HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK.

salvation.

[1. There is no post order, but please post only once for each post I make unless I indicate otherwise.

2. Post in 15 minutes or less, and declare/roll in 2 minutes or less. "In 15 minutes" means 15 minutes from my post, not the last player to post before you. If you miss your roll it will be skipped. In character this means it automatically fails. And that kinda sucks. :[

3. You are free to multi-task, so long as you can abide by the above strictures. If you repeatedly miss 'deadlines' or are unresponsive in the scene chat, I will ask you to excuse yourself from this scene (or the other) out of respect for my time and the time of our fellow players.

4. This is a very low-risk scene both psychologically and physically.

5. Please PM me now with personal phobias, triggers, or off-limits themes (if none, no need to tell me 'none'). If you're uncomfortable with anything in the scene, IM me once (outside of the chat). If you become uncomfortable/distressed due to content in the scene and need to immediately leave, please IM or email me as soon as you are able to let me know. I don't actually enjoy upsetting my players. Just their characters.

6. Please PM me now with any relevant merits/flaws/traits I should be aware of. If none, no need to tell me 'none'.

7. Keep track of your own health and tempers. Ain't nobody got time for that. Except you. What I mean is: I do not have time for that.

8. Ask questions in the AIM chat. If I don't answer after 2-3 minutes, ping me once in PMs here. In review: AIM chat for chatter and questions, IMs for personal distress, Jove PMs for questions I have not answered within a few minutes.

9. Don't be a dick.

10. Don't forget to be awesome.]

Erich

[erich has no merits or flaws :| ]

salvation.

When the sun set today, it blazed through the freshly renewed boughs of the trees, a baleful red circle both drawing and repelling the eye. Everything in sight was cast in a heavy crimson glow, the edges gilded with flaming orange. There seemed to be no break between the edge of the sun and the lines where branches and leaves should be; the world went silent for this sunset, though it flinched with dread.

When the heat grows too searing to bear, you go north. When the itch of summer's heat makes the skin crawl, you go north. You begin heading that way without quite understanding why or how; you find yourself knowing deep into the journey that you will never make it far enough to escape the heat. It seems that a great deal of time has passed, leaving you in autumn now. The leaves here are enormous: veiny orange and brown things the size of the trees they should have come from, standing tall and straight from yellowed grass, fluttering in wind that should be cold but is only hot, dry, and unforgiving.

You have been walking for -- you do not know how long. From where, you do not know, or why. There are people alongside you: three others. You do not know them, or their names. You realize: you do not know your own name. You think, looking upon the forest ahead, that there was a wall before, a low one, maybe around a portico or veranda. You're not sure. It was stone, you think. You're not sure. The sunset was red and unmerciful; you came north, and now the grass is yellow underfoot, there are leaves the size of trees, and you are with strangers and you do not know how long you have been walking with them, or they with you.

You know this: go north. You know this: you are with strangers. You know this: you are a werewolf, and your skin and bones will change shape around you, but you do not know for what purpose. You know this the way that perhaps an ant knows it is an ant, a dog knows it is a dog, a bird knows it is a bird. There is no need to question it, no need for cumbersome mythology. You are a mammal, and this is the type of mammal you are. You know that leaves are not usually that large, even if you do not know if every sunset is always so red, so disquieting, or just the one you remember.

You know that it is night now, the sky darkened, the stars and moon above. You like the moon. You do not know why, but even as thin as it is, the sight of it fills you at once with hopeful joy and maddening anger that itches at the back of your mind. You like the moon very much.

You think: the moon likes me, too.

Hector

When the sun set today this one thought he had plenty of reason to stay where he was. Now the heat sinks into his fur and it can't roll off his tongue fast enough to cool the rest of him but he does not stop. If he had stopped he would not be here.

He accepts the strangers as he accepts the heat and the leaves and the yellow grass. This is nothing more than what it is. He knows that dark speckled through with light means the moon is here.

Part of this one wants to run to catch up with the beckoning north. He has been walking with the others this long. He does not hasten to leave them yet.

He sniffs the grass and when he's done he lifts his muzzle to the night air. Maybe it will tell him something.

Charlotte

Oh, she's a rare thing. A rare rare thing, fine and pale as that slivered moon she loves so well, nothing like that the baleful light of that setting sun, those too-large leaves. The wall and the sun and the wall and the trees had an ancient sort of familiarity, see. She can taste them, somehow, on or beneath her tongue. Belongs in places like this, even if she does not know what this place is or where it might be, or that there are other places like this: any of it. Walls though, walls and grounds that are groomed, with sweeping views, well ordered though not - never - tamed.

Listen: a pale girl, slender and finely made given weight by the many imperatives and attachments of her blood is among the quartet.

She is wearing her girl-skin and this she does not mind. She can feel her wolf-skin beneath her girl-skin and this she does not mind either.

Somehow she is both aware of this mindlessness and aware of it as a relief right? A letting-go. She remembers so little she has forgotten even her madness,

and glances at the stranges who are human-strangers and wolf-strangers and says,

"Hello." Smiles, see? How strange it is to speak.

She likes it, though not so well as the moon. "I want to follow her," the moon, the girl means, with a lilting glance upwards through the too-large leaves to the slivered moon in the darkling sky. " - I wonder where she sleeps."

Keisha

She is walking along in two legs, because that is how Keisha normally walks. Her staff at her side, her sandals on her feet and a simple green sarong dress covering her. She doesn't know why she's walking this way or who she's walking with, and perhaps that sudden realization when it hits (whyever it hits) troubles her, because she stops and frowns. Her attention turns to the moon, who she likes and who likes her, and then around to the other strangers. Her hands grip the wood of her staff and then she realizes that she has a staff. She looks at it, examines the carvings that she began on it upon making her new one (which she doesn't remember she had an old one).

She looks to the wolf, the woman and the other, and takes a breath. She nods, smiles a little. "Hello. Do any of us know who we are?"

Because it's a valid question. And as she asks, she's walking again, heading northward where they want to go.

Erich

Amongst their number is a boy who walks beside the girl. He is very different from her, broad where she is slender, strong where she is fine, golden and ruddy where she is silver and white. Something about them is nonetheless similar, as though they were two shoots off the same root; hybrid stalks grafted to the same stem.

It does not bother him very much that he does not know who he is or where he is or why he is. He is, and this is enough for him. As they walk the heat of the day begins to fall away, layer by layer. He looks at the moon and smiles, because he likes the moon very much, because the moon likes him too.

The silver girl speaks: he turns to look at her, his smile widening. "Me too," he agrees, and then:

the other girl speaks, the one who is not silver and white but amber and brown. There is one other in their quartet, another boy, another who is dusky and dark. The boy looks around at the four of them and he sees that he is the largest, and he thinks this must mean he is strongest, and he thinks this must mean he is to protect the others. Of course. That makes sense.

He turns to the dark girl; he seems puzzled and a little amused.

"What a strange question. We are us and we follow the moon."

salvation.

They know things about themselves. Or feel them, like a pulse that one doesn't notice until you touch your wrist, your throat: the willingness to go into the unknown, and permit the unknown, and keep the unknown's secrets with it if necessary. The call of kingship, how easy it is to be the first to say this is what I want to do. The urge to protect. They feel themselves, their own humor and their own passion, but they are like half-buried boxes, and you are not sure what is inside.

A small dark spot from the sky grows larger, growing closer, and then grows wings, and alights on Erich's shoulder. It is a bird. You know it is a bird, and even: a pigeon. You are a werewolf and that is a pigeon. It has eyes as bright as gemstones, as smooth as riverstones. It hops a bit, and coos, and flutters its wings, then pushes off and circles, flying to Charlotte, working its beak in her hair. And this pigeon is known to the two of them, and is as much a friend as the moon is, but it has no name. Perhaps it never has.

Perhaps they never have.

Up ahead, dark-furred creature, there is a gate. Only a gate, standing between two stone posts. The gate is wrought, and rusted. The stone posts are covered in signs. You can read them: KEEP OUT. NO TRESSPASSING. and so on. You know what those words mean. And you know how strange they are, because to either side of the stone posts there is no fence, no wall. The gate is chained shut. You know this, now:

THIS IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD. BUT THE GATE DOESN'T WANT YOU TO GO THROUGH.

Keisha

She frowns at Hector; no, not even frowns. She scowls a little bit. It's a rebuke, even if light-hearted, and this is not the Keisha who is calm and gentle. That Keisha was gained through certain experiences, and she doesn't have those. She has no knowledge that she's "supposed" (in her own estimation) to act older than she is, and so she gives him a harsh look.

"There's no such thing as a strange question, or a normal one. There are only questions. The answers are what are strange or not."

She watches the pigeon as it circles around Charlotte and Erich, and not her or the other. She wonders about it, but only for a second because there's a gate up ahead. And for this Keisha, "Keep Out" and "No Trepassing" may as well be a big neon sign reading COME THIS WAY.

So that's what she does; she cocks her head to the side and starts walking to the gate itself, intending to try to scale it.

Charlotte

"Hello," says the silver girl quietly to the pigeon and her hello sounds a bit like hello and a bit like a responsive cooing. It is smooth in her throat but there is an edge to it that you cannot quiet comprehend unless you know something of the alient beasts from which such animals descended. She does not know such things and yet:

she does. The sharp and alien eye. The darting directness. The delicate savagery.

No quarter here.

--

That is how she looks at the gate. The gate the gate the gate that bars the way and keeps her from the place where she must go.

The girl does not like the chains and does not like the signs and she walks beside the boy with an unconscious certainty and she smiles at the beast and there is something benevolent about this but also assured and she smiles at the girl and agrees with the golden boy.

Here is a secret: already she knows that she does not miss her name. Feels that secret like something organic in her chest.

She glances at the golden boy, alert see.

She knows he will back her up,

when something comes,

and something always comes,

and the signs do not belong there, and how dare they bar her way.

So, she begins tearing them down. Bare hands.

Hector

And the male wolf the only one who left his home on four legs can feel in his bones that he could stand on two if he wanted but why would he want to when the ears he has now catches flapping wings before that dark spot takes on a form. He doesn't. His ears and his eyes and his nose and the moon are all good as they are.

