3days

3days

The day is overcast, the sky pressing low and heavy as blankets of cloud cover unravel ceaselessly overhead. Could you but do a time lapse recording of them, their movements would be surly, agitated, but to the naked eye they seem but snarled overhead, slow motion white water rapids over the rough riverbed that is the landscape.

Three miles to the east of the Sept lies Strontia Springs Reservoir, a long, narrow tail of ferruginous water that meanders along the base of steep mountain slopes, its waters still, its depth formidable. Three Days spends most of the morning skirting its edge, trying to stay as close as possible to the actual water while navigating the steep drop-offs and dusty conifers that line its edge. At one point he finds a tongue of rock extending some twenty feet out over the reservoir below; the headfirst plunge into the ice cold water, the explosion of bubbles, the sheer delight he feels upon emerging, invigorated and shivering, remains the highlight of the day.

Other moments as he circumnavigates the body of water: a pygmy viper shaking its rattle as it undulates backwards, into a crevice between some boulders; a small wooden cross held upright by a cairn of stones, marking an old, old death; watching an eagle endlessly swoop down the sheerest slope of the mountain, playing in the downdraft as a child might play on a slide.

Eventually he reaches the head of the reservoir, and emerges onto a narrow spit of flat land that brings him to one end of the actual dam. He climbs up over the railing, the metal smooth and warm beneath his hands, and then walks the long, beautiful arc of the dam, looking down at where a giant spout of water is released midway down the curvature of the retaining wall, to thunder and then bound over rocks into the land beyond.

Down a winding path on the far side, to a broad and faded asphalt road that soon T-junctions at Platte Canyon Road. There he sees his first house, along with an artificially green lawn. Hitching his pack, he walks past them, watching the empty windows with suspicious eyes, and then cuts off the road onto a dirt trail that follows the flank of a dense copse of woods.

Something draws him on. An urge, an instinct. He doesn't know where he’s going, exactly, or what he’s being led too. But he’s learned to trust his feet, and so eschews the asphalt for the dirt road, and spends a good half hour following the edge of the wood, until the trees on his right grow diffuse, and scatter out to loosely cover both sides of the trail. The foothills here rise and fall, and the trail undulates with them, and eventually simply peters out.

Three Days keeps going. He crosses beneath power lines that cut callously through the land, the air thick and charged beneath them. Up a final crest, and there, when he reaches the peak, he feels it – that strange, puckering inhalation, that sense of pushing through an unseen barrier into fresher, cleaner air: the bawn.

For a long moment he does nothing, and then he hitches his pack once more and begins to make his way down the far slope, down the rough landscape toward the line of homes below. Beyond them, vast plates of rusted red stone emerge at an angle where the bones of the earth have been uncovered. They mark the end of the foothills, and the beginning of a great plateau that extends as far as his eye can see. He tries not to think of it as the land of men, and on some level, fails.

Éva

It is nearly solstice so the night has been sliced open. Dawn comes early and dusk comes late and the intervening hours are dark but never still. Down there the houses unfold themselves like ferns, see, curling asphalt cul-de-sacs dark in the center of radiant fractal patterns. The countryside is high-plains dry, scrub ponderosa pine and gambol oak interspersed with waving expanses of prairie grass as far as the eye can see. Down there: people coddle roses and other tempermental ornamentals into bloom and fertilize and water and weed and aerate and mow the lawn in sweeping patterns just so you can see the cross-hatched blades the way you see the pattern of a vaccuum in a high-piled carpet, lush as any village green in merry old England. This false sense of order to their worlds. Pools glitter dark in the backyards, jewel-toned in the morning light. The sun is up; he has hiked for miles. Most people are still quiet in their beds, down there.

That's where she's coming from. Up the hard-packed dirt of the old county road, past the sign marker for a trailhead 3Days does not know he follows. Up the shoulder of the foothills from the bucolic suburb sprawling in the valley, dust churned up by her every step.

The countryside out here is spare and open and he has ample warning of the runner climbing the trail in his direction. Can see her from far off when she is still no more than a figure, cocooned in running gear, moving steadily in the early morning light. Can see her as she resolves into something more definite: a woman and not a man. Dark hair, pulled back into a pony tail. Tight black capris and a dark gray track jacket zipped up, almost to the collar. Nevermind that the cool morning air is already giving way to an early, sluggish heat beneath those roiling clouds.

