cross-country.

Charlotte
Then there's work to be done. Charlotte (or Winter's Heart, who still seems to be a lingering presence behind Charlotte's pale eyes, and in her warformed frame) decides that they cannot risk a rite of cleansing these strange woods. The twisted men came out of them, and who knows how sound will echo over the compressed hills and valleys? They'll pile the corpses in the middle of the clearing instead, and she will try to summon a spirit capable of cleansing the blight. There are instruments she uses for the ritual - a silver bowl filled with clear water from sealed glass jar. A scattering of cress and a woven willow-wand. A cool stone the color of steel, retrieved from the bottom of a clear-flowing spring.

They cannot bury these tainted corpses in the ground as they are, so she takes her time with the ritual and Erich-wolf is left to stand a long, silent guard as a few stars wheel through the narrow strip of sky visible from the bottomland wherein they've camped. At some point, she indicates that the ritual is finished, and they can begin dismembering the corpses. They should bury them; they can't drive around with the bits in Erich's car and their other options are remarkably limited. Erich studies the crumbling ruin of the clapboard house, and realizes that the basement may will be no more than packed dirt, doubling as a root cellar.

They break down the bodies into manageable pieces, then start digging, and they are no more than half-way through this grim work when the sky begins to lighten with false dawn, and the morning birds begin to sing, familiar, each to each.

While they work, there's rustling in the underbrush. Somewhere down the holler rather than up the hill, down the narrow, graveled track they drove up to find this camping spot. Strangers - no, wolves, four-legged and lean, spreading out in a wary half-circle some twenty-five feet away. Fur bristling, eyes gleaming in the dark.

Maybe Erich curses under his breath. Maybe he is still shifted, and his animal-mind does not have room for human curses. Either way, he knows immediately and instinctually that the odds here are much, much worse for them now. He counts four wolves, and there may be another hanging back. Both he and Charlotte-wolf are wounded, a fair amount of their rage exhausted by the earlier fight.

The lead wolf is bristling up into its motley-furred dire form while the others paw forward on the gravel and things are about to go from Okay, to very, very bad, when the smallest of the wolves barks out something to its Alpha. Something like, They're clean, boss.

A moment later, Charlotte-wolfe confirms the same for Erich. They're clean. Untainted by the wyrm.

This is their introduction to the Garou of the small Sept of Deep Hole. They meet Double Wide, the Alpha, a huge African-American man with ashy skin and a deep scar splitting his skull, and Ridge Runner, and Sweet Cheeks, who looks like a slightly trashier Daisy Duke, and Hern's Call. Double Wide recognizes Tiny, grunts pleasure and surprise over his demise. Speculates with his packmates about what brought the fomor so far out of the circle of protection of their mine, kicks the corpse. They were alerted to the presence of strange Gaians by the summoned spirit who cleansed them, Sweet Cheeks tells Erich.

They have a truck that they'll bring back, and a tarp to snap over the bodies. A place to dispose of them. Charlotte and Erich are invited back to their Caern, to spend a few days, healing. The Caern is a small one, Fianna and Bone Gnawer, mostly, with a lone and lonely Chld of Gaia, both led and Warded by Double Wide. Just two packs, who alternate working as guardians and going out on quests and missions and the like.

The Caern is tucked deep into a holler not unlike this one; at the center of the holler, a deep hole with a clear spring serves as the entrance to the Caern's heart. There is neither cell service nor internet availbility deep in the holler, but there's a ranger's cabin near the entrance with WIFI, and here Erich can hang out, surf the web, discover TINY HOUSES.

They have never seen a Silver Fang before; they marvel over Charlotte, her breeding, her blood. After a few days - enough for them both to heal - Double Wide asks if they want to join the raid on the mine where the fomor were holed up. He's understanding if they want to move on, but they could really use the help. Maybe there's a kin who can give Erich a hand building his tiny house. Or buying one. If they stay for the raid, then they're asked to stay for the moot - then sent on their way.

Erich
Erich is, of course, beside himself with glee when he first discovers the tiny houses. So much so that he's yelling at Charlotte to come look, look, look this this is amazing -- startles the off-duty ranger eating his lunch there, who's kin to Ridge Runner. And Charlotte comes, and looks, and they spend about three hours just clicking through pictures and plans and planning and discussing and deciding, finally, to do it. They're totally gonna build themselves a tiny house. The one with the extra "bedroom" downstairs, so Charlotte has a room to herself.

And they do end up staying for the raid, and the moot after. There's something like a barter hinted in Double-Wide's suggestion: maybe a kin can help him with his tiny house. But in the end they don't take Double-Wide up on it, because Erich's Mustang couldn't tow a tiny house right now if he had one. And also because it seems a little wrong, greedy somehow, for them to stay and help out just to get something out of it.

So -- they raid because they want to. And because it's the right thing to do. And the raid is a bloody, joyous thing, and the moot after is a drunken, trashy, informal, holy thing that ends with everyone howling through the woods half-crazed on awakened moonshine, harrying small animals and Englings and banes out, out, out of the bawn.

The morning after, they sleep until half past twelve. When Erich wakes up, Charlotte is cinching up some fresh-made talens into her bag and loading them into the car. Erich gets up and moves the few things they took into Caern for their convalescence back to the car, too, and while some of the locals help them out, no one asks them to stay. Neither Erich nor Charlotte talk about staying on longer, either, let alone settling down here. It's unspoken, and it's understood: they're passing through. They had a good time here, lent their strong claws. And now it's time to leave.

From there, they change tack slightly. Erich found some big full-sized pickups for sale on craigslist and various internet classifieds, and they have nothing better to do anyway so they drive hundreds of miles to look at them. The pair follow the slant of the Appalachians: to Knoxville, to Nashville, to Memphis where they change course and follow the lazy sprawl of the Mississippi up to St. Louis.

There, with great sorrow and reluctance, Erich sells his Mustang. He gets a pretty good price for it -- about five grand -- and turns around and buys a Dodge Ram truck. He gets over the loss of his Mustang pretty quick after that, and they camp in the outskirts of St. Louis for two weeks while he sands off the rust and repairs the drive shaft and repaints the truck in yellow and then puts down racing stripes. Because obviously every car Erich owns must have racing stripes on it, and then buys a trailer to serve as the eventual foundation of his tiny house.

They leave St. Louis, northbound. They go to Chicago, which seems enormous, sky-high, after weeks of tiny town and small cities. It's too expensive to stay long there, though, and so they move onward,

bearing west now, leaving those gleaming towers behind. Outside Chicago, civilization seems to plummet exponentially away. There's nothing in front of them but sundazzled, boundless Plains -- a land stirring finally out of a long, long winter now, hazy with heat. This stretch of the country is astonishing in its monotony. Even the highways seem too bored to meander; they carve straight across along roughly cardinal directions. It means their path, unless they deliberately drive across hundreds of miles of two-lane state highways, will take them through Nebraska.

Erich grows quiet as they cross the Mississippi again; drive through Iowa and its rolling farmlands. He's tense and uncharacteristically taciturn as they cross the Missouri River into Nebraska. Omaha sits on a hill overlooking the river and the pastoral hills of Iowa; the rest of Nebraska, however, seems to be nothing but corn.

Erich
[dammit! "look AT this this is amazing." also: "Because obviously every car Erich owns must have racing stripes on it. Later on, he buys a trailer to serve as the eventual foundation of his tiny house."

GRAMMUR = GUD.]

Charlotte
They're eating in a café right off the interstate, the city of Omaha spreading out to the east. It's mid-morning and the day and the great expanse of the midwest stretches out ahead of them, the cornfields that do not wave quite the way the prairie grasses did, when the pioneers sailed over them, seeing the ocean in their rippling movement in the wind.

Home of the Throwed Rolls, the place calls itself. And indeed - when someone calls for another basket of their hot, freshly baked white yeast rolls, the servers regularly throw them across the bakery, drawing a rousing round of applause from the tourists, and little more than yawns from the truckers who come in for the catfish rather than the entertainment.

Erich's quiet. Charlotte's alert, not trusting the waitress' aim when she lobs out a new batch of bread. She's putting a dent in the rolls all by herself, because Erich's ordered the hunter's breakfast special - which consists of all meat, at least once he is finished with the special instructions. Then she realizes how unfair it was that she insisted that they stop here. Erich can't eat the yeast rolls. He just has to dodge them when they come sailing through the diner.

"Hey," she says, pale eyes darting from the (potentially dangerous) waitress to her packmate, still and distant across the booth. " - uhm," then an awkward little pause, the twist of her shoulders beneath her Red Riding hood / wolf-girl t-shirt. " - are we getting close to your hometown?" She doesn't really have a sense of the distances these states cover, the endless, punishing expanse of the prairie.

Erich
Hey draws Erich's eyes, keen and very clear, very blue: a solar flare of attention bursting onto her. A quick frown stitches his brow.

"Not really. I mean, closer than when we were in D.C. But it's like five hundred miles northwest of here." He pauses. "Harrison, Nebraska. Last I heard population was about 220, and half of them were related to me somehow."

Another throwed roll goes sailing overhead. Erich doesn't even dodge. Grain does not frighten him! He saws at the meat on his plate -- it hardly even matters what sort, it's meat -- and then chews quietly for a while.

"I was thinking, though, we could just go north from here. Instead of keeping on going west. Go through Sioux Falls and Rapid City... check out Yellowstone. Maybe run with some real wolves, you know?" He summons up a smile. He's a terrible liar; terrible even when he's not outright lying. Anyone could see the wolves of Yellowstone aren't why Erich's thinking about a detour around the state of Nebraska.

Charlotte
Erich's lie has Charlotte twisting her mouth up in a strange little expression that looks like she's puzzling her way through a crossword puzzle in a foreign language. The deep blue intensity of Erich's stare, the brilliance behind them like the heart of some hot-burning flame.

"Okay," returns Charlotte, with the puzzled sort of equanimity that she greets most of Erich's discussions about cities and routes and highways and the human world around them. It is all so confusing to her, and she stares out the windows of first the Mustang, then the truck, watching the world depress itself and reform itself in half-a zillion shapes, sometimes seeing not highways and semis and commuters, but buzzing lines of brilliant blue light, networked a thousand times over again, crawling with every possible iteration of spider to keep it all going, keep the juice going. "I guess? But - "

Another damn roll; Charlotte eviscerates them the way a wolf does its prey, seeking the choicest and heartiest and most blood-and-protein rich organs. In this case: the sweet center of the rolls they keep throwing her way.

" - well, I thought maybe you might wanna see your sister? On our way through? I know you can't go in 'cos you'd get her in trouble, but," a neat, swimming little shrug here, her features still, her eyes big, focused but not entirely focused on Erich.

"They don't know me. I could go? And like," here she leans back, her gaze dropping from his face to the ruins of three or four rolls on her place. Charlotte also ordered a strawberry milkshake and corned beef hash, though she hasn't touched the latter and intends (it seems) to subsist on yeast rolls and milkshakes for the remainder of the day. " - say I didn't know where I was and I was in the umbra and I have to meet my packmate and could I have a ride someplace? I don't know how I'd get it so they'd let her drive me, but I bet they're let her if I asked."

