Fuck, he hurt. Keeping it together at Court was hard, when every step he took was pain. He had a farmer’s tan pattern of horrible burns all over his body, covering his arms, legs, and face.. Compound that with the touch of the Goddess that he had felt on Samhain, and Sean was a damned mess.

So Sean did what an injured beast does. He went to ground to lick his wounds. In this case, going to ground meant spending some time in and around several dedicated meth dens on the western end of Sacramento.

He hadn’t seen androgynous hide nor androgynous hair of his friend Taylor. He feared the worst. It was likely he/she was some very much a thrall of a demon by now. Sean didn’t know much about what that entailed, but he hoped that Taylor was dead rather than a slave.

Still, he had the money that he’d gotten from Taylor on the last night they had met. He had used that cash, and some of his own, to purchase a large amount of drugs, mostly meth and pot with a few other things on the side. It was easy to get someone to follow you into a dark alley, or the back room of a house, when you were offering drugs for sale or consumption.

It wasn’t a pretty existence, languishing among the dregs of society. The homeless, and desperately addicted. The hopeless masses that seemed to plague every city. Sean hunted the all night tweakers, the hooked prostitutes, even the occasional dumb middle class white kid looking for a high on the wrong side of town.

He spent much of this time high on whatever drugs flowing through the blood of his vessels. He spent his nights in a blurred daze, and his days beneath the ground in an abandoned lot amidst tall grass, and rusted hulking corpses of gutted cars and trucks.

As he took the blood and set it on its healing work his burns began to subside, with agonizing slowness the burns subsided, and he began feeling like his old self again. It still took himself a few days to drag himself out of the hole he was in, but when he finally ran out of drugs he eventually came to laying on a dirty mattress in the basement of a drug den. He dragged himself into a shower, cleaned himself up. Then he walked into a Wal-Mart and bought a few new shirts, a couple pairs of cargo pants. He changed in the bathroom, stuffing the dirty clothes he’d been wearing for the last few weeks into the waste bin.

He emerged from the Wal-Mart bathroom, pulling his cell phone from his pocket and checking the date. It was almost a new decade.