The sound of a quill on paper trailed off with a final sharp scratch and the sound of a book being hastily shut. Now that the room was quiet, Chrissy could hear Oz in the next room halfway through his prayers if she'd gotten the order right, which she rarely did. Lately it seemed she didn't get anything right. Tracing her fingers across the battered cover and over the oddly coloured phrase on the front. In the half light of sundown the colour of looked like old blood contrasting strongly against her pale skin and the dull aged leather. She couldn't read the phrase on the front but the sales girl had told it said ... in an old long dead language.
Chrissy had no idea if that was true or not or even if it was worth the money they paid for it. The sales girl said it was made with very old very dark magic. The idea was you could write into it and the words with appear in books wherever the text was sent, you had to think of the people that the writing was aimed at. So Chrissy had sat and written the first section of the new Slayer Handbook into it, trying to keep her mind on all the other slayers. If the book did it's job the next time one of them opens a book it should show the words Chrissy had agonised over for days.
The trouble was she didn't have a clue whether or not it was working, it could just not be sending the writing anywhere or it could end up in the hands of some demon somewhere. Or maybe in an old forgotten book never to be read by anyone. Then again it could work perfectly and around the world young girls might be clinging to another book finally understanding what's happening to them. Who knows maybe Buffy Summers herself was reading it at this very moment. Chrissy had to hope for something or that desire to run that had become soaked so deep into her bones in felt like the only solid thing left in her world, would resurface and before you knew it she would be back in the wilderness hiding in caves and using her slayer abilities to hunt deer.
"Hey, finished?" The soft voice broke through her doubts and a gentle warm hand covered her own stopping it's movement. Movement she hadn't even been aware she had started. Now four deep scratches decorated the front of her book, perfectly fitted to the nails on her left hand. Chrissy glanced up at her companion with a strained smile, pulling away from him to stand book held tightly too her chest.
"I'm done for now, we should move. Are you going to be sa...alright?" Cringing she looked away, even with all of Oz's explanations she still felt weird around him, especially with the full moon raising behind him, framing his slim form in white light and making the hairs on back of her neck stand up.
Oz was a werewolf and some part of her was telling her to hurt him, to kill him for what he will become. Regardless of the fact he was the only person she had, the only person capable of telling her anything about what's happening to her. The warring between her slayer instincts and her rational mind made her head hurt and her stomach twist itself into hundreds of little knots. And the full moon just made it worse.
"Yeah should be, have you got.." She pulled the small silver weapon from her pocket before he'd finished the sentence. She always kept it on her nowadays, even when she slept. Not that he needed to know that.
"We should go." She muttered, turning away from him, the full moon and the churning in her gut. For now she's have to trust him and what he said about his suppose control of his wolf nature. She had no other choice, she couldn't do it alone and she refused to die before she reached Cleveland.
She heard the striking of a match behind her and despite her better judgement she turned round, watching the single matchstick flickering in Oz's hand. She ran her gaze one last time over the run down off house they had been stayed in, allowing her thoughts to go into the dank dark of the basement where some kind of demon was taking what would be it's last breaths. She wasn't sure what kind of demon it was, but it had attacked them when they broke into this house and had kept trying to kill them until they locked in down in the basement. That was last week.
At first it had spent all day growling and snarling and threatening them in some strange hostile demon tongue. The old wooden door shuddering under it's weight, and she had spent all day staring at the door waiting for the lock to give and the boards she had nailed across to break. After a few days it had gone quiet, which was much more worrying than the growling. Crissy didn't stop watching the door though.
She hadn't slept for more than a few hours in the past week, convinced that the demon would somehow escape it's confines and come from her. But then she got that feeling with or without a demon roaming around underneath her. The match finally caught and Chrissy's hand shot out to grab at Oz's clothing pulling him back as the doorway suddenly burst into flame. Old houses burn quickly a voice in back of head warned.
Stumbling slightly at the extra weight of keeping Oz on his feet she turned her head away from the blaze, trying to convince herself that the low screaming whine she could hear was from the old wood and not the living creature she was burning alive. Demon or not she knew she'd be hearing that sound tonight, mixed in with her dreams of dying.
"Come on, we need to leave before somebody notices something." Dropping her hand down to stroke along the cover of the book, she turned her back on the increasing screams and walked out into the street. It would be worth it, it would all be worth it.
