Episode III - "The Beast Incarnate" - Part One

The police were holding up better than most of the gawkers but the scene was hard even for them to stomach. What had been an unassuming back-alley was now awash with blood and viscera. Some more human-looking chunks of flesh could be seen here and there but, mostly, the whole area had more of the quality of a fucked-up art project than a crime scene. Tanvi surveyed the scene carefully, spotting clumps of black hair or fur. What interested her most wasn't anything she saw, however, but something she smelled. Sulphur. There was no way anyone else would pick up on it but it was unmistakable to her, evidence of demonic activity.

A few feet away, doing her best not to look at the ground, Lydia was chatting up one of the cops. It came quite easily to her and her push-up bra helped a lot. After a few come-hither looks and easy smiles, she managed to get the low-down. Returning to the group, she announced, 'basically, animal control got a call last night about a large dog on the loose in the area and, well, this is what's left of them.' As the group digested that information, Valentine spotted a man who seemed out of place, nervous and distressed rather than curious or appalled.

'Do you know what happened here?' the Lionheart said, pretending to be ignorant.

'Yes,' the man said, coarsely. He was very thin, with balding black hair and an unkempt patchy beard. He spoke with a thick Eastern European accent. 'I called them. I told them about a dog. Bigger than any I'd ever seen. I tried to tell them how, um, large it was. Very large, very very large. Potworny. Gah, large, black, dog. Blacker than anything I ever saw.' He tore at phantoms of hair on his head. 'They didn't understand.'

Valentine relayed the information to the group, adding, 'my guess is a werewolf.' He could not seem to escape the wolf. It taunted him in his dreams and now, apparently, in his waking life.

Joshua rubbished this immediately, drawing on knowledge drilled into him from a young age, 'no, that's not likely. If that man saw a werewolf, he'd have been stricken mad. He wouldn't have had the thought to report it. He'd think it was a hallucination or a trick of the light, assuming he didn't just faint.'

Tanvi concurred, 'he's right. I think we are looking at a demon. Did that man mention anything about fire?'

'No.'

The older woman tutted at that, 'my first thought was a hellhound but there are no burn marks that I can see. This is going to be difficult to figure out.' That seemed to be a cue for the group to head back to headquarters and hit the books.

The walk back gave them enough time for an argument to develop between Valentine and Joshua. 'The Beast can track animals,' the Chosen One said, 'the trail might not be cold. I could go back.'

'Absolutely not,' his guard said, disgust written across his face, 'I can countenance you calling upon the monster in life-or-**** situations but if you build up a dependence on it for every little thing, it will own you. The human being will be consumed, and an animal will take its place.'

'What good are my powers if I can't use them?!' Valentine demanded to know, struggling to keep his tone even.

Josh shook his head, 'you use them all the time, you've been using them all your life. You hit harder, you run faster, you hear more and see more. That's all you need, your innate human skill, my training and that sword of yours.'

'I don't buy it. I have the memories of every Lionheart inside my head, remember? Every last one of them called upon the Beast in situations like this.' Just how far most them went was not something Valentine was comfortable sharing, however.

Joshua radiated aggression in his reply, 'as a result of arrogance and pride. They believed they could control it,' he said, pointing his finger at Valentine's head to make his point, 'you'll have memories of all the times they were wrong, as well.'

'They were right more often than they were wrong,' Valentine replied, with heat. He'd seen what happened when a Lionheart lost controlled, almost felt it, but it was rare. On some level, the rational side of him knew that the consequences were too severe to risk it but he wanted to act. He knew that he'd feel terrible if the monster attacked again when he could've ended things so easily. 'It's my power, to employ however I wish,' he said, before turning away as if to end the argument.

At that, his guard grabbed him and pulled him around. 'Like hell,' he said, 'you are governed by laws.'

'Not your laws,' the Lionheart returned, swotting his hands away. 

