both hands how many times she’d had that thought, or even how many times she had shared it out loud to somebody else. ‘I am going to be strong enough to survive’, ‘I will not let myself die again’. There were so many variations of it that she wondered if there was a trick in her wording of choice. That had to be something about it. This whole thing had started over her struggling to write one stupid letter.
What was this experience supposed to turn her letter into? ‘Dear Nukpana, I have spent the last 8 weeks nearly dying repeatedly and being devoid of human contact of the sane variety’? Yeah, that didn’t sound like a dumb letter at all, now did it? Okay, actually it sounded like a really dumb letter.
Her tail flicked as she thought over the entire mess she’d been spending most of the summer in.
Shehk’s thoughts were quickly distracted, however, when something then sunk its teeth into her tail. She shrieked in pain, quickly pulling her tail away before turning to see what it was. However, by the time she had moved to check, it had moved, vanishing without a trace. Something wanted to eat her, and the thought made her stomach sink. She was in danger, and as she was, her body wasn’t really built for combat. She was a canine. She was a canine and she needed to be one right then. She needed to get into her other body, and she had to do it quick. Shehk’s body warped as she flattened herself out onto all fours, attempting to look out into the fog. Her ears stood up alertly, listening.
Whatever was out in the fog was going to make a delightful distraction from the words that had put the throbbing in her head. She wasn’t sure which she would have been dealing with right then; pain in head, possibly external pain. However, which one she had to deal with was obvious enough to the pricolici and she had decided she wasn’t going to make any effort to get back to the house until she dealt with this problem.
“Okay, you ********,” she growled through her sharp canid teeth into the fog, “You’ve come after me once before. Now, get the hell out here and look me in the ey-iiiek!!“
Shehk suddenly shrieked, taking several steps back at the face that was suddenly shoved into her view, as though to say ‘hello!’. Well, if one would have called that thing she was looking at a face. She wasn’t sure what the hell it was, but she was pretty sure it was going to plant itself into her nightmares for weeks to come, if not even longer than that.
The sight she was greeted with was horrible, and Shehk had seen some pretty interesting things. The creature who had revealed itself to her looked like it should have been a wolf, however it had one gaping anatomical issue that told Shehk that it was anything but a wolf; instead of having a face, or even a head for that matter, there were rows and rows of teeth. The mouth they lined, which looked like something that looked like it should have been attached to a leech, was planted firmly where the based of the head should have started. The rest of its body, which was wide shouldered and seemed rather capable, despite this shortcoming it had, was coated in dark fur, missing large patches in something that resembled mange. Other areas of the fur had rotted through completely and looked completely necrotic. Through that mouth full of teeth the creature wheezed as though it was struggling to breathe while staring (did it have eyes somewhere?) at the pricolici, a dark fluid dripping from its partially exposed ribcage. Shehk could smell that it wasn’t blood, which threw her into a completely different suspicion. Or at least it had until another new development caused her to stare at that mouth of teeth, tail trailing off to try and retreat between her legs. The teeth had started to move…or if Shehk had to compare the movement of to something else, it looked like they were rotating, three rows of teeth moving in opposite directions sort of like the garbage disposal in a sink.
Despite the tunnel vision on the teeth, the pricolici could tell that this thing was much smaller than Marianne was, and for a second Shehk had considered just walking past it instead of picking a further fight. This would have worked out, until it shoved its horrible mouth over her boney snout. The teeth continued to twist in their opposite directions, the surface of them digging into, and through, the bone on her snout. She let out another shriek, more of panic than pain, and immediately pulled her face away from it.
Unfortunately for her, however, she was relatively sure the engraved ‘ring’ around her snout would be there permanently. A reminder of just how close she’d gotten to having her face bitten clean off. Shehk’s brain raced away from the image of herself missing the front of her face.
The thing wheezed and huffed, making a noise that sounded like a weak attempt at a growl and all of Shehk’s survival switches flipped to ‘on’. She flef from it immediately, and it pursued her in a dead run. It moved nearly as quickly as she did, and Shehk wondered if it was actually quicker than she was. She wasn’t going to look back at it to check, however. She had to figure out where she was going to flee from it to.