They come to a pause and he stands alongside the other male without knowing why. Scents the airs and sees the gate and chuffs out a low firm noise: there. Not harrying or herding the others.

If he is fast he does not move so fast as to leave them behind. No question in his mind and he voices no question and what voice he has he keeps to himself.

He goes around the gate.

Erich

A pigeon comes. And the boy knows the pigeon, even as he knows his own self, his bones, his strength. He is happy to see the pigeon, and the pigeon is happy to see him. It alights on his shoulder. He kisses it on its small, sleek-feathered head. It is a meek, pretty bird, neither ferocious nor even particularly intelligent, but it is adoring and loyal and terribly good with directions.

It goes to play with the silver girl. The boy smiles again to see it go.

He doesn't smile to see the gate, though. It bars their way, even if there is no fence, no wall. The wolf moves to go around it, but the boy hangs back: an eye on the silver girl, ready to defend. An eye on the gate, with its air of forbidding and foreboding both.

"Be careful," he calls to the wolf.

salvation.

One will climb the gate that says you must stay out, and one will tear down the signs that say you must stay out, and one will go around the gate that you must not go around, and one will hang back, perhaps obeying the gate that says you must obey it.

The pigeon lifts from the pink-haired female's shoulder, rising upward, landing to perch on the stone post.

This is what they get, for their troubles:

The gate should not be hard to climb, and it is not. The gate might be painful to climb, and it is. Her feet get stuck. Her hands sting and cut as she grabs hold of rusted metal. Her feet slip, too. She bangs her chin on the iron. The gate rattles under her weight as though it would collapse, but it does not. It just shakes her loose, shakes her down a few inches.

The paper tears easily, as paper does. The metal signs bend and with enough prying will come loose, but they take chunks of stone with the screws and nails that hold them in place. They do come off. The posts start to stop saying KEEP OUT STAY OUT quite so vehemently, as those messages tatter to the stomped-upon grass.

Around the stone post he finds himself looking from a new direction at the one female climbing, the other female tearing, the other male standing watch. Round and round and round and round, a door that is the same on both sides.

The pigeon looks at the boy hanging back. Cocks its head and flies back, but it does not fly over the gate. It cannot. There are laws here, you see, as efficacious as gravity.

Keisha

She makes a hissing sound (as you do) as her hands are cut and she slips down off the wall with a frown. Looks at the gate, and the chains that bind it shut to them. She examines the lock, looks at the gate itself, furrows her brow.

"We need to find a key." She looks around at the others, up to the moon. Her friends (because she assumes they are friends, even if she doesn't know them). "Some way to get the lock open and get through, or we won't be able to pass."

Charlotte

When the signs are pulled away, what are left are the chains. The chains that bar it and the doors that they secure that bar the way, properly.

And the pink-haired girl tears away the signs that say GET OUT STAY OUT because how dare they bar her and then she grabs the chains and she looks at the golden boy and she is a BEAST she knows this in her bones and she tells him,

tells them, really:

(and when she tells them she is no longer a pink-haired girl. She is large, larger, she remembers not why or what she is, but that there is a strength in her body that remains untapped.)

tells - perhaps - Keisha most of all:

"You're stronger than you look. Help me tear it down."

Erich

The boy is, indeed, hanging back. There is that about him: a sense of shyness, nevermind that he is large and well-muscled and has fists that look as though they might easily bash walls to rubble. He watches the others tackle the gate: climbing it and getting hurt for the trouble (though perhaps the sting to the pride is worse than the sting to the body); ripping the signs down; walking around it

and instantly rounding the other post, as though there is no world to either side of the gate.

The pigeon comes back to him. The boy reaches an absent hand up and scritches it under its small beak. Then he walks up to the gate, behind the silver girl and to one side of her, looking at her handiwork.

"Maybe she's right," he says to the silver girl, meaning the earthen girl. "Maybe we need to find a key. I can try, though,"

and so speaking, the golden boy abruptly bursts fur from skin, grows to an enormous and shaggy thing. He grips the gate in both handpaws and pulls as hard as he can; leans backward to leverage his weight, muscles knotted like ropes under that thick fur.

Hector

Only once does the wolf circle the gate before he sniffs the air and goes around the gate again and keeps moving north. He takes with him a warning from the upright male and he gives back a whuff of agreement.

Maybe she's right. Maybe they need to find a key.

As the others work to overcome the gate the wolf trots on ahead. He does not think the gate does or does not mean anything. It is a gate and it wore a sign and it has done nothing yet to keep him from moving around it so he keeps moving past it.

salvation.

There are many signs. The one with pink hair pauses in the tearing, has to pause, to tell the others what she does. When she changes, grows, becomes the strength and awe-inspiring beauty that is in all of her kind, even the ones who have forgotten it.

you are stronger than you look

They begin to use their bodies, power surging up from the earth through them as they change and tear and pull. The pigeon flies away, and into the sky, and vanishes again for a while, forgetting itself. There is no getting around the gate, for one circles. Going past it, one finds oneself passing another stone post on the other side, coming to discover the three others still standing there.

They look, perhaps, in the grass or the stone, pulling at bricks or looking in the lock itself, but there is no key to be found. The gate cannot be broken, which is a sting to the ego: it is so fragile, so rusted, so old, so brittle. They are so strong.

salvation.

[wits + engimas time]

Keisha

[[Wits+Enigmas]]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Hector

[hokay, so....]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Erich

[derp]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Charlotte

Wits + enigmas

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

salvation.

The pale one, the little one who is also friends with the pigeon and the moon, the one whose voice seems clearest and whose eyes seem warmest and who is the best, she's just the best -- she tore at the signs by instinct. She's so smart. She's the smartest and the best and she must know something because she is SO SMART AND SHE IS THE PRETTIEST AND THE SMARTEST AND THE BEST YAY.

Charlotte

The gate is infuriating. The gate stands between her and where she was meant to go. She wants to be on the other side of it. She wants to cross. She wants to tear it down. She wants to tear it open; it looks like it should be easily ripped asunder,

and still it remains standing.

So they hunt; for a key instead of prey. Beneath her skin and in the back of her beast-mind she knows that one is not the other but the instinct remains the same: to hunt, to seek, to range. This is right and proper and the itch of it is a fine thing beneath her skin until again,

there is no key.

They cannot climb it and they cannot tear it down and they cannot circle it and still the gate blocks the way and this is the way they were meant to go and she opens her mouth and she snarls her frustration and her tongue lolls in her muzzle as she looks at the moon in the dark-velvet sky and she lowers her great head and she sinks from her beast-form to her girl form and she considers the gate again, and all the others.

And then the gate, and oh,

well.

The pink-haired girl, she knocks.

Knock-knock-knock, see? Let me in.

Erich

Well, it's almost as though they've switched it right around, isn't it? Now the silver girl is knocking meekly and the golden boy is:

well, he is not a golden boy, for one. He is a shaggy wolf-monster, and he is enormous and his paws are enormous and there's all that fur and the heat that radiates off him feels like a sun in miniature. And for another: he is not meekly watching anymore but tearing at the signs himself, as though falling back on this option now that the others have been exhausted.

Or his arms. At least his arms are exhausted. From pulling.

Keisha

She frowns and walks away from the gate, not having shifted form and instead having just pulled with her own strength. Why? Because that's who Keisha is.

Instead, she looks down at the posters and signs and starts shifting through them. No Trespassing. Keep Out. There's a furrowing of her brow as she starts to look for something between the overt messages.

Something Deeper.

Charlotte

"Let me pass."

Not merely the knock, then.

The knock is an imperial knock, a knock of courtesy. The greeting of one shining thing to whatever abides beyond the gate. The knock is the knock is the knock is what it is.

She knocks. She says, again, "Let me pass."

--

And, then, like the boy, she resumes tearing down the signs.

Let them all fall down.

Hector

When the male wolf comes back around the gate the final time he does as his bones bid him do and slips out of a skin made for long distances. Running and howling. The grass is different beneath his feet and the clothes he wears and the metal around his fingers hung around his neck punched through his ear don't mean anything to him.

The wolf was lithe and sharp and tan of fur with brown and red and gray run along its spine but the boy who joins the others is near as tall as the other. Thinner and darker. His hair falls down past his shoulders and he wears all black clothing. A hunting knife on one side of his belt and a medicine bag on the other.

He looks like a shaman maybe but he isn't.

He helps the silver girl and the golden boy take down the last of the signs and when the last of the signs is on the ground he glances to the others. At the girl with the staff in particular.

It is not a large gate. He is not the one to test its compliance. He's watching.

salvation.

One pulls at the signs. Stupid little signs! They aren't iron or stone. Just aluminum, just paper, just cardboard. Plastic! One tears at them, til his arms are worn out from it. They are stacked and staggered.

One peers at the signs. Stupid little signs! They are thin and their words are shallow. KEEP OUT. STAY OUT. NO TRESPASSING. Variations on a theme. Some in different languages. They, unlike the gate that is meant to be walked through but is locked, do not obfuscate their intentions.

One tears at the signs. Stupid little signs! Don't they know who she is? Nevermind that she doesn't know who she is. She knows what she is. They all know what they are. She rips. The gate, being a gate, does not answer her any other way.

One takes down the signs. Stupid little signs. Stupid signs, man-made, man-lettered. Gates are symbols like walls are symbols, like giant leaves are symbols. Those might be as native as the leaves, the trees. The signs came from something else, had to have, because they have words. You never read in dreams, they say, that's not the part of your brain that works. Maybe that's a lie, to comfort you, a totem like in that movie, right? Something you can count on to assure you that you are only dreaming. Well nevermind: he knows these things, and he knows that gates are made for walking through, and signs are just spells you attempt to cast on the people who read them. He knows: spells only work on you if you believe in their magic.

--

The stone posts have holes in them, screws and nails. Bits of tape. There is a veritable cloud of signage at their feet by the end. And the gate is not rusted, they must have imagined that, and there is no chain and no lock, because the gate just stands there, the wrought iron clean and dark. It looks like it is made of soot; if you breathed on it, the particles would scatter. But touching it, it feels cold.

