Just an Old Legend Ch. 06

He kissed her as softly as he could, "Sleep then and I will keep you warm,"

She felt him against her there, knowing that he couldn't help that, and then felt him shift as his arm folded over her carefully. She felt the fur against her and smiled. He waited until he was finished with the change, and carefully pulled her tighter to him, as she held his clawed hand to her breast. She was quietly astounded when the arm that she was lying on curled up to hold her shoulder joint in the other hand.

She settled her head there under his chin, "Goodnight Ion, thank you for being my friend."

He smiled, "Thank you for being my very brave friend, Elena. Goodnight."

"Why do you think I'm brave?"

"For what you did tonight," he said, "You still wanted to be my friend, and you knew, Elena, what I am when you walked out. Even now you are brave, only for lying here - for coming here to lie down to sleep against me like this."

He heard her soft chuckle, "I didn't want to lose my friend because we didn't understand each other and I had been afraid of you like that. Now? I'm just any regular woman, you should know yourself that we always want to be warm. Didn't you lie with Danaya after you knew?"

"Yes."

"Why did you do that, Ion?" she asked.

He sighed, "Because she was my wife, and because I loved - " He stopped.

Helen smiled in the darkness and just pushed back a little, "Mm-Hmm."

"Do you say that you love me, Elena?" He was shocked.

"I don't know," she said, "I think we like each other enough for this tonight, and for tomorrow, we'll have to see. Goodnight."

He carefully pulled her tighter to him, this woman who, given time, had unraveled the weave of twisted history and superstition that he'd been bound in. He was aware that this same ability would allow her to see his heart whether he tried to hide it or not. It didn't matter to him. He had one friend in all of the world now, one lovely friend for him, and she was in his arms. He had trouble with English sometimes, but for this there were no words for him in any tongue.

Finally, he had some inner peace.

-------------------------

11:36PM Local time,

Birmingham

United Kingdom

The bag lady stood in a tiny alcove watching the entrance to a popular local club a few doors down the street. A typical Saturday night in Birmingham, she sighed, with people out enjoying themselves in the club district. She pulled her dirty, over-sized sweatshirt a bit higher up on her shoulders to get a little more overhang from the hood to hide her face, and then reached up her sleeve to check the straps on her right wrist for comfortable snugness without running the risk of cutting off any circulation.

She looked down and blinked slowly for a moment to hopefully ease a bit of the discomfort from her contact lenses and then she checked that her bags were still there leaning against her legs just so. She smoothed the old-fashioned plaid skirt and pretended to ignore the holes in her old leotards. Doing this also had the benefit of making her less noticeable to the policeman who had just walked past. She hoped for an end to this soon. If he came back, she knew that she'd have to move long before he got to her.

People swirled around her, most not even knowing that she was there, and some stepping sideways a bit as a precaution in case the old woman might try to bother them for their change or just plain bother them. She didn't mind. At least those ones took her mind off the drag of the time spent here. If anyone looked as though they'd get a bit too close to her in passing, she'd begin to mutter whatever craziness came to her mind, and they'd veer off.

She was waiting for a particular person to make an appearance by leaving that club. It had been just over an hour now. Maybe the pickings were slim tonight, the bagwoman surmised as she waited, or perhaps the woman whom she'd followed here just hadn't found anyone who had appealed to her. She couldn't figure that out. What difference would the appeal have to do with it? She supposed that someone such as the person who she was here for might have a preference to find somebody who at least bathed a bit regularly, but in a place like that it shouldn't be all that hard to do. But then, she reasoned, everybody is different.

Maybe it was because statistically, your average run of the mill werewolf had once been a human themselves, but the vast majority detested the thought of eating human flesh. The federation had banned it for several reasons. Those who engaged in the hunting and killing of people for dietary consumption tended to have a nasty habit of wanting to continue the practice, for one thing. That almost every self-respecting werewolf was repulsed by the thought of it played a large part, obviously. Perhaps the biggest reason was that torn up and half-eaten bodies tended to come to light eventually. The federation was all about integrating seamlessly with the human world. Humans were unaware of the werewolf population which lived peacefully among them for the most part, and that was all to the good. Nobody wanted the attention that this sort of grisly hobby could bring.

