To them all.

Calden White

It is slow at first, make no mistake about it. Eva was not being falsely modest; she genuinely has no idea how to ride. They have to teach her, the cowboy and the too-solemn little girl, and they do. Here, slide your feet all the way forward. Are the straps too short? Too long? Hold the bridle gently. Squeeze with your knees to turn the horse. Use the bridle only if you must, and leave it loose, give Cadillac her head. There, you have it.

By the time they ride out over the range, the sun is halfway to the horizon, and surely Eva's younger children would have long since grown bored and exhausted. Ellie, though, is a tenacious, patient sort, and her long wait pays off. Calden leads them out over the land, which he knows as well as his own skin. It's a relentlessly hot day, but he takes them east to the little river that forms the eastern border of the ranch, and there in the shade and the relative coolness of the water-loving trees they ride for -- miles, really, nearly all the way to the northern border.

By and large it's a hard land. Dry, sere, and more scrub than pasture, it's land too rough for farming, and very nearly too rough for ranching. In some parts of the country, a cow-calf pair only needs a single acre. Here, the ratio is closer to twenty-five, thirty acres to a pair. Small wonder, then, that they hardly ever catch sight of Calden's herd, which, though nearly four hundred strong, seems entirely dwarfed by the magnitude of the land they exist on.

Most of the ranch is flat, but near the north end there's a small bluff. That's where Calden takes his guests, eventually: riding up to the windswept ridge to look out over the ranch. And, beyond it: the great sweep of the eastern plains; the jagged teeth of the Rockies.

Rough land. Rugged land. Suits him as he suits it.

--

It is nearly sunset by the time they return, and the light has turned orange-red, throwing their shadows long and rippling across the land. The horses are tired, and they are tired, sunbeaten, windworn. Calden says he'll take the horses in and sends Eva and her girl ahead into the house, where they wash off the dust of the trail and re-meet the ranchhands. Paul, Jimmy, Ian, they remind Eva and her family goodnaturedly, all cousins to Calden. Jimmy picks Eva's older boy up, puts him on his shoulders. Ian squats down to talk shop with Ellie, asking her about her ride, her boots, whether or not she believes they're real cowboys now.

Dinner's a hearty affair: red meat, red wine, potatoes, vegetable soup. There are ten of them, so they gather around that enormous table that could probably squeeze another four or five in. Calden's home is a striking juxtaposition of the rustic and the modern. The table is long, glossy and dark, lit from above by gleaming halogens that march spot-lighting down its length. The plates are sturdy stoneware, though, the silverware hefty, the steak knives enormous and serrated.

The sky is pitch-black by the time they finish their meal. The stars are brilliant, almost innumerable this far from the city. The children are sent to bed, and the adults gather around the enormous hearth in the great room where, despite the heat of summer outside, Calden can't resist building a small fire. Just doesn't feel right without it, he says. They pour brandy and scotch. They crack nuts between their knuckles and dump the shells into a large glass bowl. They talk, and talk, and talk, and one by one they peel off: the ranch hands leaving first, claiming the excuse of an early morning. Then Calden's father, having socialized enough for a day or perhaps a year. Eva's mother-in-law, finally,

until it's just the two of them. Calden in an armchair, tipping another finger's worth of scotch into his tumbler, then holding the bottle up in offering.

The house around them is dark, quiet, settling for the night. The structure has been built and rebuilt and renovated and remodeled so many times over the years that it no longer bears any resemblance to the original house Calden's great-great-grandfather built here -- but the old foundation is still there, somewhere below. And now, as the night deepens, the weight of the years and the traditions and the ancestries that have woven through this house can finally and subtly be felt.

Éva Illésházy

"Ellie could not stop talking about the how much she enjoyed the ride, today." Éva murmurs, her voice quiet over the crackling fire. I expect she's still talking about it in her sleep, and will be regaling us with her storied exploits as a ranchhand for months to come. Mr. White says - will probably be as ubiquitous a phrase as but mom in our house."

The flash of a smile. It is precise, not lazy, but more relaxed than most of her expressions. It is rare that Éva drinks without thinking about where she is, and with whom, and whether she should have another. It is rare for her to pour herself more than a glass of wine, or a single Scotch, but tonight all she has to do is wander to the guest suite downstairs and after riding the land for hours, she has few fears about monsters blundering through the dark towards them.

Foolish, perhaps, but the illusory feeling of security is so rare these days that she will savor as Ellie savored ever new experience on their afternoon ride. Perhaps, most particularly, her ability to be an expert, to instruct her mother solemnly, with Calden's guidance and endorsement, in the most basic of horse riding skills.

So she tips up her own glass to Calden as he offers the Scotch, and watches as he pours, firelight reflecting in her dark eyes.

"I can see why you came back," she tells him. "You belong to the land as much as it belongs to you. Perhaps more than it belongs to you."

For all the scorching heat of the day, the summer is leaving and leaving in its wake nights with more bite to the air than one ever really remembers until autumn comes round again. So the fire Calden kindled in the fireplace seems more than right, as the adults begin to peel off, one by one by one, but welcome.

"I can't tell you what a welcome change it is from the city, right now, too. I've been looking into the history of the Cold Crescent building? And from here, with the land and the stars and the fire and the Scotch. It all seems so unreal."

Calden White

The drink accepted is poured with the effortless ease of a true Fianna: the neck of the bottle just barely tapping the lip of the glass; the amber liquid slipping out like silk. He lifts the bottle after a finger or two of scotch, mindful of his guest's self-control. The bottle thumps quietly down on the floor by Calden's chair, and he lifts his tumbler to peer at the flames through the whisky.

"Belonging to the land more than the land belongs to us," he muses. "Isn't that the ideal of our people?"

And he looks over at her as she continues. A welcome change in the city, she calls it, and his smile is wry and knowing. Of course it's knowing: it's how he feels every time, leaving the city behind for the open plains. For all his business savvy, for all that his home is modern and, in its own way, quite luxurious, Calden's way of living is pre-industrial. It's nearly pre-agrarian.

"The one downside," he says, "is that when you have a place like this to retreat to, calm and peaceful and untouched by war, it's easy to forget that there is a war going on. I admire you sometimes. It's not that I don't want to help, but ... I never seem to step up quite the same way you do, or with such conviction and determination."

Éva Illésházy

That has her breathing out a quiet breath that is half-a-laugh. Head tipped back, turning against the spine of the chair, following not the pattern of the flames against the heart, but of the starlight sweeping in through those two stories of windows looking out over the dark sweep of the high plains.

"Mmm, and what is the war being fought for except good people living on the land and in harmony with it? I don't think there's anything to admire. We have our roles, and we perform them. I suppose, in some ways, the way they do. Though our own are rather more nebulous, and rather less well defined."

The Scotch is in her hands, she holds it negligently, a bit thoughtlessly, but then lifts it up and takes a measured, savoring sip. Breathes out, not precisely a sigh, but -

"For my part, I wanted so little to do with the Nation when I was younger. I never ran from them - you can't really run from my tribe - but I, did the tasks they asked me, when they asked me, and no more than that.

"Then, Ellie. One look at her. I kept thinking - what if she's one of them? I had always resented their intrusions into my life. Then I started think about them differently.

"All the things they are called to do. All the sacrifices they are called to make, when they're so very young.

"And how unfair that is.

"And how they do it anyway.

"And I've no doubt that you do your part." A lift of her glass in quiet, steady toast. " - in hospitality if nothing more."

Calden White

"I wouldn't dream," Calden replies, unfurling his arm to tap his glass against Eva's, "of sullying the good name of Stag with poor hospitality."

They drink. The fire, small though it is in that enormous hearth that could very nearly hold a bonfire, crackles and pops. The rest of the house is still. The children and the elders have fallen asleep in their various rooms, in their various beds, under their various covers. They, the adults in the narrowest since of the word: they remain. It feels a little like tradition, like ritual.

"Is she?" he asks quietly. "Garou, I mean."

Éva Illésházy

She favors him with a sideslanting though genuine smile when he taps his glass against hers. The fire moves in her eyes and draws her gaze back to it, inexorably. Other than the two of them, it is the only thing moving in the room.

Éva draws in a breath, through her nose rather than her mouth, considering her answer.

"Andraj thought she was," a thoughtful upward lilt of her head. That smile takes on the musing gold of memory. " - though before we met, or I should say, before he met her, I had no idea."

Calden White

"I wouldn't be surprised if she is," he replies. "She has a boldness to her. And a sort of ... stillness. I wouldn't be disappointed, either, if she wasn't. She's a great kid. Makes me want one of my own," and then he smiles, lopsided: he makes it sound like kids were something to be picked up at the store, along with roombas and plasma TVs.

"What was your Andraj like?"

Éva Illésházy

"I'll let you borrow her for the odd weekend, in that case. Maybe a week in the summertime." Here her expression veers immediately wry, with a quickening energy that belies her superficial laziness. Laughs, as she says, " - call it a test drive."

Then her eyes cut away from him again, as he asks about 'her' Andraj. Not to the small fire in the great hearth, but once more to the rafters, the dark, reflective windows high above. "He was ten years younger than me. 'Proud,'" - and the quote marks are audible, framed by an arched brow and a certain tone, "of my professional success. Proud. I have no doubt, by the way, that he thought I should be flattered by the sentiment.

"Shadow Lord and a Philodox. Arrogant. certain. Often intractable, even in the smallest matters. He also loved Ellie from the moment he met her, and we had - " a pause, musing, distant. Fond, with an undercurrent of grief that has softened with time, but has not disappeared, " - an understanding, in the end."

Silent, then, she takes another mouthful of Scotch, drops her eyes from above to below, glancing at him again.

"What about you? Have you - "

And the question is deliberately open-ended.

Calden White

Calden laughs aloud, there: a test drive. And then he quiets again, sipping his scotch as Eva tells him about -- well; not quite the love of her life, perhaps, but her bedmate and housemate and everything-mate, mate, of many years. At least five. Perhaps more.

The grief has mellowed with time, like wine. It has become something to be mused over by a fireside.

For the second time tonight, Calden asks another question before he answers the one meant for him. It is gently spoken, but it is still, perhaps, a bit of salt on an old wound. At the least, it is -- so very Fianna of him to ask:

"Did he love you?"

Éva Illésházy

The question demands a moment's thought, which has her brows drawn together and the distance in her gaze changing to a different sort of distance, with different rules and a different sort of gravity.

In the end, she says,

"I don't know," which is true. She doesn't know. By then, her eyes are on him once more. Remarkably clear and unflinchingly direct. "I suppose he did."

Calden White

That brings an odd, tender little smile to Calden's mouth. He drains the last of his scotch; thinks about it, and then pours -- just a little more.

Tops hers off too, if she wants it.