Before things could escalate to ****, Lydia walked over to them. 'Guys, hey, let's not do this,' she urged, putting herself in between them. 'Josh, you promised me that you'd get off my brother's case,' she said, settling his temper before turning to Valentine, 'and just a few weeks ago, you were dead against indulging the Beast.' It was true and he nodded, mutely. 'Now, come on, we've got work to do,' she said, as she led them into their headquarters.

As for the research, even with everyone on board, it was extremely slow-going. Finding dog-like creatures that were demonic or devilish in nature but that weren't hellhounds proved difficult, whereas the list of infernal creatures that could transform into dogs, monstrous or otherwise, was unmanageably long. Tanvi soon grew impatient with flipping through bestiaries and, instead, consulted recent entries in journals of prophecies and psychic pronouncements. It was her go-to whenever research seemed to drag on. 

'Aha!' she announced, once she'd found the slightest morsel, 'I've got something worth following up on. A seer in Alton experienced convulsions during a reading right around the end of September, and was heard making such proclamations as, "the devil moves, the old enemy returns," and, "the hound will be turned against its master," decent fit, right?'

There were nods and murmurs of agreement but, really, the group was just happy to have an excuse to drop their books.

'Right, I'll make a few calls, try to get in touch with this seer. In the meantime, there a few locals we can contact. I'll split you into teams, to get things moving. One of them might be a pain, I'll assign him to Valentine, but the rest should be cooperative if you mention that you're with the Society. If we're on the right track, at least one of them is bound to know. Oh, and don't let them do readings for you, not before you get them to tell you what they know. Otherwise, they'll just get themselves all mixed up.'

The teams assembled themselves haphazardly. Valentine and Joshua were sent to put some pressure on an information dealer named Eugene Dickerson, a man known to consort with devils and fouler things, and Lydia insisted on coming along to keep her brother and his guard from trying to kill each other. Tanvi took Mark and Adam as, likely unnecessary, back-up to visit an ex-Society demonologist down in Durham. Priyanshi led the rest of the team - Judah, Aaron, Teresa, Samantha and Tiffany - to meet a relatively new contact, a young fortune teller named Tyler Simpson. The plan was for them all to meet back up in the evening, to receive a guest, a very powerful psychic medium called Zhanna Fomenko.

As it happened, Mister Dickerson was an old hat. He'd moved to town, likely at the advice of a seer, a few weeks before Valentine had even become the Chosen One, but he'd already managed to establish himself as the petty king of Dogwood's nascent underworld. Still, he was known to help the Society from time to time, generally when it suited him to point them in the direction of one of his many enemies. As soon as he caught a glimpse of the Lionheart, however, he did not at all look pleased to see him.

'Here already, I see,' the man grimaced and tried, in vain, to clear his throat. He was tall and muscled, with a full head of black hair and a wild beard. Sat beside him was a woman with bags under her eyes and glossy black lipstick. They actually looked quite awkward, positioned as they were behind the till in the cramped thrift store he ran as a front for his dodgy dealing. 'Before you ask, I don't know anything about this animal attack.'

Valentine didn't let that dissuade him and Josh seemed to intuit how they were supposed to approach things. They subtly closed off any route of escape he might try to take if things got out of hand. 'We're actually here to ask you about a prophecy. We know you deal in demonic lore, and that you've had dealings with seers. A psychic medium in Virginia mentioned the hound turning against its master.'

'Like I said,' the man snarled, 'I don't know anything.' As his assistant or girlfriend, or whatever she was, sat up and began to write something on a scrap of paper, he paid it no mind and continued to shoo the boys off. 'Will that be all?'

Before either of them could could reply, the woman thrust the scrap of paper at Valentine. 'I might know a thing or two,' she said, 'give me a call when I get off work, we can have a private discussion at my apartment.' With that, she winked before sliding back down into her seat.

Dickerson shot her a look of bewilderment before turning his gaze back to Valentine. 'You'll be going now, then,' he said. Having nothing else to do or say, they left.

When they got back outside, Josh bristled, 'that was a waste of time.'

'Oh, I don't know,' Lydia said, smiling, 'my brother might be getting lucky tonight.'

