Some time later....
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The sound of the water nearby found its way into Bastien's awareness during brief moments of consciousness. The crumbled wall, and the broken waterline. Pain, so much pain. When had the spray of water turned to a steady dripping?
Distantly he registered something. More pain? It felt hot, like fire shooting down his arm. He barely reacted to it though. He couldn't move, and his senses had been so overwhelmed that while he was vaguely aware of the new point of pain, it remained at the periphery of that awareness.
Something lifted his chin up, and he could almost make out the shape of the ghoul through red tinted vision. There was a lack of visual processing from his left eye that he couldn't quite comprehend, and the blood that had filled his right eye left him unable to see much more than blurry shapes and fluctuations of light.
---
The ghoul let Bastien go and his head slumped forward, hanging loosely once more from where he hung impaled to a wall. A rusty metal beam protruded from his chest and held him in place.
The ghoul frowned.
Its plaything was fading, and this filled it with irritation. The new ragged cut he had opened up down the length of Bastien's arm had barely elicited even a groan. It had been fascinated by the way the mutt's body continued to repair injuries, and he had pursued that curiosity with all the inquisitiveness of a child. It had been bored until Bastien had happened upon it. It did not understand why it had been made to remain here. It wanted to be out with the others. It wanted to make things hurt. Hurt like they had hurt him. He wanted to make them bleed, and die.
Before he had fallen in with Ayman, the ghoul had once been human. Deformed and slow of wit. It had wished for others to know the same terror that had been inflicted upon it. And its wish had been granted. It had been made into the physical embodiment of the cruelty that was humanity. It was a hulking monstrosity. One arm ended in a giant pincer like claw, and the other arm had a long blade that emerged from just below the elbow. Two large tentacles protruded from its back with barbed spikes emerging from them. Its mouth was no longer capable of verbal speech and had been replaced with a gaping maw of razor-edged teeth. It had not minded the loss of speech. It had never been good at words before.
---
Baron entered the warehouse with Desmond and Chloe to either side. They hadn't known what they would find upon their entry into the non descript storage building off from the location Dev had provided, but the sight of Bastien impaled to the wall was all that was needed to flood Baron's system with hot fury. For most, fury was something you felt in reaction to something external. For those of the Guiscard bloodline though, it was an ever present torrent, kept at bay only through conscious effort and choice. It was never a matter of becoming enraged. It was simply a willingness to let it loose. Baron had mastered keeping it caged behind his outward facade of calm indifference but it was always there, just beneath the surface. And it burned just as hot as his father's had, and Ragenard's.
He was immediately upon the ghoul and Bastien with a speed that he rarely displayed. He grabbed the creature with one hand and sent it hurtling across the room to smash into a stone pillar. The reverberations of the impact shook the building overhead. He moved quickly. From the state of the place filled with broken crates, cracked walls, and various debris, it appeared that Bastien had put up a hell of a fight before he was felled. Baron held no illusion that the creature would remain down.
He grabbed the metal beam that Bastien was impaled upon and jerked it free. It clattered to the floor loudly and he caught Bastien's slumped form with his other arm. His wounds weren't healing as they should have been, but he was alive. That's what mattered.
Rhetta's words came back to him.
"Who do you want to be?"
He had only ever wanted to be one thing. A protector. He had thought the only way he could protect the pack was as pack leader. He was beginning to understand why he had it wrong all along. Why the peace he thought he had achieved was doomed to fail from the very beginning. It had been their reputation carved out during his enforcer days that had carried them so far. But humans grow old and forget the past so easily. Perhaps, it was time they remembered.
"He's still breathing. Get him out of here," he growled as he passed Bastien's slumped form to Desmond.
Desmond hooked Bastien's arm around his neck to help keep him upright, but nearby the ghoul was already rising. There was an eagerness behind its blazing eyes. New playthings had arrived.
