Chapter 6
"I know the night is not as it would seem"
-Self Control, by Raf
Jennifer awoke from her alcohol induced slumber. The first thing she noticed was the darkness on the inside of her eyelids, this was soon followed by the realization of her pounding headache. She slowly opened her eyes and noticed that the ceiling fan slowly rotating above her head was rather blurry, as a matter of fact, the whole ceiling was blurry, as was the entire world until she raised her hands to rub her eyes. She covered her head with her pillow as she half expected Patches to be drooling on her face.
A few moments later, though, she realized that Patches wasn't drooling on the pillow, and that her throbbing headache wasn't going to go away unless she did something about it. She groggily pulled herself up off the bed, at least to the point where she was sitting up.
"Patches," she called. After about a minute, the shabby dog didn't show up, so Jennifer called his name again, this time with a quivering note of uncertainty in her voice, "Patches?" the dog still didn't come. Jennifer got up off the bed and shambled into the hallway, she called the dog again, still no response.
Jennifer shuffled to the bathroom and swung the medicine cabinet above the sink open, pausing for a moment beforehand to stare at her own reflection in the mirror on medicine cabinet's door. After she was done gazing at her own face, she pulled out a bottle of aspirin and popped a couple into her mouth. She then shut the medicine cabinet and downed the pills with some water from the sink. When she pulled her head up from the faucet, she saw something in the mirror that would change the course of her life.
"See it, and know the truth," her parents seemed to whisper in unison, though they were doubtlessly hundreds of miles away.
"But… wasn't that the guy who you found dead yesterday?" Michael asked Kelly, still in shock from what he'd seen.
"Yeah," she answered, "but it looks like the undertaker isn't exactly doing his job. So, uh, did anyone else hear Jesus?"
"Nah," Michael answered, "I just saw man turn into, like, a zombie or something and heard my sister telling me that I should put the dead to rest, whatever that means."
"Well, that's resoundingly mundane," Margaret scoffed, "I saw the words on my menu changing to tell me that I need to take back the night. Say, how exactly do you know what Jesus sounds like?"
"Yeah," Michael agreed, "How do you know that the voice you heard was Jesus? Oh, and there's nothing mundane about me hearing my sister's voice, she died in a car crash three and a half years ago."
"That's so sad," Kelly mumbled, "But I know what Jesus sounds like 'cuz of this recurring dream I have where I take him down off the cross and then I rise up and get nailed to it and then I become a star, wow, this sounds really stupid when I'm saying it, but rest assured, it is much more impressive when you actually go through it."
Simon Young was bored, and still didn't understand the new hours of the store. The place was open twenty-four hours on seemingly random days, and usually he was the one who got stuck at the door during the graveyard shift. Tonight, however, he'd been told to just wander the store and see if there was anybody that he could help; the last person he'd seen had been at quarter–til one in the morning, it was currently half-past two.
Simon wandered through the sporting goods section of the store, still fairly certain that any place that advertised itself as being family oriented (which, while he had never seen Wal-Mart directly referred to as far as he could remember, but the gingerbread man from their newer commercials definitely implied) should not carry any potentially lethal items. He heard a strange rattling sound coming from the next aisle over, then a sort of sinewy cracking sound.
He slowly wandered over to the place where he'd heard the sounds coming from and when he looked down the aisle, he saw a man in strange clothing surrounded by shelves with various knives on one side and firearms on the other, both in display cases, of course. The man had a huge gash running down his left arm and was muttering something that Simon couldn't understand, it sounded like it was in some strange and long forgotten language. The knives and guns rattled in the display cases in time with the oddly-clothed man's chanting.
The sign above the aisle that normally told you what can be found therein suddenly changed. Where it used to say that guns were on one side and knives on the other, it suddenly said "hE wIll tEAr hiMseLF AsunDer!" and Simon smelled a strange burning scent on the air, drifting from the strange man.
"Stop!" Simon screamed, and the man turned around to face him, hands on his arms. Simon noticed that blood was pouring out from underneath the man's hands, the glass began to crack as the man kept chanting. More and more tears began to open on the man's body and glass began to fly through the air. The man kept chanting and Simon began to run down the aisle toward him, miraculously avoiding getting cut by any of the shards of glass flying around. Finally Simon reached the man, upon doing so, he placed one hand on the man's head and the other on his jaw, bringing them together as to keep the man from the chant that would soon have torn him apart.
"Thank you," the man whispered, "But I fear that it's too late." With that, more and more cuts opened on the man's body and soon, Simon found himself standing in a pool of blood, the man gone entirely, and soon, the pool of blood was dried up, the only evidence of the whole scene left was the shards of glass covering the ground.
"What…?" Simon muttered confusedly.
"So, what are you?" Jennifer asked without turning around.
"I," the thing answered changing from dog to man, just the opposite of what Jennifer had just seen in the mirror, "am what you might call a werewolf, though we call ourselves the Garou. To be a bit more specific, I'm Doggie B of the Bone Walker tribe, though I gotta say I'm statin' to like bein' called Patches."
"Tell me everything," Jennifer said, the two of them were now back in the bedroom and sitting on her bed. She noticed a strange tattoo on his arm that had also been strangely colored in his fur, it was shaped sort of like a kite, but with a line coming out from the top and points at the ends of all the lines. Then, the dog began to talk.
