Howl of the Heavens ch.08

     “Well” says Mike, “Jeff, that legend was very interesting, In fact it may be more true than you may think.”

 

     “How so?” asks Jeff

 

       “In the legend it said that the skin walkers, which is what it was describing with the shape shifting sorcerers, danced around in a circle and talked in a chant. I wasn’t looking for skin walkers but their just might still be some out here, I never did focus my search too close to Brooksville.”

 

      “So, you think this black one may be one of these skin walkers?”

 

      “No, its not acting like one and my own encounter definitely proves that it wasn’t one.”

 

      “How so?” asks Nick who had just walked back into the room, “after all this new one isn’t in the legend, and it was sighted much further north than any one I have heard saying they have seen this grey furry woman.”  

 

      “Well” Mike answers, “For starters Skin walkers are almost always brown furred, they never have tails in their half form or at least none that are even as long as their legs, and their muzzles make them look more like a baboon than a wolf or any thing else. And they always travel in groups and talk in a chanting tone. And as for the one I encountered, it was alone, was most definitely black, shadowy black even, it had more of a fox crossed with a wolf’s muzzle, kinda jackal like really, and its tail was very long.”

 

     He hesitates to tell them how it talked or about its magical abilities, that was more than they needed to know after all.

 

      “So the Legendary Versa has herself a boyfriend who likes to hunt.” Nick says jokingly with a chuckle. Mike knows Nick is only joking but he might actually be more right than he knows. Mike remembers it said it’s mate was who he had come to hunt, so it has to be this Versa’s mate that he ran into.

 

      “These creatures are clearly a lot stronger than Skin walkers.” He thinks, he would however have to worry about those after he has dealt with these false gods.

 

    “You won’t be dealing with anyone you miserable worm.” thinks the shadowy stranger outside in the night by the wall. Rhuen had followed Samantha from the moment he sensed an analytical mind thinking about his hunting drive past him on the road; leading him right to the werewolf hunter and his cohort’s home base.

 

      “These order zealots are bad enough” Rhuen thinks as he stands up to his full fourteen foot height and moves into the forest, “but a zoologist has the kind of skills that may just find my mate’s den and possibly expose evidence of our existence to the world, while an order priest is taught to keep secrets.”

 

     “Even though this one seems to be lacking the stealth I have experienced in the past” Rhuen thinks to him self chuckling, “but skin walkers and their kind could be a threat to my offspring in their first few weeks, better take care of this problem right now while I am thinking about it.”

 

     And with this thought Rhuen takes off towards Brooksville with one thought in his mind “death to the skin walkers.”

 

     From a distance Rhuen can smell his prey. In the distance a fire glows and several figures dance around it chanting, “Blood, flesh, and decaying breath” as well as chanting, “fire, fire burning flesh pyre.”

 

     “Great” thinks Rhuen, “English speaking Skin walkers, now I have to deal with bad rhymes. Better make this quick so I don’t get a headache,”

 

     He stops and scratches the under side of his muzzle while twitching his ear, “but than again I might as well have some fun with them.”

 

     With a wave of his arm his body is surrounded by shadows and blue fire as he begins to transform.

 

     In the clearing out side of a small cave the clan of skin walkers are celebrating their latest kills and acquisition. A small girl of maybe six years of age watches while tied up to a wooden post while her parents’ now cooked bodies are eaten by these dirty clothed people she has seen change from the dog monsters that attacked her and her parents while they were jogging out side of town.

 

     One of the dirty men walks up to her and tares off the hood to her pink jacket exposing her brunette pony tail and neatly brushed hair and hisses “if you scream you will die like your parents”. She can only cry as this man examines her face, putting his grimy hands on her chine as he turns her face back and forth.

 

     He hisses to his clan members, “this girl will do, we should start her transformation soon,”

 

     A haggish woman walks up to her saying, “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” hisses the hag. She points at the corpse and says, “That was food, is food. Time to start your change, trust me you will love this.”

 

      She calls to one of the clan who is eating the little girl’s mother’s 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 a figure on the ridge over looking the clearing was about to expose himself 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 and the man hidden in the trees watched as they all surrounded this person who had interrupted them.

 

     Rhuen has entered the clearing in his human form. He can smell the scent of roasting human flesh and one living human child but these do not concern him, for it is the skin walkers he has come for. The whole lot of them surround him as he approaches the fire.

 

      They chant at him, “What have we here, what have we here, a little man a little man who wants to die this night.”

 

     Rhuen nonchalantly says to them, “You are skin walkers correct? The eaters of human and beast flesh?”

 

     “Yes we are, yes we are little human little human and who are you? Come to join the feast? We already have had two, but there is room for one more”

 

     “yes one more” they all hiss as they start to run and dance around him in one large circle.

 

   Rhuen estimates about twenty of them, “twenty, that will do for today.” He thinks to himself.

 

    “Before you die tell us why are you here, you are not dressed for the woods, yes tell us now” hissed the lot of them as if of one mind.

 

      Rhuen simply answers, “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.”

