My light shall be the moon
And my path the ocean
My guide the morning star
As I sail home to you

Chapter 5: The Morning Star

Seifer rolled over in bed and rubbed his cheek against his pillow. The inside of his mouth was dry and his tongue felt like it had swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. He smacked uncomfortably, trying to reactivate his salivary glands. With irritation, he pulled the covers more tightly around himself and tried to drift off back to sleep. He'd been having a dream that he couldn't quite remember but wanted to get back to. Something about....

He searched his hazy mind.

Wolves?

That didn't seem right. It had to have been about something else. Why would he dream about wolves?

Seifer rolled over again and opened his eyes to exactly what he expected to see. His bedroom was illuminated only by a low glow being emitted by the drapes covering his window. Morning was just beginning to dawn outside. Or...maybe it was evening. Confusion rolled over him. He remembered going to bed, but only via the vague memory of pulling the sheets over himself. Then there was the wolf dream.

He jerked up suddenly in bed, realization dawning on him. The action sent his senses back into turmoil and his vision blurred all over again. But he didn't need to see to relive the convoluted horror of what had happened.

He'd turned into it again.

And the wolves? He searched his mind. He wasn't sure how they fit into the whole puzzle, but he knew that they were somehow an important piece. He always remembered flashes of them after an episode -- the black and white flashes through the snow, like fish lurching through water. They were important, and he recalled them more vividly this time. Their yellow gaze stared back at him from a memory that he didn't want to admit was his own.

What time is it?

The last thing he really remembered clearly was going off into the woods to chop wood for Petey, and that had been in the morning. Was it that evening? Or was it the next morning? Or was it the same morning? And how the hell had he ended up in bed?

Seifer rubbed his eyes, miserable.

There was nothing left for him to do but try and get on with his life. He couldn't change what he was, as much as he hated it. He'd gone over the argument enough times in his head that it wasn't necessary anymore to even bother with it. It always ended the same way.

He looked around for his clothes for a moment only to realize that he was still dressed. His coat was laying haphazardly on the floor, the mittens dangling out of the pockets. His clothing always turned up, even when he distinctly could remember ripping it off in some other place. It was a discrepancy he didn't have the will to examine further.

The sun was blazing in the east when he stepped outside, rising up into a still purple sky to blot out the stars and the moon. The moon still hung stubbornly in the sky, glazed over by a milky morning haze.

Under the folds of his coat, Seifer's stomach rumbled impatiently. The sound was accompanied by a sudden pinching that demanded all of his attention.

Sprinting down the street, he ducked into the Black Bear Cafe. Outside the restaurant was a menagerie of stuffed animals, one of which was wearing a large chef's hat held on with a green and blue bungee cord. The stuffed mesmerize was positioned with one hoof pawing at the ground, under which someone had placed a menu for the only rival restaurant in town -- Eileen's.

Seifer only had a little bit of money on him, but he slapped down enough gil on the bar for a serving of pancakes and waited with a watering mouth for his breakfast to get done.

Almost nobody was in the cafe. At one corner someone sat with a cup of coffee and a newspaper out of Esthar held up in front of them. All Seifer could see of the man was his feet poking out from under his table. A few other patrons milled about, and the sound of forks scraping plates slowly drove Seifer wild.

His pancakes couldn't have come fast enough, and when they finally were set steaming before him he dug in with the appetite of a snow lion after hibernation. He greedily spilled generous helpings of butter and thick maple syrup over them. The feeling of half starvation was unsettling with it's familiarity. He always felt as if he hadn't eaten in days after...changing.

"Seifer!" A loud, gravely voice accompanied the bell over the door. "What the hell happened to you yesterday?"

Petey plopped down beside Seifer at the bar and ordered himself bacon, eggs, and a beer. His belly stuck out, pressing against the bar when he scooted in to settle his arms against it. Turning, he gave Seifer a long look.

"You didn't even bring my god damn axe back," he grumbled. "I know it's not the best job, but Hyne."

"Sorry, Petey," Seifer frowned, not sure how to explain himself.

"Shit," Petey replied, using the word to fill space. "Did you see it?"

"See what?" Seifer asked, shoving a forkful of pancake in his mouth. He wasn't quite listening to what the man had to say. He'd been gone for an entire day, and he'd probably lost his job. Then again, that didn't really matter. He couldn't stay in Ekalaka much longer anyway. A few spare gil would have been made a nice lining for his pocket, but he couldn't risk SeeD finding him. And if that meant he'd have to live off what he could find for a while, he would. It was better to be destitute than be captured by SeeD and become somebody's science experiment.

"Well shit," Petey slapped his hand on the bar. "John Heanny thinks he saw that god damned monster yesterday morning. You were out there, too. You didn't see a shittin' thing?"

