This is for an art trade with my friend oCryptiidCato. Both Sam and Vincent are her characters.

Sam woke to a horrible scratching noise. She quickly sat up, holding her blanket to her chest.  Was somebody trying to break in? Was she about to be robbed? For a moment, everything was silent, and then the scratching started up again, accompanied by an urgent bark.

"Oh, thank God," Sam sighed in relief. She knew that bark. As her heartbeat gradually slowed back to that of a normal person, Sam slid out of bed and padded out of her room. The scratching grew louder while Sam crossed her apartment, until she finally opened the door. "Vincent, what are you doing here? It's three in the morning!"

Vincent was practically on the ground, his stupid little paws still raised as if he planned to continue scratching at thin air. His face lit up when he saw her, and almost immediately he surged forward to clamp his jaws shut on Sam's sleeve. It was insanely weird to feel his human teeth pulling at her, especially while his wolf paws were scrabbling on the ground to pull her outside.

"Vincent, quit it!" Sam yelped, stumbling as he yanked her off the porch. She tugged her arm free of his mouth, disgruntled. "What's going on?"

Vincent hopped up onto his hind legs, gesturing wildly. He bared his teeth and made a lunging motion while Sam watched carefully, well used to his charades.

"You got in a fight?" She guessed. He nodded hard, then threw himself to ground and lay still for a moment. "Did you kill somebody?!"

Vincent nodded again, this time so hard she thought he was going to break his neck. Sam jolted; she hadn't expected him to answer yes. Was she actually about to help him hide a body? What else could she do? He was one of her best friends, she couldn't turn him in.

"Was it at least in self-defense?" She asked meekly. Vincent shrugged. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?!" Vincent growled and snapped at her hand, gesturing urgently for her to come with him. "Okay, okay! Where is it?"

Vincent took off into the night with absolutely no warning, leaving Sam with little choice but to jog after him. She almost wanted to just go back inside and pretend this never happened, but she figured doing that would make her a bad friend. Plus, Vincent would probably jump through her window.

"Could you at least set a reasonable pace?" Sam called when Vincent's increasing speed forced her to break into a sprint. As expected, he only got faster, leading her into a backwoods behind her apartment complex that she'd never bothered to go into. "Wait, why were you in these woods at all? I know for a damn fact you don't live out here!"

By the time Vincent finally stopped, Sam thought she was going to pass out. She put her hands on her knees, breathing heavily. When she looked up, she felt the heaviest of all weights lift from her shoulders. Vincent hadn't killed a person. He'd killed a ridiculously large bird, about half the side of a person, which he was now frantically sniffing at.

There was definitely blood on the grass, though Sam couldn't seem to find any wounds. In fact, not a single dull orange feather looked out of place. Odd, but she wasn't complaining. She didn't exactly want to see anything especially gruesome.

"Alright, let's give this thing a decent burial." Sam sighed. Vincent perked his head up and immediately began scrabbling at the ground with his paws, spraying dirt all over the grass behind him. "Hey, since you're mostly wolf, why didn't you just eat it? Isn't it the same as hunting any other animal?"

Vincent looked up at her and wrinkled his nose, sticking his tongue out in disgust as if she'd said something particularly horrible. Okay, so Vincent apparently didn't eat whatever it was he'd managed to take down. Sam wondered why he'd killed it in the first place, but considering it was an animal, and therefore something she was not required to report to the police, she left that little detail alone.

As Vincent continued to dig his hole, Sam walked closer and tried to figure out how to best get the bird into said hole. It might be easier to just role in, but that somehow felt disrespectful. Instead, she hooked her arms under its stupidly heavy wings and hoisted it upward so that it looked like it was sitting.

"You finished digging?" She called. Vincent yipped at her and popped out of the hole, looking quite pleased with himself. "Great." Her plan had been to gently lower the bird into its grave, but with its weight, that seemed like way more effort than it was worth. No offense to the bird, but Sam had skipped arm day one too many times to be dealing with this.

Gently, Sam began to roll the bird toward the freshly dug grave. Strangely enough, it's feathers were still warm, though it must have been dead for a while. Wait, was it getting warmer? Holy ghosts the damn thing was heating up.

"Uh, Vincent," Sam scrambled away from the rapidly heating corpse. "What in the hell is going on here?" A sudden burst of flame caused Sam to leap back with the shriek, then promptly lose her balance and fall back onto her rear. She had not signed up to watch a dead bird spontaneously combust!

"Vincent, you got in a fight with a demon!" Sam cried as the flaming bird began to move, slowly getting to its feet. Vincent watched with interest, though he seemed significantly less bothered than Sam. "Wait a goddamn minute. Is that a phoenix?!"

Giving its wings a few experimental flaps, the phoenix let out a very impressive call. Though, Sam was certain she wouldn't be able to hear clearly for at least a week. Vincent barked at it in return, which seemed to piss it off to a degree. It flapped into the air and gave Vincent a sharp peck to the forehead, and in an instant it was soaring away into the woods.

"So, did you know it was a phoenix?" Sam asked once the bird had gone. Vincent nodded pleasantly at her. "So why in the world would you try to bury it, knowing it would come back to life?" He bared his teeth and pretended to turn his nose up at her. "You were going to bury it alive...because you didn't like it?"

Vincent nodded again, and Sam had to make a genuine effort not to backhand him then and there. There was only one appropriate thing to do now. She calmly got to her feet, walked over to Vincent, and shoved him into the grave.