Erich
Instantly that alert, wary stare again. A few seconds go by -- but he doesn't turn down the idea out of hand. Just says,

(moving his head ever-so-slightly to the right to avoid a poorly aimed throwed roll)

"I don't know. Ellie's got a pretty good head on her shoulders. Don't know how you'd convince her to drive a strange Garou all the way out to someplace where she could meet me. Plus I wouldn't want her to get in trouble."

Charlotte
"Maybe - " a twist of her mouth, here. The creature's pale blue eyes flicker up to catch the leading edge of Erich's alert stare. Charlotte has a mouthful of roll here. She's chewing around it, as if she'd never had to sit through (hours upon hours) of etiquette lessons in her life. To be fair, though, they did not cover how to catch your bread from the air in a dignified fashion. And she wouldn't've listened if they had.

She chews; she swallows. The movement is visible in her temples and the hollows of her cheeks, neck and jaw working slowly until her mouth seams together with thought. Her voice is quiet, now, her answering wariness easing into something else. There's something about the way she ventures the thought that suggests she is not entirely comfortable with anything that feels like contradiction. So her voice is soft, insinuating. " - maybe she oughta have a say in it. In whether she might be willing to get in trouble to see you.

"I mean, you could call her and ask. If she wanted to.

"Plus, I mean. They'd make sure I wasn't all gross, don't you think? But then I'd bet they'd be happy to help me. Offer hospitality and get me on my way. Back to my pack," Here she lifts her chin across the table in his direction, her expression mildly abashed. Charlotte's always been surrounded by Silver Fangs. Innured to the glory of their mad blood, the intoxicating effect of it on other tribes. "I mean, did you have any of my kind there? I could say I dreamed about her or something. Maybe I even will before I get there so it wouldn't be a lie or anything."

Erich
Erich's gone back to sawing on his meat. His eyes flick up again when Charlotte says maybe she oughta have a say. Despite himself, Erich smirks a little there: he sees what she did there. Charlotte, who used to be such a little mouse herself.

That was before the boys on the street, though. And before the night under the lanterns, under the tree. And before the fight on the mountain and the days at the Gnawer-Fianna Sept, and... certainly before today.

"You don't want to lie," Erich retorts. "My uncle, who's the head of my family, is a Half Moon. He'll string you up for lying, guest or no guest, Silver Fang or not." A pause. "Can you actually do that? Dream of something just 'cause you want to?"

Charlotte
Oh, she's still half-a-mouse, Charlotte. Look how she peeks up at Erich over the remains of her many slain throwed-rolls. Over the giant silver basin of corned beef hash that she still hasn't much touched. But she's remembered that she's a mouth with teeth.

She flashes them at him across the booth now. A quicksilver little grin of something-like-victory curling her mouth and disappearing in almost the next heartbeat as she sobers, listening. His uncle, the half-moon:

Charlotte nods, several quick little dips of her head. The pink dye is growing out a bit further, her crown is entirely pale, platinum blond now. The sort that shines silver in moonlight. The color usually only found on infants or in boxes.

"Okay. I won't lie then." As if her going had now been settled. "I could just say the truth without all of it. Or I could let Winter's Heart talk to them instead of me. Or maybe if I asked her she'd help me dream about your sister. Does she look like you?"

Erich
The portion sizes here, really, are rather obscene. Well; to be honest, they've been pretty obscene since they left the Chesapeake. But this is still a bit beyond the pale. They don't even eat off plates here. It's giant aluminum basins, the sort of thing you could wash your face in. Or possibly even your laundry.

Erich's is filled with meat. There's a huge slab of steak in there, so big and unrefined that it doesn't even look like steak; it just looks like MEAT. There are also sausages and meatballs and a couple chicken drumsticks. Oh, and bacon. Ridiculous amounts of bacon. It's quite possible that even Erich, big strapping lad that he is, will need to get a to-go container for this.

"Ellie? Um. I guess. I mean she's blonde and blue-eyed." Erich puts down his knife -- actually he kinda just jabs it into the steak -- and then pulls his little crappy phone out. It's an android, but it has a screen the size of a large postage stamp. If Charlotte squints, she can see the picture Erich pulls up: a girl that looks some three or four years younger than Charlotte herself, with that sort of flaxen blonde hair and wholesome all-american prettiness that one associates with Midwestern girls.

"That was like two years ago," he says. "She's about your age." And he gnaws on a drumstick, thinking. "I guess I could text her and see if she wants to."

Charlotte
Who ever, ever thinks about what his sister looks like? She's a fact of life; the other body in the house, partner and rival and deeply irritating burr under your skin. The person who finishes off your favorite cereal without telling mom so she can buy more, swipes your action figures or toy guns, drags you into fights, grows up, changes without you ever noticing it because she was right there, under your nose, the whole entire time.

There's no reason to think about what she looks like or who she is or why or how you love her, until you're gone and she's out of reach and -

Charlotte braces her forearms on the counter, leans forward, craning her neck to study the picture. Her eyes flick up at Erich mid-study, then back to the two-dimensional girl on the screen. The picture helps, but it isn't exactly what she needs if she's going to somehow get this strange girl that is Erich's sister embedded deeply enough into her subconcious that she might populate one of those strange, waking dreams that come to anyone with more than half-a-foot in this world's Otherworlds.

And Charlotte is more than half-a-foot across that barrier, at almost all times.

Like now: a distant cloudiness in her eyes as she leans back and Erich tells her that the picture is two-years-old. That Ellie's about her age. Maybe he'll text her.

"You oughtta. Text her." The phraseology sounds strange on her lips, even now, but Charlotte has learned to text. Charles has been inundated with pictures of every strange truck, every odd monument, ever crumpled wildflower or glowing neon sign they've passed that captured her interest. "Right now? and if she says no we can go around the whole state and everything."

A little shrug.

"But if she says yes, you can like, tell me something else. The first time you saw her, ever in your whole life, or the last. And I'll think and think and think about her."

Then maybe Charlotte really will dream that dream.

Erich
Erich has no doubt that Charles is getting inundated. It must be Charles, because Erich's fairly sure that other than her brother the only other contact Charlotte has right now is Erich himself. And there's no reason for her to send Erich all those random pictures she's been snapping this whole time, first through the steeply raked, sporty windows of the Mustang, and now through the big sturdy square windshield of the Ram. She doesn't really take pictures of herself, though. Erich has to press her to sometimes, or take the iPhone from her and turn it around to snap one of her. Erich, who knows what it's like to be half a continent away from his blood-kin.

"Right now?" he hedges, uncomfortable. He takes the phone back, weighs it in his palm, ponders. "I guess," he decides finally, and takes a deep breath, and

taps, quickly, with both thumbs. He's a lot better at this than Charlotte is. A few seconds later he sets the phone down a small distance away from his hand and tries to pretend he isn't waiting with bated breath.

"The first time I saw Ellie," he says, breaking into a grin, "I was like... four. And she was just this tiny squidgy wrinkled pink thing all wrapped and tucked up. They let me hold her for a while but I was so bored, she didn't do anything interesting at all. Later on she pooped and it was awful.

"And the last time I saw her," quieter now, "it was the night I came back from my Rite. And they'd already run me out of the Caern. I was just going home to... I don't know. I don't know if I was trying to run home, or if I was just trying to get my stuff. Anyway by the time I got there all my stuff was out on the curb. And my dad stood on the lawn and wouldn't let me in the house.

"Ellie was up in her bedroom, which used to be my bedroom before I moved out to be Fostered. I could see her in the window. She put her little hand on the glass and I never figured out if she was waving goodbye or saying don't go or what."

Erich's brow is furrowed now. He exhales shortly, reaches for his soda and takes a gulp. "Anyway. She's wicked smart. A couple months later she somehow tracked me down and mailed me a cell phone. How does a kid even get that done? I think she must've piggybacked me onto her school friend's mom's plan or something? I don't know. I've changed phones a couple times since, but it's still the line she set up for me."

His phone dings. Erich's eyes snap over immediately. He grabs the phone up, turns it over, reads the little message. Then he taps something back.

"She says she's down for it," he says. "She wants to know when you wanna pull it off."

Charlotte
Charlotte's pale eyes cut to the phone, which Erich sets so carefully apart from the space he inhabits. Just aside, carefully keeping his hand away, deliberately not looking at it, waiting for the buzz of an incoming text.

She sits up a bit straighter, pulling herself upward from he crown of her head down the long line of her spine all he way to her tail. Tailbone, to be fair. Still, it is almost comical how very wolfish the posture is: alert, watching a copse of trees for something that had been run to ground to burst out of the brambles, waiting for just that second to move.

Then Erich's grinning, talking about his sister; she can hear the grin in his voice and looks back up at him to catch the edge of his smile.

She pooped and it was awful.

A curling little grin, her wide eyes steady and shadowed with a certain (mock?) solemnity. "That's why Silver Fangs have nannies."

So they need never touch or see or know anything about baby poop.

Before she can really conjure up a miniaturized Erich, bored and holding a wrinkly tucked up baby, some adult hovering over him to insure that he does not drop her and crack open her skull - before she can create that picture, he's remembering the last time, and Charlotte is alert, that prickly feeling crawling across the surface of her skin, all hot and cold and bright and uselessly angry about what Erich's family did to him.

Turning his things out on the curb, refusing to let him say goodbye to his only sister.

They're seated across from each other - there's no way she can bump up against him, in the wordless way of a wolfpack, but she does nudge his foot with her own under the table. Just this solid little moment of connection, toe to bumping toe.

--

"I guess now?" Charlotte returns, reaching up to catch an easily thrown thrown-roll, which was tossed underhanded toward the people in the booth behind them, and is claimed overhanded by the wolf sitting with Erich. That note of query in her voice, uncertainty, expectation, for all that she showed him her little mouse-teeth this morning.

"Or maybe a week? Because we have to find someplace for you to be that's far enough away that no one else will wanna come with us, but close enough that they'll let her help me. And then I guess instead of dropping me off really close it should still be a few days for me to run, you know? So I'll be footsore and not just pretending like I'm footsore because I don't think I'm very good at pretending to be people I'm not, it's just sometimes I know how trees think.

"Or I think about how trees think which isn't hard, you just have to ask yourself what if you toes were wormy white roots in the ground and you couldn't turn into the sun except slowly and people want to chop you down and burn you up."

Erich
Erich, quite frankly, doesn't know what to make of that tree-talk. Or well. He knows what to make of it -- it's Theurgespeak and it even makes some sense if you think about it -- but he doesn't know how to respond. So he kinda... doesn't respond. To that, anyway. At any rate he's all furrowbrowed and doubtful, not really liking the idea of driving tens or hundreds of miles away and then letting Charlotte run all the way to Harrison, Nebraska, to pick up his sister. It's not safe. She'd be all alone. What if she ran into trouble? What if --

he stops, abruptly. He's thinking of her like a cub, he realizes. No, worse: he's thinking of her like a child. And if Erich is going to protest how Charles treats his sister, he can't very well start doing the exact. same. thing.

"We could just drive west from here," Erich says. He still sounds a bit doubtful. "When we get to like... Sidney or Kimball or maybe even Scottsbluff I can camp down for a while. Maybe start building our tiny house, I dunno. And you could run on up to Harrison.

"If you really want to," he adds. "If it's not too far."

