Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

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Appendix II: The Rockies
T-shirt standing between him and the
end of the alley. The man was tall and
thick with muscle, but it was a solid,
farm-bred sort of muscle, rather than a
sculpted body-builder physique. The man
had silver-gray sprinkled in his black hair,
and a long white scar ran from his right
cheekbone down onto his neck. He held
up a hand, palm out, and looked Mark
in the eye as he spoke.
“Don’t panic, son, ” the man said.
“We’re not looking to hurt anybody
here.”
“So whose blood is that on your coatsleeve?”
Mark snapped. It stood out even
though the falling rain tried to wash it
away.
The man looked at the stain then up
at Mark again. “Actually, that’s mine.
Now listen, son, I want you to come
with us. We’ve got to—”
“Who’s ‘us’?” Mark demanded, looking
for a way out of the alley past this
stranger. “Who are you people? What do
you want with me?”
“My name’s Russell, ” the man said,
coming closer, “and the rest of ‘us’ are
called the Broken River. And honestly, all
we really want is for you to get out of
our neighborhood.”
“What?”
“Unfortunately, ” Russell sighed,
“things aren’t ever that simple, are
they?”
Before Mark could answer that, he
smelled the Hispanic guy’s blood again
then heard heavy footsteps at the far
end of the alley behind him. The guy was
holding an enormous knife in his right
hand and massaging his throat with his
left. His fingers were red with drying
blood, and his clothes were slashed in almost
a dozen places. He glared when he
saw Mark, but he looked at Russell first
as he slowly approached the pair of them.
Behind him came the kid in the FDNY
T-shirt and the flannel, who had four
parallel angry red lines across his face,
and beside him was the auburn-colored
wolf who’d torn off Mark’s shoe. They
congregated at the alley’s end, trapping
Mark between them with the rain beating
down on them all. The other three
deferred to the one who’d introduced
himself as Russell, and Mark locked eyes
with him as well.
“Here’s the thing, Mark, ” Russell
said, taking another step so that he was
only an arm’s length away. “We’ve been
watching you for a couple of weeks now,
figuring something like this was coming.
And we’re not the only ones; something
like this tends to draw attention. So in
a sense, we’ve been running damage
control on you, hoping that if you were
going to snap you didn’t make too big a
mess of it.”
“We got pretty lucky, ” the kid in the
flannel said. Russell cut him a look, and
the Hispanic guy growled low in his raw
throat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking
about, ” Mark half lied, paying out some
slack on his self-control in case he had to
fight to get away again, “but I want to
know what your intentions are. Now.”
A hard, bitter smile creased Russell’s
face, and he refused to back off. “First, I
thought we’d answer some of your questions
for you, son. Tell you a little about
what you are and what it means.”
“What I’ve become.”
“No, what you are, ” Russell said. “After
that, there’s people you have to meet
and some hard tests you’ll have to pass.