As I said at the end of the last chapter, this one is from Loki's point of view and I'm hoping to keep it this way from now on. I had to introduce their world through Carlie's eyes, and cover things that Loki wouldn't know about.

Thanks for sticking with it and I hope you enjoy this chapter. I apologise for anything out of character with Loki. X

I watch as Charlie rises and walks towards me, an elderly look on his young face. His dark eyes are haunted.

"There's nothing. Nothing except the scent. All these people have obliterated everything that we might have found useful. It was damp last night. We may have had a foot print, but now…" He trails of and waves a hand, taking in the scene of devastation and trampled ground around us. "It looks like they drove a heard of bloody cows through here!"

His eyes roam to the face of the hanged woman, as they had been, often, during the last hour. Hers was a face that I recognised from last night. She had been dancing with her lad, and had turned massive blue eyes and a shy smile on me as I had passed them by. Where those eyes had been, there was now nothing but darkness.

I turn my gaze away from her. "What is that?" I ask, pointing at the creature leering at us from a few yards away. Charlie smirks a little at my choice of words.

"His name is Roxbury. He's another werewolf and he's supposed to be helping me with this. The gods only know how though, he can barely string two sentences together. How's he supposed to make any more sense of this than me?"

"Ah, the runt of the litter then."

Charlie smiles at that, but quickly turns serious again. "I can't believe he was here," he says in a hopeless whisper. "We're never going to catch this guy. He's having too much fun playing games with us."

"If it were a game, he would leave you clues. It's pointless otherwise."

He hands me his note book and gives me a hint with his eyes. The book is thicker than it had been when I had handed it to him earlier.

I feel a sudden pressure inside my chest, the place where this new magic seems to come from, and my hands shake. I know I need to leave here soon.

"What do you need?" I ask Charlie.

"To be a million miles from here," he says, once more gazing at the girl in the tree.

Putting my hand to his shoulder, I give a gentle pressure. "What do you need of me?"

He glances at the notebook and then at my face. His deep brown eyes are cloudy with uncertainty for a moment and then they clear.

"Perhaps you should recover that old evidence from Aldridge, have a look through it. There's nothing more for you to do here."

The creature Roxbury chooses this moment to come over to us. He looses a pathetic excuse for a glare at me and says "Runnin away are ya?"

Ignoring this I turn to Charlie, who nods slightly. Clearly he is prepared to brave this wave of idiocy himself.

I return his nod and head back towards the castle, through the crowds that the town militia are struggling to keep back from the crime scene. The humans are standing in the soft rain, hemmed in like cattle, trying to get a look at the dead woman. This does nothing to stall my contempt for them; they really would do anything for a show.

As I walk along, I run my thumb over the jewels in the hilt of the gifted sword, something that feels like it is to become habit. I try to make haste without actually running, but it is difficult. A few people glance at me warily as I hurry past them.

Once in the room that had been assigned to us, I lock the door, throw my cloak over the back of the chair, the note book on the table and fall to my knees in front of the fireplace. I am shaking violently now. I close my eyes tightly, knit my brows together and think of fire while holding my hands towards the middle of the fireplace. I have to be careful; it would not do to burn the castle down.

I feel the tendrils of magical energy leaving my heart and gathering in my palms. With it goes my strength and I am glad that I have chosen to kneel, fearing another painful crash to the ground. I manage to send the red writhing ball of magic straight into the kindling, setting the fire, and then cut the magic off before I do myself too much damage. Still, it leaves me too weak to stand.

I lay myself before the fire on the cold stone floor and once again consider how strange my circumstances have become. After my trial, I had been told that I would be banished to a world with no hope of ever being able to return to Asgard or any of the nine realms. I had been stripped of my magic, painfully, and it had left a deep, cavernous void within me.

Once on this world, which Charlie called Edolie, a new type of magic had begun to fill that void like water, spilling over once I was too full, leaving me weak and helpless and unable to do anything but try and use it, to drain myself of it. All I had managed so far were fire castings and I had accidentally set fire to one of the guardsmen in Arber within my first few hours here.

I also find strange my luck of finding Charlie, or rather, of him finding me. What were the chances of me finding someone like him, a man who was lost, alone and outside the race of humans? He was a man who knew things that were important, and would ensure my survival here. The creature that he turned into was a wild beast, something made up entirely of hate and rage and a desperate need to kill. It was the opposite of Charlie in human form, who was honourable, honest and unfailingly kind. The fact that he could only become the wolf once a month was unfortunate. A beast like that could be used, as I well know.

