Between Two Worlds 2 - What lies between.

So, I've been toying around with this story a little more. I'm happy for the most part with how it's turned out. There are a few things I'm not too sure on and would love any feedback you can give me!
I can say now that there's a very low chance of me writing tomorrow as my day's pretty much fully booked, but definitely monday! So, expect more Darren shenanigans then! Until then, enjoy the next part of the story.

Darren took a slow stroll along the street, thoughts brewing within his mind. The smell of fresh brewed coffee permeated the air. He sighed and rummaged around in his pockets for loose change, his thoughts shifting to focus on the smooth, sweet morning charge of a fresh vanilla latte.

“One track mind, that’s what you are...”

Darren rolled his eyes beneath his glasses, “Not now, Mak!”

“What? There’s nobody around. Who’s gonna hear me?”

“You never know who or what’s around these days. Look at those two stiffs back with Grace.”

“The forensics guys?”

Darren couldn’t help but chuckle, “You know what I mean, Mak. Those kids probably never even saw what killed them.”

“Fine, fine... I’ll thought link.”

A vibrating sensation coursed through Darren’s mind, like the soft roll of a bass speaker.

“Better?” The voice now echoed within Darren’s skull.

“Much, thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me.” Darren pushed open the door of the coffee house without even taking note of its name or their prices, but as he looked up at the counter, he smirked. He’d been to this coffee house before, a few times. Darren had a strange relationship with fate. He knew that things happened for reasons, and he didn’t always agree with those reasons, but if fate wanted him to keep coming back to this coffee house, to keep being served by her, then that was fine with him.

He pushed his glasses further up his nose and observed the menu, mentally counting his change as he thumbed the coins in his pocket.

“Hi, good morning!” Her voice was still just as musical as his first visit here, “Oh, hi! Welcome back.” She smiled, “Your usual?”

Darren looked over to her, his eyebrows angled upward and his mouth curled into a slight smile, “Hey.” He took one last cursory glance at the menu board and nodded back to her, “Please. Grande.”

Sally’s nose gave a cute little wrinkle as she smiled, turning to fix his large vanilla latte, “Extra shot, right?”

“Mhm.” Darren replied absently.

“She really is a cutie... I can see why you keep coming back here.”

“Not now, Mak!”

Mak gave a grumble and Darren felt the thought link subside, leaving his ears with a slight ringing in them.

Darren left his money on the counter as Sally turned with his glass of steaming, foamy, sweet caffeinated goodness and he couldn’t help but smile as the bittersweet aroma of the fresh ground coffee mingling with the vanilla syrup punched up into his nostrils.

He made his way over to a table and set his glass down before removing his white leather jacket and setting it over the back of his chair. He glanced at the tribal flame pattern emblazoned on the back of the jacket in pale blue that formed an ancient Japanese ‘Oni’ face with yellow stitching designed to look like flaming eyes. Around the flaming face pattern and along the sleeves were etched ancient runic markings that caught the light in interesting ways.

The jaw of the face began to shift up and down slightly, causing the jacket to crease and fold in parts as Mak’s voice crept into his head once more.

“So, what do you think killed those saps?”

Darren winced, not expecting the sudden thought link, “Honestly? No clue... I need to ask around.”

His gaze fell back on Sally as she tended to other customers. He sighed, his mind beginning to wander as he sipped his coffee, feeling the warmth spread through his body.

Mak chimed in once more, “So, you think it was a Join Beast, and not a Sider?”

Darren shook his head, “As crazy as Siders can be, I don’t think any are capable to withstand the trek through the Join into this realm and still have the energy to pull off a crime like that.”

A tut echoed in Darren’s head, “They could’ve been here for a while and waited to be fully rested.”

“It’s a possibility, Mak, but for the moment I’m still hanging on Join Beast.” He took another sip of his coffee and watched Sally out of the corner of his eye, “The look of surprise on the bodies’ faces implied they didn’t see the attack, or the attacker. I’m thinking whatever did this was covered with the Veil...”

Darren took a moment to think, shaking his head. It was widely known, he mused, that there was a theory of multiple universes running parallel to his. This was, in part, true. Darren knew all too well that a world that coexisted with his own. This world was not an opposite dimensional space, because not everything was different. Instead, it existed more as a reflection, a world of possibilities and ‘What ifs’.

For example, someone could be the nicest, most charitable individual with not even a smudge upon their criminal record but in the ‘Side’ world, they would be a ruthless, cutthroat criminal with little to no regard for anyone other than themselves. They would retain most other aspects about themselves, such as gender and physical features to a degree (Though there would be some slight differences).

