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Cry Me a Murder - Part 8.

Otherkin, My Demonheart.

I left Professor Altschuler in the solitary company of his favorite vodka and left the city, driving east towards the convent of Iuna's sisters. The nuns were sworn to protect the innocent and the weak, and if nurse Richards had fled the hotel along with Chris, the convent was the most obvious place to hide him. I had a one hour drive ahead of me through the Ra'gassan desert, and four hours left of daylight. There isn't much to see in the eastern part of the country apart from the desert, sandstone mountains, and nuns. I was alone on the road, and the monotony of passing sand-dunes and sagebrush soon made my mind wander.

The young Chris Tell was both innocent and vulnerable, but he was also dangerous; so dangerous that Mr. Tejon wanted him dead. He had tried to warn me against Chris, but I did not understand the gravity of his concerns. To me, Chris was just a boy who cried when he got hurt, and hurt him they did; his father beat him to a pulp, so he could collect tears that dry into rubies. Rubies so valuable to the dark underbelly of society, that mobsters fought over them in an orgy of violence. But Jack Tell made the fortune he so desperately desired with no regard to his own flesh and blood, or anyone else's. Tell's heart had petrified into rock; dry, hard and inhumane. But that didn't make Chris any less dangerous or less innocent; the forces that made his tears so special flowed from the wrong side of the abyss. The more his father made him cry, the more he siphoned power until the abyss claimed something back to settle the balance. Mr. Tejon tried to warn me, but he didn't understand the mechanics of the abyss. Neither do I, but I'm connected to it and just as dangerous as Chris. Humans don't interest me when I shift, and their lives have little value to me. The more I shift, the more the abyss tugs at me and beckons me to come home. When the MI-16 sent a hitman after me [in: a Fall From Grace], I shifted so hard I got caught in limbo between the two worlds and it took all my strength to return to human form. I was strong, powerful and comfortable in my demon form, but staying like this was an impossible act; I couldn't walk the streets without drawing attention, but returning to the abyss with its multidimensional, mile-long creatures was a terrifying experience I didn't want to go through again.

I wondered if Slater had the same problems. He was the first person to welcome me when I landed in Ra'gasso; he bought me beer and offered me his friendship, because he recognized my true nature the moment we met. In me, he had found an ally, someone like himself, someone with whom he could share his secret.

When Slater discovered Mr. Tejon's failed attempt at killing Chris, he flew into a rage and shifted into demon form. He dragged Tejon into the view of the CCTV camera and butchered the old man for me to see. Maybe as a token of gratitude, or just to let me know I wasn't alone. Tejon pleaded for his life, explaining how dangerous Chris' powers could be in the wrong hands, but Slater wouldn't listen. He was a murderer, just like me.

_ _

Or was I?

I had been drugged the night of agent Phelps' murder and my memory was patchy. I remembered flashes of shifting, the scent of blood and the frantic panting of Phelps, his breathless gasps of "oh God, oh Jesus!" as he fled from me.

_ _

Something is wrong.

_ _

His human eyes and nose were useless in the dark and he stumbled through the woods, clumsy and out of shape from too much desk-work, from too much good food and soft hotel beds. To my ears, his dying screams were like works of Monteverdi in the key of blood, the taste of human flesh was like fine wine when I tore into his throat.

But there are no forests anywhere near the hotel!

When I left his convulsing corpse, his head dangled only by strands of skin and sinew. He stared at me with eyes that bulged, his tongue lolled from a mouth half open.

_ _

Wait! He was never decapitated. His corpse was a mess, but none of these wounds were for real.

I pulled the van over and rested my head on the steering wheel, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Damn my memory! How much was real, and how much was false memory? Chris had seen the murder from his window, but he didn't recognize the killer. All he had seen was a large feline tearing into the agent. "You're a cat," he noted when I spoke to him. With both of us having one foot in the abyss, he recognized my true nature fast, but with little understanding of it.