The moment where she sees him is marked out like so - a pause in her steady rhythm, the lift of her chin from below the collar and her eyes from the path. The steady two or three beats of regard, measuring and silent, from a distance. A moment's spartan survey of the trail and path before a decision is made and she resumes her run, climbing the trail. Though now she glances up at him with every third or fourth pounding step, marking his place in the landscape.

Just marking it.

Closer he has a sense of her blood. It is not strong, no more than a thread of awareness against his senses, but perhaps that is why she is out running in the hills when the sky is cloudcast and threatens rain.

3days

He's dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, red patterned over white and black and all of it faded as if washed countless times or exposed to the wind and the rain. His boots are great galumphing things, the tongues tortured and sticking out from carelessly tied laces, the black rubber treads fit for a Caterpillar truck. The pack over his shoulder could be a relic stolen from a museum, rawhide leather that's roughly stitched at the seams, made supple only through much use and abuse, thick and scratched and scarred and sitting on his hips and hanging from his shoulders as if it were his truest companion.

It's his face, however, that probably draws her eye. The dark waters of the reservoir have almost completely dried, so that his chestnut hair hangs in damp undulations down to his shoulders, a few tendrils before his face. He's handsome, in an unself-conscious way. It's made striking by the intensity of his dark eyes, the cut of his mouth, which takes his otherwise youthful face and makes it severe.

More than all that though. There's an intensity there. A kind of energy and turbulence that roils the air invisibly, as a current might catch a palm placed within a smoothly flowing stream. She's been around other Garou. She can recognize that palpable frustration, latent anger, that subdued fury that rests but never sleeps. It's in his frame, how he stands still, but seems on the verge of violence, of sudden movement. It manifests in the subtle way he curls his fingers around the strap of his pack where it lies over his shoulder, and how the leather creaks.

And yet. He steps back from the path, and then takes a second step, as if giving her as much room as he can afford. He reaches up as she draws closer, and curls his hair behind one ear, grits his jaw as he glances down. Like a ray of light through heavy clouds, his sullen and constant anger is undercut by a sense of uncertainty, hesitation.

Éva

She has fifteen or twenty years on him, and in the morning light, without the illusions of make-up and dress and manner, and breathless from her run: that is all the more evident. The lines edging her mouth and the puffiness beneath her eyes, sleep or its lack just being edged out by the push of endorphins in her blood from the run. More prominent, though: a cut-and-bruise at the apex of her left cheek, another small laceration on her lip and another closer to her hairline. The mottled bruising from the seatbelt cut across her chest is only just visible, rising above the mandarin collar of her running jacket, mottled and yellow and ugly on her throat below her jaw. What she gets for leaning forward, into the restraint at the time of impact.

[Sunday morning:
"Mom, where's our car?"

"I hit a deer."

"Is that why you didn't come home last night?"

"Yes."

"And what will you do next time?"

Her own words turned back on her, these. The edge of ironic awareness framed her mouth.

"Ellie," a beat, "I'll drive around."]

Her pace is slowing as she approaches him. The trail is steeper, true, but: closer now and she knows what he is. Can read it in his skin the way he can read her blood. She knows Garou by now. Lived with one for a half-dozen years. Stood taught in the frame of the patio door when his pack-and-septmates came by the house seeking him while her children were asleep upstairs.

Slowing and then she stops, ten or fifteen feet away. Hands on her hips now, breathing heavily but rhythmically, kicking out her legs and moving - moving - moving even while standing still, dark eyes on him and steady but never quite snagging his gaze.

Reads both the rage and the uncertainty in him in those beats as she's gulping her first full lungfuls of air and blowing them out again and there's nothing in her for him to read except for the animal wariness that arises from her body language. The alertness, the requisite distance she maintains between them.

Even if she knows it would not matter.

"You're new." The force comes only from the heaviness of her breathing. "Aren't you. Alone." Another sharp, controlled breath out. The words an assessment as much as a question; dark gaze sheering away from him, over the open shoulder of the rising trail. The sweep of grass and scrub trees and the view of the saw-toothed mountains beyond.

No softening in her mouth or eyes then, but something in the way her dark eyes flash back to him acknowledges the sliver of uncertainty in his manner, the same way her careful distance is an acknowledgment of his rage.

" - are you lost?"