Charlotte
Ahh. Charlotte is blissfully unaware that her theurgespeak is perfectly incomprehensible to Erich. Or perhaps: it does not matter. She meanders through these strange labyrinths and tells Erich about them; he listens because he's her packmate, and they're sitting in a diner at the edge of an interstate, within view of two dozen eighteen wheelers and four separate cheap hotels, while locals are throwing rolls around their heads.

She's never been here before; anywhere like this, and she only eats the bread, not the corned beef hash in the big silver bowl like she ordered, and now she's just tearing the remainders of her rolls and Erich's caught-but-never-eaten rolls into tiny tiny bite-sized pieces that she'll gather up (quite insistently) in napkins to feed the birds. The sparrows and the pigeons and the grackles that haunt the parking lot, darting down from the high-wire electric lines, the humming neon signs of winking cartoon cowboys and harshly illuminated billboards advertising strip clubs and fast-food places to truckers, to hunt and peck among scrabbled, twisted, hearty trees and shrubs and weeds that can fight through all this pavement and diesel exhaust and brick and concrete and blacktop and live.

In a twenty minutes or so, while they are tossing out the breadcrumbs in great handfuls to the darting house sparrows, she'll tell him oh-so-seriously, that birds are dinosaurs that changed their scales to feathers.

She'll say, if you look at them just right, you can see it in their eyes. Even the smallest of them, that predator's gleam, that fast-beating little heart, that alien knowledge that they once owned the earth. And she'll side-bump him, and throw up a great handful of the crumbs into the air and listen to the squawk and scrabble of the black-eyed birds watching the wolves-in-human-skin.

And she'll wish Melantha was here, right here, right now. And she'll flash Erich a sudden smile, all bright, a fierce, raptor's edge to her just then, shining so clear in Erich's peripheral vision. Falcon's girl.

--

Now, though. Charlotte is quiet, theurgespeak swallowed, watching the furrowbrowed concern slip across his features with one of her perfectly girlish, perfectly serious looks, all pale, swimming blue. She's keen-eyed, yes, but does not understand how to read all the strange, interstitial foldings of human expression. But she understands his concern on some level, without ever comprehending that he has to stop himself from thinking of her as a child. Understands it because: packs are meant to stay together. If Storm's Teeth proposed throwing himself into some dark hole alone, without his theurge there to heal and guard him, Black Sheep would be furrowbrowed too.

This is what she does: kicks him underneath the table. The toe of her Chuck Taylor's against his ankle bone.

This is what she says: "I want to." And, with a sly little grin crisp as an autumn leaf, a hint of tooth behind it, "Dork." That word is not her own; there's an echo of the Fury they both love in it. She goes on to reassure him, quietly, with a solemn, childlike surety, "I can run fast."

--

So they pay the bill and climb back into that reconditioned Dodge truck and head west. Through Nebraska, which is flat flat flat. With all that farmlanad, you might imagine the place is wild, is welcoming to Gaian spirits, but through the great central heartland of the Plains, where all the prairie has been turned under for production of wheat and corn and soybeans, where all the parcels are divided into perfect square miles by networks of narrow, moderately nameless roads, and all the old family farms have been devoured by big corporate operations worked from giant combines, where every street in every small town ends in a cornfield and the only suggestion of anything like wilderness are the odd loops of meandering rivers, defined by the cluster of trees clinging to their banks. Out there, the biodiversity is in often lower than one finds in New York City. The sameness is numbness, mesmerizing, and Charlotte is unsettled by the disconnect between the fading memories of the great grasslands that linger, here and there, as umbral echoes of a plowed under past, and what she sees and feels beyond the windows of the truck.

Quieter. Sometimes angrier. Not quite settled in her skin.

--

The leave the interstate, follow US 26 up the North Platte River Valley heading for Scottsbluff. They stop to marvel at Chimney Rock along the way, wandering all the way around its base with all the ordinary tourists. Erich clears the way, of course, without even being conscious of it, and Charlotte revels in that feeling of walking-through-crowds-with-an-Ahroun. It's like being on the prow of a great ship.

It's nighttime, a few days later. They've made camp. Maybe Erich's laid in some supplies to get started on the tiny house. Maybe he's still just puzzling through the plans. Charlotte leaves Erich behind two healing gourds. Sets them neatly apart for him just in case on the dash of the truck, tells him she's ready, and goes. Settles her dedicated bag over her dedicated clothes and finds her reflection in the big mirrors flanking the cab and slips between worlds.

On the other side, she shifts. Melts from girl-to-gleaming-white-wolf. Maybe Erich runs with her awhile. At her side, for a half-dozen miles. But eventually, she goes off alone, into the moon-dark prairie night. Swift and small and sure.

Erich
[omg, it never even occurred to me that falcon! was probably once a DINOSAUR SPIRIT. i bet THAT'S why he's the totem of the royal tribe. not cuz falcons fly high -- cuz seriously, if you wanna be a kingly bird, you could at least be an eagle or something! -- but because once upon a time, HE WAS A M'F'ING T-REX.

I thoroughly enjoyed that post. LOL.]

"Well," Erich reasons, while they stand out in the parking lot where Charlotte is tossing handfuls of crumbs to the birds and Erich is rolling tight the tops of those doggybags that contain the rest of his and Charlotte's tubs of food, "now they own the skies."

And then there's a sly gleam, a sidelong smirk from Thunder's unlikely son:
"Sometimes."

And she throws the rest of the crumbs to the sparrows, and he laughs aloud, and there's a raptor's gleam in her eye and an edge to her smile and he thinks to himself:

no, you're no mouse at all. you're a sparrow, but sometimes you remember

once, you owned the earth.


They crash the night in one of those four cheap motels, each of them stretched out in one of the two double beds. Or perhaps Charlotte, leery of the cleanliness of those sheets, becomes Charlotte-wolf and curls up in the middle of the bed. Regardless, in the morning they meander down the highway, taking longer than strictly necessary because, well; they don't really have anywhere to be.

So they stop at the rest areas, which in Nebraska are built by and large along those many, many, many streams and rivers that cross this great cornfed state. And they leave the interstate at the fork of the roads, follow an older, smaller US highway into the state. Tragically, neither Charlotte nor Erich are old enough to remember playing the original Oregon Trail, the real one with its blocky graphics and its garish colors, its blaring MIDI soundtrack, its ominous little pop-up boxes:

Erich has dysentery.
Charlotte has a broken leg.
There was a fire in your wagon. You lost: 1 wagon tongue, 2 wagon axles, 4 sets of clothing, 79 bullets.
Erich has died of cholera.

And so Chimney Rock and Fort Laramie and the North Platte River; these names have perhaps less resonance than they would if they were five, ten years older than they are. Still; Erich's played the new Oregon Trail, the silly, too-easy one with its cartoon characters trundling along on the screen of your iPhone or your android phone. He finds it in the Apple store for Charlotte, leaving Chimney Rock -- and while they drive on toward Scottsbluff, she sits curled up in the front seat making her way toward Oregon.There's this much to be said for the truck: it certainly has more room. There's no shell on the truckbed, which means he can't just lay his bedroll out back there, but at the least there's more room to stretch their legs during the drives. And at night, it's possible for one of them to sleep curled on their side in the back; the other to go wolf and sleep in the back. It's not super, and almost every single time it inspires Erich to mull about how awesome it's going to be when they get that tinyhouse built, but -- it's workable.

That's how they spend the last night, parked on a country road about twenty miles out of Scottsbluff. The prairies are gone, all gone, but the cornfields command a boring sort of awe of their own. So. much. food out there, though none of it is for Erich: roots and shoots and growing stalks, waving fields of grain as far as the eye can see. The farms are so large now, so consolidated, that they could squat out here in the grain for weeks and weeks, probably, and no one would be the wiser as long as they were careful about it. So that's what Erich says he'll do: he'll just wait out here, in the shade of some trees at the edge of some little river winding its way through the land, and he'll study the plans and maybe-maybe-maybe start laying the foundation. And when his sister and Charlotte, who is also his sister, return -- they can just find him right here.

Or call him. Since it's 2013, and all, and even out in the middle of nowhere there's coverage.

The morning Charlotte leaves, the sky overhead is dazzling and blue and the sun is a brilliant scar in that pristineness, too bright to look at for long. But these are skies that sometimes spawn some of the worst weather known to man; blizzards that bury the land in three feet of snow, twisters that carve a capricious path of destruction.

And thunderstorms. Oh, those plains-storms of summer, that turn noon dark as dusk, that leave the distant untouched horizon a sickly shade of green; the storms that ricochet lightning across the sky each to each to each with scarcely a pause in the thunder's roll. That pour buckets down until, on the interstate, you can barely see the car ten feet ahead of you; until you're sure that if you were to step out
you'd simply drown.

That's the weather Erich tells her about, half in wonder and half in warning, as they slip into the other-world. There, the spirits still remember the prairies as they were. The fading phantoms of endless grass, of those enormous herds of slow-moving bison, of the tiny life that darted and burrowed and hid beneath their mighty even-toed feet: these things still have presence there. Even they, the grey wolf and the white, who are apex predators in the truest sense, must give way to these memories.

At the edge of another river, a tributary that somewhere down the way meets the one Erich is camped beside, the Ahroun running beside Charlotte-wolf slows. He stops, and she runs on alone, his howl of good fortune and godspeed following her as she goes.

Charlotte
Erich and Charlotte have no totem to bind them; he has no physical, visceral, spiritual sense of her presence out there on the plains, a lone wolf a thousand miles from any territory she has ever known. Except she is a theurge, and the spiritlands through which she runs are not opaque to her, but open as a fever dream, and the moon in the sky has slipped from black to waxing crescent, a slow-growing cheshire smile that rises in the east at midday, passes the apex of its movement before sunset, then lingers, bright/dark sinking down toward the western horizon for the first few hours of every night.

She follows it through the night and across the land, wolf-minded now. Burrowing to sleep alone in the spirit-realms at night, the long-past sounds of the prairie at night echoing around her, infecting her dreams. She hunts for what small game there is in the empty physical finds across the gauntlet when it is true-night and the moon has set and there is no one around, and a white wolf can slip through unbroken fields of wheat or new-planted corn, harrying out the odd morsel of a field mouse or prairie dog. But alone, she is not a skilled hunter and the lean and hungry look about her when she arrives in Erich's hometown is not feigned.

It is Charlotte who discovers Ellie so that Ellie can discover her. A needle, a thread, a string and an old rite fulfilled. Ellie, at a fishing hole that widens and calms another of those endless little rivers looping through the plains, draining the snows from the highlands endlessly down toward the sea. The family is reasonably welcoming. Lemonade is offered and a place to wash her hands and face, but mostly they keep her outside, on the porch until Garou can come to vet her. To test her: for taint or madness, for whatever might put them in danger.

With the family, Charlotte is quiet and mousy (sparrow-y?) and polite, and she remembers what Erich told her about his mother. How she approved of people who cleaned up after themselves. How she would've liked Lauren for saying just such a thing. How she taught him to make macaroni and cheese and scrambled eggs in the kitchen (where she is eventually invited) so that he could do things for himself. So she clears her plate and picks up her glass, thinking about the actions in ways she never would under other circumstances, and eats what they put in front of her and requests mac'n'cheese if asked what she would like for dinner. With the Garou: her breeding and purity speak for her more than she ever speaks for herself. She is Just Passing Through and her pack is waiting for her. She offers a handful of talens by way of chiminage (a firetooth and a tanglefoot, which she makes properly for the first time at the edge of that river, admist the invasive and tangling roots of a young willow and a half-dead curtain of Virginia Creeper clinging to its limbs), and the fever dream of her breeding from the age of kings.

