"Hh — cough — damn. Almost got buried in there."
Raphael pulled himself off the ground and looked at the rubble.
Dust still rolling off it. The occasional crack and shift as something unstable finished settling. Nothing moving inside it, nothing coming out.
"Dead?"
He almost believed it for a second. Then he checked himself.
"No. System hasn't confirmed the kill. Still alive in there somewhere." He looked at the wreckage a moment longer. "But that ought to buy enough time."
He retraced the route he'd mapped while phasing through the building's walls in wraith form, found the direction of the medical bay, and started moving.
The wing it was in hadn't collapsed. He noticed the leaves on the ground around the building's perimeter as he walked, a thick scatter of them, and looked up. The nearest trees were on the other side of the outer fence, on the street.
Strange. Must have been wind.
He didn't think about it further. Right now, nothing mattered more than a blood bag. Two blood bags, ideally. His body was making its preferences very clearly known.
---
Beneath the rubble, the werewolf was pinned.
Rebar had gone through him in a dozen places, the broken ends of it sticking out at angles, the concrete debris pressing down from above. The wounds looked like something from an old painting of a battle death, arrows replaced with steel. Blood ran from all of them, slow and dark.
The rage that had been running his body for the past hour drained out with the blood.
Manson surfaced.
"It hurts — why does it hurt so much — what happened—"
The grey fur pulled back from his face, retreating into the skin, leaving behind the features of an eighteen-year-old with freckles and a split lip and an expression of total confusion.
The moon symbol on his forehead had reduced to the thinnest sliver of a crescent, still fading, almost out.
"Again. It happened again."
He closed his eyes.
His last clear memory was hiding in the bushes, watching through the branches as the man killed his dog without any particular effort or feeling.
That was where the memory became specific and then stopped being specific. The anger had come up fast, the way it always did, and then his body had stopped being a place he lived and started being a vehicle for something he wasn't driving.
He knew what that felt like by now. He'd felt it enough times to know.
He hadn't wanted it to happen again. He'd tried to run, actually run, put distance between himself and the anger before it caught him. It always caught him.
There was a voice that lived underneath the anger, and it told him that the anger was his, that it belonged to him, that it was the only honest response to a world that had spent his entire life treating him like furniture. The voice wasn't wrong, exactly. That was the problem.
Then the darkness, the half-remembered hours, the sensation of chasing someone through a building and not being able to finish it. And now this.
Pinned in rubble. Dying, maybe.
He'd almost died before. The near-deaths were becoming a pattern.
The memories that came up weren't organized. They arrived the way they always arrived in bad moments, in fragments, the older ones yellowed and unsteady.
Peter's face. The first time, and all the times after. The particular way Peter's friends would follow him into bathrooms. James, who was Peter's friend and also his own specific variety of cruelty.
The day Manson had finally felt something other than fear about all of it, and the name of that thing was anger, and what happened after.
He'd never understood the logic of it. Why his interest in animation and his feelings for Laura were reasons to be targeted.
Why Peter could collect protection money from half the school and the teachers would look away, but Manson getting the textbook fee wrong would result in a formal complaint that made his adoptive mother cry, and she was already working herself sick.
He'd held it together for a long time.
The last time he hadn't. He'd wanted the power to do something, and the body had given it to him, and he'd killed Peter, and others.
The memories after that were blurred. He'd run. Hidden in his apartment.
His adoptive mother hadn't understood what was happening but she'd given him the space anyway, working more hours to compensate for whatever she thought she was compensating for.
He'd felt guilty about that in a way that had no clean resolution.
When he went back to school a week later, no one had noticed he'd been gone. Not the teachers. No one.
Except Laura.
She noticed. She always noticed. She was like that with everyone, even him, even when he was at his worst. She'd found him in the corner of the classroom and talked to him like a person, and he'd started, slowly, to believe that maybe the part of his life with Peter in it was actually over. Peter was dead. His friends were dead. It could be different.
Then she died.
Taken. Used. Discarded in a field outside town.
Everyone knew who'd done it. The school bus driver, same as always, same route, same face at the wheel every morning.
People whispered about it in hallways and then went home. The adults looked the other way, again, same as they always had.
He'd felt the anger come back and this time he'd let it.
The second time was different from the first. He'd noticed, somewhere in the middle of it, that part of him wasn't horrified anymore.
That part of him understood what it meant to hold the power over something, to feel it give way under his hands.
He'd run wild after that, out in open country, full wolf, until the anger had burned itself through.
When he came back to himself there was a strange dog sitting near him. Skinless along patches, built wrong, eating something he didn't look at directly. He'd kept it anyway. It seemed to understand him.
And out there, in the same open ground, he'd met the man who had left him at eighteen months old and thought that was the end of his parental obligations.
His father.