i'll learn to beg

@bainesalthea

they fold and fade so slow. althea baines back alley tattoo artist

109 posts

That was a question that Annalise truly didn't know the answer to. She had met Anika when she first rolled into town. The next thing she knew, the woman was her big brother's girlfriend, and everything else was a blur, considering her own rapid spiral. All she knew now was that Anika was the person Reid left town for, and Lis and Rose weren't enough to have him stay.

"Her boyfriend is my brother. I met her when she first came to Port Leiry. She seemed cool enough, but we were each going through our own shit. Didn't really get the chance to bond with her or anything." Lis shrugged, looking over at Althea to see what the reaction might be.

She missed her brother, but she'd be foolish if she blamed Anika for taking him away. He was a big boy who made his own decisions; if he didn't want to leave town, to leave his sisters again, he wouldn't have done.

Althea's lips part slightly into a soft 'o' shape - she knew that Anika had a guy, but she hadn't realized he was.. known. Clearing her throat and trying to recover, she straightens and tries to recover from the obvious shock. "Knew she had a man, didn't know he was - y'know, I didn't meet him. Didn't get a chance to judge." She laughs, hopefully the joke coming across.

But she swallows down a swig of her drink to stop herself from talking too much.

"Shit - sorry, though. She is pretty cool - or was, I haven't talked to her in a while." Only a few times before they dipped out of town. "God. Damn. I feel like I put my foot in my mouth for, like, no fuckin' reason." She laughs again, rubbing her face, "They must be honeymooning all over the US, huh?"

Ms. Yearwood is an awesome person, and Tomás had known it the moment she'd caught his attention in the coffee shop and gifted him the bracelet. Althea only confirms the fact, opening up about how deeply woven the friendship had been. Tom's gonna make sure she gets remembered the best way; he'll write about it, and he'll be sure it's known that she only went out to help people. Like him. Like Althea.

Something awful happened to her, and it probably wasn't her fault if her brain was juju mush for a little while.

"I'm sorry." Priestley says, solemn and honest. He takes pause in the quiet, where some barebones respect beats the excitement for what knowledge they could share with each other. The silence is three seconds long. Althea's got tears at the ducts and it make Tomás think about loss, and his sister. He's a coward about going back, and he knows it. He doesn't know what he'd say if he sat at her bedside whilst she slept as his parents bickered about work like nothing was wrong. He dreads the day they think enough time's passed, that there's no longer a bed for her. There's going to be a way that's gonna bring her back, juju can best sleep; he had a boyfriend — ex, now with juju powers to go into minds. There's going to be a way.

Just as there will be a way for Heron's memory to be respected. "Juju fog. Yeah." Something else to research more.

And then Althea presents him with an equation he's never once considered.

"No bite?" Tomás eyes bore into hers, expectant for more than that. "Whadd'ya mean there's no sign of a bite?" Did it heal? No scar? Did she hide it all this time, she's one of the moonshifters born that way? "There's gotta be a bite. That's how it works—"

This changes it all. Pity, and loss goes out the window because there's a puzzle now.

Now there's a new name? He thinks he knows that one. Waits. Eyes dart to the pages to think back to his own foggy, messed-up memory. "Like Anika Booker, the artist?" Nouveau. He remembers, in pieces. The way it ended, not so much. "Where's she come from? She's not a moonshifter." He knows that because he's talked to her, he thinks he recalls that conversation about animals, too.

And nightchildren? If Althea didn't just widen her heart about Heron, Tomás might have thought she was screwing with him, and taking him for a ride.

But now it's just got messier. "Okay." he begins again, deep breath and fingers strecth out on the documents between them; backtrack to the first lead. "You know the packs? That's awesome. Wow. Neat." Holy fuckballs. "You talk to them?" Maybe they'd have said something about Heron being around, if that's a new thing?

A new spell from juju, a curse? A gift, maybe, to them. "Where's the last you had contact with her before uh, y'know..."

Murdering her, I guess.

"No bite. That's why I'm scrambling." Her lips are pressed into a tight frown, and she scratches at the side of her nose with her thumb as she tries to parse together the memory of it all. "Cause if there was a bite, then maybe it was on purpose and I could just go confront who did it." He'll know what she means, she doesn't need to elaborate. "But there's nothing - I talked to the gal at the funeral home, and she couldn't find evidence of even bite marks on her fuckin' bones. There's nothing. And for the life of me, I can't even figure out what would cause a turn without it."

