You're lost in darkness

[Ryang Jaesung]

Jae eventually sank down to lay on the ground, watching the vampire through half-open eyes. He rested from the exertions of hunting the first vampire but didn't let his guard down. This man was not the first vampire he had caught; he wouldn't be the last.

He did anticipate the man trying something but not being sure what that was--since vampires' abilities varied--he didn't try too hard to predict his victim's next move. All he did was lay there, until the vampire sprang forward. He was speedier than he looked.

With a snarl, Jae was up, whirling as the vampire passed him and snapping at his heels. He lunged, tackling the man from behind and using the whole weight of his body to bear down on him, to get him to the ground so that Jae could drag him back into the cabin.

[Tak Gunji]

So close to freedom that he could literally taste it. He tasted the clean, fresh air, the scent of the firs and the hemlocks, the cool breeze on his face... and then he was abruptly tackled and taken down, smashing down hard against dead leaves and earth as he was dragged bodily back inside.

He let out a sound of frustration. His satchel fell away from him and lay outside even as he was pulled away. Quickly, he made a grab for the satchel but his hand missed.

Inside once again, Gunji twisted his body in an attempt to fight back. His hand shot up to the wolf's mangy throat. It was much wider than a human's throat. Not quite so easy to strangle.

"Is this about the mushroom?" he asked through gritted teeth.

[Ryang Jaesung]

Jae's throat was protected by thick, matted fur but even so, he felt the strength of the vampire's grip. It discomforted him and he hastened to drag the man back inside before he started running into problems. No, it wasn't about the mushrooms. Jae didn't give a fuck about mushrooms.

Once inside, he bodily hauled his prize back into the corner with the pallet and then circled him. Jae's bright yellow eyes were fiercely trained on him, staring him down and willing him to be obedient. They could do this all night. It didn't take much energy to pounce and sink his teeth into soft, yielding flesh when he liked the taste of blood.

But maybe. Maybe he should deter this tenacious vampire.

So he pounced again, closing his teeth around a leg and biting down hard, crunching on the bone to snap it. Let him run out on a broken leg, Jae thought--he would be impressed if the man managed it.

[Tak Gunji]

They could definitely do this all night, this back and forth. He might have thought it was amusing, if he wasn't so sure that something was wrong with the scenario. Playing with werewolves could be a fun pastime to wile away his eternal life... but not so much when it meant being locked up in some backwoods shed.

That was basically what this little cabin was, was it not? A shed? A shack? A primitive and small building with no windows and a single door. It felt like a prison. Was it just his imagination or was it scented strongly with the blood of others? (It wasn't just him and he knew it.) That was part of the reason he wanted to leave.

Part of him wanted to just lie down and let it happen but the pride in him was too great. He had to at least try.

Trying seemed to be on the back burner once his leg made a sharp and painful snapping sound. Little more than a gasp escaped him and he dropped to his good knee as he tried to lessen the pain radiating up his leg.

After a moment, he dropped down, back to the wall, leg sitting in a distinctly painful and unnatural way. He stared at the werewolf with hard eyes.

"Others will come to find me."

[Ryang Jaesung]

Jae bared his teeth in a snarl, the long canines dripping blood, in a display of defiance against the vampire's threat. Others? He didn't care about others--he would deal with them, too, if they were foolish enough to wander into his part of the woods. They wouldn't know the terrain the way he did; they didn't know about the hiding spots, the places where Jae might lie in wait to ambush them.

For long moments, he stared the vampire down. The leg jutted out at a strange angle but he knew that he had made a clean break. Jae was more than experienced by now in all the ways to hurt someone without actually killing them. He'd been brought here when he was little more than a teenager, still young and just beginning to develop signs of the virus.

It changed him differently than it did the others--the way it did to his cousin Reagan or to Reagan's friends. He didn't know if he was even a werewolf anymore, or if he had become something else. Something stronger, faster, better--the next step up on the evolutionary chain.

