An Introduction - In Vino

If you were trying to tell the story of your life, where would you begin? What about the life of someone greater than you? Someone you could not even imagine your way into the head of? Someone who lived every day capable of anything because they made their world and all the people in it. How would you begin to speak of a man who'd risen above the status of man?
"How do you begin to tell the story of a man like Geoff M. Malone?"
My story is written in the streets already. It is written in the blood of my enemies. It is scribbled on the faces of those I have condemned, and those I have saved. It's eagerly poised on the tongue-tips of the garcon who have worked with me -- eager to impart the stories they have been a part of and the sights they have seen. Whether you believe it all began with the beat of a twisted tiny heart, the first time a bullet bit into flesh, or the instant that spit found its way into the bloodstream isn't the quandary that will ultimately vex you, my reader. I will begin where I do and that will be the beginning for you -- no arguments. What shall nibble at you, my new intimate, is the reliability of your narrator.
That is me.
The matter was first addressed several nights ago. I was standing there, in the morning star glow of a Parisian street lamp. It watched with cold awe the furry of our nature taking on the self-righteous forces of the Practical Police. Practicals, you will learn, are the bane of our existence. A Practical is no more than your common, delusional man descending into the street to fight an enemy he's been convinced must be defeated at all costs. This particular group of manipulated minds has been taught that we are the enemy, and who are we? We are the furry ones in this fight.
  I slowly lowered my hand back down to my side. One of my loyal ladies, a shapely desert eagle mark VII, smoked as she and I panted in the frore of the evening. I don't stutter in saying that the unabashed red splattered over my  front was neither my own nor unintentional. Bodacious sanguine dripped off the thin-stick porcelain digits, those same ones that pen this out for you, and back onto the cobblestone street that lay beneath me.  I heard the sound of crimson tip and the glorious gory tap crystal clear through the velvet dark. Sharp sound -- like dropping pins in time with the vicious hunter's gulumpy-thump in my breast. Just watching a spitting red orgasm belching forth from split flesh and  the subsequent spreading of a sopping ooze puddle, turning away only to bury a bullet in the back of a different Practical yob's brain. As I saw his head erupt in a cascade of fractured skull and shower of gray matter, I felt the brush of a brother duck under the red ribbon of my tail. I was the only one still wearing the camouflage that allows us to look like them (though mine is distorted by the permanent presence of that symbol) but the rest of our little family was nose to tail fur and fury. Werewolves, my reader. Those who have contracted the infection -- united at last by the desire to be relevant.
I turned to watch a great black wolf lunge up and clamp onto the throat of some nameless boy. He fell backward and his gun fired randomly into the air -- sending a silver bullet through the into the night air. Cocking my lady again -- I began to take out the streets spotlamps. The yobs would be robbed of their sight now, and would fire panicked into the dark while my brother's made a meal of them
In fact, they did so in a matter of minutes. The last gunshot was fired, and there was only the sound of panting, clicking claws, and soft snarling creeping up out of still anxious wolves. Some came by me, but we me searching for a particular person all of those gathered snapped and cracked until their illness was again hidden behind a mask of humanity. Safely settled back behind their deceptive masks, they dispersed back into the general population of Paris.
"It was so nice of you to join us," Rhoth muttered from the dark.
Rhoth LeVer, a dear friend and Et Al, to whom I owe no affection.
Smearing blood across my cheek with the back of my lady-holding hand, I admitted to him, "I was held up." I place my lady back in her cozy shoulder holster on the opposite side of her sister, and flick my fingers down towards the ground.
Tip-gory-tap.
Rhoth straightened the white jacket of his Full Moon Mafia uniform. He adjusted his black tie and then turned on me, "Let me guess. A woman."
With a dip of my chin and a soft chuckle I hid my face in the shadow of hat brim and admitted to my yob, "It was Odette."
"Tres bien," Rhoth moaned.
I was properly chided for not arriving sooner to the massacre du jour. It wasn't as if I had neglecting my role of rendering brother to spook, it is just that I am often distracted by my duty of altering girl to woman (or boy to vice allemande).
Tomorrow, the papers would read that snarling hell hounds had left a terrible scene in the middle of the Paris square. They would declare with grim severity that Geoff Malone's reign of terror and violence still made it so that children could no go out into the street without meeting the bleary eyes of a dead man. That he terrorized the parts of Paris which were free of infection, and threatened those who didn't with the chaos and random destruction inherent to the classic, cliche werewolf.
Or perhaps, with the right amount of money and a thorough clean up, they will not say anything of the sort.
"Aren't you concerned that we are easy to follow?" I asked Rhoth, who walked two steps behind me and to the right.
He, you'll see, was garbed in a zoot suit of white and black. White jacket. White hat. White tie. Black pants. Black shirt under the jacket. Black band around the hat. His twin dresses the exact same way when we do these things. Being that I have always been partial to red, naturally my suit is. I was a great red portentous emblem of death in my suit and there wasn't a Practical or werewolf who didn't know what the man in the red suit was. The omen of the Parisian infection.