Between these two worlds is a space known only as the Join to those aware of it. It is a realm where the excess energies of the two worlds gather and form into entities known as Join Beasts, or ‘Joints’. These creatures, once strong enough, seek sustenance greater than the flow of energy can provide, and so they venture out into one of the two worlds, looking to feed, to grow stronger. Darren paused and shuddered at the thought of some of the Joints he’d encountered in the past.

The energy they generate to travel from the Join to one of the worlds lingers around their bodies, creating a field known as the Veil. It is this Veil that, for the most part, prevents humans from noticing these inhumane, otherworldly beasts; instead, they appear to the human eye as the closest thing that a mortal mind can associate the beast’s form to, like seeing a quadrapedal hound beast as simply a large dog, or a wolf.

Darren was a rarity, an anomaly. Lucky him, he though. He was able to shift between both words without injury or fatigue because of his connection to Makna’ir. Mak was a Joint that through some kind of ritual (Darren didn’t fully understand the particulars) had become bound to the jacket that he wore. As a result, this created a unique bond between his two selves, merging both personalities into one singular self. Even among the other Joint Hunters, the ‘Wardens’ that Darren has come across, he is the only person he knows with this trait.

He was such a lucky guy to be able to encounter and fight twice the amount of Joints as any other Warden, Darren mused as he finished his coffee and sighed, folding his arms behind his head. He stared blankly at the ceiling, watching the fans cycle continuously. It was a boring existence, being a fan, just constantly spinning, never changing direction or reaching new destinations. But then, he thought, a fan had never known any other form of existence – assuming the fan knew anything of its existence at all, and as such it would not realise just how dull its existence was. That was true contentment... It was true what they said, ignorance must be bliss. If only he could still have ignorance, even if only feigned, to the true nature of the worlds around him.

“Are you daydreaming again?”

Darren closed his eyes and forced a deep breath to ease the twinge in his mind, “No, I was just-“

“Bullshit, you know I can see your thoughts, right?” Mak had that matter-of-fact tone that meant there was no point in arguing with him. "Man, some of things in here... Sickening!"

“I... Fine.” Darren rolled his eyes and stretched, “Let’s establish what little we know so far.”

Mak snorted, an act that caused the inside of Darren’s skull to rattle uncomfortably, “We know that whatever this killer used, it was sharp. We know it took chunks off the corpses to either chow on or display in a glass case-“

“Not funny!” Darren blinked. He realised he’d said that out loud instead of through the thought link. The majority of the coffee shop residents had stopped their own worlds to become a part of his. 

Mak’s sniggering now rang through his mind.

“No, but that sure as hell was!” Mak sniggered some more, “But we also know that this thing is either stupidly quick, or really sneaky if those humans didn’t see it coming.”

Darren closed his eyes beneath his aviators. If he couldn’t see the world around him, they couldn’t see him; Ostrich logic at its finest. He stood and made his way to order another coffee. It was going to be a long couple of days, and he needed every edge he could get... If it meant being served by Sally, then so be it. He might even ask her out some time, he thought.

“Great, asking a coffee girl out for coffee... Smoooooth.”

“Damnit, Mak!”

The coffee house stared once more.

Sally stared.

Darren frowned, blushed, paid for his coffee, then left.

No wonder people with voices in their head got locked away.

I think finishing there, when put into a novelesque format on my word processor, gives me about a full chapter's worth of pages when playing to averages, so I think it's a good place to leave it for now.

Love and Peace,

Craiggy.

Between Two Worlds

Okay, so inspiration smacked me upside the head last night, as it can sometimes do in the early hours of the morning... Y'know, right before you go to bed, so you're kept awake by your own thoughts... I both hate and love those times. As such, Darren was born. I'm still working on New Z Land, but then I knew I just had to start writing this down before the idea flipped me the bird and wandered off into another realm, so here we go.

It was a cold Saturday evening; much colder than was usually the case for September. It was the sort of cold that was unsettling, that reached into the very depths of the human soul and reminded it of times long passed and of creatures that stalked the night, not concerned with the cold – creatures that hunted, that fed upon human flesh. It was the sort of cold that frightened people.