She ran as quickly as her legs would allow her to, growling before she pushed them to go faster. Go go faster! She felt like she was running from it forever, but in actuality it wasn’t long in her fleeing before she tripped over something. It crunched beneath her then snapped. Her brain ran at a mile a minute, almost glazing over that she’d gone over something.
But then a thought struck her. She froze, immediately throwing herself to the ground, hoping that the creature following her couldn’t stop as quickly as she had. As fate would have it for the pricolici, the creature sailed over her head. Her nose went to the ground as she sniffed for what it was she was looking for. As the creature shifted its weight to redirect itself and turned to make a second round at her, slobber starting to ooze between those teeth and drip to the ground and saturate its coat of matted fur, she grabbed what she’d been looking for; the bones she had found weeks before when she’d first wandered into the fog. She shoved one straight into the leech-like mouth that was descending upon her. A part of her had been hoping it being too big would cause a problem and it would be distracted long enough for her to run away.
What ended up happening didn’t fit within those guidelines. The creature assessed the size of the bone, before the sides of its neck split open to allow the mouth to grasp around the entire bone, crushing the ‘jaws’ around it quickly to compact it down into a proper size. Shehk stared at it in shock, her fur starting to puff up. The bone was crushed to pieces in a manner of seconds before the creature turned the stump that should have been its head towards her again.
Shehk started to growl, backing up slowly, her mind rushing for a solution. She couldn’t run home yet. She couldn’t let that thing follow her to the house. She had to distract it, lose her scent amongst the trees, then flee. That’s when she remembered that out there, there was something else she could use to her advantage…
The creature wheezed, huffed and slobbered as it ran at her. Shehk growled, forcing herself to hold her ground against it, not allowing herself to shut her eyes or brace herself for impact. She needed to be there. She needed every part of herself to be in there with the thing that was running at her at that moment. I’m going to live, I’m going to live, I’m going to live. she repeated to herself repeatedly, willing those words to be true with every fiber of her being. In a desperate move, she grabbed at the creature’s throat, or something resembling the throat-region, when it grabbed for her, turning and forcing all of her weight into a turn to smash it into one of the trees behind her.
She panted, watching to see what would happen. If that didn’t do what she wanted it to do, she’d be out of options and s**t out of luck.. and possibly another life.
The toothy monster flailed as it struggled to get up again, its claws racking against bark and roots; anything it could get its paws on. It dug a large chunk of bark out of one of the trees, which bellowed and moaned in pain. Shehk recognized the noise, it being exactly what she’d been wanting from it. That was when the roots of the tree moved, wrapping themselves around the creature’s legs, ensnaring it and then pulling it back against it. The monster snarled and howled when it realized it was trapped and couldn’t wiggle itself free.
Shehk watched for a brief moment, but wasted no time past that in getting the hell out of there. She could vaguely hear the sound of huffing, yelping, an airy howl, snapping and a pained shriek as she ran. She hoped that creature got what was coming for it, because she was done with it and never wanted to see it ever again.
Fortunately, the results of where she’d found herself with the tree and the bones had helped Shehk with another problem; she had figured out where she was enough to get her bearings about her, figure out where she was, and book it to the Decebal’s house. She made her way back to the house quickly, morphing as she scrambled up the steps in a panic to get inside and get out of sight. She practically fell through the door as she attempted to enter the house, just for Decebal to open the door for her.
The vampire gave the pricolici laying on the floor of his entry hall a light grin.
“Well, you’re home late. I dropped you off nearly three hours ago. It wasn’t that far of a walk home. Did you have lots of time to think?” he asked.
Shehk shot him a dirty glare, growling a bit. “I nearly got eaten by a thing.” she snapped back, flinging a hand towards the door to emphasize the direction it had come from. “Hard to think more than ‘I wanna live, I wanna live, I wanna live’ when a leech-wolf-thing is trying to eat your face. IT TRIED TO EAT MY FACE, DECEBAL.” She flailed her arms about in emphasis as she sat up, before clasping both of them over her face. Her tail thumped against the floor of the house irritatedly.
“It was like..and then it…and it was like..ajfsjf..” she continued to make gestures for the creature she’d left at the mercy of the tree, partially pantomiming the entire incident, before growling again.