"I hope he did," he says. "Your tribe has a reputation for hardness and pragmatism, but you were his mate and the mother of his cubs. That's got to count for something.

"As for me," it's a new thread picked up, accompanied by a fanning of his left hand. Broad palm, long fingers, a workman's hand. Big, capable, not elegant in the least. No ring, he shows her, though it's symbolic at best: they both know it's a rare match in the Nation that requires signals so human as rings and papers.

"No mate to date," he continues, "Garou or otherwise. I would admit to scandalous flings and trysts worthy of my tribe's reputation, but a gentleman doesn't kiss and tell. And even if I weren't a gentleman, the truth is my history is fairly tame. I blame it on the remoteness of my living situation.

"But in all honesty, I avoided attachment purposefully to some degree when I was younger. Perhaps for the same reasons you wanted little to do with the Nation. It was never quite resentment, but -- at the time I really didn't want to be snapped up by some seventeen-year-old Galliard who still believed in Disney romances and listened to Britney Spears, who had a teenage girl's emotional stability," a wry smile -- "and the ability to turn into a nine-foot tower of doom."

A small pause, here. Long enough for a small sip.

"There is someone, though. I'm a little embarrassed to say this because it'll make my hospitality look full of ulterior motives, but I met her because she shared my roof for a night. She is, ironically enough, also ten years my junior." A longer pause. "I like her. I like her quite a bit. But she's of the royal tribe, and you know how they are about their matchmaking. So I don't really know where this is headed."

Éva Illésházy

Éva has accepted another splash of Calden's Scotch, no more. She feels warm and rather more relaxed than she has allowed herself to feel in quiet some time, and allows herself to save the moment, staring down rather idly over the surface of the liquid in ehr glass.

She does glance up when he shoes off that hand, without a wedding ring. She does not wear one tonight, and although Andraj went through with a legal adoption of Ellie, he put no such ring on her finger.

Though she does wear one, from time to time and especially when traveling, which she purchased for herself, and for reasons of her own.

"Things go where you steer them, Calden," she returns at last, still staring down at her Scotch until she says his name. Glances up then, the spark of the firelight in her eyes, that wry twist to her elegant mouth once more. "That's one of the secrets of the practice of law. And probably even horseback riding."

Lifts up her glass and tips it toward him again. "To your royal. Whom you like quite a bit. May things go where you steer them."

Calden White

Another huff of laughter there: "You pick up fast."

He does not immediately meet her glass. He holds his in reserve a moment, half-lifted. "And what should I toast for you?"

Éva Illésházy

"That they all grow up," she returns, her eyes dropping from his face, but not her attention. " - but not before I'm ready to let go."

Calden White

She can see he understands: immediately, intimately, not just the words but the meaning, all the layers of it. His glass clinks against hers, a crisp little sound amidst all the warm silence of his home.

"To your children," he says, quiet and simple.

Éva Illésházy

Éva smiles, and her smile has all of the warmth of nostalgia and none of its false romance. No, none. The expression in her eyes is essential and necessary as marrow, as blood, as bone.

Then it softens, but only at the edges, and she tips her head forward and returns, quiet,

"To them all."

Riding Lessons

Calden White

"I don't have any ponies or paddocks," Calden admits, "so maybe he'll just have to wait for when he's older. Or maybe later I can see if one of my Great Pyrenees will let him take a ride on its back."

He sets the platter of steak on the deck table; covers it with a lid to let it rest.

"As for you," he says with a smile, "I'm sure we can find you toothless old mare who won't throw you even if you have no idea what you're doing." Nodding at the door, "Go ahead and call the rest of your crew. I'm going to scrape the grill off while it's still hot, and then I'll go grab a bag of salad out of the fridge."

Éva Illésházy

"Andris does not need to be taught that canines of any sort are to be ridden about like a pony. He might learn it anyway but if so he will learn it on his own. Let's leave your Great Pyrenees in peace, shall we?"

He draws another low note of laughter when he offers her the toothless old mare. There's no immediate response though. He has the grill to clean. She has three children to wrangle, one of them an especially wriggly and inquisitive toddler, one of them a girl who has finished setting the table and now does not want to stop walking back and forth on the deck because she loves to hear the retort of her bootheels on the decking and will ask Calden, later, whether he doesn't really think she ought to have spurs of her own, too, and one of whom believes that every toy his little brother picks up should actually belong to him right now.

Eva sets her bottle of beer on the deck table, and is headed back to call the rest of her crew, but as she goes, she glances back over her shoulder.

"Oh, and I think I'd rather be thrown, Calden," the Shadow Lord tosses back, "than be relegated to a toothless old mare. Surely you have something more challenging."

The disappears inside to chase down the boys.

Calden White

"Spoken like a true Shadow Lord," Calden calls after her, laughing.

And so goes lunch: the boys chased down, the mother-in-law fetched; the father -- Calden's, that is -- roused grumbling from whatever old-man-cave he retreats to when his son is entertaining. Or just all the damn time. Rory White manages to put on a semi-charming facade for Eva's mother, but nonetheless spends most of lunch grumbling about the weather, or the damn Democrats, or maybe the damn Republicans, or that the beef is overdone (it's not) and the salad is wilted (it is, a little) and the red wine -- there is red wine, not from the cellar but from the clever little wine fridge under the kitchen counter -- isn't full-bodied enough for this beef.

Still, despite the bad cheer emanating from the elder White, they manage to have a passably pleasant lunch. It's a hot day, but the umbrella provides some measure of shade. The beef is fresh as can be, and tender and juicy besides. The salad, though slightly wilted from the refrigerator, is just light and tart enough to offset the heaviness of red meat, red wine. And the wine: the adults easily split the bottle between them, though -- if Eva approves -- Ellie gets a tiny shotglassful to sample.

Lunch ends. Just about everyone pitches into the cleanup, and then Eva's mother-in-law takes her two younger children inside for naptime or playtime or whatever it is young children do when out of sight of their parents. As for Eva, Ellie and Calden: the latter leads them down from the deck, taking not the broad interior stairs but the wooden ones that ramp straight down. The house, the garage, a chicken run, a small patch of garden, and a barn make up the bulk of the developments on this land. On their way to the barn, where the horses are stabled, Calden explains that his ranchhands have their own cabin out closer to the center of his land, whereas the house itself sits on the south end.

"Easier for them to get around," he says. "Longest they'll have to move in any given direction is two miles, two and a half or so."

At the barn door, Calden pulls up the heavy bolt that secures it to the ground. Opens it up into a cool, shadowed interior, sunlight shafting through cracks in the roof and the walls in brilliant beams; casting through the opened shutters in blinding squares. More than just horses occupy the barn. There's heavy equipment in there too, stowed out of the elements. The summer's litter of puppies yip and roll in the hay. Even in puppyhood, the larger Pyrenee guard-dogs are easily distinguished from the smaller border collie herd-dogs by their white coats and their size. Toward the back, two dairy cows keep each other company across from a row of a half-dozen or so horse-stalls. Two of them are empty. A mean-looking tomcat perches atop the divider of one, slit-eyed, watching them as they approach the four remaining horses.

"So I heard you've been taking riding lessons, Ellie," Calden says as he picks out one of the quarter-horses stabled in the barn. "What sort of riding do you like best?"

Éva Illésházy

"I was," Ellie replies to Calden, with a sulky little glance at her mother, who follows behind her and has pushed her sunglasses up over the crown of her head when entering the darkness of the barn. Éva lifts her elegant brows and responds to the sulkiness of that glance - which expresses itself more in the curve of Ellie's cheeks, in the set of her mouth, than it does in her eyes, which are rich and dark and already rather opaque, except for their side. " - but now I can only go when my mom can come and she's always working. It's not fair."

Ellie ranges out ahead of Éva, still enjoying the stompiness of her boots and all the new sights and sounds, stopping now and then in the barn to pivot on her heels and take in all the sights. The girl is mostly following Calden like a small dark shadow but then she sees -

puppies

- yipping and rolling in the hay and she stops midmotion and squees over them, in a rather un-Shadow-Lord-like but very nine-year-old manner. Unlike many children, Ellie does not throw herself at the puppies. First she watches them, from the edges of the strawpile, her dark eyes darting from puppy to puppy, then she edges closer, methodic about this, then finally crouches down carefully and holds out her hand to the closest and most placid of the litter. And stays like that, still and pleased when the puppy wanders up to her and presses his cold wet nose against her hand.

"Oh, I like Western riding best. But that's all I've done so maybe I'd like English riding too. But I'm not up to jumping or anything yet."

Calden White

"Well," Calden says, leading out a rather spirited-looking colt, "your mom has what's best for you at heart. You can count on that, just like you can count on what's best for you not always being what's most fun.

"How about this, though. We'll teach your mom to ride today, you and me. Maybe she'll make more time to go riding with you if she can enjoy it too, right?" He winks at the girl over his shoulder, and then reaches up to fetch one of the saddles hanging on hooks on the wall. "I'm going to saddle Trumpet up for you. He's pretty big, but he's goodnatured and he liked my brother's kids when they visited.

"And Miss Illeshazy," he adds -- the first time he's attempted her last name, and predictably butchered it, "Looks like one of my cousins took the toothless mare out today, so I'm going to give you Cadillac." He nods down at a pretty little mare -- a pinto. Oh, the wit. "She's smaller than your daughter's horse even, and she's got a real smooth gait." His grin looks decidedly smirkish. "Think you can handle that?"

Éva Illésházy

Ellie will allow herself to be dragged away from admiring the puppies only because there was larger and more majestic animals to admire. She is not precisely horse-crazy as some girls tend to be, but there's something remarkable about the size and the power and the soft dark eyes that defeats even the wild, rumbling charm of the Pyrenees pups.

Calden assures her that she can count on her mother having her best interests at heart and Ellie gives him a quiet and quite direct Look, far older than her years. There is skepticism embedded in the look, though the skepticism is not directed at the sentiment that her mother has her best interests at heart, but at something.

"I know," she responds at last, straightening and leaving behind the pups and walking back through the barn to watch as Calden saddles the animals for their afternoon outing. Solemn, "I know things aren't fair, either. I just wish they were."

By then Eva has followed her daughter, has come up behind her and slid a hand over her left shoulder, pulling her slightly back, into a sort of quiet, possessive physical contact.

And she's watching Calden work with a hand now on her daughter's sleek dark head, rubbing her thumb quietly over the crown with a wry twist to her mouth that sharpens when he butchers her last name.

"Your Hungarian is terrible, Mr. White. If formality is called for, perhaps you should stick to Counselor, mm?" The wry look settles into something more immediate and more bemused even as his own starts to look smirkish.