The snow crunched underfoot as Hannah and Ryan lazily wandered along the street from the theatre. Her chestnut hair cascaded around the shoulders of her thick winter coat, pushed back at the top of her head by a pair of pink fluffy earmuffs. She glanced behind at the trail of footsteps they had left behind them, at how much larger his footprints were than hers. She smiled and looked at Ryan, the moonlight glancing off of his raincoat and deepening its already dark green colour. His hair was tucked away neatly in a dark grey beanie cap and his pale blue eyes moved to observe her.  They were content with each other’s company, not showing any reaction to the cold other than the cloud of their breath upon the air. Ryan draped his arm around her shoulders like a shawl and held her close. They shared a joke and Hannah’s laughter filled the empty street with a warmth otherwise distant from the frosty September night.

Ryan noticed a crunch of snow out of synch with their own footsteps and he stopped, holding Hannah closer to his own chest as he looked around.

The street around them was empty. Only the distant sound of traffic could be heard. There wasn’t a single visible soul with them on the street.

“What is it, why did you stop?” Hannah asked, glancing at him nervously.

“It’s nothing. I thought I heard something...” He smiled and squeezed her to try and ease her tensions before slowly walking once more. Ryan tried to shake the thought out of his mind that he could still hear the third set of footsteps. Ryan convinced himself that it was the sound simply echoing in the sidestreets and alleyways and playing tricks on his mind. Sure, that was it, he reassured himself.

Hannah and Ryan never saw the beast that attacked them. They never saw the long, razor sharp claws that cut through cloth and flesh alike. Hannah and Ryan felt no pain as they fell to the floor, their bodies already in shock. As their eyes began to dim and their world sank into darkness, they finally noticed how cold it was. Hannah and Ryan convulsed as their life oozed from them, soaking through the snow, staining it black under the moonlight; part shiver, part death spasm. As the last few dregs of consciousness slipped from their bodies, Hannah and Ryan saw a shadow loom over them – they saw eyes like embers shimmering through the darkness above them as a mouth all too wide and with too many teeth shifted into a malicious, hungry grin that caught the moonlight reflecting from the snow. Perhaps it was the delirium of the cold and their dying haze, but Hannah and Ryan saw as an inhuman tongue lashed from the gaping maw and licked their dark blood from its claws, a piercing clicking noise uttering from the beast’s throat.

The shadow was mocking their final moments; mocking and watching, savouring its kill as much as it seemed to savour the taste of their blood...

***

“Damn it all, Grace! Why don’t you warn me coming onto a scene like this?” Darren covered his mouth and held back a gag in the depths of his chest and throat as he observed the two corpses on the sidewalk, already beginning to take on a shade of blue from being left in the cold all night. A fresh fall of snow had clung to the bodies and the forensics team had already begun dusting away the excess to reach the lower layers that had been stained by the victims’ blood. Tatters of clothing dotted the scene, as did slivers and chunks of flesh where the bodies had been ripped apart. Darren noted a distinct lack of blood around some of the portions of person littering the snow.

“Sorry, D, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Grace DeLance, an officer of the Detroit police’s homicide department, looked to Darren with an amused twinkle in her hazel eyes. Morgue humour... Darren had come to expect no less from Detroit PD’s rising star. It was a natural human coping mechanism, and one that she had developed to a fine art.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to spoil my lunch...” Darren glanced around once more, noticing the earmuffs next to the woman’s corpse, once pink, once fluffy, now thick and sticky with deep red blood, no doubt hers and her partner’s, “Unlike whatever killed these two...”

Grace tilted a brow and narrowed her eyes at him, “Come again?”

She hadn’t noticed. Darren smiled.

“These portions of flesh here, here and here,” he gestured, one hand still over his mouth, “There’s no blood around them. They were cut from the corpses post-mortem, post exsanguination.” He crouched by the male body and squinted, “Also, they don’t match the wounds exactly; there are parts missing, meaning either whatever killed these poor bastards had its own buffet, or took souvenirs...”

Darren stood and stretched, taking a deep breath through his mouth before looking at the forensics team busying themselves around the crime scene.

“Call them off.” Darren said, turning his attention back to Grace.

“What?”

“You heard. They won’t find anything.”

Grace pouted. She suited pouting, Darren thought.

“What do you mean we won’t find anything?”

Darren moved a hand around, as if drawing a circle around the scene with his mind, “The snow. Whatever prints or other such markings on the bodies or around the area would have been washed away with the melting snow and then covered over with the fresh fallen stuff on top of that.”

The fact that Darren already knew that whatever had done this wouldn’t leave any marks of identification was probably a little beyond Grace’s level of understanding, for the moment. He knew he’d have to level with her eventually, but for now, he just told her the things she needed to know.