“DID YOU KNOW THAT THING WAS OUT THERE??” she asked.
The vampire’s expression tightened, seeming to be bothered by the Pricolici’s tale of creatures in the fog. His eyes darkened as he thought over it.
“That sounds like a grinder…”
Shehk growled. “And what in the living hell is a grinder?”
“A grinder…” he paused, making a face before he continued on with his thought about the creature he was speaking of, “I’m not sure what I can tell you about it. Not many people are brave enough to study them. Those that do are often eaten. They eat anything they can. It is unknown why they stalk some areas and not others, even if they’re right next to each other.”
Shehk gave him an intense look, the light in her eyes flickering, steadying, then growing in strength as she stared him down. “Why do you live here if that thing is chilling around ready to eat you?” she demanded to know. “I mean, you could wake up one night to that thing looking at you going nom nom nom!”
The pricolici had gotten up to her feet as she emphasized this point, snapping her hands together, fingers mimicking the shapes of teeth. “IT NEARLY BIT MY FACE OFF, DECEBAL. I WANT TO KNOW WHY I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THAT THING WAS OUT THERE WAS SOONER.”
The vampire didn’t answer her, watching the pricolici as she threw her theatrics around. Shehk growled and huffed at him. “I’m not leaving it at this, Decebal. NOTHING in the woods wanted to talk about that thing. I deserve to know why that is.” The vampire scratched the back of his neck, gritting his teeth in a manner that seemed uncertain. “I’m sorry, Shehk. There is just no answer I can give you to why the creatures in the woods think the way they do.”
“Then tell me why you think the way you do.”
The vampire grimaced at the new line of questioning, but answered it anyways. “Because I don’t fear death by it, or anything else for that matter.” Shehk frowned at him. “Must be nice to live like that.” The vampire grinned, a rather strange and sad grin with a sort of grim confidence to it. Like he thought that there were worse things in life. “It is. You should try it sometime.”
He patted the pricolici on the back, before motioning to the stairs. “Now, I’ll work on making something for dinner. How about now that you’ve had your priorities reassessed a bit, why don’t you go try writing that letter again?”
Shehk crinkled her nose at him, brows furrowing together at him in a puzzled manner.
“Who says I’ve changed in the last 4 hours?” she asked, putting her hand on one hip.
“You told me yourself. When I left you it was ‘I want to survive’.” His smile brightened up as he said it, leaning against the railing of the steps as he watched the pricolici head up the stairs, her posture having changed ever so subtly from the way it had been when he’d watched her do the exact same thing that morning.
“Just now it was ‘I want to live’.”
Not Undead, Relive. : End
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Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 3:28 pm
A letter in a plain envelope. It hasn’t been over-embellished in any way. It says ‘TO NUKPANA’ on the front Dear Nukpana, I’m going to admit that this is about my billionth attempt to write you a letter. I know I left you a note when I left Amityville for the summer, but I don’t know if it will still be sitting there or not when I come back. I’m not so secretly hoping that it isn’t. However, the point of this fact was for me to share with you that I haven’t been neglecting to write, it has simply been a struggle to put something on the page that didn’t come out as complete bull. I’m also going to admit that I’ve not really been one-hundred percent sure what to put into this letter to you. I have this nagging fear that even if I send this to you, you won’t even read it and the effort will be worth nothing. So I’ve been trying to think of something to say that I . . . You know what? I’m going to hope you are reading this and what I say isn’t just thrown into the trash and disregarded completely. I miss you. I have missed you a lot this summer. There has been a lot of guilt I have put onto myself because I came to realize I said some things when it fell apart that I shouldn’t have. I don’t blame myself for overreacting in the situation, because in all truth the reaction was because I did, and still do, love you and I was hurt. However, I don’t feel like I was within my rights to inflict that hurt back upon you in my anger. I don’t know how anybody is supposed to react to that situation. I hope that I never have to experience it again, because I don’t want to master that kind of emotional reaction. To be honest, as I write I’m not entirely sure I’m going to make myself send this letter at all. It feels good to write, but I feel like I’m being a sap. A sap who forces herself to sit