Abduction (Primal Progeny Book 3)

By S. L. Mewse

‘Oh I hardly think I’m just going to let you go having dragged you into a shady little alleyway, am I my love?’ He replied smoothly, his voice a deep, masculine bass with a touch of an accent that hinted at a London upbringing. ‘I have a feeling you’re a flight risk sweetheart.’ He grinned at her, his teeth remarkably clean and white despite his disheveled appearance.
Audra straightened up beneath his grasp, standing as tall as she could and glaring straight into his eyes with the intent to put him in his place. But what she saw there froze her vocal chords as completely as if she had been grabbed about the throat. His face was like the badly matched creation of a mad scientist, patches of milky white skin seemingly splashed onto the background of a deep tanned hide. But that was not what caught her attention; nor was it the stark white of his right eyebrow, or the snowy streak in his facial hair. No, all she could see was that one, terrible eye. His right iris was a pale pink shot through with darker blotches, and thin veins spread from around it like lightning bolts. The pupil was fully dilated and somehow glistened a stark, bright red like a maraschino cherry. It was obvious that he had no sight in that eye, and yet it seemed filled with some terrible spark of malice, like something that belonged in the skull of a demon.
‘Cat got your tongue sweetheart?’ He asked.

Life with the pack went from bad to worse in the wake of the werewolf attacks that found Hunter Dalton finally living with his own kind. Living a life surrounded by death and destruction he found himself part of a team of guardians for a child that he wished had never been born.
With the mother of the baby on lockdown, it seemed as though nothing more could go wrong; but evil always finds a way.
In a race against time, Hunter finds himself chasing the youngster across land and sea... But will he find him before it’s too late?

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. L. Mewse
• Release date: Mar 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370694082

S. L. Mewse

Stacey Leah Mewse was born in 1987 in the old roman town of Chichester in West Sussex in the UK. She is a non-identical twin and is the younger of the two by just one minute. She spent her early years near the seaside town of Bognor Regis, and moved to Cambridge in her younger years. By the time she was of school age she and her family had moved back to West Sussex and were living in a small village near the town of Bognor Regis. Fiction and art have always been Stacey's passions. She Began drawing under the watchful eye of her mother when she was a child, and she began by writing in the fantasy genre when she was in her mid-teens. Unfortunately her first literary work was lost to a computer malfunction in the days of the floppy disk, and she was left with only a few scant chapters remaining of this first book. To this day it is an ambition of hers to re-start and finish that first book, but her horror writing is her primary focus. Her artwork began in traditional formats and to this day she still enjoys oil painting and working with pastels, though these days most of her artwork is digital. Stacey was introduced to the world of horror at a young age thanks to the likes of R.L Stine, and then the accidental viewing of one of the halloween series at the age of 8 years old. She instantly developed a taste for horror and has never looked back. An avid reader of horror fiction, and watcher of horror films, she was introduced to the world of more adult horror writing by her mother lending her a copy of the magic cottage by James Herbert. After that fateful reading she avidly sought out his work, and he remains one of her favourite authors. Stacey also enjoys the writing of Dean Koontz, Richard Laymon and Stephen King. Primarily interested in supernatural horror, Stacey has a real love for 'creature feature' style books and films, and this comes across in her art and literature. She greatly enjoys blending the unreal elements of the supernatural with real human horrors. She also enjoys tackling taboo subject matter in her writing, and including day to day realisms to keep her stories and characters relatable despite the fantasy elements. Her artwork tends to revolve around horror, fantasy and animals, and she is working on a fantasy/horror based comic. Not only is Stacey an artist and author, but also a keen animal lover and cancer survivor. She has a passion for unusual animals and is especially fond of hairless pets. She has even been on the committee of the UK Xoloitzcuintli club, and was a keen dog show attendee in her youth. She also thoroughly enjoys crafting and crochet is a particular favourite of hers, make of that what you will! She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and then treated in 2013, and is now thankfully in remission.