Another day and night spent there: Charlotte's clothes are washed and she is fed well, and the next full morning Charlotte and Ellie set out in an old farm truck converted to biodiesel by one of Erich's innumerable cousins, heading southeast through the broken lands of the high plains.

Erich has three days or four, alone amidst the cornfields, on the banks of a nameless river, fringed with trees twisted and shaped by the west-winds that pour across the land, to study the plans for his tinyhouse, to lay out the foundations if he is so inclined, and if the local outpost of Tractor Supply Company or Rural King has the supplies he requires in stock, proper tools available for rent or purchase. Three days, or four, or perhaps it is beginning to stretch onward to five days, camped out in the cornfields, beneath those impossibly wide and impossibly blue and sometimes impossibly black skies he knew for almost the whole of his life before his life changed and he became an exile from the land and the people and the blood he had always known growing up. It is early in the season; there's still a threat of frost in the air, but there's winter wheat growing and greening in the fields and the sun, mid-day, is as bright and powerful as it will be in late July, in the early days of August, radiant and crowning.

What took Charlotte some time to cover alone on four feet takes the two girls perhaps two or three hours in the truck. Erich's first herald of their return is not a phone call, but the low grind of the engine, and the crunch of the truck wheels on the graveled river access road where Erich has made camp. It is just after midday, and there - the opening and closing of two car doors. Charlotte slips down from the passenger's side carrying the picnic hamper Erich's mother put together for their lunch and dinner that day. Fried chicken and bacon sandwiches and home-cured sausages, more than either girl could eat. Carries it so that Ellie's arms are free. So that she can throw them around her brother when she sees him for the first time in years and years.

Alive and whole.

Erich
Erich wasn't kidding when he said he was a farm boy from the middle of nowhere. It's several days' of running to get to Harrison, which is a tiny, tiny, tiny one-street town with a gas station, a general store, a grocer's and a post office all run by elderly farmwives and/or their grandchildren. Most the populace doesn't even live in town. They live out on their farms, and it turns out the Reinhardts are their own megafarming combine -- them, and the other Fenrir families in town, and the few straggling outsiders who are moving away, moving on, growing scarcer and scarcer by the year.

There are several enormous REINHARDT FARMS billboards scattered on the arrow-straight county roads leading into and cutting across the farms. Cheesy pictures of smiling blonde families overlaid with cornucopias -- sometimes literal -- of grains and grain-products. A slogan along the lines of HONEST HARD WORK, HONEST WHOLESOME BREAD. Theurge that she is, Charlotte will feel an unmistakable pulse of energy emanating from each and every one of those billboards: sentry spirits, warding spells, a web of protection cast over the land.

Which, like all other farmlands, are carved into row upon row of crop, flashing by as she runs. Winter wheat; new-sown corn. Millet, barley, rye. In the distance, grain elevators; water towers. And little rivers cutting through the fields, lined by thirsty trees that afford Charlotte some protection from prying eyes, just in case, when she slips out of the other-world to drink.She is hugged tightly by Ellie when she comes upon the girl. There's little doubt that the girl is Erich's sister. They have the same hair, that same thoroughly and unadulteratedly blond hue that doesn't darken for lack of sun, doesn't streak prettily into honey and flax. They have the same eyes, very clear and very blue and perhaps with the rarely-used ability to glare stonily, ferociously. Ellie is eighteen now, about half a year younger than Charlotte, and she looks taller than the girl in the pictures; her limbs longer, her face losing those last shades of childhood. She is lean and a bit lanky, but she is not fashionably thin or starved. Walking through the fields, she's tireless, she's talkative, she stops when she sees where an irrigation pipe has gone awry from someone clipping it with a tractor and shoves it back in place.

The rest of Erich's family is a little more guarded. His very blonde father and his very blonde mother, both of them tall and longlimbed and so very we were vikings in a past life that it's a little hard to think of them as Nebraskan farmers. Charlotte is welcomed, and she is sheltered and fed and offered the shower in case she wants to refresh herself. They're gruff, though, and short-spoken, sometimes answering her questions with barely a word or two in response. Still, she is asked to stay for dinner, and she is seated at the family table in the guest of honor's spot.

Halfway through dinner the front door lurches open and a lean, jerky-tough, grizzle-jawed visitor invites himself in. He is unmistakably a Reinhardt; it's in the brow, the eyes. The eye, as it were: scar tissue and emptiness fills his left socket. At the table, Erich's father has stood to cede the head of the table, but this new visitor waves him back into his place with a grunt that may or may not have been intended as a word. The newcomer makes no secret of sniffing in Charlotte's direction, coming right over to her and laying a hand on the back of her chair and leaning down and inhaling.

Then he straightens. He sticks out his hand. "Welcome," he says,

and the ice breaks a little. They break bread together. Once or twice, Erich's father cracks a smile. The visitor, Charlotte discovers, is a Godi, which is apparently Fenrirish for Theurge. With him at the table, he does most of the talking. They exchange a few notes. He doesn't mention his rank, but Charlotte can intuit that he's far enough above her that she wouldn't even be able to challenge him honorably, let alone win.

Charlotte cleans up after herself. This earns her an approving nod from Erich's mother, who later shows her to a guest room decorated in a fairly atrocious floral motif. Her clothes are washed, which means she can borrow Ellie's PJs to sleep in, which are a little large for her but clean and comfortable. In the morning her clothes are dry, and there's bacon and eggs and hash browns sizzling on the griddle. Ellie says she'll drive Charlotte back to her pack, and her father cocks a brow over his mug of coffee.

"Make sure to fill 'er up while you're in town," is all he says about it. And then he pulls a light jacket out and disappears out the front door, something so familiar about his longlegged stride that Charlotte can, just for a moment, see a shadow of who Erich might be in a quarter-century. If he's not dead.


The drive back goes much faster than the run out. When the truck crunches to a stop, Charlotte can see Erich's truck, Erich's trailer, Erich's tinyhouse -- or at least the very first beginnings of it: a wooden foundation growing atop the trailer bed, over which he'll be laying down the floor. She can see Erich too, standing up from where he's nailing down a board or a two-by-four, the hammer dropping from his hand to hit the dirt as an ear-to-ear grin splits across his face.

"You're back!" he yells. And then: "ELLIE!"

And yes. They hug. They practically collide with each other, and Erich throws his arms around his sister and glomps her and twirls her and laughs, rocking her side to side in his glee, pushing her back and looking her over and exclaiming that she got tall, and what happened to the braids, and hey! her braces came off, and, and, and.

Later on they sit on the foundation of the tinyhouse. They eat the picnic Erich's mom prepared, which makes Erich a little sad because this is the first time he's eaten mom-food for years, which makes Ellie a little mad because that was the stupidest thing ever, what the hell, but then Erich says if it hadn't happened he'd still be stuck in South Dakota or Nebraska or something instead of driving all over the country with his best friend and packmate, waiting for the day the girl they both love tells them

it's okay, she doesn't have to hide anymore, they can be together again.

Ellie can't stay forever. She stays until mid-afternoon, and then she has to go home, and she's a little sad this time because -- well. Because. She says maybe she'll run away too, and Erich says don't be stupid, but then he says

you should get out of here, though. I'm glad you're going to college soon, but you should go somewhere else after college. See the world, and then decide if you want to come back or not.

Ellie wants to know where he'll be. Erich glances at Charlotte and shrugs, and grins, and says they'll be wherever they'll be. They'll have a house soon, their own little den rolling around behind them. It'll be awesome.

There's one last round of hugs, tight. There's a bit of mistiness in more than one party's eyes. Ellie hugs Charlotte again, too, thanking her. And then

Erich's long-lost sister climbs into her truck. She waves out the window at them. She calls a goodbye, and he waves back, and as she drives away she sticks her arm out the window and waves again. Erich watches her until her taillights are two small red dots in the midafternoon haze.

Then he turns to Charlotte. He hugs her, too. "Thanks," he says. And: "Ready to go on?"

Melantha
They sleep in packs, warm fur against warm flesh.  They come and embrace her, those that return from their own journeys or hunting trips.  She whispers in the firelight-flickering dark to a pair of glittering eyes and calloused, gentle hands that she doesn't want to, and the hands instantly still where they are, at the moment, caressing her waist.  Less instantly, they draw back into the darkness, slowly as one backs away from a tensed animal.  There's not a question of why, there's no need to be told okay as though there's a chance it wouldn't be okay, no intimation of obligation to an explanation.  The only question is a soft request to hold her, and to this Melantha smiles in the dark and tells the eyes and the hands and the familiar scent yes.

And she is held.  And she thinks of how different these arms are from Charlotte's delicate, thin, pale ones.  She thinks of how absurd it is that when she curls up in pajamas next to Charlotte she feels like the one who needs to protect, the one who should embrace and keep warm, keep safe.  She thinks of how absurd it is, and more than a little heartbreaking, that she has known some of these women for her entire life, but it's Charlotte with whom she can really be herself.

Her eyes close.  She hugs her arms to her chest where she curls up, forearms in front of her face, comforted by the leather and the clay bead where they touch her cheek.

--

Like all people who live primitively, they fill their days with work.  Hunting is not a sport here.  Offal and organs are not treats to be thrown to greedy wolves.  Everything and everyone finds a use.  Everything that is done is done out of necessity.  There is no luxury.  There is no ease, and in a strange way, it's therapeutic.

Melantha, thinking now that she will no longer go seduce the sorts of men she used to seduce, allows callouses to grow on her palms.  She winces more than the other women and sometimes they smirk and sometimes they just watch, mindful, because they are curious to see if she will work til she blisters, til she bleeds, or if she will take breaks.  Some judge.  Some do not.

There is no one single mentality here.  There is strength, and there is respect, and there is dedication here; there is endurance.  Life is full of pains great and small, and harsh winds and sharp rocks.  What good is there to be done by weeping?  What good is it to waste pity on yourself when you are so strong, and so blessed, that you can survive these things so easily?  Better to spend your compassion on others, not as strong, not as blessed, not as aware.

The ends of her hair split.  Her nails chip and she cuts them low.  There is no wax; you shave with knives or not at all.  Some scrape their scalps free of hair; few bother with anything else.  Her skin's warm tones darken to burnished gold.  Her lips are dry, her eyes see better in the dark, she gets used to feeling some trace of hunger in her belly most of the time.  Sometimes at night, wolves come and lay beside her, in one form or another, as though the smell of her and the feel of her by their side or in their arms is comforting after whatever rite they have undergone, whatever hunt or battle that nearly took their lives.  It has been so for generations: the garou come to the kin for succor.  Melantha thinks of tribes where it is not so, where seeking succor is damned or kin are taught to be weak, and she pities them.

She thinks of Erich and Charlotte, who -- if they are on the road -- have no kin to care for them, and comfort them, and sleep beside them.  She thinks of Erich, forbidden from taking that succor from his own blood kin.  She thinks of Charlotte, and of Fangs, and of all the highborn rules that prevent such blatant want, such obvious need.  She does not pity them.  But she thinks of them, and worries a little for them, and

misses them, mostly.