"Cadillac, you say?" turning to follow his nod down through the barn, glancing back at him as he informs her that the pretty little mare is smaller than Trumpet. "If I'm not up to the challenge, I'll let entertain all the questions you have about your great-aunt's will. Or something else equally dull and as far from my area of expertise as you can manage. Cadillac it is."

Calden White

There was -- something there, in the girl, in the mother, between the girl and her mother. Calden is curious, but Calden is also too polite to pry. At the moment, anyway. Perhaps later he'll ask Eva. Wouldn't normally, but then: having faced almost-certain death with this woman, and having made a verbal pact of mutual annihilation with her, he feels a little more inclined to questions.

"I'm starting to get the feeling," Calden says, strapping the saddle snugly to Trumpet, "that you get a kick out of winning. Is that why you went into law?"

Éva Illésházy

"Not precisely," Éva returns, releasing Ellie to trail after Calden and act as a slightly superfluous secondary stableboy. Ellie trails him happily and and helps him check the straps and is careful about Trumpet's back legs and wonders if Calden has any carrots that she can feed him and asks any questions she asks in and around the conversation the adults are sharing.

"My father was an FBI agent. When I was ten he was arrested for treason. Convicted when I was eleven. Sealed records and unidentified witnesses who testified by sworn affidavits that did not identify their names. I went into criminal defense law in a rather naive bout of idealism.

"Or maybe I just thought that I could go back someday, clear his name." Her own attention is steady, but sometimes slips to the girl and back again. Otherwise, Eva herself is rather still, her voice quiet, her eyes opaque. The narrowest shrug punctuates the story. "Things change. What about you? This is family land, isn't it? Did you just end up here, because it's where you were already? Or did you made a choice?"

Calden White

So they work, Calden and his small assistant: buckling buckles, tightening straps, saddling and bridling the three horses they're taking out for their afternoon ride. For himself, Calden leads out the big chestnut gelding he typically rides, the one with the sturdy frame and dark mane and gentle, steady eyes.

And he listens to Eva -- answering Ellie in between sentences with thoughtless familiarity as she asks about which way the stirrups go on, and why the bridles have no bits, and whether or not he has carrots or apples or other munchies for the horses -- listens as Eva tells him a little piece of her history; a casual mention, almost, of a past that would have scarred anyone. Calden doesn't say that, though. He doesn't point it out, and between the two of them, it's doubtful he'd have to.

He doesn't ask if the charges were true, either. If her father really was a traitor. Somehow, that doesn't seem like it would matter.

"I'm sorry you went through that," he says quietly. "I know it can't possibly be the same, but I hope time and the defense of others have healed that wound a little."

Éva Illésházy

"I don't think of it as a wound," she returns, quietly and thoughtfully while Calden provides his young assistant with instruction and advice and history. Éva offers no assistance, herself, but she watches and reminds Ellie just once to say thank you, if Calden has indeed supplied her with a sweet treat to slip to Trumpet or Cadillac or his own big chestnut gelding and Ellie has forgotten her manners in her excitement over the delicious tickle of the horse's soft lips over her little fingers.

"Not anymore. We all make sacrifices. My father made his. I make mine. You make yours.

"They make theirs. Which seem harder to me than almost anything we have to bear." A deep, quiet breath. "And I'm afraid my work is infinitely more practical and much less altruistic these days. But thank you.

"Now it's your turn," the expectancy is wry but present.

Calden White

"Good," Calden replies, gently jesting now. "Because we Fianna have cornered the market on idealism. If you'd kept it up I'd have to charge royalties."

His turn, then. The turn of his mouth is equally wry as he finishes saddling the horses and, yes, produces a treat for Ellie to feed the horses. The girl is reminded to thank him. Calden welcomes her, almost-gravely, taking her quite seriously indeed.

"I was born here," he answers, "and so was all the rest of my family going back five generations. These days most of us leave home. I did too. I went to college at the state school, and then I traveled. Saw the world, like a young man ought to.

"And then I decided to come back. It was a choice, and the right one." He smiles: "This is where I want to be. I miss it when I'm away and I'm always glad to be back."

Éva Illésházy

"Had I persisted perhaps your people would have adopted me into the tribe," this with a laugh, which is open mouthed but quiet. " - though I'm afraid I lack most of the rest of your traits, am not especially musical, and have always despised bagpipes."

His turn then, and Éva listens quietly, her dark eyes steady on him until he comes to the conclusion of that brief biography. Then she glances over her shoulder at the narrow portion of his land framed by the open doors to the big barn. Takes in the light streaming through the rafters, the pieces of hay drifting through the air, the afternoon sunlight slanting over the land beyond the barn.

"That is a long time for land to stay in the family. And you look like you belong here. I'm glad you had the chance to see the world, and glad you remembered to find your way back.

"If you don't mind my asking a question you thought you finished answering when you were twenty-two, what did you major in?"

Calden White

"Well, I'm afraid we can't accept anyone who can't play an instrument," the cattleman says, smirking, "let alone someone who despises that great and noble instrument, the bagpipe. -- Hey, Ellie?"

-- and when the girl looks at him, he nods her at Trumpet. "Can you take his bridle and lead him out? I'm gonna get Cadillac and Hickory here."

As they're leading the animals out into the sun, Calden turns to Eva again. "Animal husbandry and agricultural science," he answers, his smile a touch sheepish. "I'll admit not coming back wasn't really ever part of my plan. I was open to letting my mind change, but -- I never really expected it to.

"How about you? Denver born and bred?"

Éva Illésházy

Ellie is delighted to be given the task of leading Trumpet out into the bright afternoon sunlight. She does this, as she does most things, with a quiet care, though she does tuck down her head to watch the toes of her cowboy boots as she scuffs her feet through the hay.

Éva hangs back, falls into step beside Calden as they emerge from the barn. "Oh, no," she's telling him then, shaking her dark head. "I came to Denver, I suppose about the time they bought 1999 Broadway. Moved around regularly as a child with my father's assignments.

"His family came for me after. His mother's mate, actually. I think my youngest uncle was a few years older than me, no more than that. That was upstate New York. Then Philadelphia. New Haven.

"New Jersey, Chicago. Denver was something of an accident, but I intend to stay. Now I want to hear about the world tour. The one place - other than your home - you'd go back to again, if you could - "

They'll go riding, then. Éva was not engaging in any false modesty when she said she could not ride a horse. She does not know how to sit, or how to place her feet. Must spend her daughter's riding lessons, when she can attend them, responding to e-mails on a tablet or reviewing pleadings or - something. Still, she has a certain fearlessness that serves her well, and a hard-worn, well-cultivated athleticism that allows her to sit easily in the seat, comfortable in her physicality.

Ellie looks like she has been riding for much longer than a single summer, but look at how steady the little girl is, how intent. It is hard to imagine her any other way.

Lunch

Calden White

The original offer was sincere, if offhand, and issued some months past. It's been long enough that Calden figured Eva might never take him up on it. It may even have been long enough that he's all but forgotten about it, right up until that phone call or text message or email in his inbox: would he mind playing host to a small murder of Shadow Lord kin over the long weekend?

His answer was quick and warm: no, no he would not.

And so: it's the Friday before Labor Day. Calden is the very definition of home business, so there's no need to arrange a day off or the like. He lets his father know, and he lets the ranchhands know, that they'll be having guests. That he'll be taking some time off to show them around.

Around ten in the morning is when they arrive, Eva and her three kids and possibly her mother-in-law; all of them pulling up to the ranch house in whatever vehicle Eva has chosen for the outing. Calden meets them out front, the door to his home wide open behind him. It's a fairly impressive structure, rustic and grand at once, cresting a low bluff. The front is imposing, all roughhewn stone and exposed timbers, while the back opens up to enormous south-facing windows and a wrap-around deck. A master suite and a study share the upper floor; the lower floor, which is a basement in the front and a ground floor in the back, contains the guest suite where Eva is settled. Also, an impressively stocked wine cellar, a game room, a small gym with a pool(!).

The main floor, sandwiched between the upper and lower, is wide-open, spacious. The furnishings and appliances and fixtures are startlingly modern; lots of brushed steel and glass amidst the earthier elements that make up the bones of the house. A great room with a yawning hearth anchors the house; kitchen and dining room through open archways to one side, bedrooms to the other. One of those bedrooms is occupied by Calden's irascible father, who -- today, at least -- can't be bothered putting on a charming facade. Eva's kids are put up in the other, far enough from their mother that they're free to stay up all night if they wish.

The small party is disbanded to settle in. By the time they've explored their rooms, set their bags down, unpacked as much as they're going to for their weekend-long stay, and grabbed a quick handwash or facewash or outright shower -- they can smell hickory smoke and searing meat. Up on the sunbeaten deck, Calden is making lunch the best way he knows how: steaks carved thick off the primal cut, salted and peppered, tossed on the grill with a fat chunk of butter melting over each one. They can hear him through the house -- some more distantly than others -- as he opens the sliding door to the great room and bellows:

"LUNCH."

Éva Illésházy

The invitation started with a text message, sent just after mid-day on Monday, August 26. Brief and remarkably to the point.

Is the offer still open?

Perhaps so precisely to the point that Calden had required clarification, which Éva supplied with equal efficiency perhaps an hour later, during a break in the afternoon's sentencing hearing.

--

Four days later, the entirety of the brood has been piled into a black Lexus SUV - carseats permanently embedded in the back seat, but not a single Cheerio lost in the upholstery except for those spilled during this morning's drive - and relocated to the White ranch. Ellie in the middle of the expansive back seat slid out from between the car seats and charged out the SUV and onto the driveway and straight for Calden while her mother and grandmother worked the complex array of buckles and restraints necessary to remove the younger boys from the car.

Ellie and Calden are not close enough that she might throw herself at him for a hug, and there is something withheld, restrained about the girl. Some gravity to her dark and steady eyes that can never be erased but still: she favored him with a pleased smile and showed off her cowboy boots wordlessly. Dark brown leather, fine, with a subtle floral tooling to them and proper heels to keep her feet in the stirrups.

Then she started telling Calden all about her new adventures as a fourth grader, trailing behind him as Calden and perhaps one of his ranch hands gave their guests a hand with the array of luggage necessary for carting children around the state. Ellie volunteered to carry her Trunkee while assuring Calden that she was now too old for it and too big to ride on it but she did not want to make a fuss. Somehow, through all of this he was able to glean a sense of how thoroughly the children's lives have been interrupted.

No more riding lessons. No ballet. No soccer. No tee-ball. No swim-team. No after school programs. How are they safer at home than they might be in a public park with a dozen child-sized goals and a dozen child-sized teams except: how can life simply go on in the face of horrors such as the city of Denver has experienced?