Book preview

Prologue

The house shook as screams rang through it, bouncing from its walls and filling the otherwise tense silence of the pack house nestled in the Surrey forest. The night was at its deepest point and blacker than the pits of hell as a thick blanket of heavy clouds hung over the land, extinguishing any light from the moon and stars beyond. The day had been short and cold, unwelcoming and harsh. Frost had wilted the grass that morning and the air had a chill to it that cut to the bone. Somehow the weather perfectly matched the ominous events of the evening, it was as though nature had conspired to create the perfect birth for what could be the greatest monster ever born by natural causes.

Rain had just begun to fall in great, fat drops that splashed against the many windowpanes of the huge old house as the first scream had rung from the first floor. The captive once-Beta had gone into labour alone and under cover of darkness, but her screams soon drew the slender Alpha female of the pack to her.

Eve sat bolt upright in her bed at the first sound from the room beside the one she had inherited from the pregnant werewolf’s father. She had been expecting the labour to be soon, they had been preparing for it… But she had not expected it that night. It was to be an early birth, one bought on by stress and likely to result in an unhealthy child… But she did not concern herself with that; her chief interest was the mother, Audra. She had been patiently waiting for months to take her revenge for the murders the pregnant bitch had committed to try and secure the pack for herself. It would only be a matter of hours before she could finally realise her dreams of getting rid of her at long last.

Throwing her covers from her, the slender Alpha female sat silently and listened. Another scream, the birth was underway. Reaching under her pillow she grabbed a wrinkled old grey t-shirt and threw it over her head, crossing to her phone and calling her Betas, first Matthew, then Hunter, and summoning them to Audra’s chamber. Once that had been done she replaced the receiver carefully, listening out for more screams. She was in no rush to run to the pregnant woman’s aide. Too much had passed between them, and despite her usually kind nature, she found she enjoyed Audra’s pain.

Another scream rocked the pack house, and Eve made her way slowly to her door, throwing a bulky hair tie around her dreadlocks to keep them out of her face and smirking to herself in the darkness. The time for their revenge was so close she could almost taste it. She moved out into the hallway and crossed over to Audra’s door in the dim light of the old carriage-style lanterns that hung at intervals throughout the halls. Shadows danced across her delicate features as she unlocked the first padlock on the door beside her own, and then the second, and finally the third sliding lock was clicked back and the heavy old door swung slowly inwards.

The inside of the room was in almost pitch darkness. The curtains had been drawn and the lights had been snuffed, but by the feeble blinking blue light on the bedside alarm clock Eve could clearly see that the birth was well under way.

Audra lay stretched on the bed, her covers thrown to the floor and her pillows rumpled beneath her head. Her back arched and her legs and arms squirmed as wave after wave of debilitating pain rolled through her body. Sweat glistened all over her and her nightgown had crumpled up over her bulbous belly, leaving her lower half totally exposed. The sheets around her legs and back were soaked through with amniotic fluid, and the slightly sweet smell of it somehow made Eve feel a little nauseous.

‘Audra?’ Eve’s voice was flat and uncaring as she approached the bed, kicking aside the bedding on the floor as she went.

‘Eve?’ Audra cried out, her eyes opening and rolling in search of the Alpha female who had locked her up for all those months. She was ready to snap at her, a snarl forming on her full lips, but wrinkling away into a grimace of pain as yet another wave of agony hit her.

‘Contractions?’ Eve asked, ‘it’s early for this isn’t it?’ Hunter and Matthew skidded to a halt outside the door in the corridor as she leant forward and laid a hand on Audra’s belly, feeling for anything unusual but not really knowing what she was looking for.

‘Is it -?’ Matthew asked, bursting into the room, clothed in a pair of tattered old shorts and nothing else. Both men approached the bed slowly, clearly weary and unsure.

Eve shook her head slightly. ‘I don’t know?’