3days

She approaches, she slows, comes to a stop but never stills. He stands to one side, yet still slightly above, raised by the rising slope of the path and for having stepped up onto the shoulder. As if his presence might be a physical impediment for her passing, as if she might need a yard or two's clearance to simply run on by.

Elevated, he looks down upon her, and his face is hard and unyielding as any natural formation, wind scoured rock or water shaped stone. He watches as she regains her breath, as she kicks out her long legs, as she meets his gaze warily and begins to get a feel for him. Each passing second serves to solidify their impressions of each other, from the minutest twitch of muscles around the eyes to the expressions of their mouths. What he sees, what he thinks, however, remains opaque; his face is inscrutable, despite its youth, which normally makes a young man's thoughts so transparent to one such as she.

Instead, he slowly lowers himself into a crouch, the movement liquid and controlled both, and rests his forearms on his knees. His hands are large, the fingers long, the nails limned with dirt which also grouts the creases over his knuckles. He links them together, and seemingly unaffected by the unbalancing weight of his pack, examines her face, her features, the wounds and nicks and bruises that she must no doubt remember as his eyes trail over them.

Finally, "Yes." It's the first word she's heard, and it's softly spoken, almost quiet. He narrows his eyes for a moment, and then looks past her, sweeps his gaze beyond to the homes below, the sprawl of manicured lawns, the distant city on the horizon, visible through a pall of its own making. Denver.

"I'm alone." It's a simple statement, but there's a depth to those words, shades of meaning. He looks back at her. "But... I'm not lost though. I know where I am. I just don't know what people around here call this place." He holds her gaze for a long, searching moment, and then he looks away once more.

Éva

Those kicks are slowing, but she is still moving, this side-to-side walk in place now that her breath is regained and her heart rate has slowed to something less than thunderous. Sweat is on her forehead and temples and cheeks, the frame of her face and her hair is damp. It was a long run from the chambered coils of houses down below.

He sinks to a crouch and her dark eyes follow; something eases in her spine with his movement, the animal wariness ratchets minutely lower and she allows herself to take in other details. The settled and unbalanced weight of his old pack, the worn old shoes, the sunbleached and timeworn clothing.

His survey of her face, though, that draws her eyes back to him; and just once very directly onto his own. Then away again. She gives him her right profile, her jaw tightening as she steels herself against the instinct and glances back at him. Her eyes remain there even as he finds and traces the view of the valley below and city beyond over her right shoulder.

A small nod acknowledges his statement that he is alone. Both the fact of it and, perhaps, her awareness of the depth beneath them. They run together, Garou. They need their packs.

When he finds and snags her gaze of his own accord, oh, she gives in and meets it. Holds it as long then as he wishes to search her dark eyes, but does not, quite yet, tell him what people call this place.

He looks away and she focuses on his profile, solid against the dark scrub at the trail's edge where he croaches. It's her turn to search, and her own gaze has narrowed, thoughtfully.

"What's your name?"

3days

Her question hangs in the air between them. It's almost as if he doesn't hear her, at least, not at first. Instead he gazes past her still, out over the flat land beyond and below. He works his lower jaw out, brow furrowing, and his left hand reaches out to take a small, jagged pebble from the scree at his feet. He works it over in both hands, running the tips of his fingers over the ridges.

Each question cements the transition back into this world. Are you alone. Are you lost. What is your name. Each a demand for an explanation, a definition. There have been times when he has bridled at such an interrogation. A small town sheriff in Wyoming. A skeptical warden in a small Sept in southern Idaho. Two highway patrol officers at a rest stop off the I15. Times when the exchange has not gone smoothly, not gone well at all.

The pebble is turned round and round in his fingers, and then he inhales and tosses it aside, straightening as he does so, rising to his feet. A step down and forward and he's back on the path, leaving the edge, and that liminal state, behind him.

He turns to face her. He doesn't tower, is perhaps just shy of six feet, nor is he corded in muscle or barrel chested. And yet. There's a vigor there. A vitality. A fierce and burning yearning in his eyes, glimpsed but briefly before he raises his chin and gazes at her directly once more. He reaches up to rake his long hair back over his scalp, even though it floods free as soon as he drops his hand.

"I'm Lane. Lane Shepard." It's an unconscious imitation of Bond, spoken without affectation in his quiet voice. There's a dignity there, a reserve, an earnestness. He doesn't complete the exchange, doesn't ask her name in turn, but it's there, in his dark eyes, in the way he looks at her. Not quite an expectation, but rather an opening, should she wish to tell him, should she wish to become more than a passing stranger in his life.