Heron had wolf venom, but she was careful, and she would have taken herself out if she'd accidentally infected herself. Or told Althea before it was even a problem. So the conclusion is that she had no idea she'd been infected either.

"Yeah, Heron was involved with her family, and all." Althea chews on her lip, "A bunch vamp clan shit was involved with that, I think, which makes no sense, but that was her last big hunt and job. And nah, I haven't talked to them." She looks up at him, leveling him with a blank stare. "My type isn't exactly welcome in pack territory. But, uh, last time I talked to her was just touching base when I first got into town."

It's not really enough to fill the full car-ride over to the dark, quiet office, a small space wedged into a row of shops and offices in a quarter of town she doesn't think she's ever really been in. She tells it simply - without a scar on the outside or evidence of damage on the insides, there's little else they're going to be able to tell from a months old corpse riddled with decomposition and corpse-wax. Althea seemed to think it was a recent development, and so it stands to reason something might be amiss at frequent haunts. It's a hunch, or a lead - nothing concrete. She suggest to Baines that she ought to temper expectations before they get there; this might be the literal definition of a cold case.

YEARWOOD INVESTIGATIONS, the door announces quietly as the Hunter keys them in. The air's stale, and the space is cold as it is dark. Orderly, too - pictures of various adventures line the walls.

"Uh, look for logs, or you know. Records. Tapes, videos, journals, whatever she might have talked about stuff in."

She peers through the dark, unaffected by the dour, dim place. There's a locker at one end of a small nook that connects to the office. She tugs on the door; locked. "Heads up, loud noise."

Metal screeches in protest as she pulls the thing open with brute strength, the door whining as it hands on warped hinges. Tressa's eyes peer over a miniature arsenal; crowsbows, stakes, firearms, bandoliers of silver and wooden ammo. "Good grief."

Althea stews in the car ride over - understanding what Tressa says, but still feeling completely off kilter and uneasy at the idea that she has to work with a vampire to find anything out. But she's been a good help, with what little information she can provide, so she doesn't say anything - just bundles up and shivers as they go.

Inside, she stares at what's left of the office. She'd not cleaned it up. It's the first time she'd been in here since she died - and it's only Tressa's voice that kicks her into action from her frozen state. There's a lot of stuff to dig through, but Althea knew where Heron kept her information - she'd gotten her whole note taking system from her.

She finds the folders and notebooks full of case notes to dig through, and winces at the screeching noise of Tressa ruining the safe. Pausing, she looks over and laughs. "Yeah. Well-stocked." Case notes in hand, she wanders over and plucks a bolt off of the wall, touching the tip with her hand. "Careful touching the sharps and looking in vials and shit - she liked to keep souvenirs. Venom, teeth, you know. But I found these." She holds the notes out for Tressa. "I've gotta find her recordings, but these are both regular human shit and hunt shit, we'll have to sort."

Setting them down back on her desk, she crouches down to feel along the drawers and edges and finds the hidden lever, which unlocks a hidden compartment. Inside, she finds a veritable ton of tapes. "Bingo."

Back in Texas, her gun had been put to rest in the back of her closet, tucked safely away from tiny, sticky hands. There had been no danger lurking there, in the armpit of fucking nowhere. At least none they knew of. Anika had mapped the woods around their trailer herself, and Reid frequented the shadows for dinner and unwanted visitors. Hunting had become a forgotten part of her, something she no longer felt served any purpose in her life. The mark on the back of her neck was still there — a reminder she only caught in mirrors while pinning up her hair. But there was no magic running through those inked lines anymore. No vervain pulsing through her veins. Anika had retired from a life she'd always hated.

There was a grave at the beach in Port Leiry she hadn't brought flowers to in months. The small stones forming a circle laid under a thick layer of snow, uneven heads poking through the white blanket as if dreaming beneath the frost. No name marked the grave, but it still rested quietly on her lips as Anika knelt and pulled off her gloves to touch the frozen ground.