“If there’s anything else, Officer DeLance, you have my number. I’ll follow up some leads, chase down some contacts, see what I can find out,” Darren pushed back the hem of his white leather jacket and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his faded stonewash jeans. The wind caught his ruddy blonde hair and blew it out of his face. Grace DeLance caught sight of her reflection in the silver lenses of Darren’s aviator sunglasses and sighed.

“Fine, I’ll call you, Mr. Riley, but if you find something first, you’re to come straight to me.”

“I will...” He wouldn’t...

Darren glanced to the sky, the sun pale as it shone through the frosty sky. Something had broken from the Join, and he knew he was the only one capable of hunting it. So much for lazy Sundays, he mused...

Yeah, still on my Dresden Files vibe. I'm really getting excited by Darren and can't wait to introduce you to more of his world(s... Hint hint. Spoiler?) 

But for now, God bless and much love.

Adios!

Craiggy.

Misadventure by Moonlight (Working title)

Hey guys, sorry it's been a while since I posted something. I am carrying on with New Z-Land, and no, I didn't finish my NaNoWriMo project (Who out there honestly thought I would?) But it is another project under my belt for picking up at a later date and dusting off to finish. Yeah, I said finish. 2013 is going to be a year of change for me, and the first thing I want to change is how I write; not my style of writing persay, but my attitude. I'm not gonna just be an explosion of new ideas that then just fizzle out into nothing.

That being said, I've been reading a lot of Werewolf stuff at the minute. There's just something enchanting about werewolves that isn't really covered in modern fiction to my knowledge (And please enlighten me otherwise if there is). There's a sense of romance, of raw, natural passion about werewolves, and yet it's vampires that seem to be the cool kids in the fiction world. Don't get me wrong, I love vampires, when they're not sparkling, but I wanna give some time to the underdog (Pun intended) so here's just something I knocked together and will definitely toy around with whilst working more on New Z-Land, which is all I can really work on at the moment other than my NaNoWriMo project, as I still have yet to get my external hard drive repaired.

There are a lot of myths and speculations about Werewolves. Some are true, others are not. I want to start this off by clarifying some of these. Silver is the bane of werewolves; fact, sort of... Every supernatural entity has what is known as a bane and yes, silver is the bane of werewolves. It does not, however, outright kill a werewolf; well, it can, but no more than say a shotgun blast to the head. This myth dates back to times of old, when man was a simpler creature and had to use what was at their disposal to fight off the beasties that hunted them. As time passed, mankind got smarter, and weapons got stronger; so strong that they started to hurt like silver. Werewolf kind referred to this new period as the silver age of mankind, and it is one that they still struggle against to this day.

Werewolves transform at the sign of the full moon; a little bit of fact, but greatly embellished. When a Garou (Yeah, the French actually got it right with that word) first transforms, they are marked by the sign of whatever auspice the moon is in. As the moon is at its strongest when it is full, a lot more Garou (That’s right, it’s its own plural, like sheep. Fun metaphor, I know) change for the first time. Now, with training and experience, a Garou can transform at will; hell, stronger Garou can even partially change, shifting just a part of their body, but as a sign of respect to Gaia a Garou will always transform on the first night of their auspice.

Werewolves are mindless savages, hunting and killing based around pure instinct; myth...ish. Garou retain all sense of who they are when they transform, but they do gain a greater sense of their connection to the primal energies of Mother Earth. One of these energy aspects is that of rage. Rage fuels the Garou; they harness and manipulate it, but some are lost to rage and give in to it, becoming the frenzied beasts of folklore. They are known as Wilder, and it is one of the duties of the Garou to prevent the Wilder from becoming widespread. This is both our gift and our curse. We use our rage, yet we risk it consuming us...

If bitten by a werewolf, you become a werewolf. Bullshit. This makes about as much sense as eating a cheese sandwich makes you a cheese sandwich. Don’t make me laugh!

One thing you might have noticed, I used the term ‘we’ back there. That’s right, I’m one of the Garou. My name is Alex Grey, and what follows is a story of how I came face to face with the Wilder, our curse, and other things that go bump in the night.

It's only a short post, but I want to explore the character of Alex a lot more. And I'll say now, my main influences for this piece are the World of Darkness RPGs and the Dresden Files series, which I am very much falling in love with thanks to my friend Julianne who introduced me to them. Also loving the TV series. If you've not heard of this franchise then check it out, I highly recommend it. It's like a Buffy Noir.

Love and peace!

Craiggy.