John Wolfstone-The Book

Rescue, and the monster inside

Suddenly, a set of grunts and crashes are heard.

“Hold him down you two," someone shouted. "Jack, see if you can coil yourself around his jaws. Just be sure he will not suffocate.”

“All right James,” said another voice.

The sounds of a struggle are heard.

“Clara, help them out with holding him down and keeping his mouth shut,” shouted the first voice.

“But what about you honey?" a female voice asked. "You can’t stand up without my help.”

“They need your help more than I do now," the man said. "Please, for Julia’s sake?”

“Yes dear," said the female voice. "Hold onto him for me, Mrs. Tailscale.”

“No problem," said a second female voice. "I’ll cocoon him up and stick him someplace safe.”

“Okay,” said the second.

Some more sounds of struggling are heard.

“Okay Jane," said the first male voice. "Now bite a vein in his neck and inject him with your paralysis venom.”

The muffled sounds of something howling in pain are heard.

“Okay," the male voice said. "As soon as he stops thrashing, let go of him and I’ll do the rest.”

A little while later, the sounds of struggle have all but cease.

“Okay, that will do," the male voice said. "Release him. Clara, some assistance please, I need to be able to move my arms for this spell.”

Then the voice says, in an apologetic tone, “I’m sorry for this John.”

The sound of a wolf’s howl of pain is heard, and then there is silence.

After what seems like an eternity, there is a knocking at the door.

“You guys alright in there?”a third female voice asks.

It’s Tawna'v voice.

“We’re fine,” Justian shouts. “All four of us are okay.”

“Alright," Tawna said. "Well John caused a good deal of damage to the place trying to get in the room, so you will have to stay put until Jane has finished making a net for you to jump onto. The Highmen’s (the giant couple) are trying to keep the floor holding you guys from collapsing.”

“Okay," Justian said. "Just ask her to try and hurry up.”

A few minutes later, the group jumps onto a large spider web and the room crashes down into what was left of the basement, taking a wall and support beam with it.

“That was close,” said the female giant.

“Yah, my strength just gave out just after they jumped,” the male giant said.

“I’d have to say that we were all very lucky,” said a man with a black full body cast on him.

Julia looked at him and said, “Uncle James! Aunt Clara! You came to save us! How did you know we needed help?”

At this, James shook his head and said, “Like I’d leave you unprotected. I lost you once, so I put a small spell on you when I first hugged you. It warns me if you are ever in danger, and there is no one that can help you effectively. Also, it is undetectable, unless one is looking for it, and even then, that wizard, witch, or whatever would have to, practically, be holding you to detect it.”

Justian then looked around for John, and found the man, still in his giant werewolf form, on the ground, on the other side of the house’s foundations, snoring.

“What did you guys do to him?” he asked.

James looked at him and said, “Well boy, the Highmans here tackled him to the ground. As I know from playing football, the smallest guy can take out the biggest man on the other team, if he takes out the guy’s knees. They held him down while Jack (the naga) kept his mouth shut, so he couldn’t bite anyone. Of course, that wasn’t enough, so Clara basically encased him in a full body cast, which is something she is very good at doing.”

“Why, thank you honey," a female voice, coming the collor of the body cast, said. "Remind me to have some, really good fun with you, when we get home.”

At this, James gave a light chuckle.

“Well, anyways,” he continued. “While he was barely capable of moving, Jane here bit him with her paralyzing venom, so he couldn’t move. After that got spread throughout his body, I did the rest. Basically, I put him to sleep, though when he wakes up in a few hours, he will have one hell of a headache. Then again, the headache is because of second spell I casted on him.”

“What does the other spell do?” Janelle asked, causing everyone to look at her, noticing her for the first time.

“Why my dear,” said James. “It’s so that he can control himself when he is in his fully combined form. I kind of knew he was afraid of this form, cause he would never really used it, for a very good reason. It is because he loses control far more easily than if he was just a giant or a werewolf even.”

“What do you mean by control?” Janelle asked.

At this, a human like hand was placed on her shoulder.

When Janelle saw the owner, she freaked out a little, as the owner was the dridder the one student had talked about, and she had a fear of dridders, as she had had a bad experience with them when she was younger, as she had barely gotten out of the web of one, when she’d gotten caught in it.

However, for some reason, Janelle saw that Julia was smiling at her, friendly.

“Hey Mrs. Tailscale,” she said. “How’s Little Jack (the human boy that is the son of the naga and dridder) doing?”

“Oh he’s doing just fine, though he was nervous when he saw that John was destroying the place you guys live in,” said the dridder, as if she was just talking to another dridder, and not someone who could easily become a meal for her.

The dridder then looked at Janelle and said, “What James means by control is John’s ability to control his self, when the urge hits him.”