--

Ellie is the first to answer the summons to lunch and she takes a place at Calden's right hand watching him cook and peppering him with occasional and rather thoughtful questions. About the origin of the steaks, or why the butter, or how he knows to turn. Rosja follows, herding five-year-old Andris, who is fair as Éva and Rosja are fair, in distinct contrast to Ellie's dusky skin, and Éva is the last to arrive, with her toddler, Jozsef, in her arms.

She is dressed down, the Shadow Lord, in jeans and a sleeveless white blouse and hiking boots. Sunglasses on her dark head that the two-year-old reaches for repeatedly and which she keeps out of his hands with a deft lift of her chin before she sets him down to explore the deck while Calden finishes grilling the steaks.

It's noon, the sun is bright overhead so outside she pulls the glasses down to shield her eyes from the sun. Despite dressing down, she still looks - sharp, expensive, perhaps a little bit removed - but she circles to the grill, watching the Fiann grill the steaks she assumes came from cows he raised and cows he butchered, and urges Ellie to go decide whom will sit where.

Ellie obliges, because Ellie likes to tell people what to do.

"You have a lovely home, Calden." From the way she looks out over the sweep of the bluff, she means not merely the home but the land. "Thank you for sharing it with us."

Calden White

Cows that he raised, yes. Not cows that he butchered. He sends them elsewhere to be slain, to be quartered, to be carved. It's a small indulgence he allows himself and the part of his heart that is soft. Eva's tribe would likely disapprove; would find it weak and somehow dishonorable. Good thing, then, Calden is not of Thunder.

He is of Stag. That is never more apparent than when he is home, and at home in his surroundings: the stone, the wood, the antlers racked over the hearth. The broad open scrubland, hard land that he nonetheless loves and tends. The cattle, the herd, the dogs, the trucks, the boots, the hats, the red-checked shirts, the horses.

They should go riding later, he'd suggested to Ellie as he showed her when to turn the steaks. If her mother allows. If her mother and grandmother know how to ride, they can come too. Maybe her five-year-old brother too, but the toddler: he's too little.

The planning is interrupted when Eva sends Ellie to decide the seating and, perhaps, place the silverware. Calden looks up from the grill, smiling, the sun bringing out the subtle red-tones in his hair; the subtle glints of green in his eyes. Of Stag. "Thank you," he says, leaning down to pull a cold bottled microbrew out of the ice chest near, sort-of-under the grill. He extends it to Eva, still dripping from melted ice. "And it's my pleasure. I swear Ellie's grown since I last saw her."

He gives the steaks another nudge to judge done-ness, then grabs the platter and starts taking them off the fire.

"Haven't seen either of you in a while, though. How've you been? Sounds like you and your crew have been a little cabinbound."

Éva Illésházy

"Perhaps it's the boots," the Shadow Lord returns, with a lilting curve of her hooked brows above her oversized dark glasses and a certain wry hook to her mouth as she accepts the microbrew with wordless curve of thanks to her mouth, and reaches up open the bottletop. "I was informed that the heels are utilitarian rather than decorative. Functional, for more than adding an inch or two of height." There is an undertone of bemusement in her voice - Ellie brings it out in her more than the boys - and while Calden tends the steaks Éva watches her eldest daughter dart around the patio table, laying out silverware with a remarkable precision, talking to herself quietly as she plans who should go where.

Naturally, Ellie places herself at Calden's right hand. And Calden at the head of the table.

"Oh, we've been well," Éva continues, in the breezy tone of someone long-accustomed to small talk. To the intersectional and superficial nature of it. Give them just enough, and never too much.

She's inhaling to continue that light assurance with some grounding fact, perhaps about summer's end or the first week of school or or or - when she stops herself quite abruptly. The glasses hide her dark eyes from view, but nevertheless Calden can feel the weight of her gaze on him from behind the smoked glass.

"Actually, no. I suppose you've heard?

"I knew all of the Guardians by sight. Some of them by name. Even called one of them my friend. We had lunch every week I was in town.

"I keep wondering," and her attention has shifted again, to her children on the deck, the boys playing together, a bit rough but they are Shadow Lords. Ellie adjusting the forks and knives so that they are equidistant on every placesetting. " - if I should send them elsewhere. I have relatives in upstate New York."

Calden White

Calden knows that tone. He doesn't employ it often himself, but he's not thoroughly naive. He goes to the Big City twice a month, at least. He has standing arrangements with humane slaughterhouses there, and he has contracts and deals and exclusivity clauses with several high-end restaurants. One upscale grocer. Though he doesn't consider himself one of them, he rubs elbows often with the elite -- and, to be perfectly truthful, his bank account probably puts him into that coveted one percent. Or close, at least.

So, yes: he knows that tone, Small Talk (tm), the sort of tone you affect when you're talking with acquaintances and associates because true friends are rare in your echelon. He doesn't point it out. He wouldn't. Still -- when it shifts, when Eva abruptly drops it, Calden glances at her.

And furrows his brow, suddenly, achingly. His chest rises on an inhale as he sets the last steak on the platter, lifts it in one hand as he puts down his tongs and lowers the cover on the grill.

"I'm sorry," he says, simply. "I can't begin to imagine your loss."

That is the truth. Not just because of the Guardians, one of them her friend, but also: those children. Their father. Their fathers, because Ellie was different enough from the rest that Calden intuits that small piece of history; two men that she felt enough for, at least, to bear children by. Both gone now. He can't begin to imagine. His mind flashes on someone else entirely; that half-moon of the royal tribe, that laughing, sundrenched, life-loving woman he's dallied with so often and so pleasantly. He doesn't want to imagine.

"I think your kids will do better close to you, though," he adds, just as quietly. "There's danger everywhere. That's something they'll have to get used to. Growing up without their only parent, though -- even temporarily -- that's not something they should have to get used to."

Éva Illésházy

"It's strange," to him, quietly, with a ribbon of speculation woven into the tone. Speaking to him, her face cheated towards him but her eyes still so clearly stuck on the view of her small family in the midday sun. There is a brief flare-up of contention between the boys that another parent might interrupt. But they are Shadow Lords, and the dispute is small enough that neither mother nor grandmother steps in. "I don't much think about my losses.

"So much as theirs, past, present. Future. That's what makes me angry," There is anger in her then. Controlled and sourced and somehow just quietly allowed anger that does not have the heat of rage, but nevertheless feels just as deep and just as old and almost as worldchanging as rage. " - about it all."

Éva is clenching that microbrew in her right hand, and has formed a fist with her left - both thoughtlessly - but now she registers the tension in her body and forces herself to relax. To pull back from that moment and glance at Calden and listen to his advice.

This time he has her full attention, is a moving reflection in the oversized discs of her sunglasses.

"I appreciate the advice," she returns then, and it is the truth. There is a reflective sincerity. "Truth is, I've been spinning my wheels thinking about this every since they returned. Every since they returned. Ever since They returned.

"You're right, of course. There's danger everywhere and no way to know if things are worse there than they are here. Just saying it aloud helps.

"Thank you."

Calden White

"If you keep thanking me," Calden says with a quirk of a smile, "I'm going to start keeping tabs."

He angles his head toward the table, then. Not the long, glossy mahogany one in the dining room, nor the semicircular breakfast bar where he eats most of his meals. The one outside: the heavy teak one that sits under a canting umbrella, a little dusty from exposure.

"Let's have lunch and forget about the war, just for a few hours or days," he says. "I was going to take Ellie riding in the afternoon, and maybe your older boy if he can handle it. Do you want to come along? I'll teach you if you don't know how."

Éva Illésházy

The quip earns him a half-voiced laugh, which is wry and open mouthed. But listen: she does not thank him again. And will not, throughout the whole of the lunch. Not when he passes the salt. Not when he passes the peas. Not even when they are finished, sitting back in the warm afternoon light.

The meal was lovely, she will tell him.

Without a single thank you.

"A pony in the paddock," a glance at the children, "might be more appropriate for Andris, if you have ponies and/or paddocks. As for myself, I can't say that I've ridden before. But if you think you can teach me, I'd like to come along."

An unexpected guest.

Serafíne

Phobia roll

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

The patrol they shared through the city was quiet. The beating heat of the afternoon then sunk into a long, hot, lingering evening, the threat of rain and thunderstorms constantly on the horizon. Strange to imagine how thoroughly the Guardians of Cold Crescent once inhabited these streets. How quickly they came when called, how they moved through the corridors between the skyscrapers downtown like water through the great canyons of the west, appearing where they were needed and when they were called within minutes.

For Reverance of the Dawn and Storm's Teeth the experience is much blinder, much stranger, and much more frustrating. Their only contact with the elder coordinating these patrols is by cell phone and their sense of the city is framed by the immediate information fed them by their senses. A day on the city streets and shadowing through its umbral reflection beneath the humming glow of Weaver's workings and no more than the hint of possible violence at the edges of their perception. Leads that go nowhere. Bleak, sudden spirals of scents that end at brick walls.

--

After, they are close to Avery's penthouse. She offers Erich - who has so far to go to return to his tinyhouse - hospitality. A meal or a drink or view of the city, breathless, exhilaring, from one of her two stories of balconies. This too, is uneventful: the ride up the elevator. The opening of the door.

It has not been tampered with.

But: there is light in the foyer that is on now, which was not on when Avery last left the space.

The print of a muddy boot print on her pristine floor.

The assertion of the noise of the city as it rises up from the streets below and a warm current of a breeze to match. Somewhere, a door or a window is open to the terrace.

A certain perfume in the air.

Reverence of Dawn

They have fought nothing, found nothing. It is frustrating with the moon waning overhead, like the sky itself is trying to sap their rage from them, which only intensifies it. Avery is on edge, and though she never turned on the gift that illuminates her and her companions with silver light, she seems to be outlined in white from that frustration,

which turns instantly to fury when she returns to her den.

--

Erich is not covered in blood or ichor. He is not wounded. Avery invites him to come to her penthouse because they have roamed long and far through the night, and though she knows nothing of his particular ailment, she does know that she's seldom met an Ahroun who would turn down a slab of neatly seared beef if offered, and she would like him to know that she appreciates having him at her side or at her back even when they did not meet battle tonight.

They ride up in the elevator, not a short ride, and she introduces him into her hallway, talking about her lap pool outside and would he like to see the library and it's obvious that as frustrated as she was tonight by the lack of release, she does so love entertaining.

This is not her family's den. This is not her real 'home', per say, and not where she protects her father and brother and serving staff. It is something even more sacred. It is her most private domain, her most sacrosanct territory. When she sees the boot print, almost perfectly left as though someone wanted to get caught,

she nearly sets herself alight in that wash of Luna's white glow as rage floods her veins. She can almost feel the red cells burning, burning through her as her heart rate and breath instantly quicken. Breeze comes towards them, perfume comes towards them, and though Avery damn near snaps into hispo, instead she begins striding instantly towards her terrace, intending to take that bitch by the throat and throw her off the side of the building.

