Out in the alley Michael immediately made his point, throwing Lenore solidly against the wall opposite of the door. By her hair. His heavy sneer remained.

Lenore had been squealing since he wrapped his hand in her hair, grabbing at his wrist to relieve just a little of the pain and kicking trying to aim a barefoot for his side. "Let me go!" The words were shrill, lacking their usual growl. "I don't want to fight!" Her back planted against the brick wall knocking the wind out of her and wracking her body with a cough to follow when she tried to gasp for air. "You're hurting me, you idiot!! This isn't funny!" She was used to sparring, wooden swords and being slapped on the butt. This was something else entirely. "Let me go!" She screamed while trying to aim another kick as his side, laughable against his armor.

Tiny feet do little to dissuade the monster of the alley, savage in his work. Michael is a mechanism. Task him, and it is done. Through time and hard work, through pain and suffering, through death and murder. This is his truth. This is the hard fact no one sees beneath that sheepish smile. A mouth of fangs barks, "Shut up! You're going to fight, or you're going to die. Duck!" In an instant, Michael swept the wall at the height of her head, steel sparking as it tore through brick.

She's ready to protest and call him an idiot again but you don't have to tell her twice. He said duck and she did, the sword dragging above her and she let out another shrill sound of shrieking anger. She was on the ground, crouched with an easy enough grace despite her chest about ready to implode with gasping breaths of air. "You're going to hurt me!" He had to be joking. He had to be. Michael has never been out for blood like this.

"Heh." Hurt? She got to the point. The mechanism nodded his head in slow exaggeration. "Yes, Lenore. In the very least. I'm going to hurt you very, very badly. 'S good for you." Pain was the only thing that was real. Didn't anyone know that? You dwell in the world of the Knight, little Squire. And this is where the 'hurting' starts. Michael makes another wide cutting edge arc from above his head downward, cutting off an angle of retreat. The free hand draws something oblong and clumsy, iron clockwork with a gas cylinder. An industrial nail gun. It sounds like a piston exploding when he pulls the trigger. Here, let him show her; his hand follows her in retreat from his sword, and an inch of iron nail punches straight through her tender, tender arm. It misses bone only because he wants it to miss bone.

He. Wasn't. Joking. The sword came swinging downward and she moved smoothly out of the way of it but it was like being herded exactly where someone wanted you. She felt it before she saw the gun. A nail gun. Who brings a nail gun to a fight? It was when metal met flesh and she let out a high pitched blood curdling scream at the top of her lungs that she knew she either had to fight or she really was going to die. She was shaking as she looked down at the nail stabbing into her arm and her first instinct, which probably wasn't the smartest idea at all, was to claw the foreign object out of her arm until it dropped to the ground beneath her. "You sonofabitch!" She screamed the words while still staring at her arm, the smear of blood and the painful hole left behind. Eyes lifted up to him, lips peeled back to bare a mouth full of fangs at him. "I'm going to rip your throat out!" Big talk for a little pile of pale bleeding flesh.

"Yes! YES! DO IT!" Blood was in the air, a frenzy of red, a flood of crimson, crashing on Michael with all the love and fury of an all powerful God. Something in his head rolls over and rears its ugly, horrid face; he likes this. It's in the wide eyes that blaze bright. It's in the sharpened razor grin. It's in the excited, rushed way the words spill out, bumping into each other. Teeth cut his lip and he lets out a sick giggle, reveling. The mechanism menaces her with the nail gun, shaking it. Her blood smears its head. If she doesn't move, it's going to punch holes in her skull, through which he will touch her brain with dirty hands. BANG! BANG BANG! Click -- the nailgun misfires, and Michael drops it, unconcerned. The exact moment it hits the ground, Michael's scar filled face becomes Fury itself. "DO IT!!!" Michael is going to kill a friend. And he likes it.

