Striding through the busy farmers market in northern California, the large man known as Al paused to pick up a large cantaloupe. Turning it over in one hand, he inspected the thing closely. If he was going to have Maria and Arthur over for lunch the next day, he wanted to make certain everything was perfect. This one didn’t quite pass his rigorous standards, but the next two he picked up were good enough, so he stuck them in the canvas bag he was wearing over one shoulder before handing cash to the man waiting nearby.

Waving off the attempt to hand him change, Al moved on to inspect nearby corn on the cob. He was planning to have a full barbecue outside and good corn was essential for that. There were already several large slabs of meat sitting in the trunk of his vehicle, and he would be making a trip to the liquor store after this. Or possibly several trips.

The corn was trickier to find exactly what he wanted. He needed some good big ones. Not the little things they tried to put on top to get rid of. Maria loved some good corn on the cob, slathered with butter and salt. He wasn’t going to disappoint her.

In the midst of picking out enough satisfying ones, a voice caught his ear. It sounded like a man pleading for his life, though it was cut off and muffled quickly.

Putting the corn down, Al turned his gaze very slightly, just in time to catch sight of several figures disappearing into the nearby school. It was a Saturday, and no one should’ve been inside. The farmers market was set up in the parking lot, with porta potties on the edge for restroom use. As far as Al knew, the school should’ve been locked up tight. But there were definitely several figures heading inside, one of whom appeared to be struggling slightly while the others dragged him in. Whatever was going on there, he definitely did not want to go with them.

The pleading voice had been faint and short before the man’s mouth was covered, and no one else had noticed. Al glanced around briefly to see if anyone was paying attention, but they were all busy buying and selling. So, he paid for the corn he had taken and turned to walk out of there. There was still more he needed to buy, but first he needed to know what was going on inside. To that end, he walked straight past several other stalls to those doors, then checked the knob and found it wouldn’t turn. They had locked it behind them. But oh well. A single twist and pull broke the lock and allowed him to slip inside.

Of course, knowing how terrible school funding was around here (and everywhere), the man paused just inside the door to glance at the damage. Then he shook his head and walked onward while taking a small wad of cash from his pocket. To his right there was the main office, and he ducked inside briefly to set the cash on the long front desk where the secretaries would be, just out of sight from the hall. Grabbing a nearby pen, he scrawled a note on the pad left there, ‘For damage to door.’

That done, Al went back to the hallway and paused to listen. There, footsteps heading upstairs at the end of the hall. Cracking his neck, the man walked onward. It was very possible that this was all something normal and mundane. But something in the sound of that man’s panicked voice before it was cut off made him want to put a stop to it. They weren’t playing a game, that much was certain. Whether this was a Bystander situation or something more than that, it didn’t really matter. And besides, if it was bigger, maybe these guys could actually put up a fight. Al had been itching for some actual exercise lately. But, of course, he wasn’t going to get his hopes up.

Pausing at the bottom of the stairs, he leaned back to look up toward the second landing just in time to catch a glimpse of those figures heading into what looked like the library. They had no idea he was there. For as large of a man as he was, Al could move very quietly. He had hunted dangerous game for millennia, both in the cities and in the woods. He knew how to be quiet when the need arose. Silently moving up the stairs, he listened to the sound of what seemed to be a table being moved. It sounded like whatever they were doing would happen right where they were. Good, he was tired of walking after them. Stalking was all well and good, but he wanted a scrap. He just hoped they wouldn’t completely disappoint him after all this.

Tall as he was, Al could lean on his toes to peer over the railing at the top of the stairs when he was only about halfway up them. The library was right there, great glass windows revealing row after row of bookshelves. To the right was the checkout area, and just past that he could see several figures working to shove a table into position before they dragged their captive to it and bent him backwards over the top. He stammered a protest, and was rewarded with a punch to the face that knocked his head backward into the table with a heavy thump.