It does not take me long to recover this time, and soon I am able to go and examine Charlie's clue. It appears to be a piece of thin paper, folded over twice. Unfolding it, I find that it is covered in some kind of runes, or some language that I can not understand. It almost looks like pictures.

There is a knock at the door. I open it to find Aldridge standing in the hallway with the box that he had shown us yesterday, clutched in his hands. I step back to admit him into the room without a word.

"I saw that you had come back," he says, laying the box on the table. "Is Charlie still out there?"

"Yes, making sure that things get seen to properly."

"Good, I was hoping to tell you this, so that you could talk some sense into him."

I raise an eyebrow, waiting for him to continue.

"Fulton sent me some more stuff. They also sent me a pretty detailed letter about this investigation…from their end…um." He quickly hands me the letter.

"You've read it?" I ask, taking the paper from the envelope. I not only find the letter, but also detailed pictures. Horrifically detailed pictures. "What is this?"

"That one," He says, indicating one particular picture, "Is what was left of the last investigator of this particular killer." His choice of wording is very apt. 'What was left' indeed, I think.

"Maybe, I don't know, we can convince him to stop looking into it."

I look at him, unable to believe what I am hearing. "How can you say that? You, the Inspector? If Charlie stops looking into this, it is not going to stop this man from killing."

"It might stop him from…usi.. killing Charlie though. Just read it, look through this stuff." With that, he leaves. I'm sure that he meant to say 'using'.

I disregard this for now and read the letter. It details traps left by the killer specifically designed to get the investigators away from safety and on their own. They disappear after that, to be found in the way that the pictures depict, weeks afterwards. I commit it all to memory and then burn the lot, wondering just what Charlie has got himself involved with.

I start to go through the evidence in the box, and have just found another piece of paper, like the one found earlier, when Charlie walks in. The paper is carefully hidden in my pocket before he even takes a seat.

He sits in the chair opposite me, leans across the table and lays his head on his forearms. Before I can speak he looks up at me suspiciously.

"You know," he says carefully, "You're going to have to get Percy to show you how to use your magic."

"What?" I say, unbelievingly. "How did you know?"

"I can smell it, and it's like static, it makes the hairs on my arms rise." He shows me, looking pleased with himself.

So much for me hiding that from him then, I think. "Percy can show me how to use it?"

He looks at me with concern. "Oh, yes. Are you ok?"

"Yes, of course," I say, although in truth, now that I'm here with him alone, I feel more than a little trepidation. I have a feeling that he is going to try to bring up last nights activities in conversation, and I am lost as to how to handle it.

For now he just rests his head back on a forearm and uses his free hand to mess up his dark brown hair.

"It went well then?" I ask. "I trust that Roxbury is still alive?"

"Ah, well, that's the problem isn't it? I don't think that he was alive to start with. What have you found in there?" he asks, indicating the box on the table.

"Nothing new." I stand and walk back to the fire place. Another thought occurs, and I half turn back to him. "What were you, in your world?" I hadn't paid much mind to this so far, but I am curious now.

"How can you tell that this isn't what I've always been?" He looks a little confused at my change of subject.

"The deaths haunt you too much. It's almost as if you consider yourself personally responsible for each one."

He smiles a little sadly at that and says quietly, "I was at university. They don't exactly train you to deal with horrible vampire deaths while you're studying literature. The only reason that I have to deal with it now is because I'm a werewolf, and the humans won't deal with this stuff on their own."

He rises and comes to stand with me by the fireplace. His eyes are far away and lost as he gazes into the fire.

"There are going to be a lot more death's before this thing is over." He looks at me then, imploringly, and steps towards me, reaching out. I put my hand on his chest, stopping him from coming too close. I am suddenly afraid of this, and as ever, my fear comes out in sharpness.

Taking hold of my wrist, he says, "Loki, about last night.."

"What happened between us last night was regrettable," I interrupt him, looking away. "It won't be happening again." When I do look back at him, I am completely unprepared for what his hurt expression will do to me. Guilt rises in my throat like bile and I push him away from me, more roughly than I had intended. When my hand leaves his chest, it becomes deathly cold.

"What?...Loki.." He reaches for me again and I strike his hand away.

"You heard me."

He stares disbelievingly for a few moments and then, gathering his things, including the clue, he leaves without a further word. I fight an absurd but strong urge to call him back and apologise.

Running my hand through my hair I sigh shakily. "Damn."

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"You can't do it like that. It's costing you too much energy," Percy says, looking at me thoughtfully.

