Gangrel

Alan Wolfe kept his bike a little under the speed limit. Not that he was worried about getting speeding tickets or getting caught, but because he was on his way to meet with the most powerful vampires in Valerton, and if he rode too fast his one good suit would wrinkle. While he didn’t much care that he had only the one suit for these meetings, it was a good idea to at least make sure it was presentable.

As he rode, he sent his mind back in time again.

There had been more and more instances of banditry north of Valerton. A band or bands of men from Canada would ride south, harry a few towns and then fall back across the border. It wasn’t something that the Silver Fangs were worried about because most of their power was in invested in their own secret paces. Their influence in Valerton was small. Besides, they had their own battles to fight.

But this one was Alan’s fight. He’d never been able to stand to see someone picking on anyone else. Alan had first learned to fight standing between Anastasia and a group of older boys. It was only the first of many times he’d bloody and get bloodied for his siter or his other siblings, and as he grew older, he only expanded the people he’d fight for to include the clerks at the mercantile, the tellers at Lisa’s father’s bank, the people of Valerton and the surrounding towns.

Wolfe suspected that these were more organized men than he had ever heard of, maybe something like the Cowboys who’d terrorized Texas until Wyatt Erp had ended their spree of violence with one of his own. Alan signed on as a town sheriff and rode after the bandits.

But in two weeks of raids and riding after them, the posse couldn’t catch them or stay on their trail. There’d been a few exchanges of gunfire, but that was mostly at the time of the raids. Once they turned and left, there was no catching them.

Alan’s first hint that there was more to this than uncommonly disciplined thugs was when he was crouched in the shattered window of the bank that belonged to his father-in-law, trading fire with the bandits. One of them jumped up and ran for his horse. Alan shot him in the back.

As the man spun around, Alan saw that it was the same man he’d shot seven days ago in Stanton. Shot in the head. His fellows had grabbed him and thrown him over a saddle, carrying him away, but Alan was sure he was dead. Here he was, shot again, but struggling to his feet and mounting his horse.

Alan took some men and they went after them, and he quickly realized that the thing that made them so devilishly hard to catch was that they attacked at night, and they rode at night. Somehow, in all of their raids, never once was a rider unhorsed by a branch in the night, or did a horse step wrong and break a leg. It was happening to the lawmen every time they gave chase.

He was thinking this when he saw movement in the brush. He laid his shotgun across the saddle, trying to make it appear casual but point it towards the movement. A moment later, it was on the other side of him. Then Alan spotted the wolf. He stopped his horse and stared. Surely the Silver Fangs hadn’t gotten involved. The last he talked to Anastasia, there was some great danger on the other side of the mountain that was holding their attention.

There was another oddity. Wolfe’s horse was always unsettled by Anastasia and her pack. While she commanded more grace and nobility than a wild wolf, Anastasia was a predator, and the horse knew in its bones that it was in danger. But this wolf stopped the horse with a glance, and it stood there unmoving and unconcerned no matter how much Alan tugged the reigns.

The wolf dipped its snout and without warning Wolfe’s horse reared and threw him. He lay on the ground, fumbling for his fallen gun and trying to find the wolf again. The last thing he remembered was a fog creeping around him.

Alan remembered the mix of feelings, both confused and focused that he felt that night. He woke sometime later, not long because it was still dark, next to the carcass of a deer. It’s neck was punctured twice, but there was no blood. Wolfe might have considered this longer, but something else caught his attention.

Each tree and root and leaf and stone was clearly visible. The night sky still shown over heard, the moon was only half full, but it was like seeing the woods by daylight. Alan squinted and peered more closely at a branch. It was just vaguely outlined in red light, the way a room is lit when the fire burns down to just embers. Everything was limned ever so faintly in that red light, but it brought the darkness into startling clarity.

It occurred to Alan that he could run through the darkness without being slowed down. So he ran. Trees and branches whipped by, but the darkness hid none of it. Never the less, he brought himself to a halt when he heard gunshots and snarling. He drew his pistol and moved more carefully, peering into the shadows where nothing was hidden from him now.

Wolfe drew behind a tree when he heard someone crashing through the underbrush. “You can’t stop the Sabbat!” He heard clearly. Those moments were always sharp in Alan’s mind, even after all this time. “We’ll consecrate your blood, Black Johnny! We won’t settle for less than diablerie!”

With his new, strange, vision, Alna saw a man dashing through the brush. Occasionally, he would turn and fire a shot over his shoulder, as if someone or something was after him. Alan saw that it was the man that he had fatally shot twice.

Wolfe stepped out from behind the tree as the man turned to curse and fire again. He fired at point blank range, putting all six rounds into his back, then his chest as he spun, before he hit the ground. Alan reloaded calmly, stood over the bandit, and put a round into his head, and the other five into his heart for good measure.