The peace of the moment shattered with a scream somewhere in the distance. Her head snapped toward the sound, green eyes catching on a thin figure standing waist-deep into the cold ocean. Who the fuck was taking a dip in weather like this? Waves crashed against her boots, as Anika stepped close enough to notice this was no human. Scales covered it's neck and ribs. Long hair stuck to pale shoulders. What the fuck—

It opened it's mouth and from the depths of it came out a sound that wasn't aimed at her. Anika was so focused on the creature, she never took any notice of who was standing across from it. Althea's hand was outstretched but frozen in place, fingers twitching away from her gun, as though in a trance. Anika assumed there was not much time for strategy, so she dove knee deep into cold waters, pulled out a knife from undernearth her jacket and lunged straight for the creature's throat. A wet, gargling sound came out, choking on velvety dark blood that hissed like it was acid. Eyes turned grey, glassy and dead.

She'd thought she'd grabbed her gun - she thought she'd shot it dead, but as Althea blinks rapidly the scenery shifts in front of her. Her hand froze near her gun, still tucked neatly in its holster, and she looks down as if her body betrayed her. On her back, she can feel the tingling feeling of the magic activating in her tattoos - giving her strength and speed in equal measure. There's not much juice left, but she stumbles forward faster as if her body had been locked into place.

Blinking again, she realizes the scaled, icy creature lay dead underneath a familiar body. Taking in a shaky breath, she runs the rest of the way towards the two of them, and she wrenches Anika away from the dead thing - pure instinct to make sure she isn't hurt. The thing doesn't move.

She stomps its head in just to make sure.

But then, she turns to Anika - "What the fuck are you doing here?!" - her hands tight on her shoulders, shaking with adrenaline, fear, and the burst of magic speed still thrumming through her system. "When - are you okay? Are you hurt?"

"Probably look there," Tressa says. "I've seen dead werewolves - there's always some sorta mark - a scar or chipped bone or something, if they get turned like that." She supposes if a bite was superficial enough to break skin without going deep, it'd be an exception, but werewolves aren't scalpels - they're hammers.

Tressa leans back, knuckle to her lip as she ponders, and her eyes land on the shrouded corpse. She moves over, lifting the sheet up again, eying the rigors of decay.

"What is your secret," she asks out loud.

Althea's answers linger, and Tressa scoffs. "You know, maybe if you all stopped trying to kill us out of hand you wouldn't have to scrounge for magic. You guys are like... the PETA of the monster world, it's insane. Like, yeah, animal cruelty's bad but so is running a kill-shelter for abandoned pets, it's like you make your own p..."

She stops, like a lightbulb's turned on over her head. "Can you take me to that office?"

There should be a mark, Althea wants to say - but she knows magic makes things tricky. She'd not really been around a lot of witches to know the ins and outs of what exactly they can do, so any protest she has will fall flat. Tressa potentially knows more - definitely about bodies.

She doesn't interrupt, doing her own thinking. There might be something in the office. Althea'd just been too overtaken with fucking grief, of all things, to even try and go there.

Looking up, her expression shifts from contemplation to glowering. "I.. can. Yes. I need you to tell me what you're thinking while we go."

Tomás would tell her that her friend never would have meant to. That it's a horrible misunderstanding; it always is. (But doubt creeps into him about that, because he's had his mind messed with before) "No —" But he freezes. And his heart stutters, and sinks.

Ms. Yearwood? Eyes drop down to the bracelet tightly wrapped around his wrist. She'd given it to him, once. Protection. Something. His mind's all messy, now. Because she's dead, and he's looking at her murderer. There's a murderer in his apartment. But that's suddenly so unimportant, he's almost laughing (and then crying). Heron's gone? Instead, he just feels hurt. Aching. A hand pulling at the bracelet on his wrist, and the memory it held. He's quieter, "You were Ms. Yearwood's friend?"

He didn't know her much, but he'd call her a friend. Kindness didn't cost anything.

When she catches his eyes again, she probably sees that Tom's are uneasy. Trying to compose himself, he sucks in a breath. She has a point, there had to be reason? Heron must have known them, maybe there's more to the story that they've yet to chalk up. He'd like to know, too. "We can find that out." He's confident in it, and he looks to all the clippings, and notes he's drawn on various documents.

If she can tell him who she might've ruled out, or what areas. Maybe some of the places Heron went, they could start talking to some people. "She wouldn't have meant to attack you. Not her." That's something he's certain of. "Probably confused, lots of reports say that it's a big shift through the juju brain, yeah?" Takes a second to adjust. It's on a first account he found posted online, on a forum.