"What monster?" Seifer asked, his back stiffening.

"You know, that one Garden's after," Petey replied distractedly. His breakfast was set down before him on a plate filled with grease. Seifer could practically see the other man salivating over the smell of the bacon. He picked up one piece of it and held it up so that the bacon poked out stiffly. "See, that's how you tell it's done. If it sticks out strait like that."

"How do you know Garden's after a monster?" Seifer pressed.

"Hell, everybody knows," he shrugged. "Know Marla? Well, she asked that SeeD girl if they were here for that White Pine murder. Ya know, seeing if they were gonna catch the bastard and all. Anyway, girl said they were after a monster. Then, yesterday, John's out there in the woods and he sees this...this thing running down through the valley, you know...the one between us and the Absarokas. Those SeeD's and the EPD guy have been all over town getting supplies together. Bought out all my ammo."

Seifer's stomach sank down to his knees. Someone had spotted him, and SeeD was after the monster. Would they track his prints all the way back to his house? SeeDs were no pushovers. They knew what they were doing, and it didn't look like it had snowed overnight.

This was bad.

"These aren't over easy!" Petey waved his hand, pointing with the other at his eggs. "And where's the salt?"

"Listen, Petey," Seifer turned to him. "I don't think I can work for you anymore. Yesterday I had a run in with an old friend of mine. He runs this place down in Balamb and he offered me a pretty good position there. Been looking for an excuse to get out of this godforsaken place anyway. So, I'm going to have to split on you."

"Balamb, huh?" Petey smiled a little. "Little sun and some bronzed women?"

"That's the idea," Seifer shrugged, a vision of Quistis flashing before his eyes.

"Lucky bastard." Petey reached out and shook Seifer's hand vigorously. The action jarred Seifer's body and he nearly fell off his stool. He regained his balance just in time and forced a smile across his face.

"I'd say see you later," he said. "But, I probably won't."

Petey just waved, too absorbed in his breakfast to turn it into a long goodbye. He wasn't the sort of man who ever showed any emotion that wasn't laced with sarcasm. In his defense, however, he had fought in one of the more vicious parts of the first Sorceress War. From what Seifer had heard about the area in which Petey had been fighting there had been a lot of guerrilla warfare with unconventional tactics. Occasionally, they had to kill children who'd been laced with bombs and sent toward them by Sorceress supporters. It was an ugly thing, and Seifer was oddly relieved that the war he'd played a major roll in hadn't spilled into the general population the way that the first one had.

Petey remained behind in the Black Bear Cafe, an enigmatic ball of inner thoughts. Seifer forgot him the moment he stepped out onto the street and began to form a plan of escape. His greatest blessing laid in the fact that they were looking for a monster and, for the moment at least, he was a man. He needed to slip out of Ekalaka as soon as he made sure his tracks were covered -- in any way necessary.

This time, for once, Seifer had an idea of where he wanted to go. It was crazy, but it was what he wanted more than anything. He was going to go to Balamb. He'd row there by night if he had to. Regardless, he knew that he had to get out of Trabia. Too many people had died and it wasn't going to be long now before someone caught on to him. He was amazed that nobody had connected him to the murders yet. But, it was coming.

He wanted to see her. For some unfathomable reason, he needed to see her again. Quistis was right over the water waiting for him to show up on her doorstep. She would forgive him. Nobody else would. But Quistis would, she had to.

He'd already bled enough for his sins.

***

Darshan Zinnovy swore under his breath.

He stood in front of a house at the end of town with his pack swung over his shoulders. Bella Cevario was beside him, fiddling with the tranquilizer gun in her right hand. One of the red darts was in the other where she'd taken it out of the barrel to investigate how the trigger mechanism worked. In front of them, Lee was involved in a rather loud argument with one of the townspeople.

"Look," he waved a hand through the air, "we're here as part of a mission from Garden to get rid of this monster. It's been killing people in Trabia. Don't you care about that?"

"No," the man replied with hostility. His house looked normal enough from the outside, but the moment he'd seen them approaching he'd raced out his door with a large shotgun in his hands and told them that he'd shoot them all if they crossed his property. He had a wild look in his eyes whenever he looked at Bella and Darshan. Obviously afflicted by some form of skin disorder, his face was marked with highlighted areas that had less pigmentation than the rest. They made the rest of his face look liver spotted.

"Please, we're not going to go anywhere on your property," Lee pleaded. "We just need to get out into the forest to look for this thing before it gets away."

"The forest is my property," the man told them firmly.

"No it isn't," Lee shook his head. "Nobody can own this forest."

"Yeah, that's what the government says," he waved his shotgun around and looked past Lee to Bella and Darshan. "That what you guys are for? Going to try to take this all away from me?"

