Innocent As Charged (Completed)

Chapter 1 Rewrite

Previous issue: Information dump. Hopefully I've reduced this. Please comment if this is still an issue and where in the chapter.

Isobel's POV
A loud growl, her growl, echoes around the dense trees of the forest, the sun's rays tentatively reaching down for the forest floor. Birds rise from the canopy in droves, frightened into flight, and she pounces on them hungrily, catching one in her jaws. Not even bothering to kill it first, she starts to eat it alive and I mentally shiver with disgust: what did I ever do to be trapped like this? To be trapped inside my own wolf, powerless to stop her horrific actions. The bird is not the first thing she's murdered; she executes anything we come across, be it deer, fox, or even werewolf like us. She kills them all.

After so much time contained inside of my wolf with full access to her emotions I have realised how intelligent, how human she is; cruel and merciless, but human nevertheless. I have my own name for her; Jack. Jack, like the mysterious killer that stalked Whitechapel's streets 120 years ago, killing prostitutes. For some sick reason, she loves the name; she wants a name that will make me fear her so she can wipe out my influence in our collective mind but I refuse, clinging onto the last dredges of life I have.
I cannot afford to lose. If I do, I'm gone forever, along with any shreds of humanity my wolf has left to stop her destroying the world for what it has done to us.

Barricaded in my own mind, I can only watch while Jack rips through countless birds just as she ripped apart our father. He hurt us, damaged me beyond repair.

As Jack chows down on the bird she caught, I can't help reminiscing over our first kill. It was a rabbit, my father chucked me out the house, only allowing me to return once I had eaten, as he called it, 'real' meat. I was forced to eat it raw and nearly suffered food poisoning consequently. I had to make a trap as I was banned from shifting; the issue now is my own wolf, the person who is supposed to be my constant support, denies me. Jack refuses to grant me control, regardless of the hours spent pleading with her.

The taste of bird is horrible, the feathers sticking in my throat, the bird still writhing in pain as she eats it, Jack refusing to put it out of its misery until it annoys her enough and she bites its head off, leaving it a tiny, gruesome little corpse. My heart goes out to the little guy; he deserved a kinder death than what she gave him. And I could have stopped it if I had just taken control. But I couldn't. And now the bird's gone.

I think Jack feels my bad mood as she opens up the mental communication link between us so I can talk to her. Despite my hatred of what she does, I do not hate her; in her mind it's justified. We need to survive, and must therefore do whatever is necessary: her reasoning, not mine. I have always maintained my beliefs in right and wrong, and I refuse to change them due to circumstance.

Why do you feel do guilty? It's food, not a long lost friend, Jack comments.

You could have killed it quicker. There was no need to make it suffer, I reply.

Why kill it immediately though? It should know fear of me before it dies.

It's a freaking bird! What do you expect it to do? Bow down and worship you?!

You're blowing this out of proportion. We've eaten creatures in this manner before numerous times.

I guess I -

Hunters, she growls, cutting me off.

She blocks me out again and lopes away, heading towards the scent of the hunters, her thoughts crystal clear to me: she's going to kill them. I just hope for the hunters' sakes they're human; it will be a quicker, less painful death for them.