 

      “A werewolf hunter” the hag hisses as she steps back from the rest that are still dancing around him. They start to dance faster. To a normal human they would be a blur.

 

     The hag hisses at Rhuen, “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 in return.

 

    The hag bends over and changes form, an apparently painful change. Rhuen can hear her bones break, her muscles snap, and reform as her face distorts into a hideous muzzle more like a 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,

 

     “Those little things can’t be much better than human ears” Rhuen thinks while watching all this.

 

     She smiles at him with over sized canines that looked like they belonged in a baboon’s mouth.

 

     She hisses at him while the rest change while dancing; apparently more smoothly than the hag, “you see now why it is you who will die.”

 

     As she spoke those words the rest had stopped dancing around Rhuen. Now the twenty of these monsters stand around their apparently defenseless opponent.

 

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

 

    Rhuen holds out his hand and says, “One moment I have been suppressing a laugh this whole time.”

 

    “What?!” yells back the hag as Rhuen 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 Rhuen 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.”

 

      This 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.

 

      Rhuen stopped laughing as a broad smile crossed his face, “Vampire? You are truly pathetic, such large noses and you still can not smell any 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 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?”

 

    Rhuen smiled and said to the circle of skin walkers, “I shall do better than tell you my little snacks I shall show you why YOU SHOULD FEAR ME!!!”

 

     His last four words came out of him as loud as thunder causing them all to step back in surprise. Which was soon followed by terror as Rhuen’s body was enveloped by blue flames and shadows followed by a fourteen foot tall black bipedal canine like creature stepping out of the flames which departed soon after. Rhuen now stood before his terrified would be attackers in his giant imposing form.

 

    Rhuen 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.”

 

    Two of the skin walkers jumped at Rhuen who impaled them both on his right claws with one swipe, spurting their blood over the fire, then shaking them off his claw and onto the ground by his feet with so much force as to cause their bodies to bounce and send sprays of blood in all directions.

 

     The hag jumped back onto the cliff above the cave where they had left the little girl and yelled at her clan members who where moving in a circle around Rhuen, “You fools we must run or at least attack him all at once, did you not hear? He is the mate of the accursed Versa who chased our people from her mountain three hundred years ago; we must not take him likely we must attack all at once my friends!!!”

 

     As the hag jumped towards Rhuen’s head the rest rushed at him from all directions. However to Rhuen it was like slow motion as he moved faster than they could react or any one could see, he grabbed the closest one from midair threw it at his feet and stomped its ribcage flat beneath his right paw sending a spray of blood from its mouth and causing its eye balls to pop out. In this same instance he impaled another two with his left claw, one with his right, and crushed three with a swing of his long tail. He threw down the ones on his claws and in a flash ran forward and with a swing of his leg and tail scooped up six of them into one clump which he then grabbed up with both hands and crushed together and dropped at his feet. The four between him and the hag who he guessed must be the clan leader he dispatched with two quick swipes of each claw slicing them in half at the mid-section in mid air. The hag he stopped and waited for.

 

     Before her eyes the hag was engulfed in a cloud of kicked up dust from the clearing floor. As she jumped into the dust all she saw were many great teeth, and before she could do anything about it Rhuen snapped down his mighty jaws sending sprays of her blood out from each puncture as he ended her with a single bite.

 

    The figure hidden in the trees could only look on as the skin walkers surrounded the man who after a smattering of dialogue with the skin walkers transformed into a creature he knew as a Dire. In a flash the entire clearing was engulfed in dust which put out the fire, it was like a tornado had appeared from no where. When it cleared all the skin walkers where dead; all badly mutilated, a bunch where in 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 send a stream of light blue energy from his claw which wound around the slain skin walkers tying them together and forming a blue rope. Rhuen then picked up this morbid parcel of bodies which transformed back into people wearing coyote skins and 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 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.”

 

     “Alice”

 

    “Okay Alice, 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 King 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. He doubted he was trained enough to know about something like that anyway, in fact he doubted that even Mike knew about Rhuen. In that instance his cell phone rang, it was the higher ups telling him their was something very important going on in the middle east and that he would need to come to the Vatican to discuss it for they didn’t want to discuss it over an open phone line.  

 

    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 and 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.  

 

     Deep in the woods Rhuen was caring his bundle when he had a thought, “Skin walkers alter their biology through magic so tend to not taste like humans but they started out as human and some clans still have that nasty human taste.”

 

     Rhuen sat down his tightly tied bundle and took one of the arms of the now human looking skin walkers and snapped it off at the elbow and sniffed it.

 

    “Smells like raccoon oddly enough” he thought as he popped it into his mouth and like some coinsure of fine foods rolled it around his tongue tasting it and decided.

 

    “Nope not like human at all, in fact it taste kind of like raccoon meat.”

 

    He picked up his bundle and continued on his way thinking, “I am going to have to move my hunting further away from towns. That human male probably thinks I didn’t notice him there and who knows how many people are wandering the woods near the town. If that zoologist puts together the sightings she just might be able to calculate the location of our den and could even take a film crew there or something, yep best to avoid populated areas for awhile at least until I am sure she and that stupid hunter have given up and left.”