I was about to drive on, when something metallic glinted in the sun, half a mile up the road. It was a stationary object about the size of a van parked by the roadside. I knew something was wrong so I drove the last half mile in first gear, never exceeding 10MPH. I recognized Nurse Richard's van from quarter of a mile away. The rear doors were open and strangely out of shape, so I pulled over and walked the last hundred feet to the car, preparing myself for what I'd find. Judging by the skid-marks, Richards had been in a hurry to get to the convent when something with claws made her slam the brakes and bring her escape to a sudden stop, a lousy ten miles from the convent. The rear doors had been ripped open and bent like a cheap tin of tuna. Chris' wheelchair was still in the back and fastened with leather straps so it wouldn't slide all over the place, but it was empty.

The engine was still warm, hissing and making ticking noises under the late afternoon sun. The desert was strangely quiet, as if an ungodly hand had put a glass bell over the place to seclude it from the rest of the world. Living in the city, I'm used to having noise around me at all times. Even when things quiet down after midnight, I still have voices in my head to keep me company, but the silence of the desert was so imposing, even the crickets held their legs, too scared of attracting attention to themselves.

The door on the driver's side was half open, and I held my breath as I looked inside. The corpse of Richards was sitting half upright, held in place by her safety belt like a string puppet made out of meat. She was dead and with most of her entrails in her lap. Blood poured from the gaping wound in her abdomen where she had been slashed open by the single swipe of a clawed paw. Her arms hung limply down her side, palms facing up. Her eyes, once lively and blue were glazing over and looking to the sky. Maybe she died, waiting for the blessing of Iuna, but not even the matron saint of protection could save her from the fury of a demon. Her blood was fresh and sticky, and the scent told me death had set in no more than twenty minutes ago. He was close, so close.

I kicked a pile of refuse I thought was a bundle of soiled rags, when I recognized the lettering "Keep Calm and Hang Ten" on Slater's abandoned T-shirt. A pale green bundle of rags next to it were the remains of Slater's swimming trunks. He had stripped off his clothes before shifting into demon-form. I'd made the mistake of keeping my clothes on the first few times I shifted. The shirt is the first thing that tears, but it's painful when you grow too large for your jeans and your shoes, and it costs you a new pair every time you forget. That's why he arrived barefooted, when meeting with Tell and with Professor Altschuler; he knew he would shift before the visit was over. I expected him to lay low, in demon or human form to avoid attracting attention with Chris and Darleen in tow, naked and with the blood of an innocent all over his paws. Looking at the map, Slater's whereabouts were obvious: he was hiding in the Kisanti excavation site.

---

Unlike Jack Tell, Slater wasn't driven by greed, but by a strange obsession with the mythical tribe of the Kisanti. He was alone, both in his beliefs and in his existence, and he was desperate to find someone to confide in. As a last resort, he drove Dr. Altschuler into alcoholism and early retirement to prove his point. Yet he had not shared his terrible secret with anyone, not even Darleen or Chris Tell. Nurse Richards had died protecting the boy, but not from his father or the criminals. All the time she had protected him from Slater.

---

The gate to the excavation site was open, as if I was an expected visitor. I took the flashlight from the van's glove compartment and descended the short flight of stairs to the main chamber of the Kisanti cave. Slater stood in the centre of the room string into a purplish-black rift of swirling clouds that floated mid-air. Its shape was elongated like a two-foot ethereal vagina, pulsating and bleeding wispy flames of darkness. Slater was in his human form but naked, dirty and bloodied. He had painted his face with blood from nurse Richards, all crimson dots and wavy lines across his forehead and cheeks that made him look like some deranged chief on the warpath. All he needed was a damn feather in his hair. Chris sat on a folding chair ten feet away, and I could tell from the layer of crystalline debris on his clothes he'd been crying. At first I thought they were alone when I noticed a slight movement in the dark. Darleen sat propped up against the wall, with her hands and feet tied up with a length of thick rope, blue like the mascara that now ran down her cheeks. Either they got turned on by some seriously kinky shit, or Slater had turned on her.

"Hey, that's no way to treat a lady." My voice echoed softly off the painted walls. Slater took a step back from the black void. "You're carrying a flashlight," he noted quietly. "If you had stayed true to your inner self, your nose and ears would have led the way."

I moved closer to Slater. Panting and trembling, with blood-shot eyes and his member half erect from excitement, Slater was a long way from the laid back surfer who bought me a beer on beach.

"My inner self scares away the few friends I have," I replied. "I don't go demon on them."

