Part One: The Child

Prologue:

It didn't start straight away. This need. It developed over time and like a tenderly nurtured seed it grew into something thick and strong living like a pulsing knot in her chest. She had forgotten the initial tragedy, of course but soon it began to return to her. It came in brief and violent sensory flashes. She was haunted by sounds, smells, tastes all fractured memories of one night, no more than a few hours, buried deep and painstakingly in the wilds of her young subconscious and then emerging like a lotus from the silt of a swamp.

It was the night her father was murdered.

Alexandra Burrows hadn't known her father nor her mother. Both had been lost to tragedy. Alex was a runaway, a street kid, more at home amongst the flotsam and jetsam than a three bed house in suburbia. It was curiosity that had led her on this quest to find out what had happened that night, why her mind was filled with the memories of howls, bloodstains and smoke. Her pursuit, rapid and seamlessly, mutated into other things...

She was thirteen when she had stumbled upon the Night, a world that lay upon our own like moonlight touches the earth. Now, on the cusp of her nineteenth birthday, she was crouched between two garbage cans, her eyes watering from the stench, and her heart thundering treacherously in her chest.

"I can hear you, little girl, I can hear your heart beating." The man's voice grew hoarse, guttural, unnatural. It was the voice of a man becoming a beast and the stench was of an otherworldly creature in the throws of the Change.

She bit her lip, holding her breath, forcibly slowing down the wild beating of her heart; she squeezed her eyes shut and the tears slipped down the globes of her cheek as she tried to control her human parts. She hadn't meant to be in this alley, she had come upon the werewolf quite by accident.

"Thump thurrump thump. Mmm."

A scuttling creature skittered and squeaked disturbing some debris and she heard the wolf grunt and pick up its nose sniffing wetly. The scents of the city overcrowded its senses. Her lips moved in silent prayers as she endeavoured to make herself as compact as possible hoping that it might pass, hoping that it would find some other prey.

The creature revealed itself, part man, part wolf and gloriously grotesque. She was both fascinated and repulsed, her eyes opened wide now to soak in the sight of it and those teeth, too many of them, leered and chattered the syllables of her imminent death.

"Hold it right there, you ugly son of a-" The echo of the gunshot obscured the curse. Alex fell back from the impact, warm, sticky blood and viscera painted her face and chest as the shape shifter was cleaved in two by the bullet. Short, shallow breaths of exhilarating fear escaped her.

"You okay, darling?" The question was deceptively casual, dripping from her saviour's mouth.

Alex climbed to her feet, wiping the creature's vital fluids from her cheeks as she gave a quavering reply. "I can take care of myself."

Cal Radford gave her a significant look up and down and then looked away abruptly, busying himself with concealing the Remington 12 gauge. "Sure." She had known Cal for six years, he had a canny way of being there when she needed help, though it would be strange to most she was not surprised to find him here. San Francisco was her haunt.

Whilst he had his eyes averted she began to wipe remains from her jacket which had darkened significantly with blood. She revealed nothing of her relief in seeing him, nothing of the disgust of being bathed in the insides of a strange creature, but it was not the first time blood had warmed her skin.

"When did you get back? You never told me you were in town. I could have picked you up from the airport. What are you doing out here this late?" Cal bombarded her with questions as if he couldn't see the horror of her covered in viscera, as if he had not just pulled the trigger of a gun and sundered a creature's life from this world.

"I told you-" She murmured petulantly but he cut her off.

"You can take care of yourself?"

"Yes." Even as she replied the pill bottle slipped from her grasp and rolled across the floor and knocked the toe of his boot. He picked it up the bottle of Ziprasidone, rattled it around to hear a chorus of pills still inside and she snatched it from his hand and began to march away.

"You're welcome." He called after her.

Even as she marched, each angry step brought her closer to civilisation, the bright lights of the street beyond and the adrenaline leaking away a dull ache wedged itself behind one eye. She began to drag her feet as the ache turned to dread and the dread turned to a vicious slither of whispers. It was how it always began. Just a slither. Then the cacophony. A dozen voices fighting to be heard at once, a myriad of odd languages, tones and textures leaving her nauseous and confused. Schizophrenia they called it. It was not a word that she could comprehend, these voice were tempting and organic, they guided her with sighs and cries bending and stretching her body until she had to stop, she leant on the window of a greasy strip joint, trying to gather her wits as the voices softened and the last insidious whisper ricocheted through her skull.

"You okay kid?" The doorman asked caution and annoyance making a strange note of his voice.

She muttered something and stumbled away. They would all look. They would look and see a punk, a junkie, another nobody on the street. Smeared in dirt, dubious stains and things they could not comprehend. It took thirty dizzying minutes to get back to her cheap one bed hotel room in the Tenderloin. It was the only affordable place that didn't insist on a credit card. Her bags remained packed, her dirty laundry festered neatly on the inside.

She had just returned from Japan, she had barely time to set her feet on the ground when she had to run to get her pills, she had been caught in the alley by the werewolf. She had travelled through the islands seeking the company of a fugitive monk who had been rumoured to have some information she wanted. Information that could unlock the mystery of why her family had been taken away from her.

That night she curled up on the crummy mattress, clutching her bottle of pills. She swallowed a handful some dry and let the chemicals consume the last cobwebs of consciousness from her and allowed her to have a dreamless sleep.