She is a tumbling mess. She can't think straight. She can't put together tactics. It's slash, bite, rip, growl. It's gotten her along this far in life and it gets his throat within her gaping maw so she can clamp down to feel the satisfying crack of bone and the taste of victory laced with copper pouring over her tongue and coating her fur. It was stupid to think that would be the end of it. It was stupid. The hatchet strikes her ribs and she can feel them give, the protection of meat and muscle not enough against the much strength driving a blunt object into her side. Another roar, this one pained and her massive form topples down with his guidance and it's cut short harshly when the handle hits her throat. She can only wheeze in strained grunting pain when the handle then strikes her eye. She can hear another crunch beneath the blow though there's no time to stop and lick wounds right now. He's got his hands around her throat and who would think a man could strangle the life out of a bear but Michael seemed to make it his mission. Already things were dark without the use of one eye and she was hazy, struggling to get air. He was going to kill her. She was going to die. Paws swiped at him and tried to claw but he had a hold on her and the motion made her ribs ache, her head thudded. It was a last ditch effort, do or die, getting to the heart of the problem. Literally. Using the last ounce of strength she had a claw rammed forward aiming to go through his chest like drywall, but once past the flesh and through the ribs the fur and muscle melted away with clicks and pops of bone leaving the much smaller Lenore beneath his hulking form. It was so much easier for her delicate hand and wispy fingers to wrap firmly around his heart with sharp claws grazing tips into the sensitive flesh of the beating organ. What they had here was a Mexican standoff. If he didn't let go of her throat she was going to demolish his heart as the last thing she did in this piece of sh*t town before it all finally ended.

-- It started off with a chance encounter, a mad man with a broom, swinging his stick sword at witches and tigers. She saw him bloody kissed from love, drunk on Jessica, that first beautiful, painful, painfree night. He saw her many times, making tea with practiced finesse. Her lovers came and went. She can be fire, she can be rain, she can be hawk and lion and bear. He can be life, he can be death, he can be mechanism and knight and malkavian. Their lives wrapped up in each other like trails of smoke from the bonfire that was the bright, dark, crazy city. Though his thumbs grew slack around her throat and his face registers shock, the fear is not for him. No, it's never for him. He died so long, long ago. Right here. In this spot. That was the irony in it, really. A gorgeous woman with an accent like home asked him if he was doing anything important. ...It was the last time he saw the sun. It was the last day he was human.

Tonight, Michael is a Monster. He should never forget this. Never, ever forget this. Fear flashed in his one remaining eye as the Beast surged through him like blast wave of a falling star. He pushed, shoving, and pleaded, "No, no. No. Run. Run. Lenore, run. Please." --and it's too late. For all his brilliance with blade and fist, all his skill of war, he is nothing, nothing, --nothing-- compared to what it coming next. Shadows drip from his wounds, black stuff that sucks the light from the world and chokes it out. They coalesce, collecting, coiling into shapes. Long limb shapes. Life crushing shapes. In desperation, Michael wrenches Lenore's wrist and kicks her back. Babbling, "Not her, not her, I won?t let you! NOT HER!" Skin, scar filled, withdraws in on itself, turning him gaunt. Pools of night collect at his feet. Unintelligible noises dwell within, his history told in stereo. Abuse. Gospel. The Woods. A broken nose won on a drunken night by a hate filled father. Pain, so much pain, so much. And -- starvation. Michael is gone now, little bear. The starving, hungry monster is all that's here. Chains grow from the shadows to bind his wrist and neck, but they will not stop him. Nothing will stop him. He will eat.

His thumbs loosened and pride painfully swelled within Lenore?s chest that she had been right. He could take a hit and keep on like it was nothing but what was a man with no heart, even if it was only for display? But she saw the fear in his eye and... it didn't sit right with her. It wasn't right. She wasn't enough to cause a flash of fear like that and the fact was solidified when he told her to run. After all of that, her eye swelled shut and it hurt to breathe, he was telling her to run. What sort of monster frightened a monster? She didn't want to know but she was about to find on. Her hand was pulled free; she let him go without a fight, and amongst him shoving her she was skittering backwards on the ground, pale legs kicking like a mermaid fresh out of the water getting used to her land legs. What sort of monster frightened a monster? She was facing it with Michael's pleading cries echoing in her head long after he was gone and she scrambled across the cement driven purely by adrenaline and fear. Terror pulled the strings as her frail naked blood stained battered body wretched the alley door open and she tossed herself inside yanking it closed and collapsing on the other side. She clutched the doorknob like she was the only hope of survival for everyone smoking, drinking, flirting, and bullsh*tting within the Inn. But the monster didn?t follow.