"Speaking of making new friends," asked Slater. "Did you kill her yet?" His voice was soft and friendly, even welcoming.

"Kill whom? The nurse?"

Slater laughed. "Agent Dakota of course." He patted my shoulder, leaving a smear of gore on my cheap T-shirt. "Word gets around when a government helicopter lands in front of a tourist hotel."

"The killings stop here," I said. "I've killed more MI-16 agents than either of us wants to know. "There will be no more tears tonight."

Slater snorted. "The MI-16 are enemies. You've grown soft among humans."

"We're both human," I replied, "and I'm not the only one here with a soft spot." I nodded to Darleen, motioning I was going to untie her. "Go ahead," said Slater. "She won't run." Darleen massaged her wrists where the rope had left dark imprints. "Bastard," she cursed, but she wasn't talking to me.

"You did a good job," I said. "The criminal underworld is at each other's throat over industrial rubies, and you used Darleen to get close to Jack Tell."

"And you're a better detective than they give your credit for," said Slater, chuckling. His plan had worked, and he was quietly proud, almost satisfied that I had figured it out, because we both knew I could prove nothing. No judge or jury in the world would believe in murder by transformation.

"Tell, Phelps, Dakota; all fully human," growled Slater. "Under-evolved, single-cell creatures, they are at the bottom of the universal food chain."

Darleen flinched at this sudden outburst and a frown formed around her eyes. She couldn't make out if Slater was joking, but I knew his rage all too well. It was the rage of someone who had shifted one time too many, someone who had tasted the sweetness of other-human power, someone who had felt human flesh surrender to his claws, and had enjoyed it.

"Tell him it isn't true," begged Darleen. "Tell him you love Chris and me."

"He can't," I said, "because he never loved you or your son. When you healed his shark bite, he believed you drained power from the abyss, so he supported you in healing because he needed you to unsettle the balance. But when he met Chris, he found a much more powerful source to help him crack open the abyss."

Darleen fell silent and stared at Slater with a mixture of disbelief and repulsion.

"You're lying," she screamed at me. "Slater is a good man; he takes care of me and Chris. Why are you doing this to us?"

Darleen rubbed the rope burns on her wrists to make the marks go away. All she wanted was help to wrestle her son out of Tell's claws, so when the paramedics carried the good-looking but shark-bitten slater into the hospital she healed him and nursed him in more than one way, hoping he might be the one to team up with. She took care of every wound, she even removed his scars until she was too exhausted to finish her degree. Yet she was afraid of his powers, afraid of what he might do if he lost control, so she spent her savings on hiring Mr. Tejon to negotiate with Tell. But Tell was too damn stubborn and too damn greedy for even the talented Tejon to convince. On the night of Tell's death, Slater offered to give it a go, to have a friendly chat with the estranged father. He never wanted Tell dead, because he needed his help with Chris. Tell knew how to hurt the boy just enough to make him weep, and Slater wanted to learn that trick. But Tell didn't want to play along, so Slater shifted into demon to scare him, just like he did with Dr. Altschuler. But Tell had two tricks up his sleeve: a happy trigger finger and a bad ticker, and both came into play that night. He shot Slater at point blank before the transformation was complete and would have killed him if Darleen hadn't shown up. Then Tell's heart gave up.

"Tell was a fool," sneered Slater. "He believed he could inflict pain by hitting the boy. But Chris grew used to the abuse and cried less with every beating." Slater took a handful of rubies from his pocket and fed them into the rift. The flames grew higher, licking the perimeters of the rift like blackened tongues. The opening pulsated and expanded a foot in height.

"But emotional pain," continued Slater and waved his pistol at Darleen. "Emotional pain never grows old."

"I believed in you," cried Darleen. "You told me how much you were in love."

"Oh, I'm in love alright," said Slater. "That wasn't bullshit; but I'm in love with MY people - the Kisanti. Don't you see? Carter and I are all that's left of the Kisanti; the proud cat-people of Ra'gasso. They made a trade two thousand years ago -the ultimate sacrifice of feeding their own tribe into the abyss to close the rift. They paved the way for the likes of you and me by trapping themselves, and now is the time to set them free."

"And the boy?"