It won't be a long fall though. She might survive. That is until the wolf dives over the building's edge after her to finish her off.

Storm's Teeth

Excepting Melantha's hotel room at the Hay-Adams and Charlotte's grand Victorian, Erich hasn't been in very many Fancy Houses in his life. This one makes three, and he's rather amazed as he rides up the elevator, trying not to gawk. His new friend talks about her library, and her lap pool, and with every additional room in his imaginary map of her den his eyes get a little wider. He wonders what she'd think of the tinyhouse if -- when! -- he invites her over, but then he decides it didn't really matter. He doesn't think she'd think poorly of it, but even if she does; well, he still loves it. Charlotte and Melantha still love it! And that's what matters.

That's what he's thinking to himself as the elevator doors open. And then he's thinking holy shit because he's looking in on Avery's penthouse suite and its fifty windows, its terrace which is really more like a backyard except atop a building, its lap pool lit-up and cerulean-blue outside. He doesn't even notice the footprint there.

Avery does, though. And that wash of white-hot rage off the Philodox draws Erich's attention, draws his curiosity. He looks up and down and all around and then, then, he sees the print. Smells the perfume, which makes his nostrils flare out, makes him sniff loudly and whuff it back out.

"Lemme guess," he says, hurrying to catch up, "you weren't expecting visitors."

Reverence of Dawn

Avery is not afraid to make noise in her own den. She is not trying to sneak up on anyone. She snarls the answer: "No." and shoves the terrace door wide open.

Twilight

The doors are glass for a reason. Tempered and perfectly framed and perfectly tinted, doubtless, to both translate and transfer the sunlight from outside to inside. To show off the city, day and night, to frame wide, expansive view of the front-range mountains as if the city were at your feet,

because it is.

One is open. Perhaps two if they are double doors.

There are other signs of subtle invasion though by now Avery may be too full of surging rage to note them. They are all minor.

A picture moved. Another left behind on a narrow table with delicate inlay and shapely legs. A brandy snifter on a mantle somewhere, no more than the dregs left behind.

Outside on the terrace she surges through those open doors, snapping with fury an electric arc all around her.

There are two figures immediately visible on the terrace. The first is a tall, musclebound man with a bald pate and a cauliflower ear and an oft-broken nose, crawling in tattoos. So crawling in tattoos that a few of those tattoos now seem to be crawling on his skin.

"Dey's here boss." He says as Avery shoves the terrace doors wide open. Then steps - forward, yes forward, into her path of movement. He is absolutely stuffed into a too-small suit. Nothing can contain the swell of his shoulders or the roll of his gut. "Dat's far enough lady."

A handful of steps away, a slender African-American woman of indeterminate though more-than-a-few years stands closer to the edge of the terrace, her eyes on the city below. She draws away from the edge and moves with a slim and deadly grace to also:

intercept.

There is an oily sheen to her gaze.

--

Perhaps twenty feet away, a slim blonde is kneeling on the terrace. Head bowed, her hands clasped, her body clad in a pastel Chanel suit with gold buttons. She is praying, murmurs the words with a fervent intensity and a rhythm that makes the two guarding her sway like cobras to the mesmeric song of a snake charmer.

She finishes a sentence. Breathes out a showy amen and then turns her head with an eerie smoothness to find the wolves and - and -

smile.

"Have you felt the movement of god across your soul?" This to Avery. The sudden flash of her teeth in the darkness. This gathering blade of a smile. "I have been praying for you for hours.

"God is waiting. He stands ready to cleanse you of all your false beliefs. His arms are still open to you." She is serene. She is the dark blaze of an eclipse.

"Aching for you. Who are you to stand against his Holy Name? Repent your sins against his servants and he will show you mercy you do not deserve and should never know."

She is sublime and demure, her hands folded in front of her.

She is lying through her fucking teeth.

"Refuse and I will show you how the world ends."

Storm's Teeth

"Um," Erich says, looking warily at the tattoos on tattoo-man as tattoo-man moves to intercept.

And:

"Um," Erich says again, looking shiftily at the oil-skinned oil-woman as she too moves to intercept.

And:

"...UM," Erich says, just sort of aghast and lost-for-words, as the blonde in a Republican-running-for-office pantsuit finishes praying on a werewolf's terrace and turns around to inform that werewolf, plus her buddy, that she has been praying for their souls. "Thanks? But no thanks?" He glances at Avery. "Who the hell are these people and what are they doing in your yard? Why are they praying?"

Reverence of Dawn

far enough

Avery bares her teeth at him, growling once, harsh and rough and instant and coiled in her throat. It's a warning, daring him to get a little more in her path, urging him to take her from ready-to-kill to killing. She does glance at the other woman, but she knows that smell, and she's furious to find it here though, in truth,

she does know that she was waiting for it.

Avery feels the heated wall of Erich's rage behind her, at odds with his very young, very confused words. She doesn't take her eyes off of the people on her terrace, least of all the Whore of Babylon in pastel, but like many of her kind, she can always feel when the eyes of her people are upon her. She can sense when someone is looking to her to answer, to clarify, to lead.

"They are missionaries of the Wyrm," Avery mutters through her teeth. "They call the lost and misguided to their arms and drag them into filth. They seek the end of the world, the final battles, and the call it God's work."

Her eyes cut to Christina Black, a sharp look if Erich is watchful. "That one. Her voice is persuasive unless your will is strong. She sent her grunts to attack me and my friend in the park." Avery drags her eyes back to the tattooed man, then pin directly on Christina. Though she is still talking to Erich, her words are aimed at Christina's ears.

"Celduin and I killed them. I kept one of their skulls and have it in a hatbox to give away as a present. I sent her back a bit of her servant's skin."

Avery, hearing her own words, draws her shoulders back, straightens up, seems to calm a bit, though her rage doesn't abate. "I suppose in a way, that was an inscribed invitation," she tells Christina, her voice lighter than a growl now.

"Show me your god," she tells the woman, the words a warning. "I'll rip him apart, too."

Reverence of Dawn

[Addendum: "unless your will is strong. I stood up to her, and she sent her grunts"]

Twilight

"He was not my servant." There is a hush and a reverence to her voice and that hush and reverence give her even now a compelling countenance, a serene, near-inviolate presence in the space they are jointly occupying.

Now she is looking past Avery. Now she is standing, her hands clasped lightly in front of her body in a way that just creases the line of the suit and suggests the lithe, lean shadow of her body beneath. Walking forward, a step or two or three.

No, she is speaking to Erich. To Erich and directly to Erich and so directly to Erich that he has perhaps never known the balance of such attention. The weight and stain of it. There is something intent in her eyes.

"He was God's servant, and he stands at His right hand, at the vanguard of His army, awaiting the day of judgment when gates of heaven will be swept open and we will storm the gates of hell.

"There is such righteousness in you. Such potential. And I am here to free you from your illusions. To tear the scales from your gaze and allow you to see the truth that he has made me know in the secret chambers of my brightest heart:

"That we belong in the next world. It is, Brother, the devil who chains us here. Who binds us to this rotting tree. Who makes us wallow in this fleshy filth.

"But the time is coming when the righteous will fight for the soul of the world, and will rise up and tear down all his false works. You can stand with the forces of the Lord, young man. Or you can fall.

"She, I think," this small, sudden, regretful little smile. Wistful, dying even as it is born, " - regretfully, will have to die.

"Miss Chase, it is the only way to introduce you to the Lord."

Storm's Teeth

[ACK! WP!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Reverence of Dawn

[WP]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Twilight

Bob + 4

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

Jane +7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (2) ( fail )

Twilight

Christina: +8

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (10) ( success x 1 )

Reverence of Dawn

[-1 R, snap-shift to hispo

-1 WP for Resist Pain

-1 WP for Fangs of Judgement because you guys have TOTALLY fallen from your original purpose as Gaia intended

INIT +9]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (10) ( success x 1 )

Storm's Teeth

Christina Black's voice was enough to sway hundreds, that night at the banquet. Her presence, her authority, her charisma -- enough to sway millions. Sometimes that's the true terror of the Wyrm. Its insidious appeal, its subtle charm: the sense that maybe, just maybe, the great destroyer has a point.

Don't get it wrong, now. Erich feels that sway. He feels the tug of it, like waves washing sand away from beneath his feet. But that makes him think of Baja, makes him think of his sister Charlotte, his -- girlfriend? sort of? -- Melantha; makes him think of his tinyhouse and all the wholeness and rightness he feels when he's in it. And then he's sure, quite sure, that there's no way the side that Melantha picked, that Charlotte picked, could be the wrong one.

And besides: Avery warned him, didn't she? Her voice is persuasive unless your will is strong. And Erich isn't too sure about the strength of his will, but he is sure of the strength of his arms, the sharpness of his teeth, and he

claps his hands over his ears like a child, damps out most all of what she says until he sees her lips stop moving.

"You know," he says when she's done -- because he's polite, goddammit, he's not going to interrupt the villain's Monologue, "I can see you really believe what you're saying. And I respect that. It's better to believe in a wrong cause than to waffle around and not believe anything at all. But if we're both trying to save the world, then I'm pretty sure I'm already on the right side, and you're kinda ... not.

"I hope your god forgives you for going so far off-track when you see him, though. Which," an apologetic shrug here, "might be pretty soon."

Reverence of Dawn

Avery is not having it.

This woman tried to warp her mind and the mind of someone she's rather fond of. This woman sent goons after her life, and that fond friend's life, and had them shoot at her from above like cowards, like assassins. Avery has been waiting for her, and has kept herself ready, mind and body, and her spine is iron when Christina turns her eyes on Erich.

Avery steps back to Erich's side, close enough that her arm touches his arm. Shoulder to shoulder, or as close as they can be with the height differential. She doesn't look at him, doesn't lay a hand on his arm and urge him with her words not to listen. She just stands next to him, solid and real and pure and summoning her will and rage both as that. woman. keeps. talking.

In her den.

Erich does the simplest and perhaps one of the most effective things he can: he just covers his ears, and Avery nearly bites back a laugh but instead she lets it out. She laughs, which does not kill her rage but by god it kills any power that woman might have had over her mind. She laughs in Christina Black's face because she's going to tear her to pieces.

They. They're going to tear her to pieces.

He tells her, at the end: it might be pretty soon. And at that, Avery descends into a form most savage. A form for hunting, shredding. For defending her den. Her teeth gleam as white as her fur, her eyes a pristine blue. She lunges.

Storm's Teeth

[-1R to hispo!

-1W for resist pain!

+9!]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

[Inits:

Avery: 19Christina: 18Erich: 15Bob: 10Jane: 9]

Twilight

[Inits:

Avery: 19

Christina: 18

Erich: 15

Bob: 10

Jane: 9]

Twilight

Jane: 1. Oilslick. 2. Tackle Erich.