Iron often does. Even in summer, late summer, after a baleful sunset.

In the distance, wind moves through the trees, the giant leaves. It sounds like a sigh. A waking sigh, or a relieved sigh. The woods shudder.

The first to put their hand on the gate finds it swinging easily inward, as though it was always meant to swing inward, welcoming and unafraid. It doesn't even creak, and the landscape beyond does not change. The world is no different. Only their perception of the barriers within it.

Erich

The signs go away. The rust and tarnish goes away. All that's left in the end is a gate, powder-black and perfect, and looking at the gate the boy suddenly understands that gates are meant to be barriers, yes, but they are meant also to be portals. You can go through such things.

And this gate: it opens, as it is meant to do. Now the way is open. There is a forest; there are giant, giant, giant leaves. Maybe they are small. Maybe they have been made small by the innocence of their own minds. Their names, their lives; wiped clean. What remains is who they are, who they really are outside of those artificial and self-imposed walls, strictures, boundaries.

The boy is still a boy. He is still brave and a little shy, bright-souled, ill-considered, sometimes blundering. He looks at the open way and then he glances at the others, three of them. Then he walks through, the first step cautious, the next easier. Presently, he reduces from his monstrous form: becomes a hulking near-boy, then a boy.

Charlotte

"Oh." The pink-haired girl says, after.

"Oh," listen to the note of surprise in her voice. Listen to the way it enfolds itself into something deeper and more feral, girl-surprise giving way to wolf-noise because the gait is open,

the way is open.

There are dark things everywhere.

It is dark.

There are strange dark things inside her but she is around them too, bright as the moon will be when it is full; bright as that sliver that tastes like a sickle and curves like coy lover's smile.

She is a girl and then she is a wolf because she is girl-and-wolf, she is werewolf and she folds down to four legs and she lolls her tongue and looks at the others and barks.

It sounds like an invitation.

The gate is open. Time to run.

Hector

The gate swings open. Gates are meant to keep out so much as they are meant to permit entry and maybe it's starting to come back to him. This reflection of lies in the shadows of a life he didn't take in with him. If it does he stands silent anyway. Accepts it same as he accepted the drawing north and the too-large leaves and the red that was so red it bled into everything else.

Now the silver girl goes to her wolf skin and he does not smile. He does not join her. Long distance covered on four legs already and now he is stood back and watching.

"Alright," he says to the wolf-girl. The first word he's spoken since they regained cognizance.

He steps through the gate.

Keisha

She looks from the signs up to the gate as the last of them are torn down and the gate is swung open. Well. She seems kind of silly now.

She frowns and stands, and follows them through.

salvation.

The field is not vast. The golden grass is not endless. They are within a few moments, even less, of the trees, which

get smaller as they get closer, running or walking. The leaves are the right size. The trees are not. Things are coming back to them, like a voice that is and is not familiar:

"-- been gone a long time now.""How long is a long time?"

The golden, blue-eyed one hears himself ask. They all hear him ask it, if they remember.

"Almost two years."

There are other voices, their own voices -- protests, questions. Two years! How!

"It was before River died."

Oh, they remember a little there, at that name which is a thing found in nature and so it can be permitted. They remember someone dying. Death is a bad, sad, maddening thing. Death hurts very much. Some of them were not here when it happened. They know there was death. That's what is behind them, very very very very very very far behind them. Other things, too, but lots of death. And River, whoever River was, River died and maybe, maybe everything bad happened after that. Maybe whatever was lost was forgotten, at least temporarily.

"Keep these talismans,"

says someone else entirely, not the deep timbre of the first voice, not one of their own. They don't know what the talismans are. Or what they're for. They don't know what they have on them is familiar and what isn't. Is the staff a talisman? Is the bead, the metal piercing, the pigeon? But someone told them to keep them. Whatever they were.

--

The trees are very small, and the leaves are the right size.

They come upon a clearing, which to them is the size of a boot-heel. Something is in the middle. Something small and shining and curled up and sleeping and thumping its tail in its sleep and with red-gold fur and twitching ears. Very very small, and smelling of autumn, smelling of barley in the wind and smelling -- for here such things have a scent -- of music. Something dreaming.

A little wolf. Tiny enough to fit in the palm of even the pink-haired one's hand.

The moon likes him, too.

Charlotte

Does she have pink-hair here, too? In this form. She runs and they run through the gate and things change and the horizon comes closer and recedes. The trees are too large and then very small and the leaves are the right size and that is enough. There are scents in the air and they are vibrant as a anything, they are a chord that strikes some note of familiarity in the fibers of the muscle of her heart.

The trees open up and here is a clearing and there is a very, very, very,

very,

small wolf.

It could fit in her hand but she does not have hands.

She has paws.

She lopes closer, closer.

The moon likes him. Her nose is warm. She wuffs and nuzzles the dreaming little wolf. Smells his music.

Hector

They all hear and they all remember and they all know death to be a thing that doesn't go away. It's there waiting for all of them just as wakefulness waits at the end of a dream but all dreams end eventually.

This one's hands are heavy with all the jewelry he wears. He walks light on his feet. Even as the echoes come back at him and them he walks through the field and he listens to the voices. Glances over at the other male once. Says nothing.

Talismans?

And here the clearing. Here something small enough to trot upon if attention doesn't come before the step. He sees and he scents the air though he stands on two legs and he stands idle frowning but not confused.

He crouches at the edge of the clearing and does not mean to disturb the sleeping wolf but how is he to know his presence won't be a disturbance.

Keisha

She doesn't understand what's going on. Memories, some that she may recall, are coming back to her and she is confused. So she goes with the others and she looks at the small wolf. She drops into a crouch, reaches out gently to touch her lightly.

salvation.

With a wet nose coming close, the tiny wolf's ears flicker. She is enormous, compared to him; her tiny nuzzle rocks his entire body. It makes him open one eye, peering at her drowsily, but without fear. A shadow swoops overhead; the pigeon is the size of an eagle. Maybe they are small. Maybe the light plays tricks, maybe the bird is closer than it seems.

No matter. They remember:

shadows tearing at them in some other wood, a darker wood far from here, more to the south. God, how far have they come? Ripping at their clothes, raking claws into their skins, wounding their souls more than their bodies. How did they survive such an attack? Flashes of light, bursts of water over their flesh from shattered something-somethings. They tore -- they tore something away from all of them, and they wandered on, less hurt and less bloodied but

something was happening to them, as they walked. So gradually they didn't even notice.

It's easy to forget the most important things. You just have to keep going.

--

The wolf thumps his tail as he is woken. He snorts and stretches and rolls up onto his feet, spry. He wags his tail to see them, barks. And they understand:

"HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK."

Erich

The silver girl becomes a silver wolf, and the silver wolf runs ahead. See her go, like a bolt of silk let loose. That swift, that smooth. The boy follows, at first walking, then breaking into a trot, then running outright himself. On two legs instead of four he is not as fast as a wolf, but he is fast: fast and strong and athletic, blessed in raw and physical ways by the moon who likes him.

The trees grow small and small and smaller still. This does not quite seem to make sense to the boy, but then: nothing really makes sense. Things are beginning to come back to him, an existence before this one nudging at the corners of his consciousness. In a way it lifts the simple contentment of ignorance; it makes him, for the first time, begin to wonder

who am i?

where am i?

why am i?

But then they are at the clearing, which is tiny as a palmprint. They gather around and look down and there is a wolf there, a tiny wolf, curled up and dreaming. The silver wolf nuzzles the little wolf; the dark girl touches it. The dark boy does not touch it, and neither does the golden boy.

--

The little wolf wakes. Another piece of the past comes back to them. The boy blinks suddenly, and his brow creases with a frown that looks and feels odd, new, out of place. He rubs his face for a moment. He looks down and the little wolf is wagging his tail up at them now, telling them all that

THEY WILL BE A PACK

and the boy understands this to be a good thing, a happy thing, though he does not quite understand. "Okay?" he says, uncertainty making the word a question. He thinks for a moment. "You're very small. Do you want to ride on my shoulder like my pigeon?"

Speaking of which: where is his pigeon?

Charlotte

Charlotte (she does not know that she is Charlotte, but somehow she knows that she has a name now, a name that belongs to her the way the name River belongs to -

belongs to -

names below to things. So, Charlotte thinks that the small wolf does not want to ride the small wolf wants to run wolves were meant to run not ride.

HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK.

the small wolf barks and she barks back, and there is a spiraling sort of brightness to her tone that begins to shade itself into a howl, a paean, a ululating song.

It is worldless. It does not have a name.

After all that darkness, some part of her knows, or believes, that this is a better way to be.

Here. Now.

Keisha

The memories, they flash and they hurt. They pain her, emotionally and spiritually and she flinches as they come to her. But they are just memories. "Just." Right.

More importantly, the wolf awakes, and it is happy to see them. It says they will be a pack. Does it feel like it shouldn't be? Like she has something that fills that? She isn't sure. Maybe. But for now, because it makes the little wolf so happy, she smiles.

She does not say yes though. Just smiles.

salvation.

They came here for a reason. They came her to find something lost, lost for almost two years. They came with talismans to protect them against something, but those talismans were torn from their very bodies. They are themselves, and they have purpose, and they are in... the spirit world. They are in a place with its own standards that defy both natural law and the inexorable rules of logic. They find a gate made to open and trying to keep them out, and they think

someone made those signs.

They find something that must be lost, look how small he is, look how delighted he is for the company. Look at him wagging his tail, growing foot-sized from palm-sized, now he is up to their knees. He is very excited, his eyes bright gold, the autumnal light gilding the edges of his fur. What a pretty thing he is, and the tall golden one says okay to the pack idea, and tells him he is small.

"I AM GROWING!" he barks back, not in anger but excitement. "SO WE CAN BE PACK."

They all have names. Not easy to find, it's right on the tip of your tongue, but you can remember ... the W... the War... the Warder. The Warder in a cold place, not summery at all, telling them to go north. No, he said to cross over, to find what was lost. They know this. They all have names, and cannot recall their own, but the name of this lost little one is coming back to them, slowly, slowly.

Maybe it starts with a B. There's an N in there somewhere.