down and write at least three letters a week so I don’t deteriorate into some kind of horrible wild animal while I’m out here in the middle of the woods and fog. These letters are the only things that have kept me planted in this space between wild animal and somewhat domesticated creature. I hope that whatever trouble was plaguing you when things went south between us, has managed to find a way to clear itself up since everything happened. If it hasn’t, I might have to find out what happened and beat it up for you. A pathetic threat when my arms are still flimsy weak things even after eight weeks of trying to get a level-up in awesome out here, but I believe the phrase would be ‘come at me, bro’. Not you. Your problems. I’m ready to tackle them down if I have to. But I’m going to assume you have them under control by yourself. You’re capable. You’ve always been the big and strong capable one out of the two of us. I sort of laugh at myself as I look back at the weak-spirited and questionable creature I was. It wasn’t an entirely bad ‘who I was’ to be, but I think I am more proud of what I am now. For that, I thank you. You have somehow managed to always make me grow past hurdles I have struggled with since before we met. Some were harder to climb over than others, and these ones I have struggled with in the last two and a half months were ones I could only truly cross over without knowing there would be someone who would hold my hand if I failed. Despite knowing that I could stand on my own feet now and that I don’t truly need you to make myself feel like a ‘complete’ person, you’re still someone I’d like in my life again. It doesn’t have to be immediately. It doesn’t have to be soon, either. But I still care about you. I would love to hear how your summer break treated you, I hope it was well, though I say ‘well’ with the perspective of ‘better than mine was’. That shouldn’t be anything too difficult to manage, unless you have secretly lost a limb or been horribly maimed. If you did, that’s OK. Well, it’s not OK in the sense that it sucks, but I’ll still like you even if someone threw a vat of acid on you (I’m knocking on the wooden desk I’m writing this on in hopes I haven’t just jinxed you. Oh my jack, if I did I am so sorry!). Despite all of the horrible things I just wrote in that last paragraph, please know that I am wishing you the best of all things, even if I’m no longer included in them. I’d like to hope that I am though. Hope life is treating you well. Sincerely, Shehk. A letter to Shehk from Junko. (Written by Eight) Dear Shehk, Always candy never not candy! At least this candy doesn't sing or have a cat face on it. ...Right? I may get some things done while I'm here, but I'll be sure to leave the bulk of it until you're around! I'll get the difficult, time-consuming things out of the way. As for fabrics I don't have any in mind just yet, I just wanted to make sure it was okay first~! I'd be more than happy to make up a meeting date. A week before school starts again actually sounds like a really good idea; it'll give us time to prepare without ruining the surprise or what have you. I don't think showering me with candy would be counter-productive! The more sugar I eat the faster I'll work, right? Or something. I don't know. But really, you don't need to pay me for this. Anything to get you two back together again. It's just...so strange not seeing you two as a couple, it seems so wrong. Locking people in rooms solves all problems. I don't know what you're talking about. As long as you two don't break anything...like my windows. Or my clothes. Or my minipets. Also, tell this destroyer of clothes that I am going to slap her silly if I ever see her. Hmph! And she throws you OUT THE WINDOW?! And this is a regular thing?! Oh my Jack, Shehk! Are you okay!? At least there's FEARleading.. Also, it kind of makes sense. I'll trust your judgments. You're our captain, after all! And we need to be the best at what we do, right? So this letter took a few days longer than I would have liked, because I decided to make it a goal of mine to count all the tails in the house. It's a little harder with her parents, but thankfully her mother was nice enough to let me count hers. With her father I had a bit more of a challenge. Including Tomoko there are 23 and a half tails in this house! And all of them are so very fluffy and soft. And yes, it pretty much is a pile of tails. I sleep in the same room as Tomoko and her little brother and sister. It's lots of fun! I don't think my parents would protest, though The Empress might. But The Mistress gets mad just when I hold Seiji's hand so I don't really care what they say much. And it would be fun to have all our friends! Who could we invite? Nuk, Riley, Seiji, Tomoko, Sammy, Siddie, Malodore, Jove? Oh! And maybe Sin and Yaya too? We should try to have an even number of boils to ghouls though. As long as Altair and Sarias aren't there I'm game... Fog vision? There's...fog there? Um, is there a lot? I'm not..comfortable with fog anymore...I don't know if a lot of students are anymore. Take care, Shehk! And be safe! Junko A voice mail left on Junko’s phone. The voice on the phone has developed a strange sounding accent. Some letters sound something like the old rendition of ‘Dracula’ in black and white and how he spoke. Romanian accent?