He doesn't like that she did something so bad as to kill... but she's not the first of the type he's met, either. It sounded like a mistake, and he's not going to get bogged down by that. If he does, he'll have to get heavy with his thoughts and he can't do that right now. "I wanna help. I can. Look, I got stuff on a bunch of folk, and there's moonshifter packs, you know what she might've been looking for? Or maybe we uh, hold on," He sifts through more papers, "She go anywhere, I made a map, see, every moonshifter I bumped into, and where?" Albeit, he leaves off that a bunch of the dots on his crassly sketched out map, were him making assessments of the situation. Some he talked to, others he just passed. "I got one for every month I've been here. Look."

But he thinks he's pretty good at figuring it out; it's all in the fingernails.

Maybe it'd be a start, along with the names; if she could help him put it together.

"Yeah. Friend." It was more than that, and she debates on whether or not to share that part with him. He seems shaken - and that's ultimately what pushes her over. "She took care of me for a long time when I lost my family. She's the reason why I.." She gestures to herself, to the tattoos on her back that he can't see. It's all.. a lot. She hesitates to call her a mother figure, but at the end of the day: it does sort of feel like that.

"No, I don't think she wanted to attack me - not if she were.. aware." Clearing her throat, she wipes at her face, trying to ignore that sinking feeling in her gut that's reappeared for the first time since it happened. "So far I've ruled out any sort of bite, which is unusual as fuck. But I have no idea how else that would even happen."

She's lost.

"Last I heard it was something about Booker. But I don't even know if that was related - because that was all bloodsuckers." She looks down at the map though and sucks in a breath through her teeth. "You're close, man." She points down to a few areas - "The packs, I know 'em - that there's one territory, and over here by the docks is that Warwick shit. But she wandered."

closed starter for: @anikabooker

Dead end after fucking dead end and all Althea wanted to do was give the fuck up. It'd been months of zero fucking answers. She'd come down to the beach for a moment of reprieve, but it's just as miserably cold here as it is anywhere else in town. The sea water pushes chunks of ice up onto the beach, and she can barely even smell the stinking salt that usually comes with Port Leiry waters.

Finishing a drag on her cigarette, she tosses it into the water.

Which, in hindsight, might have been a mistake. Almost immediately there's some sort of sound rising up from the waves - a wailing, haunting sound. Something crawls out of the waves - a vague humanoid shape, but Althea's not stupid. No human sounds like that and no human can survive these temperatures. Ice forms on its skin as it moves, jagged and sharp towards her.

"Fuck this fucking place!" She yelps out, clamoring for her gun.

It's a bit more... well, not pleasant, but bearable here. Filtered air, quite cool - the rot of nature isn't really mixing so roughly with the rot of humanity. Still, dead stuff stinks - Tressa's just used to it.

"So I've heard," she chirps as she leans in, still convinced she'll find a bite mark somewhere.

At first Althea's musing is background noise, but then the hunter, she hisses in her head at the thought, asks a pertinent question. Tressa stands, leaning back and folding her arms. "Only that 'witch shit' and 'magic' make things frustratingly broad."

Her brow peaks. "I have somebody I could get ahold of, but she's not always reachable, so I don't know how long that would take." She looks at Althea then. "Those tattoos are magic aren't they? Don't you guys have witches we could pull on?"

Then she turns more fully. "Actually, she's you're sensei, right? You know where she was staying? Could find something there."

She does not want to be here, working with a vampire. The very idea of being in close proximity to one makes her whole nervous system feel like its being lit on fire. Althea wants to do what she does best: run as far away and as fast she can.

Her hands clasp at her elbows, holding her arms tighter to her chest as she waits for Tressa to do her examination here, more fully. "Our tats are magic, yeah, but I'm not B-hood." Does she know what that means? "I'm a fellow, which means we ain't that organized 'n shit. I get my magic where I can take it, sometimes that means cutting deals or forcing it. Haven't had a re-up since that fucking conclave. Deal I was making fell through, witch skipped town."

She'd also been way too fucking busy to think about anything other than making sure the reason's Heron's on her table and not fighting this freak-ass snowstorm gets their comeuppance.

"Uh. Yeah, I inherited her office." She hasn't touched it, either.

It's sitting there like a shrine to what once was. She should probably fix it up. "She might have logs or journals."

She lets the other talk, or rather, sit in silence for a few moments until she finds her voice again. Annalise nurses her utterly depressing Coke that was missing the burn of vodka or rum, but that's what being sober meant. It was her least favourite bit, sitting in bars and not ordering alcohol; the toughest bit, too, but she had to test herself. If she couldn't handle it on her good days, she had no hope on the bad ones.