And of course there was the plain fact that humans really don't taste all that good to most werewolves, she thought. In her own past there had been a time when she'd been hunted and had been forced to kill a couple of people in order to make her getaway. That had been before they'd all gotten together and tried to leave the solitary, self-destructive part of their nature behind them once and for all. In her case, it was a move based in desperation and not deadly intent. She'd been caught and then had to fight her way out. Once in the clear, she'd spent the next few hours spitting and gagging, washing her mouth out repeatedly to be rid of the awful taste. It was worse than eating a crow, she remembered.

But this one here, this girl in the club seemed to have made something of a regular thing of it. She wasn't part of the federation, but that didn't matter. Decide that you liked to gnaw human body parts off for nourishment and sooner or later you'd come to the federation's attention and be branded a renegade even if you weren't aware of it. And then they'd send somebody after you.

In this case, a bag lady, she smirked.

The commotion of a small group of people noisily exiting the club caught her attention and she looked pointedly. Yes, there she was, on one end of an obviously tipsy threesome of women, laughing and giggling over some drunken joke or comment that one of them had made. The attention of the girl at the other end was drawn by a man who had called to her and she wandered in that direction to flirt a little. The pair continued on, and as the bagwoman picked up her bags she just caught the glint in her target's eye for a split-second as she tried to guide her new-found friend toward an alley.

Switching both bags to her left hand now, the bag lady toddled over, muttering to herself loudly, and waving one arm a little to emphasize her point to someone who wasn't there. The target noticed her and tried harder to steer her victim away, but the homeless seem to have a knack for getting into your path and staying there. She muttered louder argumentatively, and then as she got very close, she extended her foot a bit just in the right place to catch her mark's toes.

Their collision would normally have never happened had the target been alone, but when you're half-holding someone up without appearing to be too strong just yet, it gets a bit harder to avoid the bothersome schizophrenics who wander about on the loose in urban areas. She half-stumbled off balance for just an instant. The mark's eyes opened a little wider as her nose sent her brain a warning that there was more than just the scent of a filthy old woman here, but she hadn't sorted it out yet.

In the middle of the confusion, the old woman's right hand curled inward unseen in the dark, and the heavily plated dagger slid down into her latex-covered hand.

"Hey, mind where yer walkin'," the old bagwoman muttered. She brought her arm up as though to steady herself, but instead she shoved the blade under the target's sternum and into her heart.

The bag lady instantly changed her tune to a more conciliatory one. "Oh, I'm sorry, dear, are you alright?" she asked as she applied a sideways motion right to left, and then she twisted her hand to repeat the motion front to back. The target's breath hissed inward in agony as the silver on the blade scorched her deep inside. The face under the hood in front of her smiled, and the stricken changeling saw that her assailant wasn't old at all, but she had no strength to save herself now.

She gasped in a half-whisper. It was all that her rapidly waning strength would allow. The sudden pain was more than she could scream through and she slumped forward as the old woman cut twice more before pulling the blade out.

For a werewolf, there is no recovery - no possibility of healing oneself of a heart shredded by a silver blade. She was already very nearly dead as she sank to the pavement. The intended victim was just beginning to clue in that there was something amiss when the bagwoman began to yell at an imaginary purse-snatcher as she turned.

"Hey!" she cried, "Come back with the lady's purse, you!" Anyone who looked would have seen no one but an old woman who looked as though she would smell pretty ripe run off to give chase. About the only thing remarkable would be the speed of her progress. She was out of sight in the darkness by the time that the drunken girl saw the spreading blood and was able to manage her first horrified scream. Several bystanders came running to help, but there was a dead person on the street now with a burned hole low in her chest which would soon confound the coroner.