Audra’s fingers grabbed at the sheets desperately, she gasped for breath and ground the back of her head into the pillows, trying to create another sensation, to distract her body from the agony it was in. She failed. ‘It is!’ She screamed. ‘It’s coming.’

Eve turned and shoved Matthew in the direction of the room’s small bathroom. ‘Get me towels, now.’ She commanded ‘lots of them, some dry some wet. Hunter –’ she turned to face the scarred and worried looking form of her second Beta. ‘Run down to the kitchens. Boil the kettle, bring a bowl of hot water, and wake Samantha to bring another up to us on your way back.’

Both men scrambled to do her bidding, and whilst they scurried around her she turned back to face Audra and sat beside her on the bed. ‘How far apart are the contractions?’ She asked, knowing that the chances of getting a decent response from the obviously delirious woman were slim.

Audra threw her head to the side and stared up at Eve with unseeing eyes. Sweat trickled from her brow into her open eyes and her skin was flushed and blotchy. In a lull between the agonising bursts of pain she panted a ragged response. ‘I – I don’t – know. Minutes?’ She squirmed and one hand wormed its way onto her belly. ‘Something’s wrong?’ Her eyes were pleading, her brows knitted in worry as her fingers gripped at her nightgown.

Eve shook her head, unconvinced but not wanting to cause extra stress that may lead to the death of an innocent child. ‘No, everything’s fine, just keep pushing.’

Audra’s head fell back against the pillows and her eyes closed, she gasped for breath in the break between her contractions and her body shuddered and shook. She had gone into labour hours earlier, but the pain had been so intense that she had been unable to move to ask for help, and the rest of the pack had been sleeping soundly so she had been left to deal with it all utterly alone. It had started as dull pains in her back and lower belly with a strange bubbling undertone of a sensation, and at first she had ignored it; but as time went by those pains became more and more insistent and eventually her waters had broken. This pain had gone on for a long time, slowly worsening with each contraction until she could no longer hold in her screams. What had begun as a cramping sensation soon progressed into feeling as though her belly had been put into a vice, the pain squeezing its way down from her stomach and into her cervix as each contraction progressed. By the time Eve got to her she had long ago felt the stretching, cranking sensation of her cervix forcing itself to open. She had felt sure it would crack her hips, and the pain had bought tears spilling from her tightly closed eyes. Her hands had gripped the sheets beneath her so tightly that her fingers bruised and she did not notice as her nails gouged into her palms. By the time Hunter and Matthew had returned she could not even feel them tending to her, wiping away the sweat from her brow, or Eve’s gentle spreading of her thighs to see how far along the birth truly was. As her legs parted the pain intensified, the baby pushing onto her cervix and the top of its head slowly pushing into view. The pain was unbearable; it felt as though a giant pair of hands were squeezing her like a tube of toothpaste. She pushed so hard that the vessels in her eyes burst and both of them became pools of red beneath their tightly closed lids. She lost control of her bladder and screamed and cried as she pushed, the tiny body of her baby finally forcing its way from her, tearing her open and erupting in a rush of blood.

Eve had lunged forward and snatched up the baby from the gore-covered bed sheets, wiping it down gently with a towel that she grabbed from Hunter’s hand dripping with water.

It was a boy. He was small and he was purple skinned, but he quickly began to take his first, hitching breaths and then began to scream and cry in her arms.

Eve was not ready for the rush of maternal instinct she felt in that moment. She had never been fond of children, not really, but with that crying baby in her arms she suddenly wanted nothing more than to silence his baleful cries. But he was not hers, and she was snapped out of her admirations of his tiny little hands and feet, and his chubby little face by the delirious ramblings of his mother.

‘Nikolai…’ The dreamy word rolled through the air so quietly it could have been nothing more than the exhale of a ghost. Audra’s eyes were half open, and her gaze trained on Hunter, who stood behind Eve, looking at the baby in her arms… Until that name was spoken.

