Near the Woods; a Supernatural Immortal Legacy of the Werewolf (Jinro no Isan)

弱肉強食 (jaku niku kyō shoku) - The weak are meat; the strong eat.

It has been said that there are those of the otherworldly kind. When you look out into the darkness of the night, there are eyes looking back at you. Though we don't know who they are or where they came from, they walk among us. And yet we are unaware unless they choose to make themselves known. And when they seek those of us who are human; we join their ranks, not the other way around. Welcome to the night. Welcome to Midnight Falls

Prologue (Part 1)

God knows how it happened, but it wasn't something that either of us were expecting. River, coming home from a grocery run had encountered a big black wolf that had attacked her. She came away with a rather nasty bite. After I had finished climbing the ceiling, she said that there was something otherworldly about it...that something just didn't sit right, but I wasn't paying much attention to her description of the wolf. I just wanted to make sure that the wolf wasn't rabid so I was trying to hustle her into the car as with rabies, time was of the essence. So I took her down to the hospital in in Sunset Valley and made sure that there was nothing circulating around in that bite wound. The rabies virus, once it takes hold, y'know, onset of symptoms, is pretty much incurable and you end up dying a painful death. That's the last thing I wanted to have happen to my wife, so it was off to see the doc and get that wound cleaned out and antibiotics administered.

According to the doctor, the bite looked worse than it really was; He didn't see any viruses that he recognized...so his viewpoint was that all was clear. He just gave River some antibiotics to make sure that there was no infection and told me to call him back in 72 hours. It turned out that we didn't have that long. Because the night of the full-moon was upon us in Sunset Valley and it turned out that the bite wasn't from a regular wolf.

River had said that the wolf had looked at her with a keenly intelligent gaze; as if aware of what it was about to do. Before it leapt at her, she thought she could see a calculating of its odds of success. Well, against an unarmed woman who was practically defenseless. Yeah, I'd say the odds were clearly one hundred percent in it's favour.

And despite the brutality of the attack, there was actually only one bite.

The general restraint of said attack spoke of an intelligent mind behind the wolf-in-question. A regular wolf attack usually ended with a person's throat ripped out, bleeding out on the ground. That scenario didn't play out at least as to what I was thinking.

There's something funny about that attack...hon..." River raised an eyebrow at my statement. "Not haha funny, sweetie, but that something just doesn't add up here. You say it leapt at you practically shoulder height and brought you to the ground. In all that snapping of its jaws...that it never once brought its fangs close to your throat?"

"There were a couple times that it came close, but the wolf seemed to pull away at the last second, almost as if it knew that it didn't want to rip my throat out." That set off warning bells in my mind. Now I'm not one for superstitions, but this just didn't add up in any case. Why would a wolf be wandering the streets of Sunset Valley? Why the hell would it jump my wife and then bite her only once? Why in the hell did it attack her in the first place. And if the wolf was that intelligent...could it be masking the intelligence of a man? I examined the wounds as I changed the dressings on her arm. Yup, those were wolf fangs all right. There was nothing human about those fang marks that punctured her skin. A cold sense of fear came rushing down my spine.

River, noticing my change in mood, asked me if I was alright. "Honey, I don't like the looks of this..." I said, "We're going to have to monitor your condition very carefully over the next few days." And I was going to read up some more books on the supernatural because if my gut hunch was correct, we were going to have to flee. Humankind didn't like living with the supernatural close by and this was not a haven or sanctuary. Oh sure, I was human. But she was my wife...my spouse...whom just nine months earlier, we stood at the altar exchanging vows of "forever and always". I take my vows seriously and I wasn't about to abandon her just because of something that I suspected. We were in this together; to the bitter end.

"Honey, you're scaring me..." River said, shivering...and I pulled her into my arms holding her tightly.

"I'm just concerned...sweetie. I love you and I am worried...for you." I told her, hoping that she understood that I wasn't trying to spook her just for the sake of it. That wasn't my intent. But if there was something going on in terms of that wolf attack, we needed to get to the bottom of it for our safety and for those around us. I was going to take these next couple of days to do some reading and get some information on what this could be.

But of course, young minds work fast. We ended up not having those couple of days. Sandi put two and two together far more rapidly than I could, when River started having balance issues and stumbling. and she fell to her knees outside the next evening.