He wags. Cocks his head to the side. "WE ARE A PACK. THIS IS OUR DEN. HELLO."

He is waist-high now.

Charlotte

He is growing. He is growing so-fast and he is growing SO WE CAN BE PACK and she barks-back and remembers the W- W- Warder, the places-that-were and the darkness. Here are names too.

She is beginning to remember names too.

She remembers, you see, that she has a name.

That she does not want a name.

--

Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. This is the rhythm when she returns to the small-wolf. Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. Familiarity, comfort, challenge. Comfort, affection, challenge.

She barks again. He is growing!

And for now they are a pack.

BARK.

But this is not their den.

When he is done growing, she knows, they have to go.

Wefindyou. she tells him. Comefollowus.

She tells him.

Home.

Though she hardly remembers what that means.

Erich

He's right, the little wolf. He is growing. Or maybe they are shrinking. The boy is a little worried about this latter possibility, and he looks often at his hands, his palms, to try and determine if there's any subtle shrinkage going on. Probably not. He looks at the wolf again; now he is knee-high. Now he is waist-high. Is he still getting bigger? Wolves aren't supposed to be much bigger; the boy is quite sure of that.

"We can be a pack," he says slowly, "but ... I don't think this is our den. No. Our den is back that way. Where we came from. And ... and across. I mean, across. Across the curtain."

He looks to the silver girl for help. She has a name. The idea is a thunderclap in the boy's mind. Names: what a novel concept. Her name is ... is ... it starts with a soft sibilant sound, sh he thinks. The entirety escapes him, but that is okay: she seems to share his mind.

Hector

He is a werewolf and they are in the spirit world and a body that stays in this world too long will shrug off its body and stay here forever. Not as a punishment but because everything here is a reflection. Reflections have no use for substance. They're born of and beyond real things.

This he knows. Not his name and not his home and not what brought them here. Only echoes these but he knows now this is not a dream.

At least he thinks he knows.

As the little wolf grows he rocks back on his heels to give it space. The wolf-girl tells him. Found and follow. He stays crouching until the little wolf who is no longer so little who smells like someone he can and cannot remember has come up past his waist and then he stands.

They have to go across the curtain. He knows this would be an easy journey for him. Like stepping through an unlocked gate. This side calls to him more than the realm does but he knows.

He takes a step back but he doesn't leave without them.

salvation.

Brandon. Possibly Brian. But he is accommodating to Charlotte's nuzzling and nipping and he is playful, wagging happily at the attention. He bumps his head on hers. He wants a pack so badly. He needs a pack he has been so long without a pack, his pack, he could use a pack.

BARK.

His eyes fly wide as Charlotte barks that they found him, and so now he should follow. He looks around, and his crest falls, his tail drooping. "not here?" he whines at her, and at Erich, who is also telling him that not-here is their den, he and his new 'pack'. He goes over to the other one, long-haired male one, and bumps up against him. "tell them here, here is good."

It is unlikely that Hector will tell him any such thing. The wolf droops, saddened.

No, Brian is his name-name, only one of his names. There's another N, another R, a gleaming red glow from the horizon, but it is the wrong direction, it is a name that means the very bright and the very cold.

--

A thunderclap: that is what it is in their minds. His name is Northern Sun. He has a name and it is Northern Sun. His name is also Brian, and he has been lost in the spirit world for almost two years. They came to find him, the four of them, to bring him back to his pack, to help him find his way. Theurges go missing often enough; maybe they each, for one reason or another, felt a measure of pity for his packmates left behind

HIS PACKMATES WHO ARE ALIVE AND WAITING FOR HIM, OH GOD.

They have packmates. They all have packmates behind them, waiting for them. Oh. God. And Northern Sun has been without his for almost two years, they without him, barely feeling him alive, not knowing why he had not returned from beyond the veil.

Because he forgot.

Because he didn't have a talisman.

Or because his was torn from him, too.

--

One of them feels his name returning like a whisper, a breath before a poem: Hhh, hhh.

Another feels it encroaching, coming closer, unwanted, fearful.

Their names are returning to them. The world will return to them. Like all gates, this gate is meant to be opened, meant to be walked through. If you can just remember that it is there. If you can just remember that the barriers between are nothing more than an illusion held in place by spells that you only choose to believe in.

Names are spells. Those spells, if believed in, call them back to their lives. And their truths. And their packmates.

Erich

Northern Sun.

That is his name. This tiny-wolf, this small-wolf, this medium-wolf, this full-size-wolf who is now their packmate. Only not. He is not their packmate but he is a packmate, his pack is out there, they are waiting for him,

his name is Northern Sun.

The boy looks thunderstruck. He is wide-eyed and stunned and sucking a breath to give the news, which he thinks is good news, it must be good news, but then: what comes out is --

"Charlotte!"

And he rounds on her, his silver sister. He laughs aloud.

"Charlotte. You're Charlotte!"

Charlotte

He gives her a name. He pins her in place. She is whining. It is an animal whine. It is in the back of her throat, this whine, not precisely of protest but of something else that remains nameless as she is for another three -

- two

- none seconds.

--

And she remembers two. Her name and his name and their names and Northern Sun. Erich says,

You're Charlotte, and the wolf becomes a girl again and she is a different sort of girl now that she is laden with a name. She knows the things behind him; the dark things she can fee scritch-scritch-scratching against the recurve of her mouth.

She swallows them.

She is a girl named Charlotte and she is not laughing but she looks at Erich with a familiar affection,

and names him.

"And you're Erich."

With an odd little smile.

Then looks to Northern Sun. And says,

" - and you're Northern Sun. Come back with us. Your pack is waiting."

Hector

Before he remembers his own name he knows he has a pack on the other side unassured of his presence. That he has a mate far from here and they will have a baby any day now and if he never came home his mother is there with her. Not their names but their faces and the tethers they offer him. He knows.

And he knows these two before him. Knows they fight together though they are not pack. Stands while they remember and he waits and then he reaches out to shuck aside the velvet curtain. Maybe they can pass through with him. If not they're strong enough to do it on their own.

He does not will not promise not to leave before Northern Sun does but he stands while the wandering wolf decides whether or not to follow.

salvation.

No one names Hector, but no one needs to. Hector knows things they are not meant to know. Hector knows his name. He knows the name of his mate and the considered names of his child. He knows he has a child coming. He knows the names of his packmates, current and former. He knows Erich and Charlotte, and knows Keisha. It comes back. It starts to come back.

They came to get Northern Sun because no one should be lost for so long. They came, instead of his pack, because of what this place is: memory-stealer, name-stealer. They would remain here, a whole pack of Garou, and stay with their packmate.

That is why they wanted wolves from disparate packs, with at least one of their number staying behind. It's the only way they could make sure they'd hold it together and get home again.

Home again, home again,

something-ity something.

--

Northern Sun wags slowly. They are not his pack. But his pack -- he remembers. He wuffs at them, and looks at Hector, who is drawing apart the laces of the veil to move through it. They cannot be carried on his strength of spirit. They will have to use their own. They will have to use their own, and hope that the prodigal will go with them.

He sniffs, and chuffs, and his tail does not wag. He shakes his furry head.

"My pack."

The veil is parting. On the other side is Northern Colorado, the outskirts of Fort Collins. It'll be a long run back. But their packmates will be waiting for them.

All of them.

dreamers unite!

wake

It is the dream. It is the dream it is always the dream the dream moves and the dream opens and the dream grows and the dream lives and the dream breathes and the dream beats like a drum and the dream does not change.

Except when they change it.

--

It is always winter here. Spring and spring and the sense of summer young and warm in the air when they wake whereever they wake but it is winter here. The sky is painted with the thinnest edge of light that is either dying or dawning, and snow spits from desultory clouds clotting the sky.

--

This is where they are.

Melantha tackles the boy-named-Jack and the boy from her dreams is the boy from the smiling photograph attached to the folded box where the occasional patron tosses in the odd bit of change. She tackles him to the ground and I miss you she whispers and

I miss everything, he whispers back.

He is crying, too.

Melantha can taste his tears.

--

Tamsin waves and Tamsin tells stories and Tamsin wants to feel his heart: how is it beating, what is its speed, how fast does it pound, and Tamsin is in a strange place with a strange taste on her tongue and George Eldred is gone and down below two young men emerge from a house (a white house) onto a sidewalk (a gray sidewalk) and somehow the morning light is gone. Somehow the morning is gone.

Somehow the morning,

shifts.

Two young men are coming out of a house, they are named Thomas and they are named Erich and they hear a young woman shouting:

"GEORGE ELDRED!" a beat. "GEORGE?" another beat. Lonely: "ERICH MELANTHA KEISHA."

from up above.

--

And then there is one young man.

The other is gone. The other is gone and the morning is gone and there is a kind of

movement

in the ground beneath them.

Something slithering to wakefulness, somehow beneath the skin of everything. Everything. Everything.

--

"Did you feel that?" The boy asks Melantha, stilling abruptly. His breath is warm against her skin. "It's waking up."

Erich

Erich has run down that street a hundred times, or at least a few dozen. He has run down that slope and seen the woods and seen Melantha there ahead of time so so so so so frustratingly many times, and sometimes he sees someone ahead of him and sometimes he sees someone beside him and sometimes he sees none of them except the woods, the smoke, Melantha.

It is different. Tonight is different from all other nights. Tonight is different because there is Melantha, there is the woods, there is someone beside him and then the someone-beside-him is gone; there is someone ahead of him and the someone-ahead-of-him is Tamsin. None of that is why, though. Tonight is different because:

Melantha is there

and Erich does not wake

and Erich's dream-brother is there too. Melantha tackles him and hugs him or maybe just tackles him to the ground; Erich is too far away to see. And Erich does not wake.

A ferocious joy and anticipation bursts in his Ahroun's heart. He bursts out of his skin, quite literally: hits the ground on four paws, a big shaggy dapple-furred wolf that lopes, that bursts down the slope at full tilt. He rushes past Tamsin, uttering a low urgent joyful bark, does not pause to see if the Fianna follows or not. That is Melantha there, and she has not disappeared and he has not awoken. So he runs. He runs as fast as his legs can carry him, down the slope, past that dreadful house, toward one of his two best friends in the whole wide world and toward the boy who said he was his brother.