"I'm more concerned about the efforts of the yobs to debase this 'good name' you're making for yourself, to be honest," Rhoth conceded, "Lah only knows how you've managed to lie your way into the position of the near omnipotent, invisible peace keeper."
We wound our way to one of the establishments which I have founded. My favorite place in the world, actually. A night club. Grandma's Place. I established only a few short years ago. It’s prospered quite well, with its were-clientele and I’m rather pleased to say that it keeps the philosophy and style of the mob boss who frequents it. You see, on the near central Parisian street of St. Germain sits a club of flamboyant facade to rival the Moulin Rouge, even from the outside, where the red neon sign declares 'Grandma's Place', you can tell the kind of club it is. One to feature acts of cabaret; mainly consisting of big band, swing and, on a good night, some tasteful burlesque. Many tourists don't take their chances at a burlesque club called 'Grandma's Place', which is how I want it. This is a place for the natives of Paris . The furry ones. There is in the door a little panel which opens so that the bouncer can look out, but it is really more smell they are interested in.
Once so much as glanced at, I and my Rhoth were let in. There was jazz music that night. A trumpet boy I'd found. His notes swimming about the soupy, smokey air. There is a raised layer around the circular room, though the staircase leads down to the floor. Trees, ferns and aloe plants, all finely pruned, sit around the room, allowing it a forest feel. The floor is artisan tile and the club consists of a lowered room, circular in shape, filled with round tables where people sit at stylish chairs. There is a convex bar over to the left side which and at the far side from the door, a likewise crescent stage. To the side of this main floor, only slightly lowered from the top by the door and not obstructed by foliage, with stairs from the main floor leading up to it, is a lune raised booth. There are two coat rooms, though the first has a removable back wall which leads to my office.
"I can only imagine what will happen," Rhoth continues, "if this writer Marcel has hired actually get to publishing this writing of his. The people of Paris are happy now, Geoff, but they're ignorant. No one wants to equate you with the quiet life they're leading."
"They want peace," I paraphrase as I coil in my mahogany armchair, "but they don't want to know about the killing required to make it peaceful."
        There isn't a single window in the room to light our discussion, so Rhoth wanders around to switch on some of my lamps as I pulled a pack of slim coffin nails out of the drawer of my antique mahogany desk (which is not weathered nor unattractively worn and has clawed canine feet to suggest the wolf workmanship). Carefully I avoid the silver spoon.
        The entire office floor is made up of midnight heart cypress. A fine, dark wood, baring a slight resemblance to mahogany, which I personally chose to floor my office. I was present to select each and every slat of the wood that they lay for my floor. On the burnt sienna before my desk lay a white tiger rug. Around his neck is a thick leather collar, with a tag that reads "Otis". His bright blue eyes reflected Rhoth on his way to the chair across from me. He had paused to meet eyes with the dead, snarling thing on my floor.
"A yob," I muttered, "At first it did not seem all bad. Flattering in fact. After my years in the business and the devastation I've inflicted. The control, the plotting, the lies, the lives, the ruin and all that other brilliant business. After all that, they are writing a biography on me. A stinking yob, of all things, thinks it can tell me right. Consider, also, where it'll all be coming from."
"I know," Rhoth says as he sits and opens the wine.
"People whose job it is to cage or simply destroy my kind. If the people are clamoring for the truth behind their safe existence then certainly Marcel Malone is not the one to give it to them. Clearly this is something I'm going to have to look after myself."
"The truth?" Rhoth asked as he poured wine in a pair of glasses, "what makes you think you're anymore capable of divulging the truth than they are?"
"It is the truth regarding your truly, isn't it?" I asked before sipping, "and it is their perverted version they want told. Can you imagine the breed of doppelganger they'd make for me?"
"Non," Rhoth said after lowering his glass and taking a breath, "but I'm sure you'll stalk the moonless night devouring babies."
"I am no toddler-gobbling night ghoulie," I contested with frustration before taking another drink, Their version will be repugnant. There's no question."
"And yours won't?"
"I'm not sure there's a pleasant way to talk about what we're doing here, Rhoth, but I make no misconstruction about my role as montebank. A more realistic version of the truth should at least be available to those who wounder why there are these claims that I eat babies and yet all their children grow without a nip taken out of them, don't you think?"
"Regardless of your gourmandic preferences, boss, I'm inclined to remind you that yourself and reality have not even met. It has never meant anything to you to be honest and never will. You might well swear on your hat or...non," he stopped and held out the bottle of wine, "Here. Swear on this bottle of Antinori Guado Al Tasso to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as observed by Lah."
Gingerly, I placed a single hand on the label and smiled, "In vino veritas."