--

Time goes by.  A full moon swells and recedes.  Celia de Luca is forgotten by the world and remembered only by the people whose lives she ruined.  He resigned.  She wonders if there are still Furies there, and kin of Furies, as tabloid reporters and photographers and so on, driving him slowly to the brink.  She wonders when the last time was that any of their number thought of trying to heal these people, influence them for good, change their minds.  She wonders if it would be a whole new order, not unlike the sort she has belonged to since she was a true maiden.  The hand that heals and the hand that wounds.

Melantha cuts some of the rare thread brought up from the general store half a day's trip away from here with a sharp snap and tug of her teeth.  The sleeves of the shirt are set aside for later; when the weather grows cool again she'll sew them back onto the tunic.

After all, she thinks, if Fenrir-born, Shadow Lord Erich could learn to think twice about some of his own sexist assumptions, couldn't some other men be taught similarly?  Not the ones who are too far gone.  They need to be punished.  They need to be ruined.  Some of them need to die.

But, Melantha considers, putting her needle away in a small box of precious things that shouldn't be lost, it's worth a try.

--

"Have you thought about what you want to do?" Damaris asks, crouching by the fire outside of her shelter, stirring the pot of stew that rests on it.  Like Melantha, she wears her hair long.  They have tied that long dark hair of theirs up on their heads in knots, keep it off their faces and out of the fire with strips of cloth over their brows, tied at the napes of their necks.  They are messy and their feet dirty, but their hands are clean.

"Some," Melantha answers, eating flat bread made in a clay oven.  It is still hot.  She talks with her mouth full, and no one looks at her askance.  She looks at her hands, tearing the bread, and not at her mentor, her mother-figure, her trainer, who was once also a whore like Melantha, and for similar reasons.  There's a young girl sharing that tiny shelter with them now.  She's started to bleed and she has that anger in her, that punishing sword.  It remains to be seen if that anger is something that will last long enough to be tempered into a weapon.  The girl isn't here right now, though.  She's been sent to gather firewood for her mentor.

"You know, you could help me with her," and she means the girl, untested and untaught so far.  "The world changes, even if men don't.  You could teach her a great deal."

Melantha glances the way that the girl walked some time ago, tears another strip of bread and devours it.  She shrugs.  "It hasn't changed so much."

Damaris scoffs.  "How would you know?  You weren't even born when I finished my work."

Her mouth twists into a fond smirk.  She chews her bread and there is silence between them for a while.  They hear a clatter of wood being dropped and glance up, listening for a scream or wail of pain or terror in the dark.  There's only some soft sobbing, defeated-sounding, frustrated.  Damaris and Melantha both return their attention to their work and their conversation.

"Everyone here has a purpose," Damaris tells her, quiet but not soft.

Melantha does not say I know.  Of course she knows.  She watches the fire, and chews her bread. 

appalachia.

Charlotte
It is six-thirty, nearly seven p.m., and clouds are streaming in from the southwest. Charlotte secures her seatbelt because Erich tells her to, and not before. She does not like the seatbelt; if feels like being bound. The sunlight cuts through them in blinding patches, setting aflame the windshields of all the westward bound commuters. The interstates, the expressways, the beltways, the feeder roads are all jammed. The evening commute is underway, and so too is the ritual weekend retreat from the city. Well to the north, two and three hours away, cars with Virginia and Maryland and DC plates will be stacked to a standstill on I-70 in what are otherwise the wilds of rural western Maryland.

It takes them two, two and a half hours to go thirty miles, and Charlotte is tense the whole time, her nose pressed against the window of the Mustang, her reflection ghostly against the stacked taillights of half-a-million commuters.

They have no place to go, and there is no map to follow. Erich takes I-66 all the way to I-81. They are in the mountains now; the interstate parallels long ridges and valleys of Western Virginia, shoulders the Allegheny front to the west.
Somewhere south of Strasbourg, Erich pulls off the interstate, finds a road plunging west, right into that rising ridge and valley wall, and heads out of the Shenandoah Valley into the highlands.

The sun has set by now, and that brief taste of summer is long gone. A wintry front pushes across the Appalachian plateau, and there will be a dusting of snow on the ridgetops tonight. Choked as DC and its many crawling feeder-roads were with fleeing urbanites, these roads are virtually deserted, crooked and crawling, climbing the spines of the mountains like switchbacks, illuminated only by the shine of the moon and the flash of the Mustang's headlights over the marching trunks of the dark trees.

The forests around them are still winter-bare, though the shocking violet of blooming redbuds dot the understory. The road just climbs and climbs and climbs. There are no more signs, and no signs of civilization. Near midnight, Erich pulls into the first open gas station they've seen in the past hour. The pumps are old-fashioned, a sign on the door says CASH ONLY. Inside, two old men sit playing cards, listening to the drone of a country station. One of them has a lump of chewing tobacco tucked heavily beneath his front lip and spits foul-looking fluid into a used Mountain Dew bottles. They are not discussing the latest scandal out of Washington, which broke perfectly that Friday afternoon. In time for the writers at SNL to change the cold open to cover it, soon enough that everyone heard it before fleeing the city, so that they could talk about it all weekend long and be ready for fresh gossip come Monday morning.

These guys, though. Spring hunting season's on their mind. It opens Monday. There's some grumbling about the trout-stocking schedule for local streams, too.

They eye Erich and Charlotte; assume that the two are brother and sister. Blond and blue-eyed and familiar as they are.

"Y'all goin' fishin'?" says the one with the mouthful of chewing tobacco, grinning a stained smile while Erich pays for gas and a bag of beef jerky. "Ain't stocked none of the lakes 'round here 'cept Spirit Lake. Cain't even get in ta Holly River."

Later, Erich will understand the question. Charlotte emerges from the small quick-mart not with the milk and eggs she meant to buy, but with the shops entire stock of NIGHTCRAWLERS, which are prominently advertised in a handwritten sign on the marquee below the price of gas.

It will be another hour, another hour and a half before they find a place that seems safe to pull off, set the parking break, and sleep. Snow is falling by now, fat, gray flakes that melt on the warm hood, but begin to accumulate on the rapidly cooling trunk.

"Where do you think she is, now?" Charlotte asks, watching the snow spiral downwards from a dark gray night sky. The question is rhetorical, but there is a plaintive shine to her voice. Before she can sleep, Charlotte has to set all the worms free first. Dash out into the woods, her teeth chattering, and dig little shallow holes for them with her toes and hands, upending the plastic contains into the cold earth, again and again and again until she has freed every last worm from its plastic prison. When she returns, she is shivering visible, her fingers bright red with cold, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright. She shifts gratefully into lupus, a small wolf the color of untouched snow glazed by moonlight, curls up in the back of the car, and sleeps.

Erich
Erich, of course, doesn't discourage the liberation of the earthworms. He personally thinks it's a little silly, but then so is sharing your birthday with one of your two bestest best friends in the whole world. He doesn't blame her for being silly. He imagines, despite being young and wild, Charlotte has had very little time to be silly.

So she frees the earthworms. And he helps, digging with his paws in his wolf-form, grinning up at her as she dumps them container by little container into the ground. He wonders if they'll survive this weather. He decides they will, because they must have come up out of this weather. When they're done they go back to the car, which is very small with two wolves and all their belongings inside. It's not worth it to juggle things from the back to the front to make more room, not when they'll be driving again come morning, and so

they both curl up in lupus. He is quite a bit larger than she is, with shaggy, thick, dappled grey-and-white fur that speaks of Fenrir breeding, but nothing that would really even ping a Silver Fang's radar. They sleep curled in opposite directions, but with their sides pressed together for security and warmth. It has been a very long time since Erich has slept with a packmate like this, and he is grateful for it.

In the morning the windows are fogged over, and there's ice on the windshield. Erich paws the doorhandle open, bounds out, and hikes a leg against the nearest tree trunk. When he comes back they dig around in that bag of snacks and find something that passes as food. A little later it's time to go again. She doesn't know how to drive, he's discovered. He promises he'll let her try when they hit the Great Plains. Has she ever seen the Great Plains? They're pretty ... flat, he says. Especially in Nebraska,

but then he changes the subject and starts telling her how they're actually pretty close to where he and Melantha went camping. A lot of rabbits in these woods, he says, sounding hungry. And so they pull over again, and wade into the woods, and snap into their wolf-forms.

It's the first time they hunt as a pack. It seems sweet and right, somehow, that they hunt food instead of wyrm. She harries and he intercepts, he chases and she cuts off, a snap of teeth, the kill. They feed together, gorging themselves hungrily on a small mammal that, in truth, barely qualifies as a midday snack for them. Afterward he's licking blood off his muzzle as he trots back to the car.

By midafternoon they're on the western slope of the Appalachians. The scenery is beautiful, so they stay off the interstates, veer close to the mountains. They ask each other where they think their friend is now, and they make up stories of the glamourous spy-movie escape Melantha must have made. They try not to think of those lurid, awful photos, the lurid, awful headlines. Blood on the tooth of the hunter, Erich thinks to himself. That's something he can understand.

Eventually they find the interstate again. It's the I-64, passing through Charleston. A different one from the one Charlotte must have seen at some point over her nineteen years. Erich asks her if she had a debutante ball, and he's only half-joking. They're starving again by then, though, so they find a little diner just west of town and pull over.

The waitress looks at him strangely when he makes his order: meat, meat, more meat. And ice cream. Charlotte's may or may not be any better. Tired from the drive, Erich stretches his legs out onto the opposite bench in their booth, leans back, and looks out the window at his Mustang.

"I'm thinking about getting a trailer or something," he reveals. "Like one of those classic Airstreams, you know? Let's stop by a library tomorrow or something and google it. Or maybe we can even find like a used RV salesman and look at a couple."

Charlotte
A lot of rabbits in these woods. Wild little things, tucked up in their burrows. Opossoms, shrews and voles, groundhogs and squirrels, muskrats, maybe too, pushing up their muddy-little mounds at the edge of forest pools. The pair catch the scent of a black bear that rumbled through the little valley two days before them. The spoor is old but still sharp with musk in the cold, bright morning air. Deer and badgers and field mice and squirrels and hawks, high up in the clear blue sky, circling on thermals. Once, the shadow of a bald eagle sweeps across the dappled valley floor as they harry out their prey. Vultures will come for what they leave behind; and coyote, too.

In another of the long north-south valleys on the western edge of the Appalachian front: wild turkeys, just visible in the verge, nesting in the thick tangle of mountain laurel at the forest's edge. The laurels are just coming into leaf, not yet into bud and bloom. They think about pulling off into the graveled shoulder and hunting again, but this road is a full two lanes, paved, curving off into the long morning shadows that edge the sweep of the valley. The field in almost full view of the road, the risk of exposure is far too high. So it's rumbling bellies and what remains of the dry food from the snack bag. Beef jerky for Erich, Reese's Puffs for Charlotte as the ridges of the Allegheny front descend into the deeply folded hills of the central Appalachian plateau.