He sank down again once he was satisfied that the vampire wouldn't make another attempt at escape and spent the next hour silently staring at him. Then he saw it, the sliver of light shafting through a crack in the door.

Slowly, Jae rose and padded over to the vampire in the corner. He paused a few feet away and shifted back to his human form, with a painful popping and creaking of bones condensing and fur retreating back into skin. "Looks like you're stuck with me for a while longer," he grated in the same hoarse voice, rusty from disuse. "Your little friends won't be able to come get you until tonight. If they even make it to this cabin."

[Tak Gunji]

Mushrooms. As if this had anything to do with those. For a long, long time, it seemed that they sat there, locking gazes and saying nothing. Gunji had nothing else to say and his questions were pointless anyway. The wolf didn't want to tell him anything; not anything worthwhile.

He barely acknowledged the leg although it did hurt. Even now he could feel it knitting itself back together. Strange how the undead body of a vampire could do that. Stranger still how a werewolf could strike blood from veins of stolen blood. Did it even taste the same by the time it touched his tongue? His gullet?

After a moment, Gunji tilted his head back and he closed his eyes, swallowing. This was not where he envisioned himself when he headed out on this quest.

At the sound of the wolf shifting, he opened his eyes and slowly lifted his head. His gaze was steel as he stared back at him, unimpressed.

"Not all my friends are vampires."

[Ryang Jaesung]

A smile spread slowly across Jae's lips. "I could use a little variety in my diet."

He sat down on the cold, hard ground in front of the vampire, staring him in the eyes. Now he did feel a little bit of a tug--the human body was far weaker than the wolf's--but his altered physiology wasn't prone to falling prey to the vampire's hypnosis.

"What's your name?"

Sadistically Jae reached out to touch the broken leg, giving it a meaningful squeeze in case the vampire felt the need to be difficult. Behind him it grew brighter; the trees were thin right around his cabin, exposing it to full sunlight during the day and full moonlight at night

[Tak Gunji]

He did not have to ask what that meant. The wolf wanted to eat everybody who came after him. So why not eat me? Was he going to keep him alive while he ate parts of him? First his leg, perhaps... then an arm? He didn't understand why. Humans must have been far tastier than an old used corpse like himself.

There was no point in lying, giving a false name, or refusing to give a name at all, though he also didn't understand why the wolf needed his name. What was he even trying to do here?

"Tak Gunji," he said without inflection. Without taking his gaze away from him. The big, bad wolf.

Gunji couldn't even call for help because he'd dropped his satchel by the door. His mushroom, his phone, anything he could have used for help was not within reach. Now, anyway. Gunji did not look in that direction--in fact, he made a point of not doing so. He didn't want the wolf reading too much into his actions.

[Ryang Jaesung]

"Tak... Gunji..."

He rolled the words around on his tongue, savoring them. Tak Gunji. The vampire's name was Tak Gunji.

Jae looked him up and down, trying to make sense of his seemingly calm demeanor. Was he really calm, or was it all an act? Tak Gunji was a good actor, if that was the case--a lesser being would have been blubbering by now, asking him what he wanted. Some fought and he enjoyed those, up until the moment when he was forced to slay them or risk them running out on him.

"Aren't you going to ask why I'm keeping you here?" He smiled, not particularly mirthfully. It was more of a baring of the teeth; there was no warmth in it and it brought none to his face, either.

[Tak Gunji]

"Did I not already ask?"

Or did he simply ask if it was the mushroom? It seemed ridiculous now, that question. Why would the mushroom have anything to do with this? At the moment, it seemed logical enough; how many of his minions had been crushed in these woods looking for those exact mushrooms? It wasn't a stretch of the imagination to connect the dots.

The mushroom was forgotten in his satchel, however. If this had anything to do with mushrooms, then it was only to lure in fools such as himself. Why had he decided to do this alone? He was getting cocky. Ever since he began leading the Blood Ring, he'd become quite... confident. Perhaps too confident, especially judging by the way other vampires in the area treated him.