I got her settled as she was rather agitated and advised her to lay down while I called the doctor to find out what I could do. From what I had read, lycanthropy, which was what I had suspected mimicked the symptoms of rabies quite closely. But the doctor had told us that the rabies virus was not present in River's body. Could it have been latent? The doctor told me no, that there was likely something else. The concern in his voice caused my fear to skyrocket when he told me, "I used to work in Moonlight Falls treating bite victims. And this is something far more serious, Mr. Chikamori. Your wife is starting to exhibit the signs of a lycanthrope." If I had eaten, I probably would have had to throw up...since my stomach was doing the rough approximation of the tarantella dance. His next sentence shot my fear level through the roof, "If you love your wife, Mr. Chikamori, get her to sanctuary. There is no place for her around us humans." How was I going to break this to River?

River started showing a prediliction for raw meat the very next day, which unfortunately, Sandi managed to catch a glimpse of. The ramifications of that were going to be far-reaching though we didn't know that at the time.

Fear makes people devolve into their most base selves. And this situation was no exception to the rule. When confronted by this news, River's mother was not happy. And I didn't realize just what she was about to do. It was only when the screaming and yelling started that I realized just how far Fiona was about to go.

As it turned out, she had confronted River while she was eating and when River told her that she had to use the washroom, Fiona had followed her and started in on her there.

"You dare to bring that contamination into my house?!" Fiona screamed at her. "There's a child in this house...and god knows what you are you didn't even bother to tell me that you had been bitten by a wolf; a cursed wolf at that? Just what am I going to tell my co-workers" Fiona shouted at River. "...that...I'm the mother to a vicious animal?" River's anger was growing to the point of no-return and she recoiled at the verbal slap in the face.

"Well, mother dearest..." River hissed, "You don't want to go there...do you?" Her voice bottomed out into a savage growl. "Do you really want to see what I've become?" Her eyes went feral as she transformed herself into a beast, her fangs dripping with saliva; a werewolf in every sense of the word.

Fiona's eyes went wide; petrified with fear, she let go of her bladder causing a very wet puddle on the floor. And nearly passed out.

As Fiona backed up out of her daughter's reach, River spat out, her voice savage, betrayed by rejection and full of wrath; "Do you truly understand what it is that you are now dealing with, Mother?" her hands clenched, razor sharp claws extending from which were once fingernails; River hissed through her teeth, a snarl in her voice, "It is because of the human in me, that I am not ripping your throat out right now. That is the side that is human of me." as she changed back into her human form so as to not further terrify her mother, she whispered, "That's what is keeping me human..."

Fiona shook her head violently in apparent refusal to understand, "No...whatever you are...River, it clearly is not human. You don't have a place here any more. Leave...and never come back." Fiona stated coldly.

Tears flooded River's eyes and she fled into the garden, crumpling in a heap on the ground curled up, weeping at being so cruelly cast out.

I came upon my beloved crumpled on the ground curled up sobbing as if her heart had been ripped to shreds. To tell you the absolute truth, that was what I would have liked to have done to Fiona at that very moment. I lay down to her level, put the arm that I could put around her and held her tightly. "You should leave me..." River cried, "I'm not human, I'm never going to be human again..."

"No, River..." I objected to her attempts to drive me away, "You remember what I told you nine months ago. I'm not leaving your side."

"but...but what if I hurt you...I can't live with that..." she said, her voice hitching...as another inadvertent sob rent from her abused vocal cords; hoarse from the crying.

"I'm not letting you drive me away..." I answered her...with a smirk... "Look, if it makes you feel any better. If I take the cursed bite from you...then you wouldn't be able to hurt me." I said sounding more confident than I really felt. But I needed to prove to River that I was going to stand by her, no matter what life threw at us. And this was one helluva doozy of a curve-ball that life just fired down the barrel at us.

"You really are stubborn, aren't you?" River said, finally laughing as she choked away the rest of her tears..." as she changed into her base werewolf form. A primal fear loomed in me, but I forced it down to remain stock-still, immobile and tried to look fearless. But I would say that her pouncing on me, with teeth bared and a savage expression on her face nearly had me recoil as I fought the involuntary reaction down.

The moon lit up the night sky and I could see River looking at me with those luminescent green eyes of hers as this primal surge went through my body. I felt this overwhelming urge to howl at the moon and succumbed to it. And we both bayed at the moon as River joined in.

I knew that we would have to get out of town as quickly as possible, so we managed to grab Franz from the kennel in the back yard and make our way to the falls where we built a little hovel that would be our little sanctuary for a while until we made enough to get out of Sunset Valley.