"Sorry about your mentor." Annalise offered, glancing over the other again. No, she definitely didn't recognise Althea, but that was no longer a bad thing. She found herself longing to be around people who didn't know who she was or what she may or may not have done. The comment about the friend leaving had her brow furrowing, tilting her head in thought. Lis was sure people came and went from Port Leiry all the time, but a woman who hadn't been in town her entire life just upping and leaving with her boyfriend was certainly familiar. "Are you talking about Anika?"

She scoffed at the talk of Sweetwater helping them forget. If anything, it just put her more on edge, and she felt more eyes on her, but she was still a hunter. Still Brotherhood. That meant she belonged there as much as anyone else.

Althea waves the apologies off - it's nice to hear, sure, yeah. But she doesn't expect it from others, even though she is grateful. Who else would understand that type of grief other than a fellow hunter? She wonders, briefly, if she'd kept with the Brotherhood way of life, would she still be here mourning a different mentor?

Would Murph still be someone she grieved and feared in equal measure, or simply just missed like she does with Heron?

She's pulled out of her thoughts by Lis up and naming the woman she'd casually mentioned, and can't help but bark out a laugh. "Yeah, Anika. I know things went to shit with her, so we didn't have a whole lot of time to catch up before she shipped out. You close with her, too?" She leans forward, then more amusement on her features than apprehension.

ethanxxparkinson

"Almost." Ethan snorted. "Good on you, not letting them take a piece." It wasn't abnormal for them to get hurt, but they trained heavily to ensure that they could compete with the supernaturals. They were supposed to know how to hold their own, especially if they didn't have anyone on a hunt with them.

News of something different -- something that wasn't a Vampire or a Werewolf, already put Ethan on edge. They could train themselves ragged, but if they didn't know what they were up against, how would any of them know how to fight it appropriately? "Have you told anyone else? Anyone done any recon?" If not, it was next on his list. "You could try, but what says any of our normal shit would work on it?"

"Believe you me, if it had - we wouldn't be talking here now." It was a part of the code. Or her's, at least. Heron had been very sure to instill that into her - which is what makes her end so fucking weird, and what keeps her up at night the more she thinks about it. Too many questions, not enough answers. She wasn't born a wolf. Wasn't bitten. What the fuck else can do that? She chews on her thumbnail while he continues on, looking up to him when he asks questions.

"Just you, so far. Don't know if you've heard, but fellows don't have a fuck ton of resources or contacts here. It's just been me." And she doesn't think Anika is coming back. "And getting word out with this crazy fuckin' storm has been more than a hassle. Even my CB in my camper don't work no more." She'd kicked it enough times to try, too. "We could head out, do some recon together, though. Been stuck in the shit so long on my own, I forgot what having someone with me is like."

Leaning back in her chair and tipping it back on two legs, she hums. "We got silver, and we got wood. Can try either of those before we have to outsource, yeah?"

Sweetwater wasn't a place she belonged anymore, or at least that's what Annalise felt like. She walked in, and she could swear she felt eyes on her instantly, but she tried to ignore them. She was Brotherhood; she had as much right to be there as any other hunter. Taking a deep breath, Lis took a seat at the bar and ordered a drink. She wasn't refused, so that was a plus.

Not even ten minutes later, she was approached, jaw clenched as she prepared for the worst, but it hadn't come yet. The other was familiar, but a name couldn't be put to the face.

"Annalise - Brotherhood." She answered in turn, still a little bit suspicious of the stranger approaching. "Can I help you?"

Althea shakes her head at the question, and thanks the bartender with as much tip as she can muster, pulling the glass close to her chest and cradling it. After a sip, she lets out a sigh, "Nah. Just making conversation or whatever." She's not so much tapped in on Brotherhood business anymore, not since Boston - but the name Annalise does ding that little bell in the back of her mind.

Some story about.. family, or something? She doesn't wanna call attention to it or make her feel like shit about something that probably is just a whole bunch of horseshit, so she just nurses her drink for a few more sips.