Twilight

Bob: 1. Tackle Avery. 2. Bite Avery.

Storm's Teeth

[1. spur claws on jane! stoppit!

R1 - bite bob!

R2 - bite bob!

R3 - let's bite him again!]

Twilight

Christina. Reflexive: Shadow of God. 1. Voice of the Siren.

Reverence of Dawn

[1a.1b.R1. -- kill Christina until she dies from it.GET OFF MY LAWN]

Reverence of Dawn

[uh, those are bites]

Reverence of Dawn

[1a. -2!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 1, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

Reverence of Dawn

[Damage! Str + 1 +1 (Hispo) +2 (FoJ) + Suxx -1]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

Twilight

SOAK

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Reverence of Dawn

[1b. -3!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Reverence of Dawn

[Ehrmagherd drmerj!]

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

Twilight

Soak!

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

Twilight

Voice of the Siren -5

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Storm's Teeth

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Reverence of Dawn

[WP!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )

Storm's Teeth

[spur claws on shiny oil lady!]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Storm's Teeth

[dam+2!]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

Twilight

Soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

OIlslick:

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Storm's Teeth

[yee, soak!]

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

Twilight

Bob: Tackle!

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 5, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Reverence of Dawn

[NOPE]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Reverence of Dawn

[YAY SOAK! :D]

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

Reverence of Dawn

The fat man with the tattoos collides into Avery. She can barely see straight, she's so furious. She bristles her spine, rolling her shoulders, twisting and shoving at him until she pulls herself free, feeling -- for a moment -- the tug on her bones that should mean pain, could even mean injury, were she not inured to it by the spirit of Bear. Avery lunges again, silent though she wants to roar, intending to put this woman down.

[R1!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 4, 4, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Reverence of Dawn

[Damage!]

Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 8 )

Twilight

Soak.

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Twilight

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Reverence of Dawn

[Soak! WTF IS HAPPENING]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Storm's Teeth

[rage 1! chomping bob! +1 diff]

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

Storm's Teeth

[dam +2]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 8 )

Twilight

Bob soak!

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

Storm's Teeth

[rage 2! more of the same!]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 2

Twilight

Jane: tackle Erich!

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7) ( fail )

Storm's Teeth

[dam+4]

Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 8 )

Twilight

Bob soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )

Storm's Teeth

[rage 3! chomp jane too!]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 2

Storm's Teeth

[dam+5]

Dice: 14 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 12 )

Twilight

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Storm's Teeth

[owie.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

The world explodes. Christina Black does not die with a prayer on her lips. Not to God. Not to any God of which they have heard. Not to a God of men or a God of wolves. She is praying to something else entirely, and it is coalescing around her, coagulating around her, a cloak of shadow that is black as tar and slick as motor oil and fiery as the pits of hell to which she should surely now descend.

Reverence of the Dawn surges forward, snarling, brilliant and gleaming white and pure, brighter somehow against the darkness with which Christina Black cloaks herself. Tears into her, again and again and then at last again - ripping the skin from her bones and with it the shadowskin which seems to Avery that it goes up like the fuse of a stick of dynamic, from the falling corpse in a brilliant, burning line right into her mouth and throat and lungs and gullet. Her insides are blistered, burning, boiled. The only visible wound will be a certain redness to her mouth. A certain caustic blistering of her lips.

The bodyguards move to her defense as the fight is engaged Neither is fast enough to stop the Silver Fang's surging attack. The larger one turns with a shout of protest and flings himself after the direwolf, and grapples but cannot hold her and is soon,

eviscerated, in two precise bites,

by the unhinged jaw of the Shadow Lord.

Then Storm's Teeth turns to the remaining creature.

Somehow, he literally bites the woman almost-in-half. Her blood was as black as the viscous substance she spewed from her mouth moments ago and spatters his muzzle, whithers and chest, burning through fur and skin and all the dermal layers to scour and scorch the great striations of muscle below.

Silence, after.

The noise of the city filtering up below.

A radio is on, somewhere in the house. Tuned to a new station at the end of the dial, one neither of them might have found on their own.

A stranger's voice, preaching about the end of the world, and salvation. Dulled by distance, by the imperfect reception, but crawling with the resonance of deep and abiding conviction.

Calling the faithful to war.Calling the faithful, home.

Reverence of Dawn

This should be another day, another battle, with not a mark left on her but the blood of her enemies. It is not.

Erich handles the two lackeys with brutal efficiency. When one of them breaks away to attack Avery, he is there in the grunt's face a second later, teeth bared and already bloodied. If Avery could see him she would applaud and she would mean it she would praise him and praise him and feed him prime rib and send him home with T-bones to share with his pack. Avery can barely see anything, though. Anything but Christina Black, some of her flesh still unbroken.

Until it splies apart, and erupts, fire coming from inside of her, leaving her vile mouth and charring her from within. Avery stands for a long time staring at her, listening to the sick wet thump of the pieces of another enemy falling to the terrace floor. Blood is splattered on leaves and on flagstones and all over Avery's fur. It takes her a long time to realize that some of that blood is her own, burnt down to flesh, because she does not feel the pain.

Her ears twitch at a sound from inside. She sniffs the air, but through the smells of death and battle she does not smell another enemy. She rounds her massive shoulders downward, blood sliding slick off her fangs.

Storm's Teeth

They should be proud of themselves. They carved their enemies to bits in a matter of seconds, tore them apart, shredded them to scraps. They stood strong against some of the more potent mindbending to come their way: cliaths that they are, inexperienced wolves of the nation that they are -- even if Avery already shines with the purity of character and strength of purpose of a true leader. They did well, they did good.

Yet in the aftermath there's only that silence, that wind through the foliage; the harsh sound of their breathing. And that distant, eerie radio transmission, cut by static and whining interference; the drone of some stranger's voice on some strange new frequency.

Erich-wolf noses the remains of the enemies. He whuffs distastefully, and then he leans his shoulder into Avery-wolf's flank, stretching out his neck to sniff at the hinge of her jaws. Then he shifts, taking it slow, form by form, until he's a midwestern boy of unmistakable nordic descent again; until he's crouching on the terrace of his other silver fang friend, tracing his fingers through the unpleasant goo left behind by her unwelcome visitors.

"If you need someplace to stay tonight," he offers, "you can crash with me and my pack. We live in a tinyhouse."

Opal

Echoes of the Lost

He didn't tell his packmates what he's planning on doing tonight because Tamsin is at the Fianna Sept in Wisconsin helping her tribesmate - their dead packbrother's sister - and her mate with their newborn baby. Or something. Tamsin told them where she was going but Hector only half-listened because it involves numerous somethings he doesn't want to think about.

And he didn't tell Jack because Jack is an overanxious mother-type and he would have called every kinsman he has and Hector just wants to go and not have an audience or other people to worry about. He knows where he's going and he knows what he's dealing with and if he doesn't he at least thinks he does. If he knows anything about this country it's that pretending to be confident is oftentimes better than actually knowing what the hell you're doing.

So: Hector goes to the Church of the Bane-Oozing Anchor-Thing without having told his pack or his kinswoman or the spirit-talkers or anyone where he was going or what he intended to do. He may have intimated to his sister and brother that he'd like to at some point in the future but.

He's here. All he has is a mental map based on what Tamsin says happened. He slinks up to the House of God and scowls at it. This is such a bad idea but he tries the door anyway.

Twilight

It is a Friday night and the thrift store is closed and the soup kitchen is closed and the storefronts are mostly-dark except for the two black-and-red storefronts belonging to the church proper. HOUSE OF GOD, reads one. Corners nearby, two and three blocks away, play host to dealers and prostitutes, but the corners of this block have been cleaned up. "Cleaned up." There's no evidence of sex workers or eight-year-old drug runners in the immediate vicinity. Catty corner to the church: a construction site that promises to be - someday, someday soon - home to the The Healing Place, according to signs prominent on the construction fences framing the building in.

One of those plastic "put out your cigarette here" bins on the sidewalk in front of the entrance. Not many people miss.

God - or at least Christina Black - is particular on this point.

--

The front door is open. Swings in his hand when he grabs for it, and opens right into a lobbyish sort of space. No more than a hallway created with sheets of plywood paneling, which have been painted a lurid crimson like the storefront. Religious art on the walls, crucifixes, lurid depictions of the torn-out heart of god, or the crucifiction of Jesus, or the martyrdom of some poor fucking bastard who was disembowled and roasted on a spit over an open fire are wrapped around with blinking strands of Christmas lights which give the space a ghostly glow. Double doors into the worship space are propped open and contemporary Christian music of the most macabre sort is playing through the tinny stereo system. The murmur of voices and the movement of a bulky body just inside the second set of double-doors.

Turning to see who's coming in.

He has piggish eyes and prison tattoos and is dressed in an ill-fitting suit that does not fit him across the shoulders or the gut.

"Who the fuck are you?"

Echoes of the Lost

He must have thought the place was going to be abandoned. Surely if the entire operation was just a front for Bane-trafficking they wouldn't actually have people in the buildings that were supposed to serve as fronts. It's good that he tried the door because now he can turn around and tell his packmates Nope they've actually got people in there all that stuff you found on the Internet wasn't a joke.

So he walks into a half-assed winter wonderland at the tail-end of August and draws the attention of a large suit-wearing person and Hector stops dead in his tracks and lets his eyes go wide.

"ACKWRONGBUILDINGSORRY" he says and then turns around and hustles back outside. Starts running as soon as he's back through the vestibule like the man-thing is possibly going to be able to catch up to him.

Twilight

There's the droning of voices in the background. Just a few, and the lurid christmas light wrapped around the religious and hellish iconography give the antechamber a grotesque, sideshow glow.

The muscle-bound man in the suit grunts and snorts out a quiet breath that rattles in the back of his throat, takes two or three threatening steps toward Hector as Hector turns and hightails it out of there. The front doors swing shut behind him and strangely the polluted city air with that deep layer of smog and ozone, cinders and car exhaust, feels bright and fresh after whatever was inside the sanctuary, though Hector hardly noticed the scent in the sanctuary when he first walked in. Some brine of human sweat, fear, desperation, and transport, maybe.

-

But: sidewalk. The barely opened door swings shut behind him and there are no signs of pursuit. Down the street, he can see a man khakis and a (second-hand) golf shirt pushing a pushbroom over the sidewalk, sweeping up the night's detritus, whistling Oh When the Saints beneath his breath. Hardly seems to have noticed Hector.

Yet.

Echoes of the Lost

Were not for the fact that he has committed himself to tearing ass out of there fast-as he would have slowed outside for the fridge horror effect of leaving that terrible place and stepping out into a place he had previously thought to be terrible as well and finding it easier to breathe out there.

