Xander's Cross, Oregon: a small town ringed with forbidding mountains and misty forest. The sky may be gray, but the townspeople are welcoming to people of all kinds...and things that are not quite human as well. Here the native shifters, aliens, werewolves, and witches live in peace. They have yet to find out the new business owners encroaching on the land are also vampires.
The peace has been broken by murder, however, and things in Xander's Cross are about to become quite a bit darker.
Welcome to your new home.
is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?
August 20, 2020
The mayor, Rowan Starkwood, was found dead less than a mile from his home. Rumors say his body was mutilated, but the state of the body has not yet been released to the public.
Post by Rikki Boehm on Jul 27, 2020 12:24:12 GMT -5
Rikki knew she shouldn't be hanging around an active crime scene, but it wasn't like that was going to stop her. She was a Forest Ranger, after all, she couldn't just ignore the fact that a murder had been committed in the forest she was watching over. Not only that, but it was the mayor who had been murdered: the mayor who was also the chief of the tribe and the leader of her wolf pack. It didn't get much bigger than that. If she missed her chance to take a look, she'd never forgive herself.
So, here she was, creeping around in the dark at a crime scene on the edge of the woods.
The Starkwood home was only a few hundred feet away, but she had waited until all the lights were out before she'd dared to get this close. Yellow police tape outlined a square plot of land, and one of the officers was parked back out on the street, asleep in his squad car. They were treating the case as serious, but three days later, in the middle of the night, and in a small town like this, there was no way to keep the crime scene under a heavy watch. Rikki crept out of the trees and ducked under the tape line, turning on her Adventure Scouts preferred, multi-setting flashlight to the dimmest setting. She wished that she had better night vision in her human form, but no such luck. Her wolf form might see and smell better, but it couldn't take notes or pick up evidence. She'd settled for human, seeing as she needed fingers to hold her digital recorder and her flashlight.
"Crime scene is vacant," she whispered into the recorder, holding it almost against her lips as she took careful steps across the root-twisted ground. "No visible blood or symbols for witchcraft. No scent of other wolves or sulfur, either. I can smell the alpha's blood, though. God, it's everywhere. Whatever killed him, they must have--" She cut off and whirled around when a twig snapped behind her, already clicking her flashlight to the setting she and the kids had nicknamed 'the light of God' for its absurd brightness. She was already snarling, ready to shift and attack whatever was behind her if needed, when she recognized the weathered and wrinkled form of Hank Bianchi, her favorite local human.
"What the fuck, Hank?" she hissed, and her heart pounded as she switched the flashlight off again. "You're not supposed to be here!"