"Not that I'm doing much talking, sorry." She offers a crooked little smile, "Port Leiry's been doing my fucking head in, making me feel crazy, like I forget how to talk to people 'n shit." Her accent hasn't loosened up since she's been here, though. "Came around here to meet up with my mentor, she fuckin' died. Met an old buddy I knew back in Boston, and she just up and left with her dude man.. boyfriend, thing. Never met him, though. So now I'm, like, figuring shit out."

She lifts the drink, as if to say: this is how I'm doing that. "Feel like Sweetwater's here to just help us forget the bullshit we deal with."

"Hm," hums Tressa, and she looks between the Hunter and it's long-dead prey, half buried in dirt, where her gaze rests for a moment before she crouches down, reaching out with the tip of a pen light to give the upper half of the hunter another once-over.

She could try just yoinking her out, she supposes - ungraceful but doable, given the latent strength vampirism's left her with, but that risks making one problem into two, as well as obfuscating anything they might glean from the corpse.

Tressa's lips flutter in resignation - they aren't going to get a digger out here if they want this off the books, and so shovels it is.

—

It is an endeavor, and Tress makes deft steps to avoid the spikes, though they're so loam-rotted by now that their soft, spongey tips are more warning than threat, and by the end of two hours' time Tressa's hauling the fragile, leathery thing up and onto the ground, falling back on her hands and kicking mud off her boots.

The exam is hasty, and tempered by the fact they're out in the open. She instructs the hunter to meet her at her funeral home, where this can be more private and encompassing, and where disposing of evidence will be simpler.

—

Tressa opens the door to Embrace to let Althea in next, eying her briefly. The time she's been allowed has hopefully let her steel herself for this next part, and it's with little pomp and circumstance that tressa leads her into the suite below the house's ground floor, where what's left of the hunter lays out on a prep table.

"Bout forty years worth of damage, but she's all so worn out I can't really tell what's new or what's old - no bites though - well, nothing that screams werewolf, anyways." The sallow, dead thing is lit with cruel brightness, features sunken and stretched - the stink isn't corpsey putrescence anymore, but a sort of sweet dirt mixing with the various chemicals down her. "Which makes her being a werewolf pretty curious. You sure she wasn't always one? Just hiding it? I've learned people are born like that sometimes."

Althea's grateful for the break, and heads over to the funeral home as instructed. She'd taken the long way around, so she could dissociate and grieve in peace before having to prepare herself to deal with a vampire again. But she arrives ready to get this over with and deal with the hand that's been dealt to her.

Back at the table, she crosses her arms over her chest and looks down at her former mentor. It's fuckin' weird, seeing her like this. "Nah, we've hunted together on full moons. Far as I know, there's no way around that."

She chews on her thumbnail while she thinks. "No bite, but she turned. Some sort of witch shit? Doesn't seem like an easy answer." She bites down hard into the flesh of her thumb. "You don't happen to know anything about magic, d'you?"

starter for: @devilsvenom where: sweetwater

It'd been a long, long time since she stepped foot into the Sweetwater. A couple of months? Hard to keep track of things since that one fuckin' full moon. A lot of things in Port Leiry seem to go tits up, and she knows she should have listened to Anika when she said to get the hell out of dodge. But she's here now, stuck in a never-fuckin'-ending blizzard hunting down something she can barely call a lead.

So, whatever, Sweetwater for drinks on a day off from tearing her hair out.

She slides next to the other blonde, and calls the bartender over for something strong. "Haven't seen you around in a minute." She's familiar, but not familiar enough for a name. "Althea - Fellowship."

ethanxxparkinson

"A clothesline?" Ethan chuckled. "Are we thieves now, Althea?" He raised an eyebrow at her, the smile remaining on his lips. He'd be lying if he said he hadn't stolen something before, however, it was not common for him to do so. He grew up working hard for what he had.

"It wasn't a Vampire." Ethan pressed his lips together into a thin line. "Was it not a Werewolf?" He asked, considering they walked on all fours. Although, he trusted that Althea knew if it was one of the two or not. "Wait, a bat? Are they transforming into new things now?"

Are they thieves? She almost snorts out a laugh. Yeah, dude. She wants to say it, doesn't. At least - she is. She grew up with nothing. All she has is taken or given to her or both. Even the jacket over her shoulders, ripped as it is from the wolf bite mark - that's a pride and joy, a gift given to her by someone who's gone now.

But she shakes her head and laughs, good-natured. "Nah. Tangled with a wolf recently. Almost took a chunk out of me." She won't mention that it was Heron. If he wants to know, surely he'll have found out about her end by now. "I sure fuckin' hope not, cause if we got two transforming assholes to deal with, we're shit out of luck on a good day."

