Chapter 2 – Chap 2

Hey, guys, it’s me, Will. So, uh… Things have gotten a little crazy in this past week, but not for the reasons you might think. I went back and looked at my other entry and a lot of you said I should just stay with Shelly and try to get her to compromise on who she kills. You also said if I was going to confront her that I should do it calmly with a gun behind me in case she went ballistic. You also said I should do some research into exactly what she is.

I did none of those things.

See, you might not have noticed from my last post, but… I’m not exactly the best at coming up with plans. Well… Good plans, anyway. So I decided to pretend to be asleep and lie in wait while Shelly got up to do her snakey thing and slither out the door and then follow her and confront her so she couldn’t kill anyone. Dunno why I figured that was a good idea, but like I said before, not the best at doing plans. I also decided to follow her unarmed which was just like me asking to get myself killed, but I was kind of running on less than an hour of sleep and was totally fried because it’d been really, really hard to actually fall asleep with Shelly beside me.

So the first thing I did was actually lose Shelly as I got out of the house. She slithered really fast, I guess, and I just didn’t see her. I decided the best thing for me to do would be to walk to the lake and call out to her. I also had to duck into some bushes on the way a few times due to the police cars patrolling. Still, I used a back path in the woods to get to the lake, all the while hearing the wind whistling through the trees and mistaking it for the sound of a snake. I got to the lake and was going to call Shelly’s name… But I didn’t need to. There she was on the shore of the lake in her snake body with some unsuspecting policeman in her clutches.

At first, I couldn’t move. My body was just frozen in place. I guess it was the pure shock of the moment or my fear, but I quickly shoved it aside and shouted, “Shelly, stop!”

I saw her stop, and her head slowly turned towards me. There was only one problem.

This wasn’t Shelly.

I get what you’re thinking, “You’ve only seen her in that form once. How do you know it wasn’t her?” Unlike whoever this was, Shelly didn’t have bright red eyes when she transformed. Her eyes were green, and this chick… This chick looked like she had molten lava rock in her irises. She dropped the policeman and began slithering towards me at a pace that was a lot quicker than I expected, and my reaction time was on the slow side. She would’ve been on me if it hadn’t been for something jumping out from the trees and smacking her away. I turned my attention onto my apparent savior and my eyes widened in surprise.

It was Shelly.

She stared the other snake chick down, eyes narrowed with fury, “Leave. Him. Alone.” The red-eyed chick lunged at her, and Shelly had just enough time to look back at me and shout, “Run, Will!”

I didn’t want to leave Shelly there to face the mercy of the crazy snake bitch, and then I noticed the policeman’s belt not five feet away from me. His gun… If I could just grab his gun… It was a long shot, but I took it, running and snatching the weapon. I pointed it at the red-eyed chick and despite how difficult it was to make out who was who in that fight ended up shooting her. She let out a shriek and looked down at her body where there was now some sort of black inky liquid gushing from her wound instead of blood.

She shot me a venomous glare, but I still had the gun in my hands primed to shoot again so she took off into the woods. I looked to Shelly, and she smiled at me reassuringly, her scaly body covered in wounds. Then she fell to the ground, bleeding that inky stuff all over the grass. I ran to her side and scooped her up in my arms the best I could. She was really heavy, but I did get her home. I will clarify that I called into the cop’s radio and gave out his position to his fellow officers so they could come get him, but Shelly was my top priority right then.

After I got her home I put Shelly on the couch and made a run for the first aid kit in the kitchen. After using a shit-ton of hydrogen peroxide and wrapping her body with bandages the bleeding stopped. When she woke up I was in the kitchen fixing some hot soup for her, and when I headed into the living room to check on her she’d gone back to her human body and had cocooned herself in the blanket I’d covered her with. She only glanced at me, but the sad look in her eyes made my heart break. “So now you know…” she muttered.

I sat down on the couch beside her and reached out to put my hand on her shoulder, but she flinched away, “How can you stand to touch me? Knowing I am what I am?”

I gently pulled her into my arms and hugged her, resting my chin on the top of her head, “Shelly, we’ve been dating for seven years. I told you I wouldn’t judge you for what you looked like without makeup. This is a little out of left field, sure, but… I still love you.” I sighed, “But I do have some questions that are kind of pressing matters at the moment.”

Shelly sighed and drew away from me, nodding, “Alright. I guess I’ve kept this from you long enough.”

“First of all, I’m not human, though that’s just stating the obvious at this point. I’m what’s called a Nure-Onna in Japanese folklore. My name isn’t even Shelly. It’s Shurui. Anyway, we Nure-Onna are sort of like vampire spirits, only with the body of a snake. We tend to live near lakes and lure victims by pretending to be drowning women or anguished mothers. But that was back in the old days, when travelers more frequented roads and had to walk them. The other Nure-Onna you saw was my sister, Jaakuna.

“Back in those days, finding food was simple. My sister often went out hunting for humans, but I… I could never bring myself to hurt anyone. I still needed to feed, of course, but I did so by drinking the blood of cattle. As the years passed, Jaakuna found less and less prey and started getting frustrated. She insisted we leave Japan and move here to America where more people frequent dark areas at night. I refused to leave unless she made me a promise she would stop feeding on humans and instead drink the blood of livestock as I did. She promised, and so we left Japan and adopted American names and disguises.

“It didn’t take long for Jaakuna to break her word to me, and she disappeared about a month after we settled in to our new home. When I started hearing about the murders in this area I knew it had to be her. Night after night I’d go out searching for her, but she always managed to get away just in time. It wasn’t long after all of this that I met you. I liked you a lot because of how genuine you were with me, and when we started dating I wanted to protect you at all costs. Jaakuna would do anything to hurt me now, including harming those that I love. That’s why I kept what I was from you. But now you know, meaning you are in very great danger.”

At that moment Shelly, no, Shurui began to cry. She sobbed into her hands, “I should never have hidden this from you. I’m so sorry, Will, but I didn’t know what else to do. Now that Jaakuna knows your face and knows I care for you she won’t rest until she finds you and kills you.”

I frowned, “Well then… We’ll just have to kill her first.”

Shurui looked up at me, eyes wide, “Will… She is still my sister. But… You are right about one thing. We do need to get rid of her. We could always trap her in the spirit world again. It took us centuries to claw our way out of there and having to do it alone would take her even longer.”

“How would we do that?” I asked.

She shrugged, “Short answer, we’d need to go back to Japan and use the lake where my sister and I used to live to send her back.”

“And the long answer?”

“It would require having to get her into the lake as the water is struck with a bolt of lightning,” Shurui replied.

I sighed and nodded, “Well, then, let’s start doing some research.”