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.