Every time he closed his eyes, Henry could still see her face. Or what was left of it after that...thing had gotten to her. He'd assumed Mary had just been slipping out for cards with "the girls" all this time. After all, he'd never had any reason to doubt her. But as he sped along the backroads of Keystone Peak, he couldn't help but wonder just how much of what his wife had been telling him all these years had been lies.<br/><br/><br/>~we got a 10-51 at Marco's place… looks like Otis is into his daddy's shine again.~<br/><br/><br/>The voice of Judy at dispatch crackled over the police scanner from the dashboard of Henry's pickup. He'd kept only this and his service revolver after turning in his badge and leaving the force. And after his wife's funeral there had been no one who really questioned the sheriff's abrupt retirement after twenty years of service even though the man was still stout, sturdy and more than capable of serving for another decade at least. Judy sounded disinterested as ever and Henry's eyes never left the road ahead as he peeled through the long and lonely stretch of dirt and gravel. It was not the call he was waiting for anyway. He had a general idea where the thing was holed up now. It had been almost a week since that night. He'd had a lot of time to figure things out. To think about what happened and what he was going to do about it. All he needed now was a little luck.<br/><br/><br/>His wife had always kept her art studio closed off from him. Something about "creative privacy" or some such. He'd never questioned it. But the night she was murdered Henry got shit faced drunk and kicked down the door in a fit of grief. Maybe he was curious about what she'd been painting in there all this time. Maybe he just wanted to wallow in his anguish amid the things she'd kept to herself all this time. But what he found inside that small room in their basement was not some painting studio, but a veritable museum of occult and esoteric paraphernalia. There had been weapons, books, strange trinkets and artifacts, and other such obscure relics all sitting there tucked away right under his nose for years. And after a bit of old fashioned detective work, Henry had figured out where his wife had really been running off to at night.<br/><br/><br/>Most of her books were written in strange dead languages but through the few of them that Henry could make sense of he'd gathered that she was some sort of witch hunter, a hexenhammer as the grimoires put it. And that thing that got her, it was some poor bastard who got himself cursed by witches. A lycanthrope. Fucking werewolf! He'd gotten a look at the thing just after it killed Mary. Not a good one though. It was dark, he was tired at the time and upon discharging his shotgun in the things direction it had run off the road where he'd found it and into the woods like a bat out of hell. He had been responding to a 10-91v, a supposed bear attack on the property of one of the town's many farmers. But that thing had been too wiry, too… humanoid. Even with the poor visibility Henry could tell that much. And bears didnt rip into cars like that. But this thing had carved open Mary's stanza like a can of tuna and ripped her to shreds before she even had a chance to fight back by the look of things.<br/><br/><br/>A lot of questions had gone through Henry's mind after the incident. And even now there was a laundry list of shit the aging ex cop wanted cleared up. Why didnt Mary put up more of a fight if she'd been hunting things like this for so long? What other sorts of things were out there just hiding in plain sight? But in the end, none of that really mattered. His wife had been murdered and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about that. And her killer was some sort of cursed freak who the five man contingent of the Keystone Peak sheriff's department were sorely unprepared to deal with. Hell, two of his former deputies couldn't walk and chew bubblegum and the rest weren't much better. Henry knew that if he wanted the thing that killed his wife dealt with, he'd have to do it himself. And thanks to a little help from his late wife's collection, he at least knew how to do that much.<br/><br/><br/>~10-91v over at willards ranch. Might be coyotes getting at his chickens again. Please respond.~<br/><br/><br/>Henry immediately hit the breaks and turned his truck around, peeling off in the direction of the ranch in question. It was the call he'd been waiting for and he would have to get there before the new sheriff showed up. Henry could count on the absent minded incompetence of his former deputies to give him a nice wide window to deal with the "animal" himself. But his replacement was zealous. Always out there doing her job the best she could like she didn't have anything better to do. It really would be a pain if he ran into her while dealing with this monster. So he tore ass all the way to his destination, reaching the farmstead in a little under three minutes.<br/><br/><br/>Upon exiting his truck and pulling his shotgun from the rack in the rear window, Henry heard gunshots coming from inside the large barn off to the west of the driveway where he'd parked. This was followed by screams and snarling that seemed to echo in the silence of the night. Then there was nothing. He loaded his gun with the silver slugs he'd gotten from Mary's armory, three in total, though he was unsure if this would be enough. Couldn't really be helped though as they were all he could scrape together aside from that blade in his boot. Silver or not though, he didn't fancy getting in close enough to use it. And as the monster came skulking out through the cracked barn door, its muzzle dripping with blood and viscera as its wild yellow eyes panned this way and that, Henry trained his weapon on the thing and took aim.<br/><br/><br/>The creature sniffed the air and abruptly turned to face Henry after catching the man's scent, snarling and charging in just in time to catch a shot to the chest. The boom of Henry's first shot rang out into the night and the slug tore a gaping hole right through the creature's shoulder. Glistening gore and the whites of bone showed under matted grey fur yet the thing just kept coming. Another shot ripped through the beasts liver as it closed the distance with the final one going wide as the werewolf lunged at Henry in an attempt to tackle him to the ground, tearing a gash into the things already bloody jowls but otherwise being entirely wasted. It was only when Henry struck the creature in the face with the butt of his now empty gun that its stride was broken at all. The creature reeled yet still its deadly claws ripped painful gashes over the mans chest, tearing open his shirt and the hard muscular flesh underneath like hot knives through butter.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>