Melantha

Somewhere between leaping upon him and dragging him down and something waking, Melantha's tackle turns into a strange embrace. She is holding him, little boy Jack who is in a coma, and she knows now he's not one of her brothers, he's not hers at all, but still she misses him. And he misses everything. She cries, too, soft, soundless, and sniffs roughly as her arms shift around him.

On the breeze she hears her name echoing, and Erich's. Her spine tenses, and she props herself on one elbow, her other arm still holding Jack in case he vanishes. Or tries to. He speaks; she looks at him, taking a breath. "What is it?" she asks him, like he knows.

She hasn't seen Erich yet, but soon enough she hears paws thundering against the ground and flinches, grabs Jack closer. "Stay, stay," she tells him, urgently, begging. "I won't let anything hurt you. I promise. I think --"

but she doesn't know. This is a dream, and she can't promise that the wolf that looks like Erich isn't going to hurt them.

Tamsin

Up on the rise, then, before The House, ax for chopping wood in hand but no more nice old man. The house is the house where the dead go, where nobody goes except for sometimes the boy, the house she coaxed George Eldred into bringing her to -- and then he died. He died out there he died like a real person dies he died for good. Who knows how real people die? They don't even know. They're dead. That's nothing.

Tamsin's moon is waning, always, dragging her toward the dark of things, dragging her toward the shadow,

and what does she do, the Galliard-girl? The Fianna-wolf? Does she shed her own young woman's shape to race past the house to the kinfolk she hadn't noticed yet, there in the wood-dark? Notices now with an Ahroun trailing exuberance, clutching someone or something; can she really see from where she is on the rise? Is that a boy?

THE boy, maybe?

The existence of a THE BOY might decide her against going into the house immediately; something is moving under the ground. Good! Good! Move! Whatever you are! Yelling-thing, maybe! Tamsin stomps the ground back. Threat threat threat.

What does she do, other than menace the ground, stomp stomp STOMP enough of that stupid GROUND? Tamsin does follow Erich's general trajectory, but she only looks to see where he went, to get a better look at Melantha and the boy in the kinwoman's arms, to call, "Hey! Do you need me? Because I swore I was going in and so I am!"

And so she does and so she will.

wake

"It's waking up." Jack tells Melantha again, more urgently this time. His breath is harsh and his heart beats fast and his name is something else. Something else something else something else but they call him

Jack.

And there's resistance in his arms, resistance in his body, resistance in his blood when she clasps him close, sudden stiff and also yearning, stubborn, mulish.

And there's this kindling fear in his eyes that has nothing to do with the wolf loping toward them over snowdusted pineneedles, nothing to do with the girl with the moon-dark eyes stomping the thing moving beneath the ground. Everything to do with that ripple that seems to shake and shudder and expand out from some impossibly defined center-of-purpose and,

yes,

that house.

Where the dead go.

--

"It won't hurt me," the boy is still twisting in Melantha's arms, trying to get up but he isn't running away and he isn't scared of any old wolf, no matter how big and bad it appears to be. This is a dream and he knows the dream, knows every pattern of it, every cranny and every nook, and there's this quietly grim assurance when he makes that declaration, which is not at all like the declaration of a boy's bravado, but rather something darker and grim and knowing, see. It won't hurt him.

It will hurt everyone, everyone, else.

"You should go." He tells Melantha, turning into her, urgency in his voice. He means it. "You should all go. I know you're sleeping. I know you're just sleeping so maybe you can wake up. Maybe it won't even remember - "

See? Melantha he's not running, the boy Jack, The Boy Jack, there is not the tension in his body to run, but he is half-rising in her arms, getting himself to his feet, turning with a quick breath to take in Tamsin and Erich-wolf loping over the rise.

"You should all go. Wake up. Run. Run."

Erich

Erich-wolf,

who looks big and shaggy and yes, rather bad(ass), though the big stupid floppy-tongued grin he's wearing detracts a bit from that,

has by now reached Melantha-and-the-boy. He skids to a stop, paws flinging up bits of grass and detritus. His tail is wagging ferociously side to side, he stamps his paws and bounds around girl-and-boy and over their totem link -- if indeed they still have a totemlink here -- there is a vague running commentary, a sense of see! see, i told you i'd find you! i told you we were sharing a dream! even if he's never actually told her any of that. Also a sense of brother! that's my dream-brother! that's my dream-brother and you know him too, and now we're together, and and and and

happy! Lots of happy. Erich-wolf bounds and bounds and rubs his heavy sides against the two and seems quite unbothered by his dream-brother telling him to run, and someone's talking about coma and someone else is talking about going inside and Erich really has no fucking idea what is going on except that he's found Melantha, he has, he's so smart, he found her.

He comes to a stop, standing beside Melantha. He is a large wolf, adult but still young enough to remember puppyhood and adolescence. His withers come to her waist. He is a hot, breathing, muscular mass leaning so heavily against her that he could bowl her over if she's not careful. His tongue lolls; his eyes -- pale blue even in this form -- blink amiably up at her. He does not seem about to run anywhere.

Melantha

Melantha is curled up on the earth, holding Jack-the-boy closely, tightly, both because she thinks he might run away and because she does not know if this wolf pounding towards them will hurt the boy.

Erich sees it in her eyes again, something he hasn't seen for a year, more than a year now: that savagery, that ferocity that gleams in her blue eyes, the way she looked when she talked of burying some motherfucker in the Senate. But it's not that gleeful destruction of the Wyrm and its influence now. It's something else, protective and powerful, as though every ounce of the energy he saw when she was screaming drunkenly in the woods could and would be turned on him if it meant that the little dream-boy in her arms might be okay, might be safe. She'd burn up the world. Her ancestors would be proud.

She might kick him in the face. Which would actually hurt.

--

But he gets closer, and he's wagging his tail sososososososososohappilyYAY and she hears him in her mind the way she often hears him. He's so proud and ridiculous and SEE I TOLD YOU and she blinks and a weird smile twists over her lips, lopsided and wonky. He's all but bouncing on his paws as he comes closer, rubbing against her side, but she's trying to counter what he's saying with what she can hear, out loud, from Jack-the-boy.

She's on the ground, and Erich's fur is warm, and he's more likely looking down at her than up, but no matter. She looks at Jack, still holding way too tightly, but she doesn't trust him at all because he's a kid and also a boy. She blinks at him. He knows they're sleeping. He keeps talking about 'it' and she's not sure now if he's talking about Erich -- it won't hurt me -- or something else entirely,

it won't even remember.

"Jack," she calls him, as he's rising. She loosens a bit, still holding, getting up with him because damned if she's letting go now. "Look, you have to slow down and act like I'm dumb or something. You know what's going on here but none of us do. So share with the class and tell me what's going on or I'm going to hold onto you and we're staying right here and I guess then we're all screwed, you hear me?"

And for Erich, who she momentarily puts her hand on top of as she's getting to her feet:

sorry I totally just used your back for leverage. HI.

Erich

it's totally cool you could probably even ride on my back if you wanted to just make sure you sit up near my shoulderblades or else you might give me swayback HI.

That is what Erich-wolf thinks back at Melantha. And then, since she's on her feet, he leans against her side. And is heavy and overwarm and generally very happy to see everyone. Also: ears perking upright, all listening-like.

Tamsin

"Ugh," Tamsin says, like there's blood in her throat and she's got to cough it out. She isn't happy; she's still holding the ax for chopping up wood in her hand, like she'd even know how to use it with any sort of precision, like something that's more've a weapon doesn't sleep in her bones.

The house where the dead go has a door or a window or a gap through which to crawl; that's where Tamsin is, having drifted while listening hard for an answer.

The boy wants them to run because something's not going to hurt him but it'll hurt them and he knows they're just sleeping and --

This isn't the time for questions, but it's always the time for questions. Tamsin says, "Is it yours? Didja find it first?"

Eldred said the boy does what he wants here. Tamsin's thinking that maybe an imaginary friend got too attached; became something more than imaginary, shaped itself up and out; Tamsin's thinking -- oh, she doesn't know.

"You gonna be upset when it gets hurt?"

wake

"It's not mine." Says Jack-the-Boy to Tamsin-the-Wolf, this defensive edge to his tone. He and Melantha are both on their feet now and she's still holding on to him, fiercely, and Tamsin has an axe and somehow something in her hands remembers how to use an axe and Erich is a wolf and the boy is also his brother,

the sun splashed floorboards. The bright joy of waking every morning to the sounds of a full homestead humming all around.

Here they are at the edge of the dark wood, the boarded up and boarded-over clapboard house all derelict on this rise looking down over the town, with its marching rows of white houses and its silent windows and its wisps of smoke and its old sort of solid dereliction.

" - not mine exactly," the boy hedges, glancing from Melantha to Tamsin to the wolf and back again. "It was already here. It was always here. I found it when I was - " There is a kind of interrupted passion there, an urgency, but then an abrupt cessation of that animation, and instead he whispers,

" - when we were dying. I held on and held their hands so they wouldn't go they said they wouldn't go they said they said they said but it came and it took them and it takes everyone and everyone and I want them to stay here with me but it takes them all and shreds them to pieces and grinds them up in its teeth and I told the old lady that we should burn them when they pass over so it couldn't have them but it calls them anyway

"even when it's sleeping.

" - and now it's waking up.

"It lives in the house. In the basement of the house. I hear it inside my head.

"It wants you. It wants all of you.

"But I don't want you to go."

Erich

Okay so there's a limit to how much one can convey as a wolf, at least when one is attempting to converse with non-wolves. And that limit is essentially: you get the basics across. You get across that you are happy! or you are angry! or you are frightened! or you are worried! or you are hungry! but the details, the subtleties: that is lost.

So: Erich gives up on being-a-wolf. One moment he is leaning against Melantha, his tail still waggingwaggingwagging and his tongue still lolling, and the next

he is changing, he is shifting, he is briefly HUGE AND MONSTROUS and then he is just Erich. Pushing up off his hands, dusting his palms off as he stands up. Now he's a lot taller than the boy, and taller than Melantha too, who he immediately puts his arm around and squeezes against his side. Because yay. Because he found her.

