Thread: Predator and Prey ~~ Practical Insanity & xoxDicexox

It had been five months since the murders began. Young men and women of all different ethnicity and walks of life had begun turning up dead in the streets of Baltimore, Maryland five months ago today. That is how things started, at least. The Baltimore PD and the Behavior Analysis Unit of the FBI had labeled the killings to be serial, despite the wide demographics that they covered. This was due to the shared signature of every killing - they were simply tore all to hell. Guts and gore were the best way to describe the crime scenes and the city was in a panic. Police patrols doubled in the first month, then tripled n the second. The whole time, more and more federal agents were being stationed in the city to attempt to curb the murderous rampage. Three months in, the agents working on the case were thrown a curve ball. The murders did not stop, but they changed so radically that they believed that a whole 'nother killer had sprouted overnight. It was not until two weeks after these new murders started that the police noticed that the previous murders had stopped. This caused them to assume that something had happened to change the killer's profile. For the passed two months, the demographic of the victims changed radically. The victims were all white and between the ages of twelve and thirty. There were still victims of both sexes, but males were more common. In addition, the mode of murder had changed. Previously, the stomachs had been torn open and guts had been strewn about. Often times, the hearts would even be missing entirely. Now, however, the method of murder was a simple and clean decapitation... if you can call that clean. In most cases, there were burns on the victim's body, but not in all cases. In the cases where there were burns on the corpse, aconitum flowers were also found near the bodies. The city was in a state of absolute panic and many people had fled the area with no plans to return. One such person as Logan Savage , a young man of twenty-four who had just graduated from college with an Emergency Medical Technician's degree. Logan's reasoning for leaving the city, however, was not the same reason of most. Logan did not fear the faceless serial killer that was rampaging about the city. Logan feared the hunters that were hunting his kind. Logan was a werewolf and a member of a pack that had lived in Baltimore since the city was first founded. The first three months of murders were the work of a rogue pack that had strayed into the town and started hunting people for food - something that his pack had not done in centuries. The more recent murders, however, were werewolf killings at the hands of the city's Hunter Association. Logan's pack had been hiding under their noses this whole time but now that their cover was blown, the hunters were out for blood. Logan made sure to tell his pack that he was leaving, and told a select few where it was that he was going should they decide to join him. Where was he going? The small town of Winchester, Virginia. It was about an hour and a half out of Baltimore - plenty of distance to shake the Hunters but close enough to return if he truly needed to. Little did Logan know, this town had a history with creatures that went bump in the night... The small town of Winchester was in a celebratory mood this hot summer evening. Despite it being nowhere near Halloween, the streets were filled with people in costumes. Some were dressed as vampires while others were dressed as the infamous vampire hunters that were rumored to have founded the town, which according to legend, started as the vampire hunter's camp during a great inquisition near the founding of the Thirteen Colonies. No one took this legend seriously, of course, but Logan didn't doubt that there might have been some truth behind it. After all, he was a werewolf. He had never met a vampire face to face, but he knew that they were out there and he definitely knew of the hunters that protected mankind from his nightmares. The main street of the town had been closed down to vehicle traffic and stands had been set up along the roadside, selling 'Human Blood', which Logan had discovered was just fruit punch, and all sorts of vampire and vampire hunter nick-knacks. There was everything from faux vampire tooth necklaces and earrings for jewelry to wooden crossbows that shot little plastic darts for the kids. It was Logan's worst nightmare - a hunter convention where you couldn't tell who was a real hunter and who was a clueless civilian. Being the new kid in town, Logan did not know anyone. He had been standing off to the side with watchful eyes nearly all night. His clothes were intentionally dark to help him hide in the evening darkness, seeing as it was nearing nine o'clock and this freakish festival was nowhere near over. His look started with black boots which rose into a pair of sturdy black denim jeans. His shirt was a sleeveless dark-grey wife-beater, but he had a black short-sleeved button-up shirt over top of that. He watched the crowd from his place among the branches of a roadside tree. Most people seemed to be going about their way without so much as noticing him overhead while others glanced upward and sniffled giggles. His acute hearing could often overhear the girls who noticed him talking to their friends, wondering who the cute and 'mysterious' new guy is. It seemed that this was one of those towns where everyone knows everyone.