Éva

Éva never knows when Garou will offer her their deed or human names. The former are strange and borderline incomprehensible to her. Had he called himself 3Days she would have interrupted with a quiet but firm shake of her head. And said: no. I mean the name your mother gave you.

--

He offers the name his mother gave him; there's muted shine in her eyes. Some sense of living compassion that she allows him to glimpse beneath her reserve.

"It's a pleasure, Lane." Quiet and steady, and now with his eyes on her, she glances away. Back over her right shoulder. The waking valley, the crawl of SUVs on those dark, manicured streets. The flare of headlights against garage doors and the matte green sheen of boxwood hedges. "This is Forgotten Questions. I should warn you, it's not a good time to be alone, up here. Or out there."

She has, in that moment, an image of Champion of Honor, spread-eagled against the side of the van while -

"You should introduce yourself."

Back. It is warmer now, or perhaps, still, she is more pricklingly aware of the sweat slowly drying on her skin. She reaches up and unzips the gray running jacket a third of the way. A gray tank beneath. The only colorful thing about her are her running shoes: dark purple, with the shock of chatreuse at the laces and soles.

"There's a fork further down, you can take it and follow Swallowtail Trail into the park proper. Things might get confusing the deeper you go into the territory, the closer you get to the formations, but the Guardians should find you.

"Keep in mind," the edge of her half smile, the bruised cheek and cut mouth, " - the park's open to ordinary hikers until dark, although I understand if you step across - "

The advice is arrested there. Dark eyes settle on his, earnest in their reserve. She cannot and does not know how long it has been since he was asked such questions; or what happened the last time, or the time before that. She has never been out of touch with the human world.

"I'd offer you my name," a note of apology in the inflection of her voice, "but I'd prefer to know that you'd been vetted, first." Her head tips in the vague direction of the interior of the bawn, where Lane can feel the thinning of the Gauntlet, the immanence of the Caern's promise, somewhere over that rise. Somewhere among those rocks. Somewhere. "Passed muster, as it were.

"But when you do introduce yourself, tell the Guardians that you met Andraj's mate running on the old county road.

"They'll know who I am."

3days

She speaks, and he listens. A certain boundary has been crossed; a certain amount of wariness relaxed. He stands, if not at ease, then at least with a lessening of that invisible tension, that sense that he might simply blink and then, like a creature of the forest, turn and disappear into the wilderness.

The sun breaks free momentarily of the cloud cover, and drags a wavering patch of aureate light across the scrub about them. Fine hairs up his arm and over his fingers where he holds the strap of his pack incandesce briefly, glowing redgold, and his eyes momentarily show lustrous depths such as can be seen in the heart of polished walnut. Then the light passes on, undulating away over rock, slope, and trees, and the landscape grows muted once more.

It's getting warmer. She unzips the upper third of her jacket, and though he's not been moving as fast as she, he's been moving at a steady stride for hours now, and perhaps, when the wind shifts, she can even pick up his scent. Not the rich fecundity of a homeless man, but rather a strange mingling of wood smoke, clean sweat, and the mineral tang of the reservoir's water.

It's not a good time to be up here, to be alone. She suggests, as some dark emotion crosses her face, that he should introduce himself. Almost he presses. Asks what's going on, why she would urge a strange Garou to do what he no doubt was intent on doing all along. But he holds back.

"Andraj's mate," he says at last, and even there, in so simple an echo, there are depths. Sensed perhaps more in his eyes than his voice, as he looks upon the marks of abuse across her face. He doesn't move, doesn't change his stance, but something within him coils tightly. His chin lowers a fraction of a centimeter, and his eyes narrow just a hair less. Like that, the hesitant young man is replaced by something that wears the human form but is clearly infinitely more predacious. It's as if an oven door were cracked open, it's in the subtle whitening of his knuckles, in the tension across his jaw, in how the open space they stand in suddenly feels vast and lonely and exposed.

"Andraj." His voice has grown even quieter. "I'll remember his name. Thank you."

Éva

Oh, she can sense the shift in his demeanor, the way he coils beneath his skin without even moving. That moving light highlights both the dark sheen of her hair and the threads of gray within it. More than one might expect, but she is facing west and he east, and there is no sudden illumination to her dark and steady gaze. Just the fact of it, dropping from his face to his hands. The rough knuckles dark with earth, gone pale now with ratcheting strain.

