Synopsis: In the night that he spends with Rayne, Jack is confronted by his two leading desires and he is forced by his mirror self to make that decision, no matter how painful it is. He begins to suddenly realize what is becoming important to him and what isn't.

Author's Note: To me, I think that this is an interesting chapter, full of emotions, desires, and lots of painful discussion and dialogue. The air is heavy and the tides of change have begun to roll in, but how will our protagonist act? As always, relax and enjoy and tune in for the next installment. =)
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Chapter 10: Throwing It All Away

The rain holds off in the heavy clouds above as we weave our way back through the carnival camp. The performance is left far behind us as we move away with the noise and the energy of the actors and the dancers slowing until it disappears entirely. The darkness in every alleyway and behind every solid figure makes me believe that Blackjack is hiding there, waiting to strike me.
Rayne leads me to her tent, briskly walking just a few steps ahead of me. She tells me repeatedly that Blackjack doesn’t care about my act and if he did, he would have killed me by now. That doesn’t make me feel any better and my eyes constantly watch each dark spot and my ears turn towards every cricket’s chirp and each crunch of paper under foot.
The carnival is creepily quiet, which is why I’m so distressed, but Rayne doesn’t seem to mind it at all. In fact, she seems used to everything here, as if she’s been here for a long time, longer than a person would mind to. That comfort transfers to me, but, not enough to keep me calm. I just try to keep behind her and try not to step on the back of her paws.
When we reach her tent, she drags a cot out from the back of the large room, one that was folded up into a big box. I’m glad that I don’t have to sleep on the ground and she didn’t seem very keen to . . . share hers. After a few frustrating minutes of reading the IKEA manual and putting the cot together, she gives me the mattress, the blankets and the pillows.
Then she lies down in her own bed and covers her body up with the thick blue blanket. I drag the cot over to near the flap leading out into the street and lie down. As I pull the blanket up and over my body, I hear Rayne breathing quick and raspy through her nose. I can’t believe she can get to sleep that quickly and I wish that I could. I’ve spent so many nights lying awake, counting the spots on the ceiling, thinking to myself. I suppose that’s why he bothers me all the time, when I’ve nothing better to do than listen to him.
As I close my eyes, the thunder cracks and the lightning reveal the interior to the tent, but, it doesn’t jar me. A few silent seconds later as the thunder runs back into the clouds, the rain begins to pitter-patter down onto the top of the hexagon-shaped blue tent. At first it is very soft and comforting, but soon it becomes very hard and even touches my face as a few stray drops spray through the three or four inches of the open flap. My heart calms down and a warm, hot sensation fills my body.

My eyes jerk open as a loud burst of thunder rocks the tent. Looking upwards, I see the lightning flash again and again, showing me the shadows of the tall trunks and steamers that sit against the cloth walls. Taking several deep breaths, I cough loudly and then spit a bit of mucus onto the ground beside me.
Rolling my head onto my side, I look towards the heavy, gritty, open flap of the tent. Outside the rain falls directly downwards, seemingly perpetual and forever constant. The drops are huge, long and make a loud crash as they hit the ground. It almost seems artificial to me like it’s made by a Hollywood rain machine that is hung above us. Below I see the rain dive into a ditch and run away from the tent. I don’t remember that being there, but, I don’t worry about it.
A gust of wind pulls into the tent and the flaps billow inwards gently, widening the gap to a good foot and a half. The flaps must be hung up somewhere above. Rolling onto my side, I pull the blanket up and over my body and then yank my tail so that it is in the warmth. Then I pull my hands up to my muzzle and wrap them around my mouth.
The warm fur brushes against the exposed skin on the insides of my hands, the prickling sensation seeming alien. The claws on the point of each finger dig into my muzzle and immediately send sharp waves of pain to my mind. The whiskers on the end of my face jerk around, so sensitive to each touch that the ticklish feeling I get almost seems painful.
A cool gust of air fills the black nose on the end of my being and I suck it in with one deep inhalation. The humid, almost salty smell reminds me of home. When the storms would come in from the sea, the entire city would smell like a seafood restaurant. It made me think of the steamed crabs, red and juicy, that we would eat sometimes. We had silver, real silver, utensils to crack them open and smother them with the melted butter.
Other times we would just cook the crabs themselves in a big vat of melted butter along with some corn on the cob and whatever else we wanted to experiment with covering with butter. We only did that when family was there, when grandma and grandpa would be there and Dad . . . I open my eyes up and look towards the flap.
The darkness outside appears to be endless, bottomless, an abyss into which anyone could disappear forever. But my eyes, my keen wolf eyes can spot the tents across the street. Their doors are pulled shut and there are no lights inside. They are asleep the way I should be.