"He's the catalyst for opening the portal. His tears suck so much energy from the other side, it opens the rift." Chris let out a quiet sob. A single tear of blood rolled down his face and landed in his lap with a crystalline tinkle. The response was immediate, pink, boneless appendages appeared out of the rift like uncooked sausage links. They stretched out, darting side to side and trying to locate the single ruby. Darleen had proven useless to Slater because she drained energy from herself, but Chris sucked energy from the abyss. When Tell beat him in room 203, his tears caused a rift to appear and tentacles to shoot out making a grab for Catalina.

"I really tried," said Slater. "I offered Tell to keep the boy and the rubies if he would only lend me Chris for a single day or two."

"But he believed you'd double cross him so he refused, and you decided to prove it to him. It was Tell who screamed out in terror when he saw you changing into demon form, and then he shot you. Darleen arrived before Fernando and me because we were busy in room 203, so she had plenty of time to let herself in. When she found you wounded and dying, she used her powers to heal you once more. When she collapsed from exhaustion, you carried her back to your room, leaving naked footprints outside the window."

Slater grinned and held out his hands. "Nice work, Sherlock. Now, what are you gonna do? Arrest me for being an otherkin, like yourself?"

"If I had the proof, I'd arrest you for killing Agent Phelps," I said. "But WHY? His investigations died with Jack Tell?"

"I did it to save YOU, dumbass!" Slater sounded almost hurt. "Don't you understand, we're two of a kind?"

"Killing Phelps didn't exactly save me," I objected. "It put me on the MI-16 kill-list."

"You are already on that kill list, and your killer was no one else than the friendly agent Phelps. When he called your phone and lured you outside to drool all over the moonlit pond, he poisoned your beer. Remember how Phelps stole your bourbon? He knew you wouldn't need it back."

"You're lying!" I cried. "We're making peace between our kind and the MI-16."

Slater shook his head as if losing the final vestiges of hope in me. "If you didn't spend all your time pretending to be human, you would have smelled that poison fifty feet away. But you've grown soft among humans."

"I...I think I shifted while I was drugged."

"Drugged?" Slater laughed out loud, "You were poisoned. The MI-16 didn't order Phelps to get you high; they want you dead. You only beat the poison by shifting into your demon form while you were out cold."

"You killed Phelps while I was drugged out?"

"I showed him how we Kisanti stick together: you mess with one of us, you mess with us all. "

"We're not Kisanti," I shouted. "We never were. The animal heads in that mural painting were costumes -a sales pitch. Underneath those costumes they were ordinary men, just like..." Then I hesitated.

"You were going to say 'Like you and I', right?"

I bit my lip. Slater was right, I was trying to pretend we were all ordinary people, that the abyss was a surreal nightmare, that our world wasn't rubbing shoulders with another, frightening reality.

"You are for real," he said soothingly. "I'm for real and so are our people, and right now they're stuck in there. Two thousand years of exile is the reward they got for sacrificing themselves."

In that moment, my conviction faltered. I didn't know where I belonged and I wanted to go home -wherever that was. "The lost library of Tamaria?" I stuttered. My mind was spinning.

"Does this look like a library to you!" sneered Slater. "This is a wormhole to the abyss. Every two thousand years, the orbit of our world and the world we call the abyss overlap. The fabric between them grows so thin, it tears open at the slightest imbalance. Living things go in and living things come out. Right now is our chance to let our people back into the world."

"It's not the only thing you'll let loose," I said. "There are monsters in there, nameless creatures of tentacles and fangs. Monsters that cause havoc and insanity."

Slater shrugged. "Behemoth? Leviathan? Satan? They've been here before. It's time to let the humans deal with them for once."

With each word, Slater's voice grew deeper and less human as he gradually shifted into his other form. His skull changed, grew feline and sprouted short horns, his brown eyes turned bright yellow, his arms extended into long clawed appendages that almost reached the ground, his entire body grew a thick layer of light brown fur.

"Look at me!" Slaters voice had dropped by almost an octave and sounded like a very large cat snoring. "Do I look familiar to you?" I didn't reply. Seeing slater in this shape was like looking into a mirror, and now I knew what the MI-16 agents had seen the second before I tore into them and I understood the terror I'd seen in their eyes during those final moments.

"Just let the boy go," I pleaded.

"The boy?" Asked Slater. "You really care about him."

