Misery County

Chapter 7 - Part 1

"Hey, are you gonna be in there forever or what?" Eric was reclining on the bed in Cassie's hotel room while the shower was going in the attached bathroom.

"Next time you spend half an hour fiddling with a decomposing body – which, might I add, didn't exactly smell good while it was alive – then you can talk to me about spending too much time in the shower," she called back, her voice easily audible courtesy of the open bathroom door.

"Oh, sweet Cassie, if you didn't want to dig through your dead boyfriend's pockets and clothes, maybe you should have been a little faster in our race to the kitchen."

"That game was rigged, and you know it."

"A bad workman blames his tools," Eric responded in a sing-song.

"That idiom doesn't even make sense in this context, you boombaclart."

"Fine. Just know that I savor every moment of your bitterness."

Cassie responded only with a frustrated growl.

Shifting his attention back onto the television, Eric was once again amazed by the lack of good programming. He flipped to another channel, then another, then another.

"I'd get more entertainment out of this television by smashing it up with a baseball bat than from anything that's on the screen," Eric called out, but Cassie didn't respond.

Flipping through another few channels did little to fight his boredom, but he kept on with it anyway. Settling on a daytime soap opera, Eric resigned himself to his fate and tried to get into it. His focus was interrupted by footsteps coming from the bathroom.

"Hey, Cassie, you'll never guess what Ernesto said to –" he turned to look at Cassie and quickly shot his head right back around. "Jesus, you're not gonna give a man warning before coming out butt naked?"

"My towel is out here, genius. I can't Harry Potter it over to me from inside the bathroom," she said from behind him. "Besides, what are you, five years old? It's nothing you haven't seen before."

Eric's face was burning. "Yeah, on women I plan to pork, not on you."

"Oh, so I disgust you now?"

"For God's sake, will you just get dressed already?" Eric wasn't disgusted – that certainly wasn't it. Cassie was young and in good shape, but she was like his sister and thinking about her in any other way seemed wrong – incestuous, almost.

"You can turn around now, you big baby."

"Ah, that's better. I like your butterfly panties."

"Eric!"

"What!? That's lewd, but you walking out in your birthday suit isn't?"

"It's like you try to be inappropriate."

"No, I think it just comes naturally."

"Hey, you know earlier you were talking about documenting our accumulated knowledge?" Cassie said as she pulled a tee shirt on over her.

"Yeah, before you made me realize what a stupid idea it was."

"Maybe not so stupid. I know that curious eyes might never find their way to it, but I don't think it's an ignoble endeavor. If it can save a few lives, whyever not?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"For instance," Cassie continued, "I met a shaman a few months ago in New Mexico. It was my first werewolf case, and while I hate to admit this – especially to you – I think I might not have come out of it alive were it not for him. Anyway, that's a story for another day. What's interesting is that he told me something I could never even have imagined on my own."

"That you have no business going after werewolves?"

"Very funny. No, he said that there's a cure for... werewolfism, or whatever you want to call it."

Eric perked up. This was the first he'd heard of such a thing.

"It's no easy feat, though. He said that you need to have the werewolf drink a tea."

"Oh yeah, that sounds downright impossible."

"A tea made from a body part of the werewolf that turned him into one."

"I see. What kind of body part? Are we talking liver soup here?"

"He said it didn't matter. Anything that holds the wolf's DNA – liver, eyeball, skin, fur, whatever."

"Very interesting indeed. Has this ever been done?"

"The shaman said he cured his brother that way. He had been turned, and the shaman couldn't bring himself to kill him, so he got a posse together and dug up the grave of the werewolf that had turned him."

"Sounds like a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon."

"Yeah, no kidding. The body was in bad shape – not unlike our friend Chopper, excuse me, I meant Merill – but he cut off a piece of skin from it and made the tea from it."

"How'd he get his brother to drink it?"

"Bound him in silver and forced it down his throat."

"Heh, that's how we used to give my childhood cat medicine. Though I suppose Princess never had the facility to rip me limb from limb."

"You always were a cat person, weren't you?"

"No cat ever tried to kill me, so yeah."