"Sir..." Lee was visibly running out of patience. "SeeD isn't affiliated with any government."

"You're telling me there ain't no government money in that hog of a building?" the man demanded. "Those people ain't coming anywhere near my house." To make his point, he fired off a shot that nearly made Bella drop her tranquilizer dart. The pellets blasted through the right side of a cardboard snowman that he had tied onto his fence with barbed wire. The sign that the snowman was holding had been faded away, but it was clearly a racist remark.

"Now," the man breathed. "Get the hell off my property." He watched them for a second then motioned toward his house. "Got a pretty nice collection of Estharian automatic rifles in there. Don't make me get them out."

Darshan rolled his eyes. They had tranquilizer guns on them. They could have dispatched with the troublesome man minutes ago and gone on their way. But Lee had insisted on talking some sense into the clearly insane man. It's like beating your head into a wall and hoping maybe the wall will give way first, he thought.

"Let's just go next door," Bella said. "The whole town is surrounded by the forest, we don't need to go out this way."

"That thing was spotted almost directly behind this house," Darshan reminded her.

"So? We'll come around. We're already loosing time here anyway," she shrugged. "There are plenty of people here willing to let us cut through their yard."

Their problem was the place the monster was sighted wasn't anywhere near the one street leading into and out of Ekalaka. They had to go through someone's yard to get where they wanted to be. This man's was the closest to the spot where John Heanny had spotted it. But, Bella and Darshan's SeeD coats had obviously alerted the man's paranoia.

Patrick Lee walked back up to them, the butt of the man's shotgun pointed directly at his back, and shrugged helplessly.

"We're guests here," he explained. "If he says we can't go through his lawn, then we can't."

"This is crap," Darshan growled.

"Yeah, it is," Lee replied. "We'll just go next door. Won't take us much longer."

Grudgingly, Darshan followed Bella and Lee over to the next house. He hated loosing a fight. And, more than that, he hated never taking one up when it was offered. That man had been looking for confrontation, and Darshan would certainly have offered it. People like him needed to be put in their place. Maybe if they had some sort of real fear in their lives, they wouldn't have to invent things to feed their delusions. Nobody ever did things the easy and sensible way anymore.

Lee stepped through the gate in the fence and strode up to the house to rap against the front door.

They were wasting time.

Damn it.

Darshan paced. He couldn't just stand still and wait for Lee to get the damn okay for them to do their job. The way he saw it, they were flown in as a favor to get rid of the monster for these people. If he had his choice, it could kill all of them and the world would be better off. At the very least, nobody would miss any of them. They should have been going out of their way to make sure that Darshan was a happy man.

"Good morning," Lee smiled brightly to the woman who opened the door. "I'm afraid we need to ask you a favor."

Darshan rolled his eyes and paced more, continually looking back toward the house they'd come from. The man was still standing in his yard beside his half blown apart snowman. The shotgun was still gripped tightly in his hands so that his knuckles were visably white against his bronzed hands.

"Great," Patrick Lee shook the woman's hand vigorously. "We really appreciate this."

"Oh...it's no problem, really," she blushed.

That's more like it, Darshan thought.

He looked up to the sky. The sun was already full on the horizon. According to the man's report, John Heanny had spotted the monster sometime the day before. He wasn't sure exactly when, as he wasn't wearing a watch. However, he hadn't reported the incident until that evening. Apparently, he'd gone about his work and was only convinced to come to Lee when he told his wife of the incident. Darshan never ceased to be amazed how stupid people could be. All the while knowing that people were dying mysteriously in Trabia, the man had stayed out in the woods after seeing what he reported to be an absolutely terrifying creature.

Naturally, he'd also told about half the town before finally getting to Lee. Their mission was no secret anymore.

"Come on," Patrick waved to them. "She's going to let us through her fence." Everyone in the town had a big fence around their house, presumably to keep out various types of animals that would roam about after dark. Darshan thought high fences looked distinctly unfriendly.

He took one last look back at the man who'd brandished the shotgun at them. He was occupied, talking to a man who'd sometime since come up to him. The two were talking quietly, and Darshan narrowed his eyes suspiciously. The new man was much taller, and blonde hair poked out from under the hood he had pulled over the back of his head.

For a moment, Darshan felt a flash of recognition but it faded ominously when the blonde man shook the other's hand and advanced toward the back of his house.

Sabotage?

The thought made Darshan's blood sizzle. He watched the man sprint into the freak's backyard and mentally marked him. If he was going to be in the woods at the same time, Darshan would find him. And when he did, he was going to find out what was up.

Lee and Bella remained completely unaware of the blonde man and talked amiably to one another. But Darshan lagged behind, his blood tingling.