"it hurts..." the teen whimpered softly. "i'm sorry...p-please let me go..."

     Shadow paused momentarily in his feeding when he heard the boy speak. Something was wrong.... Very wrong. Now that he had calmed down some, he could sense that the fear the boy was feeling wasn't entirely cause by him and that his actions had triggered some deeper trauma inside the boy. It bothered Shadow, so he decided to investigate. He notified Marlene through the link before taking out his wings.

     Marlene received the complex series of feelings and impulses detailing what Shadow intended so she somewhat understood what was going to happen next. She watched as some of the remaining black mist gathered into a pair of plumes sprouting from Shadow's back before turning into a pair of massive bat wings. They were completely black on the back with mostly white under sides. Straight black streaks went across the white, following Shadow's wing bones lying just underneath the taught skin. He then crouched down before sweeping them forward to hide what he was going to be doing to the teen.

     Satisfied that he now had some measure of privacy, Shadow released the boy from his jaws and let go of his hair to gently cradle the boy's head with that hand instead. He lowered him some too, so he could look him in the eye while he questioned him. As the boy's mind was floating at the edge of consciousness Shadow took a moment to probe the teen's body with his unique senses first before talking to him. Doing this would give the boy some time to recover enough from the venom for Shadow to be able to question him. Probing the boy would also give Shadow some idea as to what had happened to him to make him so fearful.

     What he learned, angered him. Through his unique senses, he found the tell-tale sign of many old injuries and breaks. Old enough that he must've suffered them when he was much younger and numerous enough for it to have been nearly impossible for him to acquire them on his own. Disease or malnutrition could've been possible culprits, but they would also have left signs of their own which he did not find any trace of. It left only one other possibility: the boy had been beaten and abused over a long period of time in his past.

     The harming of children was something Shadow did not --could not-- tolerate and he let loose a soft low growl in anger at the very thought. The growl stirred the teen into coming back to full wakefulness so he broke off his current line of thought to focus on learning the truth. The teen whimpered again out of fear as he once more stared at his captor's face in terror. Shadow stared straight back at him, his eyes changing from a burning red glow to a bright, somewhat hypnotic, yellow and waited patiently for the teen to make eye contact with him. When the boy did, he felt the boy's body relax in his grip as the teen fell into a trance.