He remembered the scene that waited ahead of him. Bodies torn apart, scattered this way and that, even the horses had been dragged down and killed savagely. But it wasn’t just the violence of the scene that was strange. A few of the dead men were old – wrinkled and frail with age. But Alan would have sworn that not one of the bandits they were chasing had been older than he was.

There was one more thing. Alan found wolf tracks.

He didn’t go home for weeks. When dawn arrived and he felt the terror boiling in his veins, he panicked. Alan ended up crawling under a log to hide, wondering what was happening to him. He hunted the next dusk, but when he shot the hare, he found himself licking the blood from his fingers and discarding the meat. Just like the deer. Once the panic and confusion began to fade, he realized that at dawn’s arrival, he slipped into the earth, swallowed by the dirt and not just digging into it.

The panic and confusion were gone, but they were replaced by a sense of abandonment. Alan no longer knew who he was…or even what he was. Nothing made sense anymore. It was a sort of bleak terror. But Alan remembered the wolf. If it was a Garou, then maybe it had answers.

It took Alan almost a month to track down the wolf, and in that time he learned to fear the sun, but also how to hide from it in the earth. He learned a craving for blood, and he learned to hunt with eyes that saw through the night and claws as sharp as any cat’s. Wolfe found that he could understand the songs of birds and the growls of dogs if he could hold their gaze, and that if he growled or chirped to them, they could answer his questions. And with each new thing he learned about himself, his questions multiplied.

The cave was old and well hidden in the deep woods away from Valerton, but also away from the Silver Fang caern. The trees and rocks were weathered and ancient, but more than just appearing as some old piece of the forest, they looked…lived in. The rock was worn as if often leaned against by many people over generations. Trees showed signs of scratching and there was a powerful animal musk. Alan checked his pistol, examining his last two bullets carefully. If there was danger, he would soon have to meet it with his bare hands – claws! – alone.

Wolfe’s eyes pierced the darkness, that dim red halo providing all the light he could ever need to see. He had looked at himself in the reflection of a stream, his eyes glowed red! Inside he saw that the cave was inhabited by more than an animal. There were slash-like spirals and lines drawn everywhere. They looked like a bear had dipped its claws in paint and inscribed these strange symbols by scratching the walls.

Alan poked around the cave for some time, looking for the owner of the scant tracks he’d followed and the source of the rumors the animals had told him. Alan knew he’d found the right place when the fog rolled into the cave.

The shape that came out of the fog, that the fog became if Wolfe could believe his eyes, was almost human, or almost animal. His hands were clawed, like Alan had discovered his could become, but his calves tapered down to hooves and not feet. The man’s face was as bestial as his body, his nose and mouth pushed out in a snout, fangs visible just beneath the lips. His ears were pointed and tufted with fur the same color as his dark and tangled hair. From his brow, antlers branched like an old tree; Alan couldn’t gather his wits enough to count the points. And the man-creature’s eyes were bright yellow orbs, black slits dilated wide to examine this intruder.

That was Alan’s first meeting with Black Johnny, the eldest Gangrel in the Valerton woods, and possibly in all of Montana. Wolfe quickly discovered that this beast-man was not a Garou or even a spirit like them, but a vampire, cursed by an ancient power. A curse that had been passed to Alan Wolfe.

It took no little talking, strangely accented by that snout, and quite a bit of physical force to subdue Alan and explain what had been done to him. By dawn, he sat in the back of the cave, with Johnny crouched at the mouth. Alan listened, but he was aware that Johnny was ready to stop him from fleeing.

Alan considered that he was cursed, but added to that the reason Johnny Tempest had done this to him. Those bandits were vampires belonging to something they called the Sabbath, a dark cult intent on slaying all other vampires. And they didn’t care who’s blood was shed in the process. Alan thought of the wonton destruction the bandits practiced and believed Johnny.

“You’re a protector, Alan Wolfe,’ Johnny told him. “I need someone to protect my clan, and the people we live with.” There was despair of course, mourning for a lost humanity. And all that he was raised to believe as kinfolk of the Silver Fangs went against what he was now. “Has who you are really changed, Wolfe?”

Alan was shocked into awareness. Was he different? He drank blood, his fingers could become claws, he could see in total darkness… but that was what he was, not who he was. He still missed Lisa and grieved for the family he had not gotten to have. He loved Anastasia and his aging mother, still beautiful, and his other siblings, just starting families of their own.

No, he supposed he hadn’t really changed who he was. He still wanted to make a good life for himself and for the people he loved. If they were in danger of being preyed upon by vampires of this Sabbat, he would protect them, cursed or not.