The scarred Beta male looked across to the prone form of the woman sprawled across the bed and his expression slackened into one of shock. Was she really so exhausted that she thought he was her baby’s father?

‘Nikolai’ she repeated, weakly stretching one hand past Eve towards Hunter. ‘Look at our baby’ she almost sighed ‘isn’t he beautiful?’

Eve turned to look at Hunter, catching sight of Matthew’s shocked expression as she did so. ‘She’s hallucinating.’ She stated flatly. ‘Pain and exhaustion do strange things to people.’ She turned to face Audra and handed her back her baby, placing him gently on her chest and wrapping both of her arms around him. ‘Varulv is dead.’ She pointedly told the exhausted woman, this is your son.’

Audra did not seem to hear her, but her gaze was drawn to her newborn and she smiled down at him, her hair clinging to her face in wet tendrils and her eyelids heavy. ‘Taron’ she whispered, leaning to kiss his forehead as he began to cry again.

Hunter leaned over to Eve and asked her quietly in the darkness. ‘What are we going to do with her? Can we leave her with a child when she is like this?’

Eve shook her head just as Samantha appeared at the door. She turned to face the other woman and instructed her to run to the kitchen for a breast pump. Only once she had gone did she reply to Hunter. ‘No, she is too feverish; I think she is a risk, at least until her exhaustion passes. I will take him for tonight.’

Hunter’s eyebrows raised, but the dark within the room hid his surprise from her. ‘She’s injured isn’t she, what should we do about her wounds?’

Eve shrugged, watching the other woman’s interactions with her baby like a hawk. ‘She had our acting medic killed, I do not know how to administer stitches in such a delicate area, do you?’

Hunter shook his head, and in the background so did Matthew.

‘We will just have to leave her and hope she heals well.’ Eve pulled a face ‘I’m sure she can clean herself up a little once she wakes up. I doubt leaving it for a little while will hurt her.’ She did not care even if it did. ‘For now I’ll use the pump to take some milk for him, and in the morning, provided she’s lucid, she can have him back.’

The two men had consented, but a feeling of unease swept through them, it did not sit well with either to potentially leave her to die of her wounds no matter what she had done in the past. But Eve would not be swayed, and so that night the child went with his new Alpha to her bedchamber, and slept cosied up against her breast, nestled amongst the cool metal of her piercings.

In the next room, his mother fought for her life as Samantha tried to clean her up out of pity. It had not been an easy birth, but what more fitting way was there for the child of a mass murderer to enter the world?

Chapter 1

The night of the birth had been stressful for the pack as a whole, as Audra’s screams disturbed both sleep and poorly buried memories of her past misdeeds. Samantha had barely managed to keep the wounded woman on her bed once she had realised that her baby had been taken from her, and had been forced to call on Matthew to keep her from harming herself or any of the pack. The new mother had fallen into delirium through the pain of the birth and convinced herself that the father of her child had returned and swept him away. She had been frantic in her efforts to get out of her locked bedroom and into the night to chase the ghost of her long-dead lover, and in the end Samantha had been forced to tie her to the bed. She had not wanted to do it, but when the deranged woman had lunged at her with clawing fingers aiming for her eyes, she had seen no other alternative.

In the next room, despite his mother’s screams and cries, her newborn son had fallen into a deep and peaceful sleep in the arms of his pack Alpha. Perhaps he was soothed by her calm and dominant presence, or perhaps it was a sign that he had inherited his father’s broken and uncaring mind. Only time would tell.

The whole thing sat rather badly with Hunter, who had watched along with Matthew in obvious discomfort as Eve had hitched up Audra’s gown and applied the breast pump to express some milk. Even if the woman was utterly mad he felt that she should at least have had that first feed with her son. Eve however would not hear of it, as far as she was concerned Audra was a potential danger until her mind calmed as the pain wore off, and she had quickly snatched the child away to her own room.