So the skinny young man races from the doorway to the alleyway around the corner and once there he realizes okay. Doesn't need to book it quite so fast.

He hasn't lost his breath so when he gets there he stands still to listen for footsteps. All he hears is whistling. The Uktena scowls and looks around for a piece of broken glass or tin foil or something to peer across the other side. Barring that there's a reason he wears so much freaking jewelry. One of his bracelets has a piece of mirror woven into it.

Look before you leap, son.

[gnosis: peering into the umbra, trying to see if ghost-opal is lurking around. i forgot the diff for that roll.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Echoes of the Lost

[perc + alert]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

The umbra is dark and the entire block of church-related buildings have a pregnant solidity that is darker and more immediate than any of the similar blocks of old brick storefronts surrounding it. What is here is there as well: darker perhaps, opaque and cloaked in shadows though a waning gibbous moon gives the places an eerie, opalescent glow. The buildings are too solid, too immediate, too present to see inside even in spiritual reflection. Even the dark suggestion of windows fitted into the shadowbrick walls have a blackened, oily sheen to the glass. Staring down at the street like dead and blackened eyes.

But yes. There; the second floor on top of what must be one of the two storefronts devoted to worship space, a flicker of white figure, framed in dark glass. The only relief from the oily facade of the whole block of buildings.

Echoes of the Lost

[cross]

Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )

Echoes of the Lost

In this part of town the Banes hunt free clinics and street corners and houses where partners hit each other. They're the reason he stopped to check the other side before he pushed across the Gauntlet but they're occupied and once he spots the banshee-woman Tamsin described for him Hector steps sideways.

Here he finds getting around easier but that does not mean the way is unobstructed. If he can he goes to the second floor of the storefront to investigate the spirit on the other side of the obscured glass.

Echoes of the Lost

[dex + athletics WOO CLIMBING STUFF]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Echoes of the Lost

stam

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 10) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

The shadowstuff of the buildings' reflection feels - viscous somehow rather than solid. Some phantom sensation of sinking in as he gains the base of the building and looks up at the second story window where the female figure appeared and now - fades by. He passes a pair of dark spirits, who seem largely intent on the other side of the gauntlet, feeding on some stranger's misery, some broken person's pain, some slow promise of building rage, and stands in the dark shadow of the dark buildings, and starts to climb.

It is easier than he might have imagined. That tackiness to the surface gives him more purchase that he might have otherwise assumed, and he games the second story window none the worse for wear for his traverse. But: back-of-the-throat, some acid burn, some tingling of his skin suggests that on some level, even the building itself feels slightly... off.

There is: the shimmering 'barrier' across the window much as Tamsin described across the interior door. Perhaps it is merely a trick of the moonlight; the waning gibbous moon shining down over the dark reflection of the city.

The woman's figure has faded from view, drifted back inside the second-story room where she lurks, but as he gains the windowsill she comes back into focus. Glowing white, with eyes like onyx, and a mute, sewn-shut mouth. Watching him stonily.

Echoes of the Lost

At the apex of the pipe or the ladder - just outside the window - he works his hand to make sure the tack on the surface hasn't started to eat through his flesh and then he peers through the 'glass' at the woman inside. Suffused with light that does not touch her eyes, stitches binding her lips together.

Like there was another spirit in the area matching the description Tamsin gave him that he needed to worry about.

The moondancer slinks across the barrier and comes to stand before her. Her black gaze rests on him and he looks back and he could not intimidate a kindergartener. He does not expect to intimidate a spirit.

All he has going for him is that he understands and speaks their language. That's spirits, though. Dead people are a different story.

"My name's Hector," he says. "Are you Opal?"

Twilight

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Echoes of the Lost

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

Echoes of the Lost

shit

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Twilight

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )

Echoes of the Lost

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Twilight

It is not precisely as easy as slipping through the window. Though he does slip through the window, which gives with a membranous quality that feels damp and clotted somehow against his skin as he climbs through. First an arm then a leg and each limb ten degrees colder on the other side than it was on this one. This push of fear so forceful and immediate and intense that it feels like the fucking rush a junkie gets when she shoots up. It spikes through his veins, cold and cold and colder, wraps around his spine and pulses up the articulations of his vertebrae in opening waves that have him shivering and frozen unmoving, but not running, not now, not yet.

Again and then again he withstands that rush of cold water in his veins, and then at last something changes; he breaks his teeth on the sensation, tears it in half and finds himself on the other side.

--

It is an ordinary room. He has one of his headaches and a damp cloth over his eyes and the lights are off and he's praying a prayer he has known since he was girl. Learned it from his grandmother he remembers the fringed apron she wore and the strength of her hands and the strength of her conviction. His grandmother never spent so much as a half-hour in bed during daylight hours and had seven children and raised them hand-to-mouth in a dugout in the dustbowl with damp towels stuffed in every crack of the sod dugout to keep out the dust but here he is, again, down with one of his headaches.

They are singing downstairs and it is his favorite him. The children's choir and he has no children of his own but their voices still even when every noise, every shouted profanity from the street is like a spike in his skull - even then their voices are like sunshine, the background hum of them reminds him to pray. For guidance, for the Commencement of the Signs, for the Fulfillment of Prophecy.

--

How much later it is he doesn't know but the singing has stopped and the light has shifted even though he has the blinds drawn closed. Sometimes the days run together into the nights and the nights are lurid with dreams of the end or what comes after. The Tribulation. The Trial by Fire.

--

She is here again with him and they are all downstairs and she will not go down. Another headache, another cool cloth. The same one? But he has seen her and seen inside her and whatever she offers his husband it is not worth the price he will pay. He cannot see past her pious words and her scrubbed-clean smile and her mesmeric eyes. Looks nowhere else when she's in the room and leans into all her praise and all her false words of praise but in her eyes he sees The Devil in all his glory and pain. Tried to warn him but the words are like blood and bile in his throat when she is in the room and then she leaves and the headches come and --

--

She does not knock. Unlatches the door and lets herself into the room. Which is closer and darker now and there is a smell that he isn't letting himself smell. It is a body smell it is a corpus smell it is a smell of this world not the next.

She does not knock and unlatches the door and closes it after herself and he sits up in bed and pulls the cloth from his eyes -

- the conversation is old and receded and long past and the words don't matter. The pain in his head is sharper than ever and even his arms feel weak but she comes and sits at the edge of the bed and picks up a pillow and smiles. Smiles and he can see that her tongue is forked and every promise is bitter and ruin is in her eyes.

"It never had to be like this, Mrs. Black. If only you would give yourself to Him."

Hector tells her that her He is the Devil not god and she smiles and he can see the oleaginous stain of the demon in her eyes. The slick, oozing immediacy of it behind the blond-and-blue. Trying to insinuate itself into his brain like an earworm, but - but - but -

Mad, the strength that dying gives you. It comes from the Lord yes to resist that which is below. There is no breath and no strength in his body he cannot breathe cannot breathe cannot breathe but he knows that he is praying a prayer against demons and thrashing against -

- oh he breaks free. Tears in a deep, gasping, grasping breath and staggers out of the bed toward the door and she turns in a sweeping arc faster and younger and demon-bled and demon-fed and demon-born, perhaps and picks up the goddamned praying hands statue from the nightstand and bashes Hector's skull in.

What's surprising is how little pain he feels after the first starburst of light. What's surprising is the blood on his hands, wet he thinks it is tears or rain or milk, why milk? - as he staggers toward the door, collapses, and falls.

--

It took him hours to die. Mostly unconscious hours, like laying on the quilt-covered iron bedstead with a cloth across his eyes. A cloth he couldn't pull off, no matter how many times he tried.

That's how the world ends.

And this is how it continues, after.

A room you cannot leave. Anchored by your corpse which is: sealed behind the wall.

Why they sewed your mouth shut, you will never know.

--

He is standing then, the center of the room. The ghost of the room-that-was still visible. The iron bedsted, the rickety wooden nightstands. The religious symbols on the walls, the old rag rug on the old worn hardwoods. The white woman with the sewn-shut mouth and the onyx eyes.

If he still has the presence of mind to ask if she is Opal: she just stares.

Hector

[perc + PU]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 5) ( fail )

Hector

[int + occult]

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

Twilight

After the vision resolves and recedes Hector is left standing in the glowing white room with bloodied handprints on the - suggestion of a membranous door. He wonders how to free the woman, considers whether on some level her death may be tied to whatever it is that lies below. In considering how to free her from this haunt, though, he stumbles across the simplest answer: unearth her bones from where they have been stuffed into the wall.

See that she is laid to rest.

Perhaps it would not be enough. Perhaps some other unfinished Thing keeps her here. But -

Hector

[NOTICE THINGS HECTOR FUCK]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

Twilight

When he swings out of the upstairs window to leave, he notices that a few banes have left the church and are milling around on the sidewalk for a minute or three. They are not as affixed to the tellurian as the ones he managed to avoid when he came scouting, but do look like they have an ear cocked to the otherside. Though he does not notice or cannot see what they follow, they leave in a sort-of-herd following something after 5 or 10 minutes.

Dmitri

Afro Daddy

(Ear to da streets! [Cha+Streetwise])

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

Afro Daddy

(Ya don't say? Tell me more)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

Afro Daddy

(Aw, c'mon. You know you wanna tell me)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Twilight

So Afro Daddy spends a few weeks working his sources, those barely-useful eyes and ears. The low-level runners and the street-level dealers and the old-hat prostitutes and the junkies who aren't so far gone they don't know who's asking them questions and who's paying for their next fix.

This church, right? The Citadel - that juvie camp - has maybe 20 kids. Block grant, yadda, information gleamed from Sam Evans or maybe just the goddamned google. 20 kids funded by a block grant for a non-violent offender diversion program. Just the summer: the great outdoors, away from the streets, a healthy atmosphere. You can imagine it right? Red Rover and fishing and hiking. Bonfires and smores. Color wars maybe, with an added bolus of anti-drug rhetoric and woodworking instruction: something with-the-hands. Something useful, something that won't challenge any sort of status quo.

Staffed entirely - get this you fucker - entirely by ex-offenders. By parolees. By ex (or "ex") gang members. Not members of one particular gang, though. Folks who came through the system, got released from prison on parole, got funneled in to this half-way house from hell and came out with religion. With Religion, really, all firebreathing and armor and end-times, that sort of old-time religion. All Apocalypse.

Those gang members: yeah. From every damned city neighborhood. Fucking ex-Aryan Brotherhood bastards next to ex-41st Street Locos next to ex-Tre Tre Crips. 'Cept, the way the talk is those folks keep in touch, at least with their old weapons dealers.

That's the rumor, anyway.