“Junko! Hi! I tried to call you, which I guess is obvious, after I read your letter but given that nobody in this house ever sleeps, getting a chance to sneak a phone call in pretty much means I got to rush in something before I hop into the shower. On that note, I don’t recommend fleeing from people by climbing out of a chimney. I’ve gotten really good at climbing up the insides of chimneys, but I still don’t recommend it. It’s messy business. ANYWAYS! I’m rambling. I’ll definitely bring some more candy home with me when I hop on the train in a week. It shouldn’t be too bad to survive this last week, but lately Marianne is getting a really suspicious look on her face and I’m wondering if I’m going to get horribly mangled in the time span to come. I hope that isn’t the case. Mangling is bad, and Marianne is really good at it. Stupid woman. I don’t hate her as much now, but she’s still insufferable and so not worth the company she provides. I think the battle plan you had laid out in the last letter you sent me is good, and I probably just would have sent you another letter to say this, but I don’t know how long it will take for post to go through and when I’m on my last legs of being here, it is probably easier for you to get this and assume you’ll be talking to me in person soon. Should be fun! Also, I’m sorry to hear you don’t like fog. This stuff is really cool though. I’ll just bring a jar of it home with me and show it to you. Unless my room suddenly turns into a fog zone. I might avoid trying to do that if I can help it. In case it creates a grinder…” There is a sound on the other end of the phone as though Shehk just shivered, rubbed her arms and possibly cowered at the thought of what she has just said.“Okay, don’t want a fog zone in my room anymore. Don’t want to risk a grinder. And are there seriously that many tails in that house? Holy crap! That’s a lot of tails! All I’ve got out here are sharp teeth. If I tried to count the sharp teeth I’ve seen since I’ve been here…lessee, four between me and Decebal, a lot on Marianne in both forms, and….I think I’m stopping this thought. I don’t want to think about teeth anymore. Always teeth. Anyways, I’m sorry this is so short. I’d have left you a longer message, but these things have a time limit, and I only talk so qui-“ The phone message has been cut off. Another one is left shortly after that.“Me again. I ran out of recording time! But as I was saying in my lovely attempt to say farewell before I throw myself into the shower to clean the ash off of me is that I only talk to quickly, and there is only so much time so there isn’t a good chance for a real phone conversation to happen right now. It sounds like things have been eventful at Tomoko’s! Tell her I say hi, wouldya? Also, I’ll find..something to drag home from here as a souvenir, though I can’t promise there is much in terms of ‘interesting crap’ here. Outside of candy. But you already get that. But yes. Have fun at Tomoko’s. Say hi to her for me. Try not to trip over any tails and hurt yourself! Or anybody else. Oh, and I guess there is a hello to the Mistress in here as well. Anyways! Gotta shower. Bye!” A third message arrives timed about 40 minutes from the first one. It is Shehk again.“So I realized I didn’t touch on the trip at all! UHH. I think it’s something we should definitely plan the week before school starts up so we can see who at school is interested, if the school will sanction it, if we need to fundraise a bit, etc etc, stuff like that. That way if we do need to do any gruntwork before next summer, we have several months to do it in. And hopefully not be killed by school field trips in (I’m still not sure how I didn’t end up on the boat trips? I’m completely baffled. Then again, I don’t remember much happening at all while everybody was gone. Selective amnesia?). ANYWAYS. I’m rambling now. I’m going to stop before this turns into a ‘I might as well have tried to call while you weren’t sleeping so you could get my calls’. That and Decebal,” The name is pronounced as ‘Day Say Ball’ by the pricolici“is calling on me now to play the piano for him and then go out hunting with him. I’m not sure I’ll be sleeping tonight. Oh well! All in a day’s work. See you soon, Jun baby!” The phone messages are over for real this time.