"Really? I hadn't guessed," I say, putting as much sarcasm into the words as possible. I am sitting slumped in a chair in the corner of my room, breathing heavily, sweating profusely and feeling more sullen by the second. "Show me how I am supposed to be doing it then!"

He seems unfazed by my obvious annoyance. He also seems unfazed by the weather. The close humidity has got everyone, except this eternally calm man, in a fighting mood.

For the last week since our return to Arber, it has been almost impossible to sleep at night, and I'm feeling frayed around the edges, as well as extremely frustrated with my lack of magical progress. I had expected to be a lot further along with it by now, after I had put so much effort into it.

Percy shows me his empty palms. "You can't just create it; you have to breathe it out of you. Like this." He breathes fine tendrils of energy into his hands, creating a Light casting which glows briefly and then goes out. I had watched him do this a thousand times since being back from Kaelyn, but was no nearer to actually achieving it myself. I try it again to no avail, and the Fire casting just appears in my hands without me breathing it out.

I fling it away from me, disgusted with it and it makes a small explosion on the floor. Percy does not even flinch. Instead he hunkers down, something which cannot be easy at his age, and looks me directly in the eye.

" At least it's not draining you so much now." He sighs, heavily. "It takes people years and years of magical study to be able to do even half of what you have already done."

"I should not have to learn something that I have been able to do my whole life. Leave me," I say suddenly, tiring of his exercises, his encouragements and most of all, of his patience.

He rises and smiles at me benevolently. "Well, I do have another student to deal with. One last thing before I go. The fact that you have done this before might explain a few things. It's almost as if you are trying to keep hold of the magic, by creating it in your hands. Really, it's more like letting go of it, by breathing it out."

He leaves the room and Charlie enters. "I need to speak to you," he says to me.

"And I need some time alone. We can't always get what we want."

"You're in a good mood today then," He says jovially. Charlie seems to be another man with endless patience, luckily. It had not taken him long to recover from my lashing out at him, and he was soon back to his half jokey, half worried self. The heat does affect him as much as it does me though and he looks just as frayed as I feel. He is constantly trying to pull his wet shirt away from his sweat soaked body and had tied his hair back with a thong, to keep it off of his neck.

"I reckon it's going to storm later," he says.

"You have been saying that for the last three days."

"Wishful thinking. Anyway, I really need you to have a look at this. I can't make head or tail of it. Is it some kind of language do you think?" He holds out the paper that he had found at Kaelyn. It is the first time that he has even mentioned it since our dispute.

"I didn't get a chance to look at it," I lie easily. "Leave it with me and I'll see."

"Ok. I'm driving myself nuts by constantly looking at it. I've got to go back to helping Ray. I'll see you later then."

As soon as he leaves I retrieve the other paper. I have had an idea as to what they could be and laying them one on top of the other; I see that I was right. Flattening them against each other, I see that they do indeed form a picture. It looks like a castle.

"He first draws them away from safety," I say aloud, softly. I wonder what this place holds for Charlie, what reasons he would have for being drawn there. I know that I will have to pry more deeply into his recent history and that I am going to have to be careful in doing so. It seems to me that his past may have been almost as turbulent as my own.

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That evening Charlie is proved right. The storm is one of the worst in recorded history and it lasts for days.

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The rain lashes me and lightning flashes overhead, showing the trees of the forest in bursts of black and blue. I am breathing heavily, willing my legs to take me ever faster. I know that I cannot outrun the beast, and that eventually I will have to turn and face it. My spear is a comforting weight in my hand.

Somewhere in the distance I hear Charlie's screams of agony, as once again his body rips itself apart. Soon enough the sound stops, and I know that I don't have long. I find a suitable place to make a stand against him and I wait for him to find me.

There is a ripping snarl to the right of me and he stalks from under the cover of the trees. The lightning shows him as he truly is, a hulking, immense beast thrown from the bowels of hell itself. His shaggy brown fur becomes as black as ink and his eyes glow red with a fury that even I could never match.

When I speak, his hackles rise at the sound.

"Charlie, save me," I whisper.

"Charlie, save me," I beg.

"SAVE ME!" I scream. He roars an answer and charges towards me, lips drawn back from bloody fangs. I cast my spear aside, turn my face towards the heavens and throw my arms wide.

Standing thus, I wait for his sharp embrace.

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So, hope you liked this one, and sorry for the backtracking. I'm hoping for a little slash in the next one. It might be a little while before the next update. XX