A block and a half away now, the bag lady began her metamorphosis. The bags had been discarded along with the glove and the smelly hoodie. The dagger and wristbands had been peeled off and dropped into a trash can that would be the only one emptied by the passing refuse truck in about twenty minutes.

As she turned the next corner well out of sight of the commotion, she smiled as she walked, a pretty young woman in a plaid skirt over trendy torn leotards and sneakers, now a couple of inches taller without the feigned stoop to her shoulders. That was one of the reasons for her smile.

It felt good to walk normally again.

Her face clouded over after a few seconds as an old memory came to her mind.

That she'd ever been able to walk normally was due in large part to one person, just a boy in the mountains so long ago. She'd never gotten the opportunity to thank him and show him how she'd finally gotten to be able to walk unaided like everyone else without a thought. He'd never seen how she could run as fast as anyone could, mostly because of his efforts then. She didn't have these recollections often unless she visited the place where he'd taught her to draw strength from inside herself where he knew it lived in abundance.

She fought off the sting in her eyes and blamed the contact lenses that she'd worn to hide the color of her irises from her target. The passage of time was inevitable, but that didn't remove the debt from her heart. He'd been her only childhood friend.

After all that she'd been through and everything that she'd become, he was still the only boy she'd ever loved.

She shook the thought from her mind and crossed the street to get into the parked Acura. She had no time for this now, but as she twisted the ignition key and checked her mirror, she wondered if he'd have been proud of her.

-------------------

8:04AM Local time

30,000 Islands

Georgian Bay, Ontario

Canada

His eyes opened as the power was restored. Specifically, it had been the quiet hum of the refrigerator that he'd heard through the structure of the building. The birds outside were exchanging their morning pleasantries, and by the diffuse daylight coming in under the overhang, it would soon be mid-morning. He couldn't ever remember sleeping this late. He gradually became aware of several things.

He was not alone here, Helen's soft breathing came to his ears. He looked for her and smiled at her soft expression in sleep. He took it in for a moment, and thought that he could have looked at her all day, just like this.

But there were other considerations.

The first was the discomfort of the messages that his brain was receiving. He moved his hand, knowing what he'd find, but reaching anyway. His bladder began to yell for attention, and he was faced with the small conundrum that human males are faced with a lot of mornings - a rock-solid erection at the same time that he painfully needed to pee.

It doesn't work both ways, he thought, as he began to carefully shift so that he could get out of bed, hopefully without waking her. One or the other, he told his body. But the pressure of his bladder had been a major contributor here. The conundrum was that as long as he was anywhere near erect, he couldn't pee, and even if some angel magically appeared to help with the arousal, he thought with a smirk, the bursting bladder would painfully demand attention too. As he got to where he could get to the floor, there was another deep discomfort, an ache.

Despite his struggles the evening before with his bashfulness, his upbringing, Helen's comfort with their unclothed condition, and his trying to come to grips with all of that, there was always the primal male underneath everything. And he'd had so many erections over the course of the time, that now there was this ache. Well, he thought, as he remembered a few of the adventures of his own rural adolescence, despite how teenage boys plead with their dates, nothing had changed. This hadn't killed him then, it certainly wouldn't kill him now. It was just something that he hadn't experienced for a long time. He wanted to look at her for more than the moment as he stood at the door, but his bladder wouldn't allow more than a long glance.

It took a lot of concentration, but he finally managed to empty his bladder, and that seemed to take forever today. The dull ache? He shrugged, and walked back to the bedroom to stand leaning against the doorframe with a soft smile.

If he looked with a critical eye, he thought as he searched his memory, he could find a few little flaws to her wonder. But that would take the eye of a person shopping for the best fruit, an old man or woman peering at every piece as though they feared that the shopkeeper wanted to cheat them. He smirked to himself for making the comparison. Danaya had been perfect, he'd thought, way back then - and she was in her way - but compared to this beauty, she'd been a stick girl, for all of her blonde loveliness.

