Appetite for Destruction

While You Were Sleeping

When Derek stormed into the house in the early hours of the morning, a familiar scowl on his face and the coffee he'd gone out to get nowhere in sight, I knew something was wrong. "The Alpha attacked someone last night."

I froze. "Who?"

"The school bus driver. They don't know if he's going to make it," Derek said, and I dug blunt fingernails into my palms, mind racing. If we'd found him sooner, searched more thoroughly, we could have prevented this. We could have, we could have...

Derek's hands were suddenly on my shoulders, gripping firmly. "This isn't on us." He said, calm but stern.

I bit my lip and stopped myself from blurting out something about how we could have stopped this from happening. I knew it wasn't right, that we were no closer to finding the Alpha than we had been the night Laura was killed. It would happen again. I was certain about that.

"Does Scott know?" I asked, and Derek shrugged.

"He'll have figured it out when he got to school this morning."

I met Derek's eyes and tried to figure out what he thought about this whole thing. Derek tried to act like the person he used to be sometimes, tried to force his words together and make himself seem kinder, less angry, let his guard down. But Derek had been a line pulled too tight since the fire and his guard wasn't going to go down any time soon, but sometimes I wished he would just come out and say what he was feeling instead of hiding everything from me.

"I'm going to the hospital. Maybe he can tell me something about what happened," He said. "You should check out that bus once school's out. There might be something there that can lead us to him."

I nodded. "Sounds good."

I watched him leave, remaining where I was stood in the middle of the room for a while. The Camaro's engine roared to life and I listened as it slowly faded away into the distance. Then I went upstairs, slammed the door to the bedroom closed, and lay on my sleeping bag so I could stare up at the blackened ceiling.

-x-x-x-

Emotional impressions were a hard thing to get the hang of.

What most people don't realize is that every time they had a thought or feeling, especially a strong one, it doesn't just evaporate into nothing. It's like making a little deposit of that feeling into your environment. Like walking into a room where there's just been an argument and the atmosphere is so thick that you could cut it with a knife, or entering somewhere that just didn't feel right and you want to just turn around and leave but can't explain why.

It was why people believed buildings were haunted; the impression left by death was so strong that it made people tense and uncomfortable just being in the same room someone had died in. For the most part humans were unaware of anything happening, some more sensitive to it than others, but those impressions left by intense feelings lingered, sometimes forever.

Those with supernatural senses could literally tap into these. It wasn't enough to actually see what had happened, but it was enough to get a basic idea of what had transpired in a specific area.

When I stepped into the bus something fierce and bright brushed over my senses. With each step the air got heavier, the intense feelings left over making my head ache; the fear, the anger - God, the anger. I moved to the back of the bus where most of the blood had been split and stood in the middle of the gory scene, eyes roaming over the claw marks amidst the red coating every surface. 

I ran my fingers over the four long claw marks where the emergency exit had been torn from the bus. They were deep, and when I placed my own claws in the gouges I could see just how large this Alpha's claws were. Looking at the marks and the sheer amount of blood I was pretty amazed that the driver had actually survived.