***
He didn’t know how long he had been on the roof, only that when he finally decided to clamber back through the trap door, night had long since fallen.
Ryan’s progress had been slow: he could clear his mind until the wolf part of his brain began to expand in his consciousness, and then Ryan could force the wolf back into submission. The physical symptoms had ceased entirely, but that was Ryan’s only indication of progress. He didn’t know what the next step was. He didn’t know how he was supposed to take the miniscule amount he had learned and use it to transform at will or control the wolf within him entirely. He had hit a wall and he knew he needed a break, so he trudged down the clanging metal stairs onto the first level of the warehouse.
Daniel was still there, but now he was playing pool alone at the scratched and scarred table.
“He has gone?” Daniel asked without looking up from his shot.
“Yeah, for a while now. Does he do that a lot?”
“Ben dislikes staying anywhere for too long.”
“Why?” Ryan asked, and Daniel smiled.
“I have known him for more than forty years, and yet I do not have the faintest idea at an answer to that question.” He replied in his low, melodic voice.
“You don’t look old enough to have known anybody for forty years.” Ryan said.
“I take that as a great compliment, but believe me when I say that I have known many men for much longer.” The cue sprang forward between his fingers and a ball shot into a pocket with a satisfying clack. “Would you like to play?”
“No thanks, pool isn’t really my thing. More of a mini-golf man. If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?”
Daniel smiled again. “I first played billiards with Louis XI. It was not his game either. Though he did try to cheat at every turn.”
“Louis the…that’s hundreds of years. When were you born?”
Daniel sighed. “1178, in the Iberian peninsula. I cannot tell you which day or month because I simply do not know.” He lined up another shot. “I was a soldier, and a good one. One day, one of the other footsoldiers in my battalion defected, and I was given the assignment to either retrieve him or kill him. I found him at his home and tried to persuade him to return. He refused. We struggled and eventually I killed him. The elders in his village were angry with me, claiming that I had brought death and war upon their homes. They placed a curse upon me then: to live forever, that I might see the eternal consequences of man’s wars. And in order to better see the carnage and suffering that I represented, they gave me the form of the bird. In 1212 when the Muslims were driven from Central Iberia, I was conscripted into one of the armies of Alfonso VIII because of my stature and skill. As the centuries passed, I found myself in England, then France, then all over the regions of Europe. Always a footsoldier. I have seen more wars and killed more men than I can possibly recall, but billiards…billiards quiets both the mind and the memories.”
Ryan didn’t know what to say. He was still struggling to believe it.
“If you’re invincible, how does Hess even stand a chance?”
“I am not invincible.”
“You said you could live forever.”
“Old age will not take me. Disease cannot fell me. But that does not mean I cannot be killed. In fact I have come quite close, many, many times.” The soldier replied.
“So you can be killed, but you’re saying that in the eight hundred some odd years you’ve been fighting wars, you just haven’t been killed?” Ryan asked, incredulous.
“Yes.”
The topic of his age, or perhaps his bloody, violent life, seemed to make Daniel uncomfortable and he changed the subject.
“Ben recited his sermon on doom and inevitability, I take it?” Daniel asked.
“You disagree with him?”
Daniel sank another ball. “Make no mistake, Ryan: yours is a difficult path, perhaps more than anyone else here. Simply because a task is difficult however, does not make it impossible. I believe you can control the beast and maintain your goodness, I have seen it done.”
“Ben says that the odds are stacked too heavily against me, that all the other werewolves he has known have let their power corrupt them. That the next time I taste blood…I’ll never go back.”
“But you have something those other werewolves did not have.”
“What?” Ryan asked.
“Us. That is the very reason we are all here: to save us from ourselves. We can help you.” Daniel replied. “The war we find ourselves in now is no different from any other. The fighting does not take place on battlefields, but in basements and back alleys, but it is war nonetheless. Believe me when I say, Ryan, that a man can weather any storm if he has two things: singularity of purpose, and people to watch out for him.”