"He's taken enough abuse. From his father and now from you.

"Then, take off your clothes" said Slater, baring his fangs in a wide smile.

"My clothes?"

"I want you to change into Kisanti form with me," growled Slater. "Together we will draw so much energy, the walls crumble and our people can re-join the world."

"You're insane!" I cried, "-and I should know, I have a diagnosis."

"-and you're a traitor to your people," shouted Slater. "And you're a liar to your own self."

"I'm not Kisanti, and neither are you. The Kisanti was a tribe of peaceful tradesmen, but you and I are bastard offspring of abyss and Earth, creatures that hate everything human."

"Then shift," snarled Slater and pointed his shotgun at Darleen. "Shift or the human gets it."

---

With Slater's change, the rift expanded until it reached the ceiling. The tongues of black and purple flames surrounding the blackness hissed and breathed fumes of acrid gas that smelled of sulphur and rotten onions. The flames materialized into short, solid tentacles that probed the air. Slater bent so far forward, his head almost touched the rift, and shouted into the abyss "Come my friends! We're here to take you home." Hundreds of pink, slug-like creatures poked out from the rift, clinging to its side like boneless fingers.

"I'll give you till the count of THREE!" he sneered. "Then the broad gets it."

I looked to Chris who was quietly weeping blood into his bowl. What was I to do?

"THREE!"

"Please... don't" whispered Chris. This was the second time I'd heard him speak, buth this time his voice was clear and determined, like someone waking up from a year-long slumber.

"TWO!"

Don't do what? I wondered, but the boy went quiet once again. Don't change, or don't shoot my mother? I sighed, this was of no use.

"ONE!"

With a howl of pain and rage, Chris lunged forward. He threw the crystalline contents of his clay-bowl at Slater where the sharp rubies dug into his fur and clung to his face. Slater clawed at his eyes sweeping away the crimson gems that swarmed around him like angry bees. He screamed and staggered around, blindly firing his pistol. "I'll KILL you!" he screamed while the bullets ricocheted off the walls and whirred past our ears. Darleen cried out in pain and clutched her chest, where a stray bullet had found a home. Chris couldn't keep himself upright and he had tumbled to the floor, looking at me. There was a determined look in his eyes I hadn't seen before. "Your move!" he seemed to say.

"Son of a BITCH!" I shouted above the howling noise coming from the rift. "Let's get this over with, motherfucker." I took off my shirt and my trousers so they wouldn't tear, and allowed myself to shift. It was easy to slip into my demon form; I had done it so many times before, it had become second nature. Changing back -now THAT was a problem I'd have to deal with later.

With my shift, the rift to the void expanded to the size of a household window; a jet black membrane surrounded by wisps of daylight blue shifting into purple as it was sucked into the abyss. The white fingers of hundreds of small tentacles probed the perimeter like maggots burrowing into a ripe carcass, bulges rose from the blackness like shark fins protruding from the sea. The other side was about to burst through.

"I kneeew you would see the light, brother!" giggled Slater when he saw me shifting. He was giddy from the anticipation of breaking the doorway wide open and the excitement made him sport an erection like a yardstick.

"Hang on," I said. If I could drain energy from the abyss to save Irene, I could to the same to heal Darleen. I knelt before her and let the energy flow through me and into her wound. But the flow was too damn slow and it felt like an impotent trickle of light dripping from my clawed fingertips. Healing Darleen would take hours, much more time than we had. In that very moment, the rift emitted a terrible tearing sound when the fabric separating our world from the abyss tore wide open. Tentacles, ten feet in length burst out of the void, probing for prey. I charged forward and cannonballed my full weight into Slater. If his physique was better than mine in our human form, he was even more impressive in his demon form, and pummelling into him was like crashing into a tree. Surprised, he took one unsteady step back.

"Hey dude, what the..." he said, staring at me in confusion. Two tentacles, the width of a grown man's leg wrapped themselves around his midriff and started tugging at him. "You double-crossing motherfu..." he cursed, before two new tentacles shot out from the dark and caught his arms.

"No!" he screamed. "Don't take ME, take HIM... He's a traitor." He lifted an arm as far as the tentacles would allow him and pointed at me, but the creatures slithered around him, mindlessly and embracing him with blind arms, like an otherworldly octopus, probing, sensing and licking the rubies from his fur. Slater struggled, writhed and flailed his arms, but despite his strength he soon grew tired, and his flailings ceased.