The infant had been returned promptly in the morning to his real mother, only after she had demonstrated her sanity suitably. She had slept the long, black sleep of exhaustion and awoken at almost mid-day, whereupon she had politely requested to be released from her bonds. Samantha had agreed, and watched as the woman awkwardly pushed herself up and off the bed, shuffling to her bathroom to wash carefully and gently. Her wounds had re-opened, but she had kept quiet and padded her underwear in an attempt to contain the blood flow. Samantha suggested a hospital trip, but Audra had insisted that she would heal well enough in time. They both knew it to be true thanks to the nature of their shared condition, but the idea of leaving Audra like that made Samantha’s legs cross without her having even realised that they had done so. Once she had clambered back onto her bed, Audra had asked with wide eyes where her baby boy was, and if she could hold him. Samantha had seen the devious glint in her eyes, but there was a warmth to her too, something she had not seen in Audra before, and so she had crossed to the telephone and called Eve to request that she return with the child.

Eve had begrudgingly given back the baby boy when Audra had proved herself to be in a more stable state of mind, and the chubby infant had quickly latched onto his mother’s breast. He was not taken from her again.

Audra raised the boy in the pack house under strict supervision. She was permitted to wander the house and the lands, but only with company, and almost always had two escorts. Her companions frequently changed to try and prevent her getting under the skin of her pack mates, and to a degree it worked, though Samantha slowly developed a strange pity for her over time thanks to over-exposure. Audra began to request her as a minder more frequently, and soon it became commonplace for the three of them to be found together.

The boy himself had all the features of an attractive face blossoming and ready to grow into true handsomeness. He had inherited his father’s angular bone structure, and both of his parent’s slender builds. His skin was olive like his mother’s and his eyes were dark, and yet his hair grew in to be a pale shade of blonde not much darker than Varulv’s had been. Audra called him a cherub, and he truly did resemble those rounded little figures in his first year or so.

By the time the child was four years old, Samantha actively considered Audra to be a friend and thanks to her relationship with James, he too grew to be a little too comfortable around her. So the trio eventually became a regular quartet, and in time little Taron came to see James as his father, which Audra was always quick to remind him was not true. Whenever the dark haired pack delta picked up the child or spoke to him, she would always be there in a flash to quietly insist ‘NOT daddy Taron. Not daddy, OK?’

It had not taken much for Audra to persuade Samantha that it would be good for Taron to visit a nearby indoor play area on his fifth birthday. They had even managed to gain Eve’s permission, thanks to her distraction with other matters at the time. Much had changed since Alfred’s death, and the once happy-go-lucky pack Beta had blossomed into an Alpha who found herself easily weighed down by her duties. Many of the pack had paired up in the wake of all the deaths thanks to Varulv and Thiess, and some of them had even moved into some of the old cottages that dotted their lands. There had been a sudden scrambling to create new life in the wake of so much loss, and the pack itself had fragmented to a degree. Lucas and Allison had become a permanent couple and had requested the opportunity to start a family, as an extended branch of the pack. Eve had reluctantly agreed provided that they continued to defer to her rules. They had consented to her wishes and so she had let them go, though they often returned to eat with the pack as a whole. Isabelle also frequently visited the couple who had moved out of the main pack house, and often stayed with them for days on end. With all of the segregation Eve had grown concerned over time about the stability of her pack, and her fears that they would never truly recover from Alfred’s passing had made her blind to the deviousness that she should have guessed had never left Audra.

On the morning of Taron’s fifth birthday Eve had been distracted by a rushed meeting with Allison to discuss a possible pregnancy with her, and when Samantha had asked permission to take Audra to the play park she had agreed without really hearing what she had asked.

Knowing that her Alpha was distracted, Samantha had left her office in the library quickly so as to get out of her way. She had packed one of the pack’s cars with a few bits and bobs for a picnic with the help of James, and in the meantime Audra had begun preparations of her own.