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Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2011 12:03 am
A long look in the mirror was what came first. Shehk looked at the vial that now hung around her neck; a final gift from her new parental figure (she had suspicions about it). It was a suspicious thing to have, a silver bullet around one's neck, but she allowed it to have whatever implied significant meaning it was to have before she looked away from it again.
Shehk surveyed the room carefully, giving it a calm once over. She had spent 10 weeks in that room. There was going to be a part of herself that was left there. Forever and eternally left where it was to be trapped forever. She had told herself to not miss it. It was there because she couldn’t have it anymore. But there was so much about Hollow Creek she was going to miss.
For example, she was going to miss that writing desk she had spent so much time slaving over letters at. It certainly wasn’t the most fancy of furniture, especially when it came to what all the vampire actually had inside of his house, even if it was mostly covered in dust, but it had a sort of sentimental meaning to her. Shehk quickly flipped through her pockets to pull out the neatly tied stack of envelopes she had with her, leaving them on top of that desk. She shifted the placement of them several times before she finally let them be. With a final sigh before she turned to give the room one last long survey, taking in everything she had experienced in that room. Though the idea that soon she’d be able to actually sleep at night was very novel to Shehk, who grinned, though there was some sadness to it all.
The Pricolici looked to the repacked suitcase at the doorway, still lined on the inside with yellowing newspaper, though these ones were fresher than the previous set had been, then down at the two celestial wolves who were looking at her anxiously, tails wagging slightly. Shehk flashed them both a grin, crouching down to stroke both of their heads. They were like a tiny piece of sanity that she had brought with her, and had managed to keep through a lot of trial and error.
“Things are going to be okay,” she said, patting both on the head. “We’ll be OK,” she grinned. She placed one hand on her hip and flipped her ponytail over her shoulder to keep it out of her way, “We can’t keep moping around here forever, Hati, Skoll.” The two canines seemed receptive of her positivity as she picked up her suitcase, gave the room another careful look to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything before she exited the room with a sort of purposeful gaunt, closing the door behind her with a very careful click.
On the other side of the door was Marianne, who gave the pricolici a long look, crossing her arms. Shehk could feel the Cleaner giving her a long look of evalutation underneath all of that massive hair of hers (who was her dad, Cousin It?).
“I won’t be missing you be gone, you know.” She said after a long moment, licking between her teeth before she spoke. Shehk just grinned at the Cleaner, not phased by this news in the least. “Well. I won’t be missing you when I’m gone either, Marianne. I won’t miss not sleeping at night, I won’t miss you trying to eat me and my dogs. I certainly won’t miss you pulling on my tail and ears, or trying to steal every meal I had in this house.” She tapped her chin as she ‘came up’ with each of the things she wasn’t going to miss about staying in that room when it involved Marianne.
She shrugged after a moment. “You’re just not worth missing.” The pricolici snarked back. There was a long silence as the two stared each other down, before the Cleaner just grinned back at her and the pair took a moment to hug, much closer than the bickering between them implied at all. Marianne pat Shehk on the back. “I don’t want to see you moping around here next summer.”
Shehk shrugged and dismissed the notion of it easily.
“Well, if all of my efforts turn out to repeat this year, I should just swallow my pride and deem that clearly I have poor taste in men.” Shehk laughed. “If it happens two years in a row, I’ll just ask Decebal to marry me and see what happens.” The pricolici thought nothing of it, despite the kiss that had happened nearly 6 weeks previously, but as she went down the stairs, the Cleaner’s mouth contorted into a look that could have been bothered by the pricolici’s suggestion; as though she knew something Shehk would never know. However, she left it at that, saying nothing, and followed the younger girl down the stairs without much of a thought about it. Shehk moved quickly to keep her tail from being grabbed, giggling the entire time.
Decebal was sitting at the table when Shehk entered the kitchen (sometimes her break had felt like it consisted of Pineapple-décor-Kitchen → Bedroom → Bathroom → Outside -→ Lounge in that house. She hadn’t even explored half of it!). Shehk offered him a wave and a ‘Good morning!’ as she grabbed a plate of food and immediately scooted it to one side of the table before she sat down with it. Breakfast didn’t feel any different than it normally was; protect food from Marianne, some playful banter here and there. She had learned to enjoy the daily routine even if it was really strange in perspective.