A quick scan from his position allowed Al to take in everyone there. The man being assaulted was a scrawny figure with long, scraggly blond hair and an unkempt beard. He was wearing old clothes that looked like they hadn’t been washed in some time. Between that and his overall dirty appearance, Al was guessing that he was homeless. Meanwhile, the other three in the room, his captors, were very different. They were well-muscled, dressed in clothes that were clearly meant to blend in with the urban environment while still allowing them to move properly, and gave off an aura of superiority and contempt. They were soldiers. No, not soldiers.

Heretics, he thought to himself darkly. These were Heretics. Eden’s Garden Heretics, if he had to hazard a guess. Which meant the guy they were assaulting was some sort of--

“Werewolf!” one of the men snarled, holding a knife up to the throat of the dirty figure in question, while the other two Heretics held him down by the arms. “Let’s you and me play a little game.” He nodded to his partners, one of whom stepped back and waved a hand to make a couple silver shackles appear from the wood and trap their prisoner’s arms to the table top. Meanwhile, the other Heretic also stepped back, focusing on the table until the wood transformed into stone, along with part of the floor. Clearly they intended to make sure the man couldn’t rip his way free.

Al was about to move, but the trapped figure giggled, bringing him up short. “A game?” That giggle came again. “What sort of game? Shall we play Connect Four? Ooh, or Monopoly. No, that one always leads to violence we hear, and there’s probably already enough of that, hmm?”

The Heretics (and Al) all took a moment to process that, before the man in charge pressed his silver knife even tighter to the werewolf’s throat, enough to make the skin sizzle as he drew blood. “I’m sorry, maybe you don’t recognize the seriousness of this situation.”

“Recognize it?” The pinned, trapped figure giggled again. “Oh, we recognize it. We do.” There was a brief pause before he added in a somewhat softer voice, “But serious for whom?”

Something in those words made Al pause and wait to see what happened next. He had seen a lot of innocent and not-so-innocent Alters get taken by Boschers. He’d seen many various reactions, but this was a new one on him. He wasn’t sure if the captured figure had lost their mind, or--

With an abrupt jerk of both arms, the man snapped his wrists against the silver shackles and twisted. The bands glowed brightly, clearly enchanted to impart pain, judging from the sharp sizzling sound and the smell of burning flesh. But the trapped figure gave no reaction to the pain from either his broken wrist or from the magic. No, that wasn’t true. He did give a reaction. He laughed. And with his mangled wrists, he was able to twist his arms free, breaking at least a couple more bones in the process.

It all happened faster than the men surrounding him could react. Their leader snarled and went to drive the silver blade into his throat, but the man lifted his arm just enough to take the blade there instead. The weapon was driven all the way to the hilt in the man’s arm, doing even more damage to him. It wasn’t only silver, Al realized. The knife was enhanced to deal extra pain. It was burning and sizzling in the figure’s arm while it was embedded. And yet, the werewolf ignored that, hand snapping out to grab the leader by the face while his claws extended. The Heretic gave a sharp cry as those claws were driven into his face and head.

The other two started to react, but the werewolf was already twisting around. He was on his feet in an instant, grunting as he slammed the Heretic’s face down into the top of the table not once, not twice, but three times all before the others realized something was horribly wrong. On the fourth slam, he adjusted his aim. Instead of slamming the bleeding, dazed Heretic’s face into the table, he slammed his throat against the edge of it. The table had been much stronger than it should have been, given its transformation into heavy stone. And yet, between the toughness of the Heretic himself and the strength of the werewolf (even as he ignored all his injuries), it had been cracking under each impact. On the last one, it broke in half and fell apart. Unfortunately for the Heretic, he broke as well. The impact of the corner of that table slamming into his throat collapsed his windpipe in grotesque (to some) fashion.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Three seconds, if that. The imprisoned werewolf had gone from being trapped and helpless to murdering one of the Heretics who had captured him in three seconds.