"Lots of stuff want to shred me and grind me up and stuff," he says to his not-brother. "So far none's succeeded. Though I suppose if someone succeeded I wouldn't be standing here, so that's kind of a moot point. Still.

"I don't think we should run away. I think we should stay and fight. 'Cause if we run, it'll just catch up to us. I mean that's what I do to like, rabbits that run from me when I'm hungry.

"What's your story, anyway? You said you were my brother but I don't think you are. No offense; I think you'd be a great brother."

Melantha

By now Melantha has noticed Tamsin, farther away, at a... house? that Melantha has never seen before. Her brow stitches for a moment at the axe Tamsin holds, and her hand rests on the boy's shoulder where they stand. When he mentions dying, she looks down at him, though. Tamsin and Erich can take care of themselves. Melantha can take care of herself.

Jack is just a kid. And he is talking about his family dying, and how they tried to hold on, and 'it' took them. She looks from Jack to Erich, and her eyes are sharp and intelligent and she is piecing this together from her own dreams and from her own thoughts on death and dying and what happens in the underworld.

Erich shifts. Melantha is hugged, but she is distracted; her mind does that to her, goes into overdrive, pushes everything else down and away. She doesn't reject the hug, she just looks down at Jack after Erich is done talking and tells him:

"This is what we do, Jack," she says, and she is starting to let him go. She says 'we' and not 'they', not Tamsin and Erich. But then: "Tamsin and Erich, more than me, at least when it comes to going into basements and fighting things that sleep and things that eat and tear apart.

"But I'll stay with you, if you want. And if it takes Erich and Tamsin and grinds them up in its teeth, we'll figure something else out." There is a beat. "I'm really smart. So I'll stay with you, if you want."

Tamsin

The ground hasn't moved again; maybe it's waking up slowly, like a giant wakes; like the Wyrm probably woke the first time, in increments, stretching itself up against this thing called Creation, curiously --

or maybe it felt that stomp stomp stomp and rightfully settled down. So there. The Fianna-girl lifts her chin at that exactly like uh huh see, and Tamsin was an only child, had to be an only child, but there's still something siblingesque about that knowing look.

But then the sad story;

and it is a sad story.

"Do you really want to stay here forever? Do you really want us to stay forever? Did you bring us here?"

"This place isn't good for people. The thing waking in the basement might be bad, too, but this place - it's amazing if I'm understanding right; but do you really want it?"

wake

Dice: 15 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 11 )

wake

"If you wake up," the boy is informing Erich quite seriously when he says that if they run it will follow, it will harry, the way Erich himself harries rabbits, " - it can't follow. It can't find you during the daytime. It can't find you when your eyes are open.

"That's why I wanted waking-people. I saw you drifting by and I stitched you in because I thought you'd stay. I thought you could all be here and be there too because here wasn't the only place left for you to be."

Then Erich asks him, what's your story and Jack gives him a very odd and very adult look.

"I'm dying. Everyone here is except for you and you and you. Your friends woke up. I bet they won't come back. They took themselves out, see. They unstitched the stitch I made inside their ears and took themselves away. But everyone else - "

Jack the Boy gives Tamsin a look. A Look, and he shakes his head rather fiercely, and somehow in the midst of all this his hand has found Melantha's and his grip tightens in hers.

"I don't want to stay here forever but I can't go anywhere else and I want people here it's terrible when you're alone and there's nothing, all the houses empty and no one to hear you so you don't even know if you can hear yourself and I did bring you here I thought you'd stay I thought you wouldn't die I saw you at the edges and I brought you over and stitched you in.

"I thought you'd stay. I thought - "

Then he glances back at Melantha. "It won't hurt me. It can't hurt me. I don't want you to go. But I don't want you to - "

There is a deep shudder below the earth. Something liquid to the movement. A certain concavity and ahead of them the house with the boarded over windows and the boarded over doors shudders and half-collapses, like a man falling to his knees, sinking into the earth.

Something - oh, oozes from the ruin. Black, oleaginous, hungry. So filthy it was never meant to see the light of day.

Melantha

[willpower!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7) ( success x 4 )

Tamsin

[wp]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 5) ( fail )

Erich

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 6, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Melantha

Melantha holds Jack's hand. Of course she holds his hand, she would never let go. She holds him tightly, just as tightly as he holds her. He doesn't want to say, and he can't -- she wants to interrupt and tell him he can, he can, one day, but maybe not she's not a doctor -- so she takes a breath. She squeezes him back.

She looks down at him. "First: "

There's nothing after that. The ground erupts, shakes, and Melantha's head is pounding suddenly, like icepicks jammed in her ears. Her eyes fly wide, her free hand grabbing at her skull but her other hand only holding Jack tighter. She gives a shake, bracing her legs, grasping mentally for Volcano, hoping it can hear her, which it must -- she holds her footing and holds onto Jack and does not fall. She looks toward the house, toward the ooze, her mouth and eyes wide open.

Erich --

but really, what is she going to say? That's the Wyrm, kill it. God, please, kill it. Do what your mother told you. There aren't words for it. That's just the feeling that pulses at him through that bond they share with Charlotte. Go, go, please, be good.

Melantha grips Jack's hand and steps closer to him, moves closer. "Your family is trying to help you and get you out of here, Jack," she tells him, though there's a faint trickle of blood in one of her ears and they're ringing and her voice is too loud. "We'll get you out of here. You won't be alone."

Erich

Now that.

was not.

okay.

It's bad enough that whatever shook the earth damn near knocks Erich off his feet -- and, in fact, knocks Tamsin off her feet. Look at her: there she goes, up on the hill near the Scary House. It's bad enough that whatever shook the earth REALLY HURT HIS FUCKING EARS, made them actually literally bleed the way we think our ears are gonna bleed when we hear something awful. That's all bad and awful and whatnot, but

whatever shook the earth also. made. Melantha's ears bleed. And that is just NOT FUCKING KOSHER, the way it was NOT FUCKING KOSHER when those weird gross dudes down in Baja came and snuck up on the tinyhouse where he and Charlotte were living and were spying on them with binoculars and we're digressing.

The point is: it's not okay. And Erich is totally not okay with it. And Melantha is sort of thinking hey go deal with it omg but really she hardly needs to because Erich has both hands over his ears and he's kind of just yelling, just bellowing wordless WTF-rage, and then:

and then he's really wish he had a hammer or a cinderblock or something to throw. And also: something to throw it all. Since he has neither, he grabs Melantha and the boy and kinda gives them each a squeeze on the shoulder that says nothing and says everything. Then he turns and pops into his wolf shape again and goes running up the hill toward Tamsin, and toward the house.

"Wait! If you're going in, I'm going with you!"

Tamsin

Tamsin's gaze shades to something pitying, perhaps, something understanding, something that wants to salvage the boy, wants to know more about what happened and why, what courage it took and what courage it didn't, where the line is drawn, where the mystery is held, the why of it and the heart of it. And of course there's still the smoulder-coal knot of something furious, within, something that is furious not Rageful. Her hand is shielding her eyes as if there's light falling from above, getting into them, and she opens her mouth to say something and

the earth shifts again, greater than before, much greater, and she falls hard on her ass, bruises the bone deep and loses her grip on the axe and the scary house has begun to collapse in on itself, sink further into the ground, the ground yawning up like a grave and this black ichorous ooze bubbling out splashing out and Erich's running

if you're going in I'm going with you

and Tamsin's shifting, because that's just fine; because it seems that now is a time to fight, to go into the house where only death go, to snap at the shadow-filth pouring out and go and go and go and go

and go for its filthy fucking death-taking

heart.

wake

And they

wake

up.

world's most inappropriate date spot.

Erich

Sunday night is a weird night for dates. But then, Melantha works at a bar, so Friday nights and Saturday nights are usually worknights for her. Erich doesn't work at all! Unless one counts patrolling the area around Cold Crescent, of course. And at any rate: KFC is a weird place to go for a date.

That's where they go, though. Erich drives his truck, the tinyhouse unhitched and left on that quiet little cul-de-sac up in Evergreen. Look, he's even dressed up for the occasion: he's wearing his newest, nicest pair of jeans, and his shirt is buttondown.

"You have to try to doubledown, okay?" That's what he's saying as they pull up in front of Colonel Sanders'. "That's the whole point of coming here." And he kills the engine. And he hops out, and thumps the door shut, and comes around to the other side to let Melantha out.

And also: reaches into the bed of the truck to fish out a bedraggled, windblown, handpicked and hand-tied bunch of wildflowers. Because date. And also because springtime.

Melantha

Friday nights and Saturday nights are almost always worknights for Melantha. Sunday nights she almost never works, because they almost always give her those Friday and Saturday nights and she makes lots of tips and never really needs those days off anyway. She saves a lot. She wants to build a tinyhouse before it gets too hot to bear the work. She wants to build a tinyhouse and make it light and comfortable and airy and pretty and her own. Her very own.

Erich doesn't have anywhere to pick her up from. They're getting ready at the same time, in the same place. There's no reveal to. Melantha wears a little skirt, knee-length, soft, heather-gray. She wears a blue shirt with it, just a t-shirt with a wide v-neck, and a pair of flats. Her hair is actually tied up, in a high ponytail because it's quite muggy today, even as evening falls.

They drive all the way down to Littleton for a KFC, and Melantha wasn't exactly expecting one of the nicest restaurants in Colorado but she's working really hard to hide the wtf look in her eyes when Erich parks.

The two of them don't really 'date'. They almost always stay in, even back when they were in D.C. Neither of them have ever dressed up for each other or anything. But he said date, and he was dressing up, and so she put on a skirt, and he opens the car door for her and hands her a wonky little bunch of flowers he got from up in Evergreen.

Melantha is charmed. By the flowers, and Erich Dressing Up, and his earnestness and excitement. And takes them as she steps down from the truck to him, smiling a little. "Maybe I'll just get corn and biscuits," she says lightly, taking his hand.