Putting her son carefully on the bed she had given him a toy car to play with and instructed him to stay put. Taron had nodded in silence and done as he was told. In company his mother was nice as pie, but in private her temper often left him with hand marks on his rump and legs. Despite her love for him she was often unable to control her anger when he misbehaved, which he did frequently and seemingly without remorse. That day he felt sure that if he was not a good boy for her, as she so often asked him to be, then he might not get any of the presents he had been promised.

The young boy ignored his mothers frantic scrambling around the room as she snatched up clothes and crumpled them in a bag beneath his wrapped gifts. He did not see her pick up her razor from the side of the bath, or see the way that she dislodged the blades in a way that carefully concealed her from the sight of the camera in the corner of the room. The pack had never stopped watching her and she hated them for it. She wrapped the freed blades in a flannel and stuffed it into the bottom of the bag as well, just rearranging the presents on top in time for James to burst through the door. Somehow she had managed to convince him that she had been checking the presents were all in place and ready to go, and he had even let her carry the bag to the car herself, where she rested it on the seat beside her. Taron reached out for it when Samantha lifted him into his booster seat on the other side of the rear of the car, but Audra slapped his hand away. She had angrily told him that he had to wait, and miraculously neither of her two guards sensed the reason for her protectiveness of the carrier.

The two guardians had taken their places in the two front seats completely unsuspecting of any ulterior motives on Audra’s part. The trouble with the passage of time is that it dulls pain and memories into almost comfortable fuzziness, and this is what had happened within the pairs minds. Both had been carefully and meticulously groomed by Audra to be trusting of her, and to believe that she had turned over a new leaf after the birth of her son. She had painted herself as a loving, mother earth type. They had fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

James had driven the four of them to the park, where they had parked up outside the brightly painted building and bought tickets at the desk just inside the doors. They set up a small picnic on one of the tatty old, brightly coloured benches that dotted the black foam matting around the netted play area. Whilst they had been distracted Audra had laid out some of the presents on the table, carefully unwrapping the razor blades and nicking her wrist. Moving a present on top of the flannel containing her weapons she placed another small item on the table and gasped, clutching at her bleeding arm tightly. She convinced them easily that she had caught it on a ragged nail, and the pair agreed to watch Taron if she quickly ran to the pharmacy across the road to grab some plasters.

Almost unable to believe her luck, the devious mother kissed her son on the forehead and told him to wait before he opened any presents before running across the road and rifling through the pharmacy shelves. She could clearly see Samantha and James playing with her son through the glass fronted building on the far side of the street, and was thrilled that they were so distracted and trusting. She gathered up a packet of sleeping pills and some cold medication as well as a packet of plasters and two bottles of apple juice and two orange, dumping the lot heavily onto the counter. The cashier had rung her purchases through with a level of disinterest that might otherwise have irritated her, but that day it made her smile that little bit wider. Everyone was unsuspecting. It was perfect.

‘Do you have a bathroom I could use?’ She had asked after her items had been bagged up by the increasingly agitated looking middle-aged woman behind the counter.

She had been pointed wordlessly in the direction of the toilets, and she had scurried into them with her bag. Rushing into the nearest stall she had thrown down the toilet seat and dropped the bag onto it, pulling out the two pulp-filled orange juice bottles and unscrewing the caps. Then she carefully and quickly opened the medication packets and popped open the tablets, pouring the contents of each into the two bottles. She made certain not to waste any of the fine powder from within the capsules, and swirled the bottles to make sure that the mix was thorough. Only then did she exit the shop and make her way back across the road.

Passing by the young woman at the play-centre counter, she seated herself elegantly down next to her son. She placed the bag on the table and pulled out the two apple juice bottles, giving one to Taron and taking one for herself. Plucking out the packet of plasters she pasted one onto her wound and then offered James and Samantha the two bottles of orange juice. They accepted them seemingly unthinkingly, even shaking the bottle at her insistence to ensure that the pulp wasn’t stuck to the bottom of the bottles. Audra could barely contain her smile as they drank them down gratefully.

