Author's Notes: This is an idea that came to me out of the blue when I was listening to the Country song "Old Red". I kind of typed it up hurriedly and forgot about it, but I found it rather recently. Hope you like it!

Disclaimer: I own no Storm Hawks or any element from Nerd Corp's Storm Hawks. *tear*

The Red Blood-Hyde

By WhispertheWolf

I was mighty proud of myself, I have to say. No one could've done what I did, tricking him like that. Not Ravess, not the Dark Ace . . . heck, I don't even think that darn kid Sky Knight could have pulled off what I did.

It all started when I was in the Zartaclan prison.

How'd I get there, you ask. See, I'm not exactly a "follow the line" kind of guy. I never was scared to go out and do things I shouldn't. That was the start of my trouble in the first place. I wasn't always straight with my wife, so I guess it should be no surprise that she went screwing behind my back. I wasn't suspicious of anything. If I had been, perhaps it would have been less of a shock. Well, one day, when I supposed to be out all day but came home early, I caught her with another man. In a fit of rage, I stabbed him.

I know I say that a little too calmly for your comfort, but I might as well come out and say it. I'm still not sure the bastard deserved to die. I probably deserve to die more than he did. But what's done is done, and much as I regret, I can't say I'm torn up over it.

Anyway, much to my luck, it turns out that I'd stuck my pocket knife into a Talon. In Cyclonia, the country that I called home, that was the worst crime to commit . . . besides betraying Master Cyclonis, of course. I was on trial for my life. But I was one lucky son of gun, let me tell you. I had the best lawyer that side of Cyclonia. He was so persuasive that he convinced the judge to spare me and just let me spend the rest of my life on Terra Zartacla.

Now Mr. Moss, for some reason he and I saw eye to eye on many things. He wasn't one to trust and socialize with a prisoner, but two years of good behavior and a couple hundred conversations later and I made the warden my friend. That gives you a lot of power in a prison. None of the gangs would touch me.

Now you get time off to do some community service for the prison or maybe even on some nearby Cyclonian Terras when you act right. The jobs vary a lot. Since I was such good old boy, Mr. Moss gave me one of the easiest jobs of all; I was to take care of his prized blood-hyde trackbeast, Old Red.

See, a humanoid is no good at hunting down criminals unless they can see them. It's the occucrows and the blood-hyde trackbeasts the do all the tracking. Occucrows can spot prey at 1,000 paces away, but they can't do anything. Trackbeasts? They're great at tracking, but they are easily deceived when another target has the same scent and often need a relatively new trail.

But Old Red was a different kind of blood-hyde. See, Red could smell a two-day-old trail and keep it, right through the stinky muck and swamp water. After all, that myth about trackbeasts losing your trail when you cross a river doesn't work. All trackbeasts can plow right through following the smell of your dead skin cells. But none can pick it up quite like Red. He's a tracking machine, nature's escapee detector.

You see, sending someone to Terra Zartacla used to be the worst punishment ever other than death. Yes sir, that prison was once considered inescapable.

That is, before that kid Sky Knight found his way out. I bet you know the one. Name's Aerrow. Only fourteen years old, a couple inches lower than me, leads the unofficial Storm Hawks squadron that keeps succeeding. He's also the only one who's beaten the Dark Ace, but in Cyclonia you can get in real trouble for pointing that out.

This kid not only escaped the inescapable prison, but in doing so distracted Mr. Moss while his squadron freed the other prisoners. Most of them were prisoners of war; rarely are they Cyclonian criminals like myself. The prison was shut down for awhile and Mr. Moss was unemployed. Now mind, he did try to redeem himself against Aerrow but failed in that, too. Luckily for him, our Master can be merciful, and she'd given him a second chance.

Now at first when the prison opened up again, the prisoners shipped there had the confidence that they might escape. If a kid could do it, why not them? After the first escape, Mr. Moss made punishments even crueler and more brutal than any ever heard of. It got even worse when the second one escaped. But the prisoners did not lose heart. A third one escaped. Mr. Moss decided it was time to get a new kind of weapon other than fear of punishment and the outside dangers of the swamp.

By the time I got there, confidence was gone. Since the first three escapes, there'd been five more attempts, all of them failures. Getting out of the prison building is a synch, but you'd be mighty lucky to get past the wild beasts and Widow's Peak Waterfall and the quicksand. But some did it. What was their ruin?

Old Red. Yes sir, that was one special trackbeast I had on my hands.

Now mind, they already had an animal handler, a skittish boy named Hamish. He doesn't like the occucrows (especially when he cleans their cages), he's nervous around the trackbeasts (especially when he feeds them), and he's scared of Old Red (all the time). That's why I got him.

I don't know what Hamish was so scared of. Old Red was quite the beast. He was strong and muscular and smart, and his coat had the most handsome hint of bold red that made him seem superior to his purplish pink brothers. He was as well-trained as any of them—when he respects his handler. He wouldn't hurt a flea unless you told him to or unless he didn't respect you. That whole thing about blood-hydes being "vicious" sounds like a cruel joke when you refer to Old Red. Vicious trackbeasts only happen when you keep them half starved and don't treat them right or when you don't gain their respect. I was sure to give Red everything he needed and more, and I made sure he knew who was boss, and it was all good. We were great buddies.

There is one thing Old Red absolutely hated, though. It wasn't because it did anything to him or that he was born that way; Mr. Moss trained him to hate it. He hated the smell of the Storm Hawks' Sky Knight, Aerrow.

The warden used scraps of the boy's clothes and anything else he had touched while he was there in almost all their training sessions and allowed Old Red to use them as chew toys when they were done. Nothing of the Sky Knight's ever came back in one piece. If he ever came in contact with the kid, he wouldn't come back in one piece either, which is exactly the kind of training Mr. Moss had pushed for. Old Red was so psyched about his hunt for the Sky Knight that he could pick up that boy's day-old scent five miles away. Mr. Moss had made a tracking and killing machine bent on revenge.

After a time of taking care of Red and observing these training sessions, I began to take and keep some of Old Red's "chew toys".

Now one of my jobs was to take Old Red out for his evening run. Mr. Moss preferred I take him outside the gate to really stretch his legs. On one of those nights, I didn't run Red. I tied the poor old boy up to a tree. Then I went around with Red's chew toys, hiding them everywhere I could think of, all of them on the opposite end of the Terra from the prison. When I got back to Red, the old boy was straining at his lead to go after the hidden items, but I took him back inside.

The next night, I made my getaway.

I watched the light of Mr. Moss's lantern in the distance as I hid and heard the crack of his whip. "Come on out, son," I heard him say. "You don't wanna let your own friend betray you, do ya? I'm 'bout to send Ole Red on you. Go ahead, run. We'll have ya treed by mornin'."

"Not this time 'round, warden," I whispered to myself. "It ain't gonna happen this time."

I smiled when I heard them turn Red loose. I headed west around the backside of the prison, and Old Red was headed east. He'd found the scent of the hated Storm Hawk Sky Knight, and he was tracking.

The guards had left the hangar bay; they had been needed on the front line with Mr. Moss. The other guards had stayed behind protecting the prison. The guards' sky rides were unguarded. Mounting one, I smiled to myself at my own brilliance and triumph. And with that, I drove away from the Terra toward freedom

Now Old Red lives a life of luxury just like the good old boy deserves, spending his last years as a pet. Looks like Mr. Moss's own revenge training worked to his disadvantage. It was vengeance that got me in that darn jail to begin with, and it was vengeance that got me out.

Author's Notes: Well? Awesome, good, bad, horrible? Let me know what you think!