Here the hills are so steep and narrow that - mid-fucking-summer - the valley floor might get direct sunlight from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Each one seems defined by a narrow creek, running silver through the tangle of opportunistic trees and scrub, and an equally narrow road, blacktopped but otherwise undefined. Here and there, make-shift suspension bridges cross the creek to the bottom land on the other side, where a cluster of rusting trailers blooming with plywood-and-siding additions sit, right in the floodplain. Everywhere green is beginning to intrude. Locals call these places hollers. Outsiders have no idea what the fuck the locals mean, but each one just seems too mean a place to be called anything so fanciful as a hollow.

The hills seem primeval, but the forests in which they hunt in the highlands, and through which they pass as they descend the western slopes are no more than a hundred or a hundred fifty years old. The pockets of old-growth Eastern hardwood forest are so few and far between - no more than a few hundred acres across the entirety of the Eastern seaboard. Even the most remote, serene shoulders of the most remote, serene Appalachian mountains were clear-cut in the 19th century. This is what comes, after.

Timberwolves used to roam here. And mountain lions, and great herds of elk. There were woodland bison lumbering through the folded valleys, mink and otters in the shallows of the swift-running rivers. All gone: left behind only as names: Panther Ridge. Elk River. Mink Shoals. Big Otter. Half-a-dozen towns named Buffalo.

No, Charlotte has never been to the Great Plains. Erich will let her drive when they get to flat land, where crashing means merely mowing down a line of winter wheat. Charlotte lifts both her blond eyebrows, flashing him a doubtful look. Unlike virtually every other teenager in history, she is perfectly okay with other people driving her around. A-okay. Hell, Erich has to show her how to answer her iPhone when it rings mid-afternoon. Then she holds it three or four inches away from her ear and sort of shouts into it, like an old woman who has to be careful about feedback from her hearing aid.

And she notices but does not remark upon the cleft in the conversation - the jump-shift from the plains of Nebraska to the night Erich and Melantha camped in the Appalachian mountains, somewhere nearby. There's more speculation, then. Where she might be, and what she might be doing. Right now. How strange the world is, that it goes on when our eyes aren't on it. All of these things happening in the lives of people we love, that we can never see.

--

And no, Charlotte never had a debutante ball. She gets that stiff, wary posture when he (half-joking) asks her about it, too. Her shoulders are forward, her head canted and still - posture just at the edge of songbird / raptor. Whatever she is, in that moment, she is hollow-boned and fragile.

It wasn't - , she starts to tell him, frown edging itself way between her pale brows. Then stops, and says, No. She hates balls, remember? They're stiff and stupid, full of false faces. People smiling when they want to show teeth. People showing teeth when they mean to smile, until it is impossible to know what is a threat and what an invitation. Cordelia and Theodosia will have one, but they're kin anyway. Charlotte, she's a wolf. Wolves aren't debutantes, Erich.

--

Maybe it's nothing. Maybe she was on edge from hunger, then. She's more pleasant after they've eaten, and gods she can eat, especially for such a skinny little thing.

Charleston just strings itself along, and endless parade of dumpy little weirdly-named town after dumpy-little weirdly-named town, which have grown together, merged into a chemical conglomerate. They're in a town called Nitro, which used to be so poisoned that a chemical scent enveloped you as you drove across the Kanawha River. That's mostly gone, but maybe Erich can still sense the irritation of it against his skin. The diner is local, serves down-home food and Coke products in waxed paper cups. The walls are plastered in kitchy, hillbilly themed merchandise. Charlotte eats biscuits and cornbread and home fries, but refuses foods-masquerading-as-other-foods, like chicken-fried-steak. Is it steak or chicken? Why is there that WHITE STUFF on it. For dessert, she has peanut butter pie, which has enough sugar in it to keep her going for hours. The hosts bring out something called the HOMEWRECKER for Erich. Which is a giant hamburger topped with a giant rasher of bacon and slices of giant hotdog and a giant slab of ham.

So Erich gets the homewrecker, minus the bun, the ketchup, the mustard, the cheese, the lettuce, and the onions, followed by ice cream.

Then leans back, says he's thinking about a trailer where they would have more room.

Charlotte, of course, has no idea what a classic airstream is. Maybe Erich shows her a picture of one on his phone, or hers. Like a magpie, she admires it, so sleek and gleaming, so neatly compact, a half-human den-on-wheels.

When they're leaving the diner Charlotte remembers something with an Oh! I forgot! and digs something out of the mysterious layers of her little messenger bag: an Amex card, in Eric (NO ATCH) 's name. Charles told her to give it to him. For emergencies. She forgot last night, she says with a little shrug. Erich is left to do with it as he pleases.

The next fifty or sixty miles are too populated, too developed for them to just pull off the road and find someplace to park the car and sleep in lupus, so they stop at twilight in some overbuilt suburb full of McMansions and fast-food places and rent a cheap motel room. The parking lot full of tractor trailers, the rooms full of all the oddments of the American highways. Sometimes whole families renting a single room, not by the day but by the week. Their doors open, children scampering up and down the concrete tarmac, laughing and barefoot despite the cold and the broken glass glittering everywhere. Laundry drying on the scrubby boxwoods that serve as landscaping, a prostitute leaning against one of the wood columns supporting the second story walkway, eyeing the trucks as they turn into the parking lot, the flare of their headlights brilliant against the scratched and fogged over windows.

Charlotte is delighted only by the MAGIC FINGERS on the doublebeds in the room. The mattress is lumpy and gross and she fusses, doesn't want to bring in her pillow to touch the mattress and in the end she sleeps in the middle of the sheets in lupus, nose tucked under her tail, the curtains drawn tightly across the windows. Maybe they should've gone to the Greenbrier, instead.

Somewhere at the heart of that ugly suburban landscape is a charming little town bisected by train tracks. The next day, they find the Hurricane town library and Erich shows Charlotte what 'google' is and that 'google' lives on her phone, too, when she has bars or Wifi. When there are invisible waves spreading google stuff through the air. Charlotte gets a shivering, spidery feeling when she thinks about the invisible waves and comes to the conclusion that perhaps her mother - who swallows her paranoia about modern technology beneath an icy sea of propriety, but ruthlessly excises as much of it as she can from the lives of her children and family - isn't crazy after all. It makes her think about Melantha, who told Charlotte that crazy isn't necessarily crazy. It just is.

So Charlotte asks Erich where he thinks Melantha is now and they make up someplace lovely and wild and they look for an RV place on their way out of town.

This time they go south rather than west. Down into the southern Appalachians, where the roads disappear again among the thick hills and they can 'camp' the next night in the Mustang on some deserted road, without much fear of discovery.

They're deep in the coalfields, now. The few towns they pass through are old and brick and gutted from population loss. By afternoon, they cross the Big Sandy River into Kentucky. The hills and landscape don't really change. These are still the coalfields. That night, they camp again. Some deserted road up a holler, which dead-ends at an abandoned clapboard home, the windows gone, weeds grown up all around it. This time dinner is a campfire and hot dogs roasted on sticks over it. Erich picked up marshmallows at the little grocery, just so Charlotte could try them burnt crispy and oozing. She's never had Smores, but the store didn't have graham crackers so marshmallows will do.

The cold creeps in with the darkness, so they sleep in the car, the same way they did the first night. This time, though, the night is not uninterrupted. The holler is too narrow to track the progress of the moon across more than a sliver of the sky, but it is sometime after midnight, in the hollow part of the night when the nightthings have slunk back to their burrows, before the earliest of early birds have started to sing.

Erich wakes first, something in the underbrush pulling him to consciousness. The sweep of a flashlight in the woods outside the Mustang, the low, tidal rhythm of hushed conversation. Maybe he wakes Charlotte with a nip or a low warning growl, and the first thing on his mind is discovery, the Veil, ready to snapshift back to humanskin, but Charlotte wakes, huffs a breath in, thumps her tail quietly against him and snaps a quiet, one-word warning.
 
Wyrm.

Erich
RV "shopping" takes them the entire morning. They're all so awesome. Erich is all but running from one to the next, climbing into the sleeping lofts of the smaller, van-chassis ones; pushing out the sides and unrolling the sunshades on the big, bus-chassis ones. They marvel over the satellite dishes, the TVs, the showers and the kitchenettes and the big, comfortable, infinitely adjustable captain's chairs. They spend so long there that none of the salesmen have even the faintest illusion of their ever meaning to buy anything, though no one tells them to get lost, either. No one, frankly, dares.

They do leave, eventually. It's nearly one in the afternoon then, and as they're driving away from that magical lot full of magical transforming house-cars, Erich bats his sunshade down against the glare and says,

Well, that was fun, but totally unaffordable.

So it's back to the drawing board on that idea. And the truth is over the next several days he'll mull over cranky, falling-apart old RVs; he'll look at ancient ratty conversion vans; he'll look at the iconic VW campers; he'll consider some sort of large tent; he'll even consider buying some sort of hitch-trailer and sawing windows into the sides before he'll finally stumble onto a website full of the most awesome tiny houses-on-wheels ever.


But that's in the future. Tonight, they're still sleeping the way they did that first night: curled up in the back of the Mustang, noses tucked into thick tails, like sled dogs in the snow. Or well. That's how they started. By now Erich has entirely stretched out -- is sprawling on his side crosswise in the back, his head wedged against the side of one of his dufflebags. Something, some sweep of a flashlight or crack of a footstep just out-of-the-norm enough to ping on his subconscious, pulls him out of sleep. He lifts his head, eyes gleaming in the darkness, ears up and swiveling. The warning growl doesn't make it out of his throat; it's a rumble in his ribcage where he's pressed against his packmate. He's turning onto all fours, preparing to shift, when her tail thumps him and she warns him back:

Wyrm.

His ears fold back. This time the growl is low but audible, raising the hackles on his back. He wiggles past her, all the way to the very cramped back of the Mustang, his paws scratching at the hull several clumsy times before two claws manage to catch on the mandatory safety-release handle on the inside. This more than anything tells Charlotte just how long he's been alone and how used to it he's grown: he doesn't so much as whuff to see if she's ready before he simply yanks the catch, rises smoothly and suddenly to all fours, pushes the hatch open on his back and

leaps out of it, hitting the ground one shape and several sizes larger, snarling.

Charlotte
The muffled conversation is more immediate and more distinct as soon as the the hatch sweeps open. The night noises are few at this hour; and more than that, whatever animals might have been discovered in the darkness have deserted this particular stretch of woods by now. Even the insects are silent. There's just the call of a Chuck Will's Widow haunting the air and the snap of uncareful feet in the brush.

Which stops as soon as the hatch pops open, and the wolf emerges, growing into something monstrous and prehistoric and full of inherent, immediate threat. Erich has the impression of three or four men as indistinct shapes in the darkness. He catches their scents - the sourness of their body odor, stale clothes, acrid tobacco spit out in a long stream, cheap bear and cheaper meat, gristle and blood. The dull, oiled immediacy of a well-cared for weapon.

(Behind him, too: the scuff of movement. Charlotte worming about through the car, finding the strap of her messenger bag, nosing her way through the path he made, a dull thump-thump as she drags her little bag-o-tricks behind her. It's dedicated, but she doesn't sleep with it tattooed into her skin.)

If these were ordinary rednecks, out in the woods beneath a waxing moon, with booze and guns, hoping to roust a couple of strangers, lovebirds maybe, from the den of their car parked way up this hollowed, tainted only tangentially by the deep thrust of the mines snaking underneath the slattern mountains, by the acid drainage from the mines, the seep of taint into their drinking water, their fast foods, their cheap tobacco, they would turn, right now.