She leans her chair back on two legs. "Dunno what the fucker was, but I'm gonna find it and mount its ass on my mantle."

ethanxxparkinson

Ethan nodded as she ordered and the bartender left to make the drinks. He lifted the rim of the bottle to his lips again, finishing off the beer before setting it aside. "That, or the lead is fucking false." Ethan muttered as he ran a hand through his hair. His body was no longer cold, as he'd been sitting in the warmth of the room for almost an hour now.

"I might stay up later tonight. See if the weather helps in any way." Snow could easily cause leads to disappear. However, it could also show trails after its fallen. "Although, I might need to invest in a better jacket." Ethan chuckled as he glanced towards the coat that was draped over a nearby chair. He'd had it for years and at this point, it barely kept the cold away from his skin. There were tears he'd patched but his zipper no longer worked.

"What were ya huntin'?"

"Yeah, feels like no matter what, we're screwed." Althea's face turns down into a grimace - trying not to think about who could be laying down false leads for hunters to find or why. Most of the times, they went about their business without trying to trick people. She glances over to his jacket as he points it out, and feels a soft, humorless laugh bubble up. Her own jacket isn't quite as worn out, but the back is still ripped and bitten up from her encounter with Heron.

"Pick one off a clothesline, dude, come on." The bartender heads back and slides her drink over to her, which she sips - the burn of it sliding down her throat sending a pleasant shiver through her system.

"Most of my leads on who bit Heron went fucking dead." No bite marks. Anywhere. "So I've been hunting vamps. Ran into this nasty fucking thing the other day and clipped it, but it wasn't like any vamp I'd ever seen. It skittered off on all fours and looked like.. a weird bat or some shit. I'm looking for that thing."

ethanxxparkinson

closed starter for @bainesalthea

Ethan lifted the rim of the beer to his lips. Water was most likely preferred, however, he didn't care to drink it. He'd had a long day, tracking a wolf that had managed to do damage to some of the local businesses in recent weeks. Normally, Ethan didn't have much of a problem with the tracking part, but this one seemed to pose more of a problem for him. And unfortunately, he was currently unsuccessful.

Eyes flickered towards a familiar face. "Althea." He motioned towards the seat beside him. "What are you in the mood for, hm? On me."

"Hey." She murmurs, sliding into the seat offered to her. She's both sweaty and freezing all at the same time, her oversized coat doing the best it can at keeping her warm while her cheeks remain pink. Althea huffs out a breath, and looks up while wiping some of the excess, melting snowflakes from outside. It's kicking up again, it seems, and she's ready for this shit to be over with.

Hard enough keeping warm without a weird, magical blizzard - worse when you have a shack that's barely finished being patched up and a wood stove for heat. She sniffs against the running of her nose, "Jack'll do me." She raises two fingers to the bartender to make her order.

"Fuck." She starts, finally, when she has at least a sip in her system. "It's like every time I catch a lead about anything, the weather shits all over the bed."

"Wellp. There's a ton that's interesting about it," Tressa crouches down in the pit; the mummified corpse is hunched over, run through with spikes, and the putrid smell is a lot, its pungence biting through the cold. Tressa pulls a small tin from her pocket and tosses it up at Althea. "It's a peppermint balm, might help the smell if you rub some under your nose." She keeps it for the newbies. Gingerly, she moves the head, finding an entry wound in the top of the forehead. "This is you, I'm assuming?" It's a guess; not many people would know exactly where to look for a dead body unless they'd put it there. And most people don't bury a corpse unless they made it a corpse.

She stands. "Well, nothing from the chest up, but we're gonna need to get it out if you want me to look the whole thing over." She looks up at Althea again. "Are you looking for something specific?"

Althea catches the tin and immediately rubs some of it underneath her nose as instructed without a second thought. She should have sniffed it or tested it first, but desperation at current moment speaks louder than logic. "Yeah, that was me." Still, she can't look directly at it.

Get it out sounds like a hell of an endeavor, but she finally turns around - ready to do whatever it is she needs to do to get this shit over and done with.

"Yeah," She starts, barely holding it together - not sickness, but her face is wrinkling up into something akin to regret, "Looking for a bite mark or something. A scar."

#tressa #corpse tw /

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