“Um, I hate to ask," Janelle said. "But what do you mean by urge?”

At this, the dridder leaned down and whispered into her ear, “Either the urge to just rape someone, or eat someone, or even, both.”

At this, Janelle’s eyes bulged.

“Are you saying that John would have eaten, or, even, raped, me if I wasn’t in that room?” she whispered, so Julia couldn’t hear her words.

The dridder raised her head and nodded.

“Those are the most basic of urges that anyone could have,” she said. “After all, all animals need to eat to survive, and reproduce so the species itself can survive.”

The dridder then gently grabbed a hold of her, lifted her off of the web, and took her to the ground, and went back to get the others.

As the dridder went to help the others out, Janelle walked over to John’s sleeping form.

“Did you just meet him today?” said a male voice, as a hand placed itself on her shoulder.

It was scaled and reptilian in appearance.

Janelle, acting on fear and instinct, grabbed it, and twisted it, in an attempt to break the owner’s arm.

“Um, that won’t work too well on someone like me,” the voice said, with a light-hearted chuckle.

Janelle looked at the owner of the hand and arm and saw that the person was a naga. From where the waist would be was the long tail of a snake. Above that was human in build, but covered in scales, and the man’s head resembled that of a snake. However, despite the fact that the man could easily swallow her, much in the same way that a snake would, he was just talking to her, as if she was another naga.

“I guess that,” he said. “Someone, who was a reptile in nature, attacked you at some point in the past.”

“Yah, when I was walking home from work today. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if John hadn’t shown up and killed him and his friends,” Janelle said, looking back at John.

“Yah, I’ve seen the end result of things like that,” the naga said.

“What do you mean?” Janelle asked.

“I used to be a police officer back in my hometown,” said the naga. “Something like that would always occur on what seemed to be a daily basis. However, no one did a thing about it, except me. It started one year after I had married Jane, and a month after I was accepted on the force. It happened one night, while I was on patrol, when I saw a dragon, with a full belly, lift a small bundle of cloth to his mouth and swallow it. If it hadn’t been moving before hand, I would have ignored it, but it had been. Something in me said to stop and get the bundle out of the man. When I told him to cough the bundle up, the guy refused and said for me to get my own baby. At that, something else in me exploded. It was something of a paternal nature. You see, Jane and I had been trying to have a child, but when we went to the doctor, he said that she was sterile. When we went to adopt, the orphanage said that we had to have been married for at least five years to be considered eligible. Well, on that night, I felt that it was a father’s duty, not a police officer’s, to try and save that baby, so I attacked and killed him. When I opened him up, I found the body of a dead human woman, who seemed to have given birth recently. Her body just reeked of recently having just been raped. She seemed to have died from drowning in the guy’s stomach acids, before I could have saved her. The bundle of cloth though was intact. It had landed on the body of the woman. When I removed some of the cloth, I saw a baby boy. Well, I took it home, where Jane through a fit. She said that just because she couldn’t have a child, it didn’t mean I should deprive a mother of a child that was rightfully her own. She also said that if I planned on eating it to get out of the house and never come back. Of course, when I explained the situation to her, she calmed down. When she saw the child look at her, she just couldn’t put him down, not even for a second. It was basically then that we came to an agreement, that we could never take another human as a meal. Then again, even before we had known that Jane was sterile, the humans that we ate were usually older than thirty, and mostly criminals that I had captured, people like rapists and murderers. However, the moment me and Jane saw little Jack, as we soon called him, we knew that we could never take another human as a meal, if only for his sake, and peace of mind.”

“What happened after that?” Janelle asked, still wonering why someone would care for a child that wasn't even one of their own, or even that of their spouse's.

“Well, at first," the naga said. "We tried to keep him a secret. Me and Jane would, more or less, kidnap lactating women, who had too much milk to feed just their own babies, or had lost theirs, for any variety of reasons, and force them to breastfeed little Jack, until he was full. If they had no children, or family, of their own, well, we’d keep them around for a week or two. In any case, after each time the woman feed Jack, Jane would inject them with a type of venom that caused amnesia, so that the woman wouldn’t remember seeing Jack. We would keep them in the same room, stuck to a web Jane had made in it. Even when the other women saw one of us taking one of them, they were unable to figure out what we did with them, except take some of the milk out of them, for some reason. When we no longer needed those that were mothers or one that we kept for a longer time was unable to produce milk, we would blindfold that woman and take her near where we had taken her. Thankfully, after a year or so, Jack no longer needed breast milk, so not having to take care of those women was a relief for us, in many ways. Of course, then there was the problem with education. We wanted Jack to have the best education, but there would be no chance of him going to school without a birth certificate. As a result, I, um, convinced an excellent forger, who was also a doctor, to make one, with me and Jane as Jack’s biological parents. Of course, knowing that the school’s headmaster was cheating with the Police Chief’s wife was a plus, in getting them to accept Jack into that school. We also made sure that nothing bad happened to him, cause I’d expose the headmaster’s dirty little secret.”