Turn and break and run. They'd have stories in the morning about a frickin' cougar in the woods up above Scarey Creek, a lion escaped from some hippie fuckin' sanctuary. Like that damned weirdo in Steubenville who kept a menagarie, then killed hisself and loosed all these exotic predators on the woods around him.

They are not, though. Taint grows like cancer cells, metasticizes, crowds out whatever remained that was human, that remembered anything but a sort of virulent hunger to spread their sickness to the world.

The biggest one steps forward, into the clearing, just to the left of the ivy-colored ruins of an outbuilding. He is huge, fat, greasy jeans sliding down a hair beer-belly, smiling a sudden, viscious kind of smile, which is missing at least half of its teeth. Shotgun in one hand.

Can of beer in the other.

And a third hand, empty, growing flaccid and useless out of the middle of his chest.

There's a weird growth on his neck, too, bulging like a goiter gone untreated. Another step or two, he cracks his head, side to side, loosening the joints of his spine and that - bulge - reveals itself as a second, vestigal head. The second mouth a dark slash, full of needle teeth and a fat, lolling tongue he does not bother to try to hide.

Erich-wolf's eyes are gleaming, adjusting to the darkness. He senses the others spreading out, a bit behind the big one, a sort of semi-circle. One of them curses, shit, low. Taken aback. Hisses to the others that they oughta git back, go git - and there's a sort of murmuring hesitation to the rest of the group as the snarl, the size, the immediacy of what is before them registers fully.

But Tiny's already ambling forward another step, grinning that crazy grin. "The fuck do we have here." With both mouths.

Erich
The fuck do we have here indeed. Erich-wolf's teeth are bared, and they are huge and curving as daggers. His growl explodes into a short, coughing bark, a sort of retort to that taunt. He keeps his back to the car, his tail waving low and tense, side to side, side to side. His ears flick. Swivel. Hunt for sounds in the night, for numbers, for positions, for morale amongst the enemy. Which ones were swaggering. Which ones were flagging.

His eyes stay on the big one, though -- the clear Alpha of this twisted little pack. Those eyes are pale and clear in the night, almost colorless, glaring. And the truth is, he's never hunted with Charlotte before. Not just the two of them. He doesn't have her measure, doesn't know her capabilities; doesn't know how much he'll have to protect her, or what she'll throw into the mix. He wants to glance over his shoulder at the much smaller wolf, but

he doesn't dare take his eyes from Tiny.

A low chuff will have to do. A communication: We stay close to car. Together. Let them come to us. Not be surrounded.

Charlotte
The movement in the trees stops cold as the growl explodes into that coughing bark. The sudden eruption of sound freezes the group, disrupts that knit-and-honed familiarity of movement. The two stragglers of the group remain in the woods, behind the treeline. Uneasy and unsure. The rest pause in their spreading half-circle. Three more figures visible now at the edge of the wood. One more with a shotgun to match Tiny's - the most normal looking of the group. Another has a hunched back and yellowing skin and a machete in hand. The third carries a compound bow. The left side of his face is normal. The right side has been melted into a slagpile of concentric rings of ruined flesh, a topographical map made of human skin.

The dull wuff of breath from Charlotte-wolf's lungs as she hits the soft, trampled grass beside him. Then a thud. The fucking bag pulled off the tailgate behind her, hitting the ground.

Tiny opens both mouths. "Now that," he says, all posturing swagger, the sort that can put some backbone into his followers. Remind them that they are on their own ground. That they outnumber these wolves. That one of the damned wolves is dragging around its luggage. " - is fuckin' comical."

His voice rises, seems now to come more from the vestigial head than from his own mouth. They are moving out of time, the mouths. "Y'see that Cooter?" says the one mouth. Something in the reaction of the followers suggests that Cooter is one of the men in the woods, not yet committed to the fight. The bowman glances at machete, then cuts a look over his right shoulder, something moving in his ruined eye socket as does so. "Ain't that some comical shit right there!"

They are too far away, it is too dark, and they are too lupine to lip-read human language. But the other mouth, the real mouth, is now saying, again and again and again a single word. Run. Impossible to tell whether it is a plea or a prayer.


He chuffs instructions to Charlotte-wolf as she hits the ground beside him. Can sense her changing, too. Her tail hits his shank, just once, acknowledgment of her awareness of his instructions. They don't have the luxury of more.

Her shadow lengthens beside him. She goes upright - two legged, warformed. The posturing exchange buys her time to reach Crinos.

"The bitch brought its purse!" Crows Tiny's second mouth, spraying bloody spittle into the air, laughing in a high-pitched, hyena bray that pulls an uneasy chorus of laughter from the group behind him.

Erich-wolf's instincts are right. Tiny is the key; if he took his eyes off the big, twisted, greasy bastard for a split second Tiny'd raise that shotgun and spray them with buckshot. Or charge, all slavering swagger, drawing the rest after him like an inexorable tide. And Tiny is the only one so twisted, or foolish, or badass to think that wolves are his prey. That's the purpose of this display, this back and forth, this show of bravado. To strengthen the spines of the things behind him. To pull them forward, to call out their arrogance, their hunger, their bloodlust.

"And a fuckin' slingshot." Both mouths are moving in concert again. The resonance of Tiny's voice deepens with the re-union. His real mouth twists in a pulled smirk, but no matter how non-threatening he finds the slingshot, he's hitching the shotgun up to his side. Dropping the can of beer to free up a hand. Now that, that pisses him off. "I'm real fuckin' scared."

Erich-wolf cannot see what his packmate is doing beside him. Thank god Tiny is the vocal sort. There is a seized, hazy moment as Tiny is lifting the shotgun and the bowman is coming back to his bow and the pistol-guy looks uncertainly sideways at Tiny, back into the woods. The machete guy opens his mouth so wide he could swallow a yearling lamb whole. Flicks a forked tongue.

The faintest ping, as the Crinos launches something small into the air. It goes flying over Tiny's head. Lands, harmlessly, a foot to two behind him, close to the loose center of the group.

"Badasses my - " Tiny is scoffing now, as he levels his shotgun and blasts both barrels. The bowman has already loosed his first arrow at the Crinos, and is reaching for a second when -

that harmless little missle nestled in the grass in the midst of the group explodes. And the world goes red.

Erich
The twisted men aren't the only ones caught by surprise when Charlotte's harmless little missile Hiroshimas the fuck out. Erich-wolf -- whose forepaws were lifting from the ground, whose hindpaws were launching him into a leap right in the face of that shotgun blast to rip that fucker's face off, both of them --

lets out an undignified, startled yelp as the world quite literally blows up in his face. A livid fireball belches out from that previously miniscule pebble. It singes the tips of his fur, stings his eyes, blows him back against the open trunk of the Mustang. It does much worse than that to the fomori: the guy with the machete is on fire, shrieking, rolling on the ground, while the bowman's arrow goes wide because he

is also on the ground, flat on his face, his hands over his head like maybe once upon a time he was in some war, he was shellshocked, he came home and then there was a recession and there were no jobs and things just spiraled down until

he ended

here.


They all have sob stories, don't they? Even Tiny, with his real mouth silently sobbing runrunrun while that second, twisted mouth leers and jeers and eggs them all on. They all have sob stories, and maybe there are times when Erich cares and Erich feels bad, but that time is not now. There is no room for pity in battle, not for an Ahroun, to whom pity is akin to mercy, and therefore weakness. He is not weak. No.

He hits the Mustang with his side. Then he hits the ground on all fours, and the moment his paws touch he's wheeling about. That blast from Tiny's shotgun caught him in the chest, but his fur is thick and his hide is thick and the truth is he barely felt it in the wake of that explosion. There's no room for cataloging damage in battle, either. That comes later. Now: now, he wheels, he leaps, he's snarling horribly when he lands square on Tiny's chest, knocks the big man backwards. He's clearly forgotten his own suggestion: stay together, let them come. He's forgotten and he's fells his prey and he's savaging him now, snarling, roaring, biting and grabbing and shaking until things tear and snap loose.

Machete man has stopped moving. He's a charred mess. The other guy with the shotgun wavers, unsure, wanting to run, but then the bowman whips an arrow from his quiver, nocks it, pulls it back in the same motion. He's standing so close to Erich-wolf that when he looses the arrow

the impact knocks even that enormous direwolf into a sideways stumble. The shaft buries itself almost to the feathers. Erich-wolf roars in pain and outrage, and encouraged, the other shotgun-toting fellow raises his barrels and: BLAM, this one knocks Erich-wolf entirely off his feet, sideways.

Tiny's not quite dead. He's mangled, he's spurting blood and coughing it up, but he somehow sits up and that second mouth is still talking: "GIT EM, GIT EM, GIT EM." His friend pumps his shotgun, stomping after Erich-wolf who's limping back to his feet, and the bowman is nocking another arrow when --

Charlotte-wolf, forgotten by the others; Charlotte-wolf, who does have savagery in her after all, does have wildness and rage in her after all -- lunges, swipes, claws the slagpile half of his face off. The bowman shrieks. He whips around and he looses the arrow and it punches through her left lung, but she's whipping out with her other claws. There goes his bow, smashed to smithereens. There goes his quiver. There goes the other half of his face. He drops.

The shotgun BLAMs again. Shot pings off asphalt, trees. Erich-wolf rolls on instinct, avoids the worst of the blast. He comes up snarling. Tiny is wavering, one hand pressed to the ground, one hand flopping uselessly, one hand lifting the wavering muzzle of his shotgun, going for another shot. The Ahroun corners hard, his claws grappling for purchase. When he leaps, he leaves a spatter of blood behind him, but his aim is true, and the second gunman is still pumping the action when Erich-wolf

basically

eats his head.


Then there's just Tiny. An epilogue of sorts. Who is still screaming, cursing, calling them all manner of horrible names. The shotgun tries to point. Erich-wolf, advancing on heavy paws, bats it aside with a short, impatient growl. Tiny tries to punch him -- last ditch efforts now, points for not giving up -- but Erich intercepts that, too. With his teeth. Tiny howls: Erich-wolf bites down, digs his paws in for purchase, those heavy muscles in his neck and shoulders bunch, he tears, it's brutal and it's hard to watch and half of Tiny's shoulder comes off with the arm. There's blood everywhere. The Ahroun drops the mangled limb and plants a paw on Tiny's chest, pushing him down.

The one mouth -- not the cursing, spitting one but the other one -- whispers something. Might be thank you. Might be please stop. Erich doesn't see it: he tears

Tiny's throat out.


Quiet then. Erich-wolf's tongue lapping at his bloody muzzle, his eyes gleaming in the dark. They need to clean up, but he's not very good at this, and there are no convenient dumpsters to dump into, no convenient lakes to fill. He sniffs in Charlotte-wolf's direction.

"Fire-talen?"

Charlotte
Charlotte-wolf is still standing tall, resplendent in Crinos - white furred, silver limned when the fickle waxing moon deigns to shine down upon them. The glory of her fine breeding in perfect display. There's still an arrow punched through her chest, crimson spatter her lovely white fur, scrap of viscera clinging to her claws which she shakes off with the comic intensity of a cat trying to rid itself of an offending piece of scotch tape. Her chest rattles with every breath she takes, and a tinge of bloodied froth dampens her muzzle from the collapsed lung, but she does not seem to notice or feel her wounds. Not yet. Not for a while, yet.

