After hours of picking through the wreckage of what was once her home, Tiger sighed deeply and sat on the stairs that lead down from the store above into the werewolve's headquarters and looked over the large circular shaped room, trying to ignore the stench of blood on the air, or the way bodies lay everywhere, some so mangled, it was impossible to identify them. She'd been out that night. Hunting. Tracking down a vampire that had killed a friend of her sisters, trying to right the wrong he'd done by taking his life in return for her pack member's.
And she had. She'd succeeded. Only to return home and find this. She'd slipped into the little clothing store the pack pretended to run, shifted into her human form, getting dressed, and then went to the back of the store, opened the door to the basement and their living quarters, and that's when it had hit her. The smell of blood wafted up from the room like nothing else, so strong she knew it was more than one dead. She'd stood there for a long time. In utter shock, her mind unable to comprehend what she knew she'd find down those stairs.
They couldn't be dead. They just couldn't. Not all of them. They were her family. Her pack. If they'd all been killed, wouldn't she have felt it? Wouldn't she be able to feel her connection with them sever? Probably not, but she was so close to them, it certainly felt like she should have.
When she'd finally managed to make her feet move, she'd made her way down the stairs, following the long blood streak on the wall into the depths of the building to find that she was right. They were all dead. Every last one. The main room, a large circular room with a maze of doors and halls branching off it, was littered with body after body. Blood was everywhere. On the furniture, on the floors, on the walls, as she walked through the rooms, it was on the mirrors, on the bedsheets, it appeared that not a single surface was spared of it's crimson stain.
These were the people she loved. The people who'd taken her in when she'd had no one. She would have fallen to her knees and sobbed right there, except her heart was still in shock. She couldn't seem to understand yet. Seeing so many dead had her running in survival mode, rather than sorrow mode. She was forced to pick over every body and count and identify them, so she could see if there were any survivors. Some of the bodies were so badly mangled, they couldn't be identified, but she still counted them.
When she finally finished, there was a shortage of bodies. Which gave her hope that some had gotten away from the massacre, but the fact that she couldn't identify some of the bodies meant that it was impossible to tell who might still be alive. And they might not even be alive. They might be held prisoner. She'd have been able to tell apart the members of her pack alone, had there not been so may dead. There was too much blood in the air for her to properly identify by scent. It followed her everywhere she went, threatening to close her throat with tears.
Everything inside Tiger hurt as she sat there on those steps and the realization that she was suddenly, utterly alone sunk in at last. The reality of the situation was finally settling upon her, and a hundred thousand emotions were flooding her at once. Guilt, sorrow, mourning, anger. Anger. Tiger held onto that one. She forced herself to swallow down the others for now and allowed them to feed her anger. Because otherwise, she feared, she'd cry. Something she hadn't done in ages.
She was angry. Angry at whoever had done this, as well at herself for not being there, but, for the time being, Ty directed her anger at whoever had slaughtered her family. Who was it? She thought for a while, but the only thing she could come up with was the vampires. She was reluctant to lay the blame on them, because their two sides had been feuding for centuries, and yet they were bot equally matched. This sort of destruction shouldn't be possible for either side.
And yet it was there. In front of her.
It was the only thing that made sense, and, at this point, her anger was so high, she leaped to her feet and flew swiftly up the stairs, through the store, and into the street, emerging from the store's entrance as a small, sleek black wolf, white-tipped tail swaying dangerously, ears laying flat against her head as she slipped into the shadows and took off towards the vampire coven at top speed, not caring if the place was full. She'd take down as many as she could and then die. With the rest of her pack.
The closer she got, the stronger the smell got. Blood. Again. Was her scared mind just remembering that coppery smell and using it to fuel her anger? Or was it really there. By the time Tiger finally slipped through the back door to the vampire's home, she found that it was, in fact, real. Before her, was a similar sight to that which she'd just left.
Bodies and blood. Everywhere. Tiger slipped into the shadows near the walls as she made her way through the house, looking for someone alive, whom she could take her anger out, but there was no one. Everyone was dead. It was utterly confusing, and Tiger slipped into the room of a female vampire and changed back into her human form, quickly slipping on some of the woman's clothes, thankful that, whoever she'd been, she preferred black.
What had happened here? How had her race, and the vampires both been obliterated in one night? Who could have done it? Who was strong enough to do it? A pack or coven from out of town maybe? Tiger's mind spun in circles as she started to make her way through the eerily silent building again, the only sound, the sound of her feet against the floor as she looked for clues as to what had happened and who had done it.