Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

Whether it was an instant or an eternity
later when he came to his senses,
Mark couldn’t tell. The first thing he knew
as the red haze dissipated was that it was
raining on him and he was lying on cold
stone in the dark. He looked around,
groggy and exhausted, to find that he
was lying at the bottom of a set of concrete
steps in front of a locked door. His
clothes were a shambles, hanging on him
in strips, and even the seams of his one
remaining shoe had burst open. The bandage
around his right hand had come off
somehow, but looking at his skin now, he
saw that the deep puncture wounds he’d
been covering up were no longer there. In
fact, he felt better all over than he ever
had, except for how tired he was and
despite the awful taste in his mouth. He
almost couldn’t identify that taste or the
smell on his breath, but a closer look at
the red stains on the scraps of his clothing
and the reddish-black gunk under his
fingernails solved the mystery for him. It
was blood. He had blood in his mouth, on
his teeth, and it wasn’t his.
Reeling, Mark stood up, trying to
recall what he’d done or how he’d gotten
here. All he remembered clearly was
the subway station, his panicked flight
from it, and being brought down…
by wolves… And then something had
happened to him. He’d changed. He’d
become something bigger and more
powerful… but he’d also lost control of
Epilogue:
Skins
himself. What had he done? What had he
become?
Unwilling to hazard a guess, he quietly
mounted the steps and found himself
in an unfamiliar alley festooned with
clothesline garlands and a proscenium
of rusty black fire-escapes, tucked away
behind a parking lot of dumpsters and
trashcans. The rain rattled on all the
asphalt and metal, and it slicked every
surface down with an ugly veneer of
reflected pink-orange from the sodium
lights overhead. The stench of rank,
wet garbage assaulted his nostrils, but
beneath that smell was another as uncomfortably
familiar as the taste in his
mouth. He could smell blood, and he
somehow knew who it belonged to. It
was the Hispanic guy who’d tried to hurt
him. Mark could smell him on the wind
somewhere out there, getting closer. The
powerful, primal anger started to throb
inside him again, but he decided to hold
it back until he could figure out what was
happening to him. He’d stood and fought
before, and he’d lost control of himself.
This time, he figured he’d better run
instead and try to find a safe place to sort
things out. Only now he’d run smart and
not panic like he had on the subway. He’d
keep his wits about him and try to turn
things to his advantage.
As he turned around to do that,
though, he found a man in jeans, a
wool-lined denim jacket and a black
311