Of course, that still left the other two. Yet even as they readied themselves to retaliate, Al practically materialized behind them. His hands came down on their necks, gripping the two tightly. “Well,” he announced, “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here. But hell if I’m letting someone else have all the fun…”

*******

Unfortunately, the werewolf died in the ensuing fight. And yet, that didn’t turn out to be the end of it. Because his death released a smaller, younger looking female figure. A Seosten figure. More than that, she was a Mendacia, as Puriel would have said.

Actually, given the conversation that came immediately after that, once the other two Heretics were dead, Puriel would have called her more than that. He would have called her daughter. Or perhaps he would have if she hadn’t been a Mendacia. Al wasn’t sure where the man stood on them now. It had been a long time since they spoke. Long enough that Al had no idea the man had a daughter.

Well, to be entirely accurate, it had been so long since they spoke that the man could have had a dozen or more children, all grown to adulthood. But still, the point remained.

They left the school behind, just in case those Heretics had backup, or anyone else came to check on them. First, Al had used a spell to incinerate the bodies, leaving no evidence behind. He didn’t want their potential companions to have any clues, and he sure as hell didn’t want some innocent kids to stumble across three mutilated corpses. Once that was done, he insisted that the Seosten girl come with him. She was intrigued enough to follow once he introduced himself, and he had learned who she actually was while walking down the street with her.

“So you know, in a way, you and I are somewhat related,” Al mused as he stopped outside a fast food joint. Glancing that way, he curiously asked, “They don’t give you names, do they?”

“We are Lies,” she flatly replied, head tilting a bit to regard him. “What use is a name for a Lie?”

Rather than address that directly, Al instead mused, “That pain spell they were using should have incapacitated you. Hell, it should’ve left you crying on the floor for another twenty minutes, even through a host. But you’re fine. You wanna explain that?”

“Mother used that spell, or a variant of it,” came the casual, yet horrifying reply. “When I was bad and couldn’t let go of my friends. She was trying to teach me to be good.” There was a brief pause then, before, “We moved on to more intense spells when I was eight. Or was I nine?”

“Wait.” Al reached out, his large hand catching the girl’s shoulder.

As soon as he did that, she gasped in audible surprise, more affected by his hand holding her shoulder than she had been by all the torture. “You touch me? You know what I am. You may be too strong to control, but…”

“But if you possess me, you’ll have no way out,” Al finished for her. “You have more control than that, I know you do. Your people might think it happens all the time just by accident, but I know better. You’re not a baby anymore, so you can control it. You’ll only possess me if you want to, and we both know you don’t want to. Now, back to Kushiel. You mean to tell me that psycho cunt tortured you when you were a child, just because you’re… what you are?”

The girl, in turn, blinked up at him. “She was trying to teach me to be good.”

Some might have thought that a semi truck was driving past at that point. Yet the rumbling sound was actually Al’s growl. He resisted the urge to tighten his grip on her shoulder, instead managing a low, “What are you doing here now? Why are you on Earth?”

Some Seosten--okay, most would have objected to that question, to say the least. Yet she barely hesitated before giving him the full story. She explained about how she had been sent away from her mother by Puriel, and ended up being directed to come to Earth to work for Manakel. Her job was to infiltrate a werewolf pack and manipulate them into becoming a distraction so that Manakel could focus on killing the surviving descendant of Liesje in order to stop her from ever accessing the anti-possession spell in that blood vault. Unfortunately, by sheer happenstance, those Eden’s Garden Heretics had seen her new host and captured him. The Seosten girl had still been deciding how to handle the situation when they took her into that school. In the end, she had decided to kill one of them ‘just for fun,’ before allowing the other two to either capture her host once more, or kill him. If they killed him, she would simply possess one of them and go from there. Maybe she’d get a werewolf to bite him and still be able to do what Manakel wanted. But if they captured her, she was sure they’d torture her good and proper for killing their friend. And that would leave them emotional. At some point, they would’ve left their guard down and she would have been able to get her werewolf host to bite one of them. Either way, she was very curious about what a werewolf-Heretic host would be like.

Of course, Al showing up when he had changed that. And now she was here, talking to him. “But,” she finished, “Manakel will wonder where I am if I don’t check in soon. He becomes frustrated far more easily than my father implied he would.”