Fire tooth talen.

- she clarifies, with a great big, rather endearing shake of her wedge-shaped head, which is much more specifically Charlotte than it is glory-of-a-Silver-Fang-in-Crinos-under-the-moon. She'll tell him more about that later, when she's human-shaped and can chatter. That it is something the Red Talons make, and she had to knock out a tooth to make it. It grew back but it still hurt and it's hard to pull out your own teeth, and firespirits are fickle, edgy things that just want to BURN STUFF RIGHT NOW which includes theurges if theurges aren't quick and sharp and wary and ready with distractions. She's trying to make something else too, with vines, that'll explode and entangle their enemies, but that's harder. She doesn't know exactly what sort of vines work best and anyway, things that are rooted are weird and alien and very hard to fathom. They don't like moving about, they can't necessarily come when you call, so she has to seek them out rather than call them to her. Most woods cannot move like Dunsinane.

Now, though - Charlotte-wolf lumbers over the distance between them, circles Erich-wolf, inspecting his wounds. The fletching of the arrow buried deep in his side. There are other arrows, spilled and broken from the quiver, scattered over the blood-stained and trampled ground. Hooked and cruelly barbed, she sees, to that they will do as much damage, more damage, coming out than going in.

The truth is, Erich-wolf looks wrecked. Hard to tell how much of that blood is his and how much belongs to his enemies, but he has taken the brunt of two shotgun blasts and been skewered by a barbed arrow.

Her ears flick with consideration; then she makes a decision, closing her eyes and opening herself to her ancestors. Somehow, Charlotte-wolf is different when she re-opens her pale blue eyes. More settled, older, wiser, more finely drawn. It is Erich's first introduction to Coeur d'Hiver, and it is almost wholly silent. She assesses him, directs him to shift, to lupus, then shoves the arrow through his flank until the arrowhead has punched through the other side and she can break it off. Then she pulls the shaft back through the wound, and - finally - heals him. They will have to do same with the arrow in her chest; Erich if he can handle it. If not, Charlotte (or, to be fair, the ancestor riding her skin tonight - who moves with a delicacy, a prim and primal grace Charlotte herself has never shown) needs must do it herself.

Melantha
There are still places you can go in the United States where there are no roads.  There are places that are too hard to get to when you rely on wheels to take you everywhere you want to go.  There are places, though they are shrinking, where you cannot see wires overhead when you look up.  Only stars.

In the southeastern corner of Oregon, the Great Basin is a little wetter than it is elsewhere.  When the sun goes down, the temperature plummets.  Even in summer, the nights are chilly.  Rain falls from higher up and flows toward narrow stripes of green in the valleys.  Snow stays on higher peaks well into the warmer months.

The sisters hunt antelope and other beasts in the refuges to the west and southwest.  Their reach extends down into Reno and, occasionally, all the way over to Salt Lake City.  They are allies to the wolves in central Montana as well as Mt. Rainier.  Most of the women here, Garou or Kin, are used to this type of living.  Some of them come from religious compounds.  Some from hippie communes.  There is a rhythm to life here.  Sunrise means it's time to wake.  Sunset means it's time to sleep.  Sometimes those are reversed, particularly for the more nocturnal sisters.  There is no electricity here.  There is no plumbing.  Everyone works.  Everyone trains.

Shelter is always a problem.  Those that can sleep in fur do so outside , usually without a fire, even in the coldest winter.  Those that need it build what they can however they can, low-ceilinged shelters that they share with several others and camouflage carefully.  They used to have shacks and the like, but there are satellites now.  There's Google Earth.  There used to be a time when no planes ever flew overhead.  There used to be a time when you could climb high, look out, and not see the landscape lit up in orange and yellow and white and red in all directions, forever, forever, forever.

Every year they watch the lights come closer.  Every year they watch their territory shrink, their safety tremble.  After a year of this life, with its pain and beauty and loneliness and freedom, it is hard to judge the sisters who pray for the death of mankind, who sacrifice wine and love and songs to Gaia, pleading for strength to the Wyld, even if that strength means chaos and agony.

That rhythm, the daily life under the sun and under the moon, does falter and break.  Sometimes it is discordant, and that is at times terrifying and joyful.  These women still run in the hills, shrieking and cutting themselves, tearing apart anything they find.  They pour wine onto stone and into the sky and let it rain back down on them.  They harry any backpacking or traveling humans out of their land, sometimes with nothing but howls, sometimes with the Delirium itself.  They are mad and holy, and for them, there is no difference between grief and glory.

Melantha came here when she was a little girl.  And it's her home.

--

Out on the Great Plains, Erich and Charlotte make up stories of her super-spy escape from D.C.  They eat small mammals that they harried and snapped, licking blood from their muzzles.  They drive, and drive, and drive, asking each other: where do you think she is right now?  what do you think she's doing?
 
The Saturday Night Live sketch with Cecily Strong playing the mysterious teenaged mistress Celia de Luca had the actress in pigtails and a schoolgirl outfit, just like in the photos.  They got a huge laugh at her exaggerated tonguing of a lollipop while Jason Sudeikis, as Jack, tried to get his colleagues to believe she's his niece.  Erich and Charlotte didn't see it.  Neither did Melantha.

She would understand Charlotte better than Erich -- and Erich does understand her -- when they talk about debutante balls.  She would understand Erich better than Charlotte -- and Charlotte does understand him -- when he shifts so quickly from talking about Nebraska to something else, anything else.

They are traveling by car from Washington to Oregon, but they are not taking a meandering path.  The drivers trade off, including Melantha.  She keeps thinking about Erich and Charlotte.  This isn't the first time she's returned to the clefts and shadows of her home after one of these 'missions'.  But it's the first time that she really feels like she's leaving something behind.

Something that matters, at least.  The clothes and cards and the phone Jack got her don't matter.  The phone with all those adorable text messages between her and Erich is gone, too.  No more less-than-threes.  The SIM card snapped, the phone crushed under Duck's expert heel and tossed into a dumpster in West Virginia.  She has the bead, though.  She sleeps with it around her neck instead of her wrist.  Against her skin.  Sometimes she holds it.

Her friends imagine her someplace lovely and wild while she sleeps in a snatches in the back seat of a car, earning cricks in her neck and shoulder, holding onto a little bright-eyed pigeon.  She dreams of them.  One at a time.  Then together.  All three dreams are different.  They all comfort her, and they all break her heart when she wakes.

--

They get to Oregon in four days.  There's a stop in Chicago to drop off Veronica, who has other work to do for the tribe in one more sinful city.  But then Melantha and Duck and Damaris get back on I-80 and drive west, and west, and west.  They opt for speed over almost every other concern.  No one is exactly starting a nationwide hunt for some slut just to ask her what sort of underwear the Senator wears.  They do not stop for sight-seeing.  They hardly even stop for meals.  They certainly don't stop for sleep, not with three drivers and an ample backseat.  They just want to get her home.  Get her clean.  Wash the city off, wash the mission off.

No one complains.  No one whines.  The back seat of that car is a more comfortable bed than most of them are used to.  Even Melantha, who spent the last several months in one of the finest hotels in the country, finds a strange comfort in hardships.

They pass through Nebraska and Melantha stares out the window, thinking of Erich.  His sister.  His family threatening to kill him.  She closes her eyes, forehead to glass, because thinking of Erich makes her heart hurt.  She thinks of Charlotte and wonders how it all went over: her leaving.  Was she able to leave?  If she wasn't, if something stopped her, Erich had better still be there with her.  She'll murder him if he left her back there with that weird, stifling brother.  If she sees him again and she doesn't see Charlotte and she can't hold her and smell her and feel those fragile bones, that delicate skin, she will hit him until her arm falls off.

From the driver's seat, Duck hears Melantha sniff moisture from her sinus cavities.  He glances sidelong at her as she flicks her fingertips under her lower lashes, wiping away tears.  He has seen her cry before.  Just not when they're taking her home, usually.  He doesn't say anything.

--

Her first night back in the commune, it's just her and Damaris now.  They left him to the towns and the lowlands and went off with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the talen around Melantha's neck.  They hike for hours.  It's a warm day and the sun darkens their olive-toned skin that much more as the climb and weave their way through the trees.  They have no water with them and Melantha feels dizzy, but she's felt this before and she knows how far they are from succor.  She does not complain.  She never complains.

When the sisters welcome them back, it is the first time in the past few days that she has not felt the grief of leaving Erich and Charlotte.  She knows that reprieve won't last very long, but it lasts as long as it lasts, and she is grateful to Luna for the mercy.  They are given clear water from raincatchers.  It isn't very cold but it doesn't need to be to cool them.  A smiling sister rubs salve on Melantha's burnt nose, and kisses her in amusement when she wrinkles her nose at the smell of it.  Night is falling, and it's time for another hike, this time to a reservoir.

The water is deep.  The water is cold.  But in most other ways it's nearly indistinguishable from a lake.  The sides are not made from steep, un-climbable concrete.  They strip.  All of them.  Damaris, Melantha, every sister who was awake and not engaged otherwise and several who were.  They hike together in the dark and they take off all their clothes and they go into that icy water.  Some of them run.  Some slowly ease into it.  Some shapeshift and tread water in four paws.  Competitions stir up almost instantly: who can go the deepest, who can hold their breath the longest, who goes out the farthest.  Some stand closer to 'shore' and hold others by the ankles and armpits, swinging them out to fall splashing and shrieking into the night-dark water.

For her part, Melantha doesn't play.  She washes, scrubbing her scalp and her skin and keeping herself warm merely by the eagerness with which she gets clean.  She doesn't play partly because she isn't in the mood, partly because she doesn't want to lose the tightly-tied bird bead.  It won't be much help if it drops however-far to the bottom of a reservoir.  It would be disastrous if someone accidentally broke it.  Especially for Erich.  There's no amount of vouching for him that will make him welcome here.  Even Charlotte would be a stretch.

They bathe and they swim and they nearly freeze to death and leave the water shivering, laughing, embracing.  Almost everyone who comes near her hugs Melantha, some of them tighter than others.  She is kissed and she is blessed and even those who hate what she does, who think it undermines the purpose of the tribe, they all welcome her back.  She is their sister.  And you don't always have to like what your sister does to love her.  You don't have to agree with her to respect her.

They trudge back, in varying degrees of nudity, some of them on four legs, several of them in fur.  Some of them are dry by the time they get back, and others have not shaved their head or don't wear it short, so they're still quite wet.  Melantha goes to Damaris's shelter, which is one of the more permanent ones and roomier ones, as it is often shared with girls like Melantha.  The ground is covered with woven mats and the ground is hard and unforgiving and Melantha falls asleep before her eyes are fully closed.

In her dream, Charlotte is laughing, and rubbing aloe -- just normal aloe -- on her nose and shoulders.  And Charlotte kisses her, lays her head on Melantha's shoulder, and talks to her in what Melantha's dreaming mind decides is French.  And then Erich is there, and Erich kisses her and it is an entirely different kind of kiss, and then he lays his head on her other shoulder.  They are both wolves.  They keep her in the middle and they keep her very warm with their thick fur,

snow-white and iron-grey.