The four of them moved closer to the play area after their drinks, Audra insisting that Taron would be sick if he played immediately after eating and refusing to let him run off to the foam slides and ball pits. As time passed by, both Samantha and James began to look weary, and within an hour both were slumped on one of the benches that lined the windows beside one of the climbing frames, sleeping deeply. Audra quickly snatched up her son as soon as James’ eyes finally closed. With one finger pressed to his lips to tell him that she wanted silence, she grabbed the bag of presents and walked calmly past the woman at the counter, who did not even look up at her as she went.

With a smug smile she ambled out into the street and placed Taron gently down onto the floor. She had handed him the bag and then with a brief glance back through the windows to check that the pair in the building were still unconscious, she turned and made her way coolly into the village.

Knowing that she was at risk of discovery if she stayed in the area, she promptly called a cab and travelled to the nearest town, where she had once encountered her child’s father. The smells there were more potent, and far greater in number. It was a soup of scents that she felt sure would help her to remain hidden long enough for a real getaway plan to fall into place.

*****

The pack member’s arrival at the village play-centre had far from gone unnoticed, but so distracted by the little boy’s birthday were they that they failed to notice the surveillance they were under.

On the far side of a nearby field, where the short tended grass met the gnarled roots of the woodland trees around the park border, a figure reclined in the darkness. He watched keenly as the people carrier pulled up, his nostrils flaring delicately as the engine cut out and the front doors swung open. The wind direction had been working in his favour, and the clear scent of werewolf had drifted to him on the crisp January air. A smile had crossed his face fleetingly as the back doors of the car were opened and a small child was revealed. There was no scent of human in any of them, and so the boy was unmistakably a pure born werewolf. He had a scent to him that seemed somehow familiar to the hidden mans nose, a smell that caused the stirring of long buried memories of the ancient ones… The old ones who he had encountered in his own youth.

Leaning forward where he sat, the scruffily dressed man shifted on the earth to face the group more completely, giving them his undivided attention. He watched and listened carefully as they entered the building and bought their tickets before setting up a picnic inside; and studied the woman who almost ran across the quiet country road to the little pharmacy by the village tuck shop. She was gone for some time, and he guessed that she was wounded, as the smell of fresh blood wafted from her. She had gone for bandages or something for the pain, and yet still she seemed to be inside that building for a very long time. When she finally did return into view, she carried a heavy looking bag and made a beeline for the company of who he presumed to be her pack mates. From the bag she had produced some drinks, which seemed odd to him given that they had arrived with a basket full of food. But they all drank happily and soon the boy was playing in the park area.

The man watched the child intently, leaning forward into the dappled light beneath the trees to get a better view and revealing the strange canvass of his face. His skin was tanned in a way that only holds on truly olive skin, dark and even except for a strange scattering of patches where the pigment was entirely gone. A patch on his forehead above his left eyebrow was devoid of colour and the right half of his face was almost entirely pale, with that lack of pigment whitening his eyebrow and parts of his mid-length beard. His right eye too was without true colour, the iris an unnatural reddish-pink, with the pupil fully dilated and reflecting as a deep red rather than black. He was completely blind in that eye, but thanks to the sharpness of his other senses he was not impeded by that one-sided lack of sight. His hair was long and greying, not dissimilar to Hunters, but his natural hair tone was a rich brown rather than black an his beard matched it perfectly unlike many which are tinged with tones of red.

As he watched the child play, he moved forward even further, slowly revealing more and more of himself for them to see had they been paying attention. He was muscular and broad-shouldered, dressed in a white tank top and a pair of faded old jeans. His feet were clad in scuffed old work-boots and hair peeked out from the neckline of his discoloured old vest. He looked every inch the drifter that he