“Okay, well, first things first, you are not going back to those people.” Al made that announcement firmly before adding, “I’ve only seen Manakel a couple times in the past few centuries, but believe me when I say he’s not the man he used to be. If your dad paid more attention, he might realize that.”

“But working for Manakel is my job,” the girl pointed out. “If I am not doing what he says, I am worthless.” She paused very slightly before adding a slightly quieter. “I do not wish to be worthless. If I do what I am supposed to do, my mother will notice. She will see that I can still accomplish things. She will see that I am not--”

“She won’t,” Al interrupted. His voice was gentle, tinged with pain for having to say it, yet firm. “She will never see what you’ve done. She will never accept that you have worth, I… promise, she won’t. But listen. Look.” His hand moved to her chin, tilting it up to look at him.

If she had been surprised by his grip on her shoulder before, the touch against her bare skin drew an even louder gasp, though she didn’t say anything. Her eyes met his, staring uncertainly.

Al started once more, his voice low. “Who gives a flying shit what she thinks? Who cares what any of them think? Here’s a little secret for you. It’s a secret that people like that don’t like to hear, and they sure as hell don’t want you to know about it. So here it is. Fuck them. That’s the big secret. If someone treats you like shit, you don’t need them. What you’re worth is defined and decided by you, no one else. If someone treats you like shit, you don’t have to stand there and take it. You don’t have to prove a fucking thing. You don’t have to earn the right to exist, or to live without being tortured by anyone, let alone your own mother.

“I said the big secret is fuck them, and it is. But here’s what it means. You can walk away. That’s the big fucking trick, the thing people like your mom and others never want you to figure out. If someone hurts you, if someone makes your life worse than it would be without them, you don’t need them. You can fight. You did it back there on your own. You’ve been fighting your whole life. You don’t need those people to help you survive. You’ve got a whole planet here, with billions and billions of people. And I promise, if you give it a chance, if you take a risk and walk away from the ones who give you nothing but pain, you can find a few who are gonna matter a hell of a lot more to you than your mother ever did.”

The girl was silent for several long seconds, before speaking in a slow, uncertain voice. “But I don’t know anything else.”

“Then I suppose I’ve got a lot to teach you,” Al replied. “Starting with where the best burgers in town are. Come on.” He nodded to the nearby restaurant before starting to walk that way.

“You want me to come with you?” the girl echoed, seeming surprised that he wasn’t simply intending to leave her there.

Al looked over his shoulder at her. “Puriel basically adopted me when I was a kid. That makes you my sister. So yeah, come on. All this talking made me hungry. I’m about to keel over, and you do not want to try to drag me out of here.”

There was another brief pause before she reached into her pocket, taking out the communication device that she used to check in with Manakel. Setting the thing on the ground, she stepped on it, shattering its pieces. Then she moved, catching up with Al as he began to walk again. “I could drag you though. I am stronger than I look.”

“Well you’d almost have to be,” Al shot back. “If you were as weak as those little twig arms and legs seem, you wouldn’t even be able to stand up. I’m afraid you’ll snap in half if I talk too loud. We’ve gotta get some real food in you, ahh…” He paused halfway across the lot. “You need a name.”

“I have never had a name,” she pointed out. “Lies do not--”

“Verity,” Al interrupted. “It means truth. Because that’s what you are. You’re not a lie. You never were. You are the truth. What do you think?”

Slowly, the Seosten girl tilted her head to one side, then the other, as though allowing it to roll around in her brain. Finally, she straightened up and met his gaze. Her mouth opened, yet no sound came out. She looked… surprised by her own inability to speak through the lump that had formed in her throat. Finally, after swallowing hard, she managed a weak, barely audible, “That is… that is a good name for a real person.”

Reaching out, Al took her hand. His grip was tight as he turned and walked to the restaurant once more. “Come on then, Verity. Let’s get some grub, then you can help me do a little more shopping.

“I’ve got a couple friends I want you to meet at a barbecue tomorrow.”