He was little more than a youth in their eyes.

How old was this one? He was just a werewolf. He wouldn't live as long as a vampire. He seemed young, rough. Probably a tortured soul. Less poetically, a deranged soul.

[Ryang Jaesung]

Jae's answering laugh was more of a harsh bark than anything else. "You mean your precious mushrooms?"

He turned to look at the fallen bag, remembering it just then. Unhurriedly he strolled over and picked it up by the strap. Then returning to his former position, Jae opened the zipper and glanced into it.

"You came for these?" He held up a mushroom, studying it curiously. Come to think of it, most of the vampires he caught, he'd found near the area where these mushrooms grew. They clustered at the base of a certain type of tree. Jae had no use for them--he was a meat eater--but why did a vampire need a mushroom?

"Why?"

[Tak Gunji]

"They're used in spells."

The mushrooms didn't even look all that innocent. They were quite sinister looking--an ugly dark and blotchy color, like a bruise stained with ink. They had fat, wide heads but long, unseemly stems. Really, they were the ugliest mushrooms that he'd ever seen--but at least they were distinctive, both to the sight--and to the scent.

The scent was something else. Despite the ugliness of the mushroom, the scent was sweet. A bit like the gentle perfume of a flower.

Gunji tensed as he watched the wolf with his bag. Would he find the cellphone and break it? What of the other items within the bag? He'd brought with him a few other ingredients in preparation. He was supposed to meet the witch after he acquired the mushrooms.

Slowly, he shifted his broken leg to test how well it had healed. Not quite there yet. It didn't matter, though. He could see the light through the door. He wasn't going anywhere for at least another day.

"Why then?" he asked. "Why did you drag me in here?"

[Ryang Jaesung]

He did find the cell phone but ignored it in favor of looking through the rest of the bag, mostly out of sheer curiosity than anything else. Maybe the contents would lend insight into Tak Gunji's reason for being here.

Or was he nothing more than an errand boy? Jae glanced up at him with an expression that betrayed nothing. He thought about the question seriously, for some long moments.

It was a compulsion. A desire and a gut-twisting need. Jae's appetite for violence was like none other and vampires, they were self-healing. Whatever damage he did would be mended over time, allowing him to keep the same person for a long time, to satisfy his perverse urges. The answer was both simple and not so simple.

"I just wanted you," he said at last, before bending his head to look through the bag again. He wanted Tak Gunji so he took him.

[Tak Gunji]

There were other ingredients in the bag, such as eyes of newts (common enough ingredients), along with his wallet, credit card, fake ID, all that nonsense. There was a book on black magic, although it wasn't of use to Gunji himself. He wasn't a witch and had no real magic other than the things that came with being a vampire.

No blood in the bag, though. He had to keep it cool and he figured he would pick somebody up on the way home or take one of his ghouls. The beauty of having underlings meant not having to hunt every night.

Although he did feed already tonight, that didn't mean he wouldn't be hungry when evening fell again.

I just wanted you. That was.... Gunji didn't know how to react to that. His visceral reaction was almost a raw, magnetic desire. But he quickly shoved that down. That was the monster part of him, not the logical part that still retained some of his old humanity.

"Because I was here."

[Ryang Jaesung]

"Not quite." He didn't explain. Gunji would find out in due course why he was spared.

Jae had extracted the ingredients, giving each a sniff and recoiling slightly (almost comically) at the scent of what looked like a desiccated toe. That was offensive to both sight and smell, to say the least. He finished looking through the bag and finally pulled out the phone when it buzzed.

He turned it on, annoyed that there was a lock code. There was a flashing icon that looked like a little envelope; he supposed it was a text message. Gunji's friends? Someone worried about him, perhaps? Or was it the person for whom he was gathering ingredients?

"Give me the code."