“Guess after this it’s back to catching my own meals. Not many rabbits to be found at Amityville...” Shehk chuckled, though a part of her seemed sad that she would return to dining alone. Skoll and Hati walked about underneath the table, putting their heads on people’s knees to pander hopefully for someone to slide them scraps. Decebal looked down at the faces propped on his knees, the pair of dogs keening at him hopefully, before he made a face. There was a long moment of thought before he snuck a few pieces of bacon underneath the table. The canines were overjoyed by the development of shared food. “Well, it wasn’t like you weren’t doing that for a while.” Decebal answered bluntly as he snuck the food to the pair. Shehk sighed. “I guess so- hey, stop that!” She agreed as she slid her plate away from the incoming invasion threat of Marianne’s fork. The monster stuck her tongue out at the other girl, then both laughed a bit.
“Spending the summer here was a lot less horrible than I thought it was going to be, admittedly.” Shehk said as she popped a last bit of toast in her mouth, leaning back on her seat. “I thought if I came out here, everything I saw and my life as I knew it would suddenly not be the same anymore.” She shrugged a bit, before stabbing at some of the bloody mush, that was starting to form on her plate from shuffling food around so much, throwing a piece of it into her mouth as well. Food was food, and Shehk wasn’t the kind to discriminate against it. It all was meant to be in her belly in the end. Shehk; always wooed by being fed.
Well, she discriminated against garlic, but that hadn’t been a problem for her this summer. People normally didn’t eat things that would kill them either, so she was going to solve that problem.
A look around the table made it feel like this was going to be the last time Shehk had a ‘normal’ morning for a long time. She helped with the clean up as she always did, before she looked at the pair of celestial wolves staring intently at her. Hati’s tail tapped against the floor a few times.
Shehk knew that look.
“It is about that time, isn’t it?” she said to the two wolves sadly, before looking to Decebal, offering him a weak smile. “I assume if I leave Precious with you, she’ll find her way back to me on her own?” she inquired. The vampire nodded solemnly, seeming more bothered to see the pricolici leave than even she herself was to see herself leave. Shehk frowned and walked over, throwing her arms around his neck in a tight hug. The vampire wrapped his arms around her to squeeze tightly, burying his face against her shoulder.
Shehk had a lingering feeling that in all truth the vampire was going to miss a part of her that she had already abandoned to the wind completely. The pricolici was able to swallow that thought to prevent a whole new swing of pain from striking her, just pulling away from Decebal and giving him another slightly sad smile.
“I’m going to miss you. You’ll send me more letters, right?” she trailed off, before adding, “Just please don’t make them so long!” she laughed. Decebal smiled again, though he didn’t seem like the hug had reassured him of anything. “Just write me back, and I’ll keep writing to you as long as you’ll have it,” he answered. Shehk laughed. “I hope I don’t get sick of it. I’d hate to do that to you when you’re so good to me.” Decebal’s lips tightened a bit as he pulled Shehk over to hug her again, stroking her hair a bit, his hand seeming to gravitate towards that patch that had grown back in so slowly over the summer. It was gone now, her head as perfect as when he’d sent her off the first time.
“You’re a good kid, Shehk. I can just hope that this second year of school treats you well.” He said when he pulled away from her again, patting one hand on her shoulder.
Shehk smiled a bit.
“I’m confident it will. After what I’ve done out here, there’s nothing out there living or dead that’ll stop me!” she grinned, pumping one fist. The enthusiasm soon dimmed again, however. They still had to handle the one problem at hand;
“I guess…” she sighed. “I should probably get going.”
Decebal frowned, thinking for a moment, before removing his hand, offering it out to her instead.“Let me walk with you part of the way then.” He offered, taking her suitcase from her. Shehk gave him a coyly suspicious look. “Are you doing to steal my stuff again?” she asked, teasingly, though she was actually wondering if her things were going to vanish from it again. The vampire waved one hand dismissively. “If I did that, we’d be stuck with you for another 10 weeks!” he answered. Marianne shuddered in fake horror.