"Welcome me, my Kisanti brothers!" he shouted. "I'll join you now..." He gave up all resistance and simply leaned back, allowing the tentacles to drag him into the rift. He locked eyes with me and for a moment I felt like a traitor to my own kind. We never broke eye contact until he disappeared from view and into the howling blackness of the void, with a faint sigh that sounded like "... I hope."

Darleen knelt by Chris who wrapped his arms around his mother. They were terrified of Slater, and of me. "Humans!" I growled, my voice sounding like a rolling avalanche of rocks. I loathed their weakness and sense of self-importance. When their type climbed onto land on misshapen fins, my own kind had been around for millions of years, and yet the humans thought themselves superior.

Chris struggled to get on his feet, this time without help and he leaned heavily against the stone wall. We watched in silence as the rift closed in on itself and vanished with a soft sigh. Then everything was quiet except quiet sobbing of a young boy and Darleen's labored breathing.

"Run!" I bellowed. "Go home." I stormed up the stone stairwell and into the night. It took me hours to shift back, while the mountains echoed from my howls of rage.

---

"Your new friends at MI-16 sent us these." Chief inspector Quinn poured the contents of a sealed envelope onto the table. It contained a small handful of dark gray kernels.

"Some kind of seed?"

"They say it's rye from the fields behind the hotel. It's contaminated with ergot."

"That's some kind of mold, right?"

"Ergot is how they make LSD. It's a kind of poison that makes you hallucinate and also causes pain and convulsions, like the ones Darleen described."

"And we've all been eating rye rolls for breakfast and dinner every day?"

"The boffins at MI-16 say you guys have been living a week-long acid trip after you ate contaminated rye."

"-so Slater was not a demonic monster from hell?"

"Do you really believe the MI-16 would write something like that in a report to the ministry of defence?"

The blackened kernels crumbled between my fingers like cane sugar, leaving a trail of dust on Quinn's mahogany desk. Maybe they were right, maybe we'd all been going through the mother of all acid trips for a week and going berserk? At least we hadn't been staring into the sun. I made a mental note to myself to read up on my Timothy Leary and ask my dad if I could have his collection of _Grateful Dead_records.

"Acid trip, huh?"

"That's what they say." Inspector Quinn leaned back in his chair and lit his pipe, waiting for me to make my own conclusion.

"What do you believe?" I asked.

"I believe there are two letters waiting for you." Quinn reached into his desk drawer and produced two envelopes. The first was from Fernando.

"I hope it's not a ruby," I grumbled while I tore into the envelope. But it wasn't a gem, it was something much better. Inside was a photo of Fernando standing in front of his hotel, next to Miguel, Catalina and Darleen, their new employee. She supported her son, who stood on his own two legs. They looked very happy.

The other envelope had Apex Curtains listed as the sender. If I was still on the MI-16 kill-list, the letter was certain to contain a bomb, or maybe a needle laced with ricin. What if it was poison? Paranoid images of envelopes spilling toxic powder of anthrax into my lap flashed across my mind and I hesitated. I gave the envelope to Quinn.

"You have the better nose of the two of us." Quinn smiled and winked at me.

"It's ok," he said. "You don't need a werewolf to tell you the contents are safe."

The envelope contained a single printed sheet with a database record:

Wolf, Carter

Age: 26

Sex: male.

Occupation: Musician

Medical status: Healthy.

Standing: 2, favorable.

Signed

Evelyn Dakota

Quinn laughed when he saw the startled expression on my face. "Take it any way you want," he grinned. "But I believe you've made quite an impression on the guys from MI-16."

"Can... can you do me one last favor before we close the case?" I asked.

"You're going to ask me to shift in front of you, aren't you?"

I nodded at Quinn. "I've got to know, man."

Quinn thought about my request for a while, smoking his pipe and looking at my hands crushing each kernel of moldy rye into dust.

"Alright," he said, winking at me. "I guess you've earned that much." He grabbed his car keys. "But not down here at the precinct." We rose, and I followed my friend to the police carpool. Together we began the long drive towards the deep forests of Farvale.

THE END