Pulling my left hand away from my head, I look to my watch on my wrist. The gold body glimmers in the darkness. My watch is the only luxury that I ever bought for myself. I bought my mother everything with my paychecks. I pay rent, I’d pay utilities, and I bought her clothes and things for around the house. I fixed this and that and everything that needed to be or not.
And I bought myself the things I needed, very few of the things I wanted. My car is a 1981 Ford Escort hatchback with a five speed and an I4. It’s a piece of shit, but it gets good gas mileage, it’s cheap on insurance and it was cheap overall. And of course my jacket and boots and such, all clothes and all cheap in the end.
My watch is the only luxury, a Dufonte by Lucien-Piccard, manufactured of 21 karat gold and studded with a diamond on the face, Swiss movement. It’s most likely twenty years old, if not older, but, it’s beautiful and sparkles in the light. I always hide it beneath my jacket, for fear of bumping it or the damage of someone else’s coveting eyes. I see that it is after three in the morning and it is long from daylight. Retracting my arm back into my chest, I lie in the warmth of my new bed and stare forward.
“Having fun, Jack?”
I look forward and then hold my breath. My mouth begins to become dry and I feel a hideous heaviness in the air. Closing my eyes quickly, I pull my blanket up and over my head, the material setting heavy down upon my thick fur and hair. But I know that will not keep him away; it never did in the past.
“Why you even try to hide from me anymore, Jack, will always be a mystery to me.” He informs me sarcastically. “And why you stayed here with her will be a mystery to me no longer, you stupid ass!”
Throwing my covers down off of my body, I sit up and look around me. To every shadowed corner of the hexagonal tent my eyes flee, but, I find him hiding nowhere. There is no shiny surface for him to cast himself from that nether realm he loves to hide in. Then I look to the big leather trunks, tall suitcases and rolling armoires that fill the void between the walls and see again absolutely nothing.
My eyes fall upon Rayne’s crumpled form in her bed and they stay there. She lies on her side, the same way I do, and stares towards the inside of the wall. Her arms are up over her head and beneath the mess of pillows beneath her head and shoulders. Her legs are drawn into her body and her thick, bushy tail falls from beneath it to the ground.
She has bunched up all of her covers into a ball around her and despite it being huge; it can’t seem to cover everything. That tail just twitches around her in her sleep, the long, silky hairs made of spun silver hanging in the minimal light. I smile at her and feel my heart, which had leapt forward to pound away like a steam engine, begin to settle.
“You stupid bastard, you’re thinking with something other than your head!” He cries to me.
I ignore him. Usually I would cry at him, call him a foul player, and shoot down his argument and accusations entwined into one constantly shifting conversation. But this time I think he may be more or less true. But still my face curls up and I turn around to where I thought I heard the voice come from.
“I don’t love her.” I whisper loudly at him, trying not to wake Rayne. “She’s just another prisoner trapped here under that mad, black Merlin.”
“And she could be a spy for him, a prison guard for the warden.” He shoots back.
“She is not!”
“She is and you damn well know it!” He immediately shoots back.
That’s when I see where he stands, peering at me from beyond this world. He is outside in the rain, his form reflecting through the millions of pouring rain drops. A bit of his body will show as the raindrop plummets, a hair, a nose, an eye, a finger, but never his entire body.
His body is like a fractured mirror, a broken painting pieced back together. But still, with all the fragments glued back together, he stands outside staring at me with blackened, almost reddened eyes. But what is more is that he looks like me still, but not human like me.
His body is just like mine, tall, strong, and furry. His wolf frame and heavy tail lumber out in the heavy downpour, standing in the mud. But he doesn’t seem to become wet; he’s always just as dry as ever. The rain is just another medium for him to harass me, to get me to do what he wants.
“See what you’ve forced me to do, Jack?” He asks me, his head cocking to the side as he lifts his arms up. “I’m standing out here in the rain, trying to figure out why you fucked us.”
“I did it to right a wrong!” I loudly hiss at him.
“Right a wrong?” He exclaims. “And yet it’s gotten you nowhere but back in the same fucking hole you’ve been in for the last two days! You’ve made no progress towards escaping and you only seem to get closer to that . . . that thing!”
He thrusts an angry finger over me and towards where Rayne lays, his body tense and his face curled and contorted with pure rage. I throw my head around and look to where she lies, wondering if she is awake. When I see that she still lies on her side, still sound asleep, I turn my head back towards the aggressor.
“She’s the only one that’s trying to help me!” I fight back as loudly as I can without waking Rayne.
“I’m here, dammit, Jack, I’m here!” He cries out, hitting his blurry chest. “I’ve been trying to help you escape from here and you’ve done nothing but ignore me! Where the hell is your jacket, your boots? Well, Jackie-boy, where the hell are they?”
“I’m working on it!” I cry out.
Rayne mumbles behind me and I swing my head around to look at her, realizing that I’ve just screamed out at the top of my lungs. She rolls onto her back and then grabs her muzzle with both hands as if it was a motorcycle’s handle and is still again. I gasp several times and then turn back towards the rain where he still stands.