“So, does your son know the truth about himself?” Janelle asked, as she saw Julia rush up to a similarly aged human boy.

“Well, he knows he’s different," the naga said, as he looked at the boy, with a fondness in his eyes. "When he asks why he doesn’t look anything like me or his mother, we tell him it is because he is special, that somewhere out there, someone has a great plan for him.”

“Well, what about your relatives, or your in-laws?" Janelle asked. "What do you tell them?”

“There is an easy explanation for that," the naga said, with a sly smile. "One of each of our parents was human, so we just say it was chance that he was born human, and not a naga/dridder mix. The again, enough of his features are similar to my, and Jane’s, human parent, that everyone buys it, including him.”

“So, he has no idea that his real mother is dead, or knows anything about his father?” Janelle asked, as she looked at the man.

“Actually, I knew the kid’s real father, if only briefly,” the naga said.

“Why do you say that?” Janelle asked, wondering what the naga meant.

“Guy was a murderer, and a rapist. Caught him about seven months before I saved little Jack from that dragon’s stomach. You can kind of see where I’m going with this,” the naga said, with something of a nervous chuckle.

“Yah, I can see," Janelle said, knowing that the man had practically admited to killing the boy's father. "You and your wife hadn’t made your agreement, so he was one of your meals.”

“Yah, even then, we were on our way to becoming vegetarians," the naga said, as he looked back at the boy. "We wouldn’t just take someone off of the streets for a meal, we wanted a good enough reason to justify, to ourselves, the act of killing someone so we were able to eat them. It’s been almost twelve years since me, and Jane, have eaten a human, even for self-defense. John though, he’s told me that he has eaten humans, but he won’t do it unless he has to, either for self-defense, or the defense of someone he cares about, or if he was starving to death, and there was absolutely no other choice.”

“He did tell me that he did once eat a piece of a human as part of a meal,” Janelle said, as she looked at the giant sleeping werewolf.

“Yah," the naga said, as he shook his head. "But he also probably said that he felt pain for what he had done.”

“What do you mean by pain?” Janelle asked, as she looked back at the naga.

“Imagine just killing someone, who had none nothing wrong, not even to you, who happened to be just going about his day, when you killed him just to satisfy an urge that you had," the naga said, with a sigh. "The moment that you came to grips with what you had done, you would feel guilty. You would do anything to get rid of it, try to deign it, put it on someone, or something else, or even try to kill yourself.”

“Well, what about John?" Janelle asked. "Why would he feel guilty about killing those monsters that were going to kill me?”

“There could be a couple of reasons," the man said, as he looked at his stepson. "He could just hate having to kill anyone, or, much like he told me that there is a part of him that enjoys eating human flesh, there could be a part of him that likes to kill.”

“You would be correct on both parts, Jack,” said a deep voice.

It was John. He had woken up long before James had said he would.

“Ouch, that’s a major headache for sure,” he said. “Anyone got some sort of big-ass painkillers on them; my body hurts like a ton of cities hit me.”

“Actually, we all did a number on you John,” said James.

John then said, “Well, someone must have paralyzed me after I lost control, because I can’t seem to be able to move any part of my body, except certain parts of my head.”

“That was me,” said Jane.

“Well, I have to thank you for that. Otherwise, I doubt anything could have stopped me,” said John, with a slight smile.

Then, Janelle asked, “John, why did you say Jack was correct? Do you hate having to kill, or is there a part of you that likes to kill?”

John tried to move his head, so he could look at her more clearly.

“It’s both,” he said, causing everyone to gasp. “I hate having to kill, but at the same time, I love the excitement that I feel during the act, watching the life drain from someone’s eyes, the feeling of power over one’s fate, being able to decide if that person should live or die.”

As he said this, John’s face became very menacing in appearance.

“However,” he said, sighing, as his face returning to normal. “That is not the sort of person I want to become. I don’t want people to fear me because of what I can do to harm them. I want to be the person that parents tell their children, ‘That’s the man you should look up to,’ or, ‘Son, here is a man that is an inspiration to the entire world,’ and other such things. After all, when I die, I want to be able to walk through those pearly gates, with my head held high, knowing that I had helped a lot of people out with their problems.”

With that, John gave a smile of genuine happiness.

Then Samual, who just had to ruin the moment, said, “So you tried to kill me just because you can’t stand the sight of a little bit of blood? How pitiful can you get, vegetarian?”

At this, everyone glared at him, including the Highmans, and John.

“Oh, shit,” he thought, as the world became very black to him, because he had fainted.