Erich

Erich is aghast. Erich would be aghast, at least, except Melantha is taking his hand and she looks charmed by the wonky flowers and he thinks she looks so pretty in her little skirt and her blue shirt and her ponytail.

So he gives her hand a squeeze. And then he sort of tugs her a gentle step forward and slides his arm around her waist and gives her a squeeze instead. He feels utterly solid, a wall of muscle and meat. She feels --

well; soft. And she smells good. And he kisses her where he can reach her and then they slide apart and he finds he is still holding her hand and when you go on a date you go get food first, Erich. "Well, you should at least try a bite of my doubledown," he bargains, and they walk toward the little KFC with its distinctive red-trimmed building.

Melantha

That kiss lands on the top of her head; in flats, especially, he's quite a bit taller than she is. Hell: even in the highest heels with their thick platforms that Celia de Luca would wear, he was quite a bit taller. She squeezes her arm around his waist, holding the flowers in her other hand, walking alongside him into the KFC.

He bargains that she should try some of his, and she makes a little face, nose wrinkled up. "I think I'll be okay," she tells him, with a touch of amusement.

Erich

Erich is like: !

"They're gonna stop making them soon, you know! And then who knows when they'll make them again? Man, the very thought makes me all sad." They're at the door. He opens it for her: such a gentleman. "But all right. Whatever! Have corn and biscuits. I'll eat like three doubledowns to make up for it."

He pauses a moment, scans the inside of the -- can we call it a restaurant, even? The inside of the KFC, then. Erich points at an empty corner booth: "Oh, let's take that one. It's the best. Want me to go order and bring it over?"

Melantha

Melantha slips her arm away from his waist as he opens the door, walking through it just ahead of him. He tells her -- for the third time -- that omg she really should have one of those things, and she's turning to him to maybe, just maybe, start telling him to back off a little, but he does. He says he's going to have three of those things instead.

Quietly, Melantha lets him point out a booth, and looks up at him, and nods. "Sure," she says. "Would you get me some water, and corn on the cob, and a couple of biscuits?"

Erich

So they divide to conquer. She goes to claim the booth, hold down the fort; he goes to order. She can see him across the KFC: standing patiently in line staring up at the menu even though he knows exactly what he's getting. Getting to the front of the line. Ordering, laying his palms thoughtlessly on the counter, making the unfortunate clerk lean backwards to put a little distance between them. Standing about, then, arms folded, occasionally turning to glance over his shoulder at Melantha as though to check if she's still there or not. She is. He smiles at her and waves. Then they call his number,

and then he's coming back toward her, a red plastic tray in hand, three doubledowns and a large coke sitting next to corn on the cob, two biscuits, and an uncapped cup of water.

He looks sort of proud as he divvies up the spoils. Though there's plenty of room across the table, he scoots in next to her, taking a slurp of his soda before unwrapping the first of his doubledowns. "Yay," he says, all quiet and happy, before sinking his teeth in. Because meat. Meat meat meat meat meat.

Melantha

Of course Melantha is there, Erich. Sitting in the booth with her ponytail, looking at something on her phone, when he looks over to make sure she's still there. His gaze is heavy, and she glances up, smiling at him. He waves. She laughs to herself, and soon enough he's bringing over their dinner, even though hers is a couple of sides and water and his is... well.

MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT.

And Coke.

Instead of sitting across from her, though, Erich scoots in beside her, and Melantha makes some room. He digs in, and she puts her phone away and starts eating her corn. And biscuits.

Erich

If this were a First Date, this would officially be an Awkward Silence. Fortunately, this isn't a first date for them. It's not a first anything. They've eaten out together at plenty of places. Most of them fast food places. Have they ever gone anywhere nice? Well; the paleo cafe sort of counts. Maybe he should take her someplace nice someday.

That's what Erich's thinking as he munches his way through the first doubledown. And he does, in fact, eat the entire damn thing before he talks again. When it's gone, and when he's sucked and/or wiped the crumbs and sauce clean from his fingers, he takes a big slurp of Coke and sits back. Drapes his arm along the back of the booth.

"Have we ever been on a date before?" he wonders.

Melantha

In some ways, though, it is a first date. Sort of. And maybe Erich doesn't think of it that way, but... he asked for a date. And then dressed up, and she dressed up, and he brought flowers and it's not exactly like anything they've done before, this sort of planned-out thing, not picking her up from work and seeing if she wanted to grab coffee or calling her from Denver seeing if she'd want to come down or sitting in Cold Crescent together, or maybe Melantha is just seeing it differently, because it feels different, and it actually does -- at least for one of them -- feel pretty awkward. And silent.

She eats slowly, in part because -- to be honest -- she finds the very smell of this place unappetizing, and even the corn on the cob seems a little bizarre to her, like it's maybe not quite real, and she hasn't touched the biscuits yet. She mostly drinks water.

Erich demolishes his first double-down, leaving the other two stacked nearby, and then slides his arm behind her, sort of around her, and asks if they've been on a date.

"Sort of," she answers, after a moment of thought. "I guess."

Erich

"But not really like this," he adds, like his thoughts are an afterthought to hers. He quiet for a little bit longer. They have quite the view: rows of booths, a family of four making their way through a bucket of chicken. Kentucky Fried Life.

"I kinda like it." He looks at her. "Do you?"

Melantha

Not really like this. And her foot bumps against his under the table, unintentionally. Stays there, intentionally.

"Like what?" Melantha asks him, looking past the curve of her shoulder to him. "KFC?"

Erich

"Nooo." He bumps her back. It'd be a shoulder bump except his arm is up, so it's more like a side-of-chest bump. Or an armpit bump except that sounds pretty ew. "Going on a date. With you. But not like... all full of pressure and expectations and stuff. Just having a night where it's like, okay, we are gonna wear nice clothes,"

he considers these nice clothes; not just what he's wearing but also what she's wearing, never mind that she's been Celia de Luca and a dozen other girls, worn any number of thousand-dollar outfits and designer heels,

"and go out and have dinner somewhere. And then we'll go take a walk somewhere nice and, I dunno. Maybe go bowling or dancing or something. I like it. You know it's prom season? We should crash a prom next weekend, I bet we could find one."

Melantha

She smiles at his description of a date-date. Where they dress up and go out and have dinner and take a walk and I-dunno-something. But her head tips, as she leans back, nestling into his arm and side a bit. "What kind of pressure and expectations do you mean?" she wants to know, going backward a bit.

Erich

"You know. Like. Date pressures and expectations. Is he going to be on time? Is she going to look pretty? Are we going somewhere nice? Is he gonna pay? Is she gonna -- y'know. Put out? All that crap.

"We don't have that. 'Cause we already know each other. But we can still go on a date and ... it's nice."

Melantha

"Well, if you weren't on time, I'd think maybe something happened and then the date isn't something I'm worried about," she says first, sliding her arms around his waist. "And I always look pretty," which she says with a faint smirk, "and I don't care who pays for what," which is true, "and I think we're doing pretty good work on not feeling pressured about sex or making me feel weird about it."

She does not mention the going-someplace-nice, but she hits all the other bases. She is hugging him, and smiling a little, leaning her head on his shoulder. "It does feel a little awkward," she admits, "even though we already know each other and everything."

Erich

Erich gets hugged. This is good. It makes him happy. That's the whole point of putting his arm up like that: it clears her path, gives her access. Lets her get in close, close where an animal would only let his most trusted friends and family. She puts her arms around his waist and he drops his arm around her shoulders.

Laughs when she says she always looks pretty. Bumps his nose against her hair as she leans her head on his shoulder.

"If it's too awkward," he says softly, "we can stop having a date. This can just be normal dinner-out. I'll even roll up my shirt sleeves," he grins suddenly, devilish, "and stop holding in my farts."

Melantha

Melantha doesn't grin at his joke about farts, because ew, Erich and she even gives him that nose-wrinkled look again. "No, I... do kind of like the whole 'date' thing. With you." Obviously you, Erich.

And that is when she is SO OBVIOUSLY NOT SAYING SOMETHING THAT IT'S REALLY DUMB, and takes a breath to just say it instead of making him ask:

"I just... would kind of like to go somewhere nice. Not every time we get food together. But if we're going to dress up or make a whole 'date' thing out of it... I would kind of like to go somewhere nice. And where I like the food," she ends quietly, which is -- however gently spoken -- still an indictment of KFC, Erich? Ew, really?

Erich

"Oh." Erich's crest falls so visibly you'd see it from across the room. "We can go somewhere else. Let's go somewhere else. I'm sorry. I just brought you here 'cause doubledowns are like one of my favorite foods ever and that's why I really wanted you to try one but then I could tell you were starting to feel kinda pressured and that's why I stopped.

"Let's go somewhere else." He starts packing up. Because: he's still going to take those other two doubledowns with him, obviously.

Melantha

They are both emotional, emotive creatures. They are passionate. Melantha's anger, when roused, is a terrifying thing. She cries at the drop of a hat. One of the hardest things about leaving D.C. and coming here and everything she's been through is how much it dampened some of her passions, made it harder for her to submit to herself, to nature, to wildness.

Erich wears his heart on his sleeve. His rage, his adoration for her, his love of Charlotte, his frustrations, his self-doubt: it all has a place on his face, in his eyes, in the way he speaks. Of course he gets sad, very sad, when he picks up that Melantha doesn't like it here. It makes sense to get sad, and to feel bad, and for his crest to fall.

She feels bad anyway. She looks bummed out because he's so sad. And he says they'll go somewhere else like three times and he's babbling and Melantha doesn't let go of him, still hugging him around the waist. "Hey, slow down," she says quietly, soothingly. "Don't freak out. I may not like the food here but I still like you."

Erich

Melantha hanging on to him manages to slow Erich down. He pauses in his almost-frantic packing; pauses and looks at her and exhales, shoulders relaxing.

"I know," he says quietly. And he slides his arm around her again; gives her a squeeze. "Thanks for reminding me. But let's go somewhere else, kay? Somewhere you like."

Melantha

He goes from 0 to Frantic pretty quickly. It doesn't surprise her anymore. She just hugs him, like he's running and if she just digs in her heels and grabs a hold, he'll be unable to get the forward momentum necessary to go totally nuts. And it works, proving that love is greater than physics yet again. He settles. He touches her instead, calms a bit.