“Tomorrow I’ll go.” I continue at a whisper. “In the morning when nobody is active, I’ll go and smash the lock. I have an axe, I have an overcoat. I just need my chance.”
“Then you’ll have it, boy.” He says calmly. “I don’t know why the hell I trust you, you’ve only screwed everything up royally every time that I do. But don’t screw this up boy. You failure, you piece of shit. You’re worthless.”
Lighting fills the sky, making everything turn yellow for a second and as the darkness returns and the thunder fills my ears; he is gone, disappeared again into the darkness where I can never touch him. Looking out of the flap with my mouth agape, I sit upright and wait for him to return, for his angry, hateful words to fill my ears once more.
When they don’t return, I slowly begin to lie back down onto the cot, the soft mattress that has brought me a sliver of comfort in a world of uncertainty, a land of confusion. As I put my back down onto the warm material, I slowly slide the blue blanket up over my cold figure. Then I sniff and clear my throat, licking my lips as my mind still toils away at what just happened.
Closing my eyes, I lie in silence and hear his words constantly reverberate around inside my skull. I know what I did was stupid; I do know it did nothing but hinder my chances of escaping. But I don’t care, it was stupid, I don’t need another bond, another connection! I just need to get away from here!
Suddenly I hear Rayne gasp out in the darkness and then she begins to yell out as if she is being raped. Throwing the covers off of my body, I sit up straight and throw my head around towards where she is sleeping. When my eyes focus on her, I see that she is sitting straight up in her bed, her arms propping her up and the covers still over her. Her eyes are deathly open, wide as saucers.
“No,” she cries out frightfully, “no, leave me alone, stop it! You horrid bitch, I’ll . . . I’ll-I’ll-no! Why? Why, dammit, tell me why? You-you-ugh, I hate you!”
And just as suddenly as all of this came on, her arms buckle beneath her weight and she falls to her cot’s surface and is silent. Without thinking, I throw my covers off of my body and put my paws down onto the cold coat where I threw it. Thrusting myself off of my bed, I stumble across the room and to her bedside.
As I near her, I tower over her and see that her eyes are closed and she is completely still, breathing slowly through her lips as if nothing had happened. It was a night terror, or something near to one. I calm down my breathing and touch my chest where my heart screams out at me in a cold, fretful fear as painful as hers.
I gasp for a breath and then look to her face. I’m not exactly sure what that was all about, but, I don’t think I want to know. As my body cools down again, I simply stand and look to her face, soft and smooth. Her eyelashes are neat, perfect, her nose small and twitching in her sleep like a puppy’s. Her lips are smooth and ideal, hidden just beneath silvery-white fur which leads down into her shirt. Even her hair, cut short and messy, seems beautiful to me.
No, no, goddamnit, you are not going to get into this, not now! I think. Averting my eyes, I stumble backwards and towards my cot. My eyes continue to stick to her form, lying hidden beneath a layer of down feathers and cotton. Suddenly the backs of my lower legs contact something and I stumble into the cot.
My bottom hits the hot mattress hard and I sit without moving for several long seconds, confused as to where I am. Then I look down and realize that I’ve arrived back across the room, despite feeling as if I never left her bedside. I lift my legs back up onto the cot and then thrust them back under the blankets.
Scooting downwards, I lie down and then pull the covers back up over my body. But despite lying there totally still, I don’t feel tired. I lie staring up at the ceiling for the longest time, my mind wandering around and around in a circle like a dog tied to a tree. I try to focus my thoughts upon what I’m going to do tomorrow, how I’m going to get away from here in one piece.
But then they come back to Rayne . . . Rayne. I shake my head around and then roll onto my side so that my eyes can stare out of the open flap. But after five minutes of watching the heavy rain fall down, I can’t stop thinking. Closing my eyes, I hug my body together and pull the blanket up to my head.
I force every thought away and then lie still, comfortable as the warmth rolls back over me. The heavy raindrops begin to fill my ears and my thoughts begin to wander away from me. It’ll be really easy to get away from here, as long as Blackjack doesn’t stand between me and the exit.
I just bash the lock off, get my things, hotwire a truck and I’m gone. There couldn’t be anything easier than that, could there be? I don’t know, I just hope that whatever can happen doesn’t happen. Lord, just let me be able to tiptoe away from here in the morning, I don’t want anything to hold me back, absolutely nothing.
“No, don’t leave me.” A dreary voice says. “Please, no . . . don’t go.”
I roll onto my back and look back towards Rayne lying in her cot. Her head is turned towards me, but her eyes aren’t open. Her arms hug her blanket as if somebody were there with her. My heart begins to pound heavy and slow in my chest, my blood feeling hot in my veins. Tomorrow is going to be very hard, so very hard.