“Quick! Get her on that train!” she jested. Shehk punched the woman in the shoulder. “Yeah, I think we need to get separated as much as possible, don’t we?”
The pair laughed for a moment, but another whine from Hati caused Shehk to look down at her ‘pack’, smiling a bit. “Alright, alright. Let’s go then.” She said, herding her two wolves along with her. Decebal took her suitcase from her, holding it underneath one arm, and offering his other to the pricolici at the door with a debonair smile.
“Shall we, then?” he asked. Shehk grinned and slipped her arm around his. “I think I’d like that.” She said, her tail wagging cautiously. The two departed, Shehk offering a last wave over her shoulder as they left Marianne in charge of the house, plunging into the fog. The fog was tame that day from Shehk’s observations, the creatures mostly still and the visibility not as limited as it had been for several days.
They stopped several times in their walk. First was to let Shehk actually attempt to bottle some of the stuff, as she had promised to do in her letters. Another time to let Shehk say farewell to a few of her woodland friends, such as the Strigoi and a few fogdogs. There was also a stop at the familiar tree-of-woe, the body of the grinder no longer mangled and smashed across the base of it. Shehk shuddered at the vision of when she and Decebal had returned to the tree to check it the day after the incident that had partially marred her face. She was surprised it hadn’t reflected on her humanoid appearance as anything more than a small scar across the bridge of her nose. It was hard to see pale on pale though, and Shehk mostly forgot about it.
However, the trip was, outside of the occasional stop, as uneventful as it could have possibly been. Shehk was grateful for the lack of disaster striking her, but Decebal paused once he got to the edge of the fog and handed the Pricolici back her suitcase. Shehk looked at it, then looked at him, ears drooping. She knew that this meant he wasn’t willing to go any further than that point.
“So…” she started. Looking to the vampire anxiously. This was the furthest she’d ever seen him go from the house. It almost looked as though he was afraid to go into the town, and part of her wondered why that was. She didn’t press for information, however.
Decebal nodded at the beginning of the pricolici’s assumption. “This is where I have to leave you.” He confirmed for her.
Shehk frowned. “But…”
The vampire smoothed Shehk’s hair away from her forehead and kissed her along the seam of staples down her face. He pulled away after a moment and looked at her, his eyes much softer than those clear, but harsh, ones that had greeted her at the beginning of the summer. Those eyes that looked bothered to have even bothered reaching out to her at all.
“You’re a big pricolici. I’m sure you can walk to the train by yourself.” He teased. Shehk puffed her chest out, placing her hands on her hips, but grinning.
“You’re right. I am a big pricolici.” She beamed, feeling a surge of confidence in her chest. She felt like she’d stepped into shoes that had been gifted to her, but were far too big and managed to find a way to make them fit. “Now all I have to do is walk to the train all by myself.” She then paused to prod a finger against Decebal’s chest. The vampire looked at her with a sort of faked quizzical expression. “By the way. I left you some letters at the house. You better catch up with me!” Shehk teased. “Really now?” Decebal grinned at her. “Then it looks like I have some chores to do when I get home then.” He joked back.
There was an odd silence, before the pair hugged again. A long hug, as though really neither wanted her to go. Shehk had found herself enjoying her break more than she’d ever expected she would, but she knew that she couldn’t make her break last forever. She would gain nothing out of it, and what she really wanted out of life was out there in the world beyond Shady Hollow and Hollow Creek.
“I guess….I better go.” Shehk said, sighing.
Decebal patted her shoulder firmly, giving her a long look.
“Better walk quickly if you don’t want to miss your train, then.”
The silence lingered between the two, before Shehk hugged the vampire one last time. “I’ll miss you,” she whispered. Decebal smiled that sad smile again, but said nothing, just pulling away from her, and then pushing her along with one hand.
“I always miss you. Now go. Flourish.” He said, waving to Shehk’s retreating form. He sighed once and then turned to vanish back into the fog.
Shehk paused only once to look back, before she took a deep breath, turned, and marched on, two celestial wolves on her tail.
Shehk walked on.
She was ready.
From the House at Hollow Creek: End
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