She does sense the shift, even if she does not comprehend its source. And in response, a sort of coiling of her own, oppositional and aware. Her right hand is at her hip. Beneath the jacket, mostly hidden, the bulk of a running belt with a waterbottle velcroed in. No reason for him to guess that as he is not a runner. But instead of reaching for the water bottle, perhaps offering him a drink, the movement shifts. She reaches up to grab the tab of her jacket, and zip the top third closed again with a definitive jerk of her hand.

She is aware of the weight of the weapon she carries against her right ribs. The reason for the jacket even on warm summer mornings like this, when the first incandescent flare of the sun begins to warm the earth, and the temperature rises early and fast. Equally, she is aware - and acutely on this raw and cloudy morning - that the weapon she carries is of no account against beasts like him. They shrug off bullets the way she shrugs off the grasping hands of an insistent toddler when she leaves the house every morning.

Wary, the new edge to her. She is not Garou, but she is wolf-blooded and wolf-born same as he, and her reaction to his coiled threat has its own primal tension.

"I'm going to finish my run," she tells him, then, her eyes on his profile, the set of his shoulders. And she starts past him, walking up the trail he was descending, her shoulders taut beneath the running gear, her heart-rate increased, no longer merely from the exercise. "Good luck."

She walks past him anyway: three four five six steps, watching him as she goes, straight-on and then sidelong, and then simply sensing him, the heat of his rage at her back as she accelerates into a jog, moving fractionally faster every time she plants a foot on the solid ground.

The trail she indicated takes him further and further from the village of Roxborough Park and deeper and deeper into the state park itself. And the bawn. Dusty trails and scrub oak, ponderosa pines. He's in the lower elevations of the park here, closest to civilization, but here and there he can catch glimpses of dark green stands of Douglas fir tucked in the moist hollows. The prairie grasses will wake to lush green when it rains again but now they are dry and brown, just another layer, another definition of sere against the red sandstone and abrupt peaks.

The sense of disorientation - primal and timeless - that protects the sacred place despite the crawl of humans all over its grounds begins to affect him too. He can look back when he reaches the top of the rise and see the valley and village in the distance and sometimes Denver hazy in the great beyond, framed all around by the landscape, but it gets harder and harder to remember the exact path even with the blazes and signage, or how long he was on it. Or when he first felt the frission of electric awareness at the bawn's edge.

No way for him to know this but the Guardians are on high alert and he's stopped sooner than he might have been on another day. Three young men and women with that same predatory aura to them waiting in a protected elbow of the trail. The usual challenges and then a few more. They keep him there after his introduction, after the theurge, a dark-haired and scarred young woman, has pronounced him clean and sit there arrayed on the rocks for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, awaiting the arrival of a ranking philodox to listen to his introduction again make an independent assessment of the truths or falsehoods he might utter.

--

The Guardians who challenged him accompany him deeper into the park, though not all the way to the heart of it. There's a heightened sense of tension between them and over the next few hours and days, he learns why of course: the deaths of two Guardians, one an Adren, the capture of a third, not three or four nights ago. Rumors about a cub in custody somewhere in the bawn, who was captured and twisted by Spirals but not wholly corrupted and whom the Sept, perhaps foolishly, hopes to save. There are wild stories about the night and murmurs about the Garou who survived. The Right Hand and Law in War. Bone Gnawers both. One who threw herself into action to protect a cub, the other who stood fast in expectation of death to guard her retreat.

If he mentions Andraj's mate, the younger guardians, not of her tribe, are not likely to know her. But Garou from both Septs patrol the bawn and Andraj's former packmates have dispersed here and there and everywhere. Someone suggests that her name is Rozsa but no, they are corrected. That's the mother, she's a great cook. Ever had her baklava? My sister's cousin is married to her younger son. Eva, corrects a Glass Walker from the city Sept. If any of the Garou give her a last name, it is Andraj's last name they supply: Markovic.

There's more talk about the dead. Wind-on-Concrete. River-of-Whatever-Liz-Forgot-The-Name. Striker (Maybe? The Adren Dude Liz Forgot). And the missing: Champion of Honor.

And the cub. They call her Fern.

And the pack, oh, they remember the pack. The Beloved Horror.

Killed six of them and finally drove them away this year last, but the cost to the Sept was two or three times the cost to the enemy. Now they are back and already casualties are rising.