Elena wasn't large either, not that it mattered, he realized. Every woman has her flaws and her wonders. But to his eye, Elena was easily the epitome of feminine beauty. He'd been with more than a few farm girls in his time, but he'd never once seen someone like Elena. She wasn't large, she wasn't small, everything, every detail was just a variance, maybe even a tiny bit off perfection. But combined, taken together, or even in large pieces of her, like a leg, or a shoulder, for example, she was a prize to be cherished, worthy of any artist's brush or the film of a photographer. And she loved him, he thought - a little, anyway. To his cautious mind, there had to be at least a little love in her for him or she'd never have done this. No woman without some feelings would have crawled into bed with something like he was.

He couldn't understand why she was alone. Surely some man, somewhere... He remembered that she'd said that she'd been married. To his way of thinking, that would have meant that she must now be widowed, normally, but over the time that he'd lived here with the occasional renters passing through, he'd snagged a magazine or newspaper now and then and struggled to read them. He knew that people today sometimes fail in their loves, and wondered how to broach this to her.

She was on her back with her face toward him now, and he listened to her breathing. Every once in a while she gave a soft snore that made him grin. He followed the lines of her legs, the series of curves there that led to the wondrously long and impossible to describe arcs of her hips, one of the wonders of a woman to a man with eyes to appreciate it all. Her abdomen and stomach were flattened in the way that made his pulse pick up.

He'd been with women who had disliked having a man see them as they lay like this for what gravity did to their breasts, but most men don't care, and Helen certainly didn't have a reason to feel any sense of deficiency or lack of beauty. His eye went to details, and it could be said that here too, there were imperfections, but pulling back even just a little, they complimented each other. He stared at her lovely throat with a barely audible sigh. He knew that he could spend a week only in that one area appreciating.

With a shrug, he admitted to himself that even if this worked, even if she'd let him, he probably never could love every square inch of her the way that beauty such as hers demanded. His eyes went to her face, partially hidden by her long wavy dark hair, and he had the feeling that he could lose himself just there as she slept, never mind how he could just drift off watching her face as she spoke to him, or only smiled at him.

There was a danger there, he realized suddenly. It had already happened the night before. She could talk to him, and he could drift off to the sound of her soft voice, spellbound as he stared at her loveliness. He could miss the content of her words then, and she deserved to be heard, he decided. He became aware that her breathing had changed, and even with this warning, he was totally unprepared for it when she opened her eyes to look at him. He stood spellbound.

"Hi," she said softly, and he was lost again. He struggled to come up with something besides what he imagined must be a goofy grin, though she didn't see it that way. She was looking fondly at male perfection topped with a smile that said a lot.

"The electricity is on again," he tried tentatively.

She nodded and sighed as she stretched, and he thought that he'd fall down then. "I have to, well, you know," she said, and he nodded, "Of course."

She swung her legs over the bed, "And I have to do a lot of laundry, I guess," she said as she stood and walked to him, reaching up to kiss him softly, "You stay right here. I'll be back," she said as she trailed her hand down his arm in passing.

She tried to think of something, some conversation that they might have now, she didn't know if he could hear what she was doing as she sat there, "Hey, Ion, I was thinking, if you were to start farming again now, do you have what you need to do that? You're still the same man who started this farm, but your tools and things must have aged. Maybe sometime today you could look at that so we know what we need."

He nodded to himself. "A lot of it has turned to rust, I think and any leather straps have been eaten by the mice or are dust now. I can look."

"Good," she said, coming back to him to hug him tightly for a moment. She felt him brush against her as his reaction began again and she smiled at him. "I've got a lot of things to do today, but this guy here just won't give up, will he?"

Ion was only slightly embarrassed now, "No, it seems not, Elena."

To his surprise, she took gentle hold of him and grinned, "Well you just bring that over here then, we'll have to make some time, I guess."

As they moved on the bed, exchanging kisses, she'd have thought that his would become more insistent, and they did, but remained the soft kind that she could drift away in. It was almost more than she could exert control over. She had a doubt, an uncertainty that nagged at her, and she was careful to only allow him so much.