Melantha smiles. "Let's stay," she says. "Eat your totally gross meat sandwiches. Then we'll go get some ice cream, and take a walk, and when we get back home I'll make something for me. And some other night, I'll take you on a dress-up date and we'll go somewhere I like, and hopefully you'll like it, and we'll just... keep practicing, until every time we go on a dress-up date it's completely awesome."

Erich

He resettles. Slowly, little by little, he goes from Frantic back to 0. The way she treats him helps. The way she holds on to him, and reminds him that she likes him, and reminds him that he didn't mess it all up forever onoz: it helps.

The gentle little joke helps too. He responds: "They're not gross," protesting, unwrapping the second of three. He's not going to eat all three. Even he would throw up. But two: yeah, he's gonna eat two. "They're the best sandwiches ever made."

And, sinking his teeth in, tearing off a great big bite of meatmeatmeatmeatmeat, he leans back in the booth again.

"I'll make you an omelette if you want when we get home. With spinach and mushrooms and stuff. It'll be really healthy and not all-meat at all. But if you wanna take me on a real dress-up date next time you have to give me some advance warning so I can go buy a tie."

Melantha

"They're totally gross, and I bet all fast food places are owned by the Enemy," she says, and she's only half kidding, but the truth is she's kind of worried about him eating three of those things. But she doesn't push on that one too much. He digs into his second doubledown and she holds him, leaning back just a bit so no stray specks of food hit her face or hair.

Not that Erich is a sloppy eater. Just. Um. Anyway, moving on.

"It's okay," she laughs. "I can make something at home. And I like meat. And I don't think I'll take you any place worth wearing a tie for, unless you just really want to wear a tie." Her hand rubs his back. "I'll think of something nice," she says, smiling. Then she leans up, pressing a soft kiss to his cheek when he's finished with one bite, closing her eyes against his temple for a moment.

Erich

"I wanna wear a tie for you someday," he says, mouth full. "You can wear a skirt and I can wear a tie. I think we'd look good."

She kisses his cheek. He closes his eyes too, comforted and adoring, and so they close their eyes together for a little one, leaning into that touch like animals.

"I know you will," he says.

there's a man you should kill.

Erich

So Erich is in the Santa Fe Arts District again, and it is in fact Third Friday so the area is swamped with pedestrians and all the art galleries are open but what does a meatheaded Ahroun from Nebraska know about art anyway.

So instead he is at the whimsically named mmm...COFFEE!, which advertises itself as some sort of paleo cafe, which is perhaps not exactly the sort of place one imagines a meatheaded Ahroun to frequent either. But nonetheless there he is: out on the small patio, making that wrought-iron patio set he's occupying seem small with his blond-blue-tanned-muscled-ness, a plate of chicken and a hot chocolate keeping him company.

Also his phone. It is set on the tabletop; he is hunched over it, grinning in that private way people grin when they are terribly amused by whoever it is they are texting, tapping rather nimbly with his fingertips as he neglects his food.

Eva

Something slightly more formal is happening across the street. The occasional town car sleeks up to the door and the occasional grandee slides out in evening or cocktail attire. Some of the patrons spill out the front doors of what otherwise seems to be an unfinished space, and they both stand out from and blend into the Third Fridays crowd. Somehow it looks like the point of confluence of two rivers, one shallow and silty and slow, the other deep, swift-moving, clarified. The punch-and-swirl of it.

--

But Erich does not notice. He's on his phone, grinning, and may be taken by surprise when Eva lets herself in the small metal gate leading to the fenced in patio, and stops at his table, one hand braced on it, leaning over a bit -

"Erich. Do you mind if I join you?"

The briefest pause.

"Just for a moment."

Erich

He is, indeed, taken by surprise -- that sharp animal up-snap of his head, the grin frozen by startlement and then regaining its footing. His eyebrows have climbed halfway to his hairline.

"Whoa," he says, presumably of the dress.

Eva

There is about her a certain patient didacticism. An impassive query in the lilt of her brows.

"I did not mean to startle you, but I cannot tell if that is a yes or a no."

Erich

"Oh!" And he sits up, busies himself with -- tidying up? making the area presentable? In the end all he manages to do is rearrange plate and cup and then extend his foot under the table to kick the other chair out for her. "Yeah, sure. Of course. Sit down."

There are a few surreptitious glances around, as though perhaps he were afraid (or maybe hoping) he might be mistaken for her date. Or maybe he's looking for her actual date. Or maybe he's wondering where her kids are. Perhaps it's the last, because then he asks:

"Where are your kids?"

Eva

"I stashed them in the truck of the limo." She takes the seat with a certain grace and allows her bemusement over his business in the tidying up (?) to show through, but seems almost entirely - straightforward - in the disposition of her children.

"They'll be fine, don't you think? Just for a few hours."

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Erich

Erich. Looks. Horrified.

"Uh," he says -- clearly flailing for the most diplomatic way to say this, "well, at least it's nighttime so it's probably ... not too hot in there? But you might want to go let them out. Like, soon. Like, before they die."

Eva

"Sound advice, Erich." This quick-sliding smile crests her mouth, and is gone as quickly as it came. "Thank you.

"I will see to it as soon as we finish our chat."

Erich

"Wait," all squint-eyed, "they're not really in the trunk, are they. Oh, duh," the penny fairly crashes down, "it's not like you'd go to a black tie party with kids in tow. Man, you're a convincing liar. I guess that's a good thing."

He's practically having the conversation all by himself. He stops; he pushes his plate of half-eaten chicken toward her in instinctive offering. You share your kill with the kin; that is what you do. Even if the 'kill' was recently bought from a paleo cafe.

"How've you been, anyway? I haven't dropped by to get food from your office very much lately."

Eva

Erich tells Eva that she is a really good liar. She does not point out the contrapuntal idea: that he is an especially gullible young man, in part because she does not believe it. The smile that coiled across her mouth settles in again.

No response to his question about how she's been; instead, "Good. You had the support staff in an uproar. Passive-aggressive notes about missing pepperoni sticks and gogurt for weeks. Rhonda Porter started keeping her cheese slices in her desk, but locked them into a file drawer and the smell - "

Poker face.

"So if you need food, it would be best if you brought me a list.

"Or my assistant, Richard. He is kin as well."

The most minute pause. Then:

"How involved are your plans this evening?"

Erich

"I don't need food," Erich is a tiny bit insulted at the assumption, "I'm a wolf. I can get my own food. It was just fun to go down there and see what you guys were munching on. The gogurt wasn't me though. Or the cheese slices! I only took meat."

Obviously.

"My plans?" He looks bemused. Amused, as well. "Well, I don't really have any. I'm just hanging out here. My one packmate is doing theurge-y stuff and my other is at work. So it's just me. Why?"

Eva

"Then perhaps you were not the source of office strife."

An arch of her brows.

"Your plans?"

Erich

"What, like specifically?" He thinks a moment. "I'm gonna eat my chicken and drink my hot chocolate and then maybe wander around a bit and not understand any of the art they're showing. Then I was gonna go home."

And again, "Why?"

Eva

"There's a man in that gallery I think you should track, and perhaps kill, instead.

"His skin is too hot.

"And where his collar rubs his neck, the skin has come away. A hint of green, beneath.

"If you follow me across the street, I'll go back inside and make sure you know the one I mean."

Erich

"Oh."

And that is the only answer for a while: a simple oh ripe with all the connotations of ohs spoken from Garou to their watchful kin. Erich's fingertips drum on the wrought-iron surface of the cafe table for a second. Then:

"Okay, well, lemme eat my chicken and then we'll go."

--

So that is what happens. He eats his chicken -- quickly, he doesn't dawdle -- and then he drinks his hot chocolate and then he kinda rumples everything up and disposes of the disposables and sets the plates atop the trash can to be collected.

They cross back toward the gallery. Not together; that would look too weird. Eva goes first, and she slips back into that exclusive-looking party of hers, all swooping necklines and bare shoulders and satin lapels and diamond cufflinks. Erich loiters around outside and tries not to look too suspicious, though already the doorman is casting him stink-eyed looks, but he doesn't have to stay long.

Just long enough for Eva to indicate the man,

mark the kill.

--

She does not see her much younger tribesman for quite some time after that. Actually, she does not see him again for the remainder of the party. She doesn't see him when she goes to her car, either, whether it's her everyday car or, in fact, a limousine. She doesn't see the man she pointed out either, the hot-skinned creature whose hide was beginning to split to reveal true horror beneath. In fact, she will never see that man again.

--

She does, however, see him before the night is entirely over. When she has left the party. When she has gone home. Just before she actually enters her house, that is when she sees him, sitting at her curb, keeping a respectful distance away from her front door and the young souls that sleep within. Headlights sweep him out of the darkness. He stands up as her car pulls to the curb, or into the garage.

He looks no worse for the wear. Maybe a little scuffed. Maybe a little -- calmer, is that the word for it? The moon is still so, so close to the full. Calmer is not the word for it. But a little more settled, not quite the crackling, heavy presence of before.

He waves at her. Foolish thing; no subtlety at all.

Eva

He wants to finish his chicken. She gives favors him with this quietly thoughtful glance as he does, warmer than you might imagine. Something concealed but searching about her eyes as she makes him in that space, that patio, the edge to him; and the youth; and strange and strangely bare simplicity.

Says nothing, though.

There is nothing to say.

--

And: there is no limosine, just a quietly expensive Lexus parked down a quietly expensive sidestreet with a quietly expensive handgun hidden thoughtfully beneath the dash.

After the soirée, Éva is eager to get back to the Lexus and the weapon quietly hidden inside. She is always armed, except when she is dressed as she was tonight,

and then she feels naked.

--

Much, much later, a suburb. Quiet streets. Dark houses. The low hum of the engine, the sweep of the headlights. The shadow of the mountains against the sky.

She sees him, of course.

Cuts him a glance, the edge of it lilting-fine.

One rises above the curved leather of the steering wheel as she makes the turn into the gated drive.

Is she returning the wave?

Perhaps; though he will never know.

She could have just been turning the wheel.