Valentine said nothing and Josh rolled his eyes, 'the Chosen One is not interested in someone like her. He's had prophetic dreams about Pri. They're fated to be together.'

The Lionheart found it very strange for someone, especially his often antagonistic guard, to speak so frankly about all that but, again, he said nothing. Lydia replied, with a wry smile, 'I had no idea you were such a romantic.'

Valentine zoned out on the walk back, as the two of them got themselves into an insufferable flirtatious back-and-forth.

Meanwhile, Pri was leading her rather large group to their assigned target. 'Tyler the Terrific,' Sam said with a sneer, as they approached his small shop. Pri hadn't had much of a chance to get to know Samantha. She was a tough girl with black hair, not cut particularly short but still shorter than any of the other girls, with olive skin and an athletic build. A few of the others laughed when they saw the illustrated banner hanging on the exterior wall, covering up the sign for what had once been a tearoom. As well as featuring his moniker in gaudy gold text on a purple background, it featured a cartoon drawing of the young man himself, with a laughable amount of muscle mass.

When they got inside, they were struck by the contrast to the real person, a weedy young man who looked barely more than a year older than any of them, barring Judah. He was skinny and short, with thinning dirty blonde hair, facial hair, that had barely come through, awkwardly styled into a Van Dyke and a purple costume, with gold trim, complete with a cape. The only feature of his that Priyanshi appreciated were his vibrant eyes, that reminded her of Valentine's. He introduced himself at once, with a deep bow, 'greetings, fine friends, what might you be after this afternoon? Readings are twenty dollars, seances are forty.'

'No readings today, I'm afraid,' Pri said with a smile, 'we're looking for information about a prophecy. It's about a devil or a demon, it was given by one of your lot, up in Virginia, and we think it has something to do with last night's attack.'

'I consort with devils as rarely as I consort with Virginians, I'm sorry to say.'

'Cut the bullshit,' Sam said, startling him, 'you moved here to be close to the action, you've got to paying attention to what's going on.'

Tyler began to speak but stopped himself when he met the girl's gaze. 'The wolf,' he sputtered, 'a werewolf.'

Pri tried to snap him out of it, 'that's unlikely. We're sure there's something more demonic at play.'

'It's your future,' he cried, 'a maddening, howling, beastly future.' He retreated behind a table covered by large purple cloth. 'There's nothing else I can say. It's too much, please leave.'

Sam growled, 'useless,' before storming out. Most everyone else left in turn but Pri lingered to see if he might snap out of it. When he remained cowering, with his head down, she wrote the number for the headquarters down on one of his business cards.

'Please, if you learn anything, give us a call.' He shot her the slightest look of acknowledge and she left.

They brought the notion of a werewolf back up to the rest of the group when they returned and it was taken seriously enough to be moved onto the maybe pile but, generally, everyone felt like they'd wasted their time until her mother returned, alongside Adam and Mark. Their trip to Durham had not yielded much but the man they'd met with had been much more cooperative and given them a full transcript of the prophecy: 'The devil returns, Hallowe'en night, he sets his sight, down and up, the old enemy returns. The devil moves, flesh for a feast, fit for a beast, the old enemy moves. The hound comes, a fatal disaster, the hound turns against its master, man and beast, beast and man, cats and dogs, dogs and cats, dark things, dark thoughts.'

The group threw plenty of interpretations around but what Priyanshi was most sure of was that it meant Valentine would have to embrace his beast. Josh, of course, and Judah too, believed the opposite. They said that he would need to confront the monster within and defeat it as surely as he would need to defeat the monster without. Valentine, for his part, only brooded and took neither side. She wished he'd open up to someone. In her mind, anyone would do, but in her heart, she hoped that when he was eventually ready to share his burden he would choose her. She imagined cradling his head in her lap but the vision soon stripped them both of their clothes and she had to shake herself free of such thoughts.

They still had something rather important planned for the evening, a reception for the esteemed Lady Zhanna. It would not do to be preoccupied with sexual thoughts in the presence of a powerful psychic.