--

So, these 'reformed' gang members are the counselors and the cooks and the guards and the therapists and the lifeguards at The Citadel, where despite the government funding, the religious theme is hit hard-and-often. Least according to a friend of a friend of someone incarcerated there.

Incarcerated? Housed. Diverted from the system with a promise that the conviction will be erased entirely from their record once the program is completed.

--

And then: Dmitri Halloran.

He's sixteen. Arrested for possession, but has no other criminal history. A reasonable student, that's what his eyes and ears say. Managed to stay out of trouble and out of obligations. Good kid. Quiet. Bookish enough that he was more-or-less left alone. Smokes pot maybe, he's fucking sixteen and this is Colorado.

Now there's a warrant for his arrest for assault and evading custody, issued on June 27, 2013.

Afro Daddy teases out a couple of next-step options:

- tracks down Dmitri Halloran's mother.- his ex-girlfriend. - and/or - a kid named Warren McComber. Who was sent to The Citadel but was released early, for reasons that are unclear.

Afro Daddy

Well wasn't this citadel a project after his own heart. And that was probably the problem. he could see the potential in the project, for both good and bad, and he wasn't the one pulling the strings. not in this case, anyway. Not that he probably could, it being tied in so close to the corectional system. But a few enterprising kinfolk maybe...

And yet, Dmitri had escaped, and the reaction to his escape felt all wrong. All wrong was also how Sam Evans described some of the folks that had come out of that church. All wrong was how it felt. Here was an emperor of the city...and fresh land for conquest. it was enough to get his mouth watering.

But first, the little lost lamb. He decides to check with this Warren kid, find out more about the place. He also decides he might need some extra legs on this one. Where was it that 'Dances with the Hurricane' chick was patrolling again? Better swing by there before Heading over to Warren, see if she wanted to tag along.

Hurricane

Everywhere, and nowhere, that is where that Dances With the Hurricane chick patrols. She's a bit of a drifter that one, has been since last year when she cut a few ties and found herself adrift. She liked that, being adrift.

But all good things must come to an end, and so it is with Ingrid. She has not left the city since the attack on Cold Crescent some weeks ago. Her base of operations is a hotel downtown, at least until preparations can be made for a more permanent residence here, and though she ranges all over the places, popping in and out of shadows like a shadow herself, it's somewhere in the city that Afro Daddy finds her. Accident? Or fate?

And don't they look like two disparate pieces. Ingrid is average in height, slender in build, and somewhat aloof in appearance. He finds her and he fills her in, and while she's ambivalent toward children, that he is interested is of interest to her. So, with a sly curl of her lips, she agreed to come along with him to talk to this Warren, for all the good it might do him. Her presence is an uncanny one. Though she's graceful, elegant, poised in a long green maxi dress with thin straps and a neck that scoops just low enough to expose a hint of ink, there is something inherently different about her. She is an animal just beneath the surface of her skin, wild and untamed and predatory.

Where the tall Philodox goes tonight, a slight dark shadow follows just behind and a little to the side.

Twilight

That kid - Warren McComber - lives in the Quigg Newton homes, a low-rise Section 8 development operated by the City of Denver Housing Authority. Town homes, spread out over tree-lined blocks, with the usual signs of gang activity and neglect. Patrolled by a handful of rent-a-cops and pint-sized rent-a-cop lookouts. Haunted by an aura of neglect or abandonment that even the leafy canopy cannot really banish.

Afro Daddy knows a guy who knows a chick who knows a junkie who hangs out routine on a park bench near the busstop in front of the central courtyard and that junkie knows the kid and the kid lives in Apartment 3. Always was a bit of a fucking rabblerouser but since he came up out of that place he hardly ever leaves his grandmother's town home. Just sits sometimes, barely visible in one of the upstairs windows, staring out over the courtyard. Or disappearing behind the curtains of Unit 27-G.

Afro Daddy

Then that is where they are headed. Quigg Newton homes. In some ways he was still new to this city. In some ways, though, this city was the same as any city he'd ever been in. It didn't sound like any of the citadel's teaching programs did much for Warren, if he just came back and shut himself away. It sounded like he was about as non-violent and reformed as lobotomized junkie. Which means, maybe, he knows what Dmitri escaped from, and where he might have gone.

"We're goin up here." Tommy says to Ingrid as they ascend the stairs (best not to try the elevators in these buildings. That'll get ya nowhere fast. "We're gonna go talk to this kid. But maybe you should let me do the talking. You keep an eye out for anything suspicious."

Hurricane

Ingrid hasn't been keeping up on this case, the case of the strange church with its strange habits and programs and unprecedented population growth. Afro Daddy knows where they're going they get there, somehow, not likely in Ingrid's car. To small and sleek and in it's own way flashy. It stands out and would draw attention. Not to mention what harm might befall it in this neighborhood. Not that Ingrid worries about things like that. If the car disappears - on this street or any other in this city - she'll find it. If she finds it stripped, she'll find the ones who stripped it.

It's the Fostern's call here, because this is his venture and, well, because he's a Fostern and Ingrid honors rank.

We're goin' up here says Tommy, and Ingrid tips her chin to look at him levelly before, without a word, she slips ahead of him, taking point. She doesn't expect to run into trouble here, but even so she is a scout. So, up the stairs she goes, footsteps quiet, taking in the smells more than she takes in the sights. When he suggests that he should do the talking, Ingrid casts a glance at him back over her shoulder. In her quarter profile he can see the curve of her smile. Not talking, obviously, is just fine by her.

Up the stairs they go, Ingrid with her skirt gathered to the side in one hand so it makes nary a whisper as she moves, and leaves not a trace of her presence behind.

Hurricane

[percept+alert (scents): sniff sniff]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )

Twilight

The stairwell smells of: urine; marijuana, and crack. It smells of old diapers and slightly rotten food. It smells a bit of mold. In short: it smells. Otherwise, nothing particularly stands out in the stairwell, though Ingrid is aware of eyes everywhere. The lookouts, the neighbors, the people with nothing to do but gossip the day away until the next disability check comes in.

Twilight

Whatever he was or is or will be: this is where he is now. Behind the door of a dull and rather scratched interior door in the project. Unit 27-G, Apartment 3. There is graffiti and a strange sound of water drip drip dripping in the stairwells and a solid door from which the unit and apartment numbers have been largely peeled away. What is left is scarred wood.

They: knock. The door rattles. In its frame and on its hinges and behind the door the sound of a television turned up too loud and the sound of a scramble. Someone lunging for the remote, someone rising from the couch. Someone moving.

Someone watching fucking Judge Judy, though the television is turned off as soon as the knock is heard. As if the sudden cessation of noise might be enough to convince you that no one was ever there in the first place.

It takes another series of solid knocks, louder and more rattling before the door opens. And when it opens it opens no more than a crack. There's a chain lock secured at about chin level, visible, brassy and dull in the interspace between door and frame.

The suggestion of an eye in the framed space. Greenish brown. The curve of a young face, probably a boy but still boyish enough to be cleanshaven or incapable of growing much scruff. Caramel skin and close-cropped brownish-red hair. Immediately wary.

"Yeah?"

Voice pitched lower than you might think.

The apartment smells like fear and burned Kraft Mac'n'Cheese.

Twilight

The stairwell smells of: urine; marijuana, and crack. It smells of old diapers and slightly rotten food. It smells a bit of mold. In short: it smells. Otherwise, nothing particularly stands out in the stairwell, though Ingrid is aware of eyes everywhere. The lookouts, the neighbors, the people with nothing to do but gossip the day away until the next disability check comes in.

Afro Daddy

"Hey." says the smiling wolf man with the halo of black, puffed hair. He lounges is gangly limbs over the door, leaning against one side and his arm arcing up over his head. The other rests idly on his hip.

"You're Warren, right? Cool, man. How you doin?"

The tone and that smile sounded like a cross between a guidance councilor and a salesman, possibly the types of salesmen that Warren might have known.

"I'm Tommy. Tommy C. Maybe you heard'a'me?"

Maybe he had. It was worth a shot. Depending on which gang he was associated with (and its true, if you lived in places like this and you looked like him, you were associated whether you liked it or not.) Tommy C was either a man you went to to get things done, or the last muthafucka you wanted to mess with. Sometimes both.

"Listen, I wanna talk to you about somethin'. Why don't you invite me in?"

Afro Daddy

(cha+streetwise)

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

Hurricane

Tommy stands in front of the door, Ingrid stands to the side of it, back to the wall and her gaze facing out over the hallway. At the other doors open just a crack, or the places where she hears a shuffle against a door that means someone's trying to listen in.

The kid answers the door, or at least it's probably the kid they came to see, and Tommy talks.

Twilight

"I don't need no fucking religion." The kid returns, his eye narrowing behind that slivered view of the apartment, something hardening in the shadow of his cheek. Some pull of a tendon, some snap of awareness or sharply edged fear. That survey cuts down the narrow opening in the door and then the boy's gaze returns to Tommy, the slice of his face, that guidance counselor / salesman smile.

The door closes then, with more force than it requires though not enough to buffet the pair beyond it. There is a pause, which is not quite pregnant but is longer than either of them would prefer. Then, the rattle of a chain coming undone.

The kid opens the door and gives Tommy a sulky look that slips behind the Fostern to the Ragabash beyond. Starts his survey at Ingrid's foot but adolescent male hormones are not enough to overcome that shivering aura she gives off: of being a predator, an animal, inhuman.

The kid steps back; gaze swinging from Ingrid to Tommy, into a sparsely furnished living room decorated only with religious iconography and commemorative plates. The kitchen is open to the living room and there's a scuttle of cockroaches shivering back to their hiding places as the shadows shift and move. TV, not even a flat-screen, is now off.

"Hell do you want?" He looks ready to bolt, and that pugnaciousness feels put on, papered over as he: Shivers, visibly.

Twilight

WP - phobia

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

Afro Daddy

There's no response to the kid's outburst. Not verbally at least. Just the tightening of jaws that, to every child that age with any kind of parent says 'I know you're not talking to me like that.' The door closes and Tommy sighs. Was he gonna have to take his belt off? No, the chain rattles and the door opens wide, and Tommy takes it as an invitation to step inside. He notes the decor, somewhat typical of...

"Your grandma's out?"

He notes the roaches and for a flash his mind thinks 'hello, cousins.' But he also thinks 'what are you guys doing out right now?' Grandma would never allow that.

"Nevermind. Don't answer that."

Not yet, anyway.

"You got outta citadel. Seems like you got out the long way. You hear about anybody checkin out early?"

Hurricane

The boy looks around Tommy and sees a woman standing there. He starts to check her out and in doing so starts one of Ingrid's favorite games. You see, it doesn't matter how pretty she is, how well shaped her body, or how nicely she dresses. She triggers something in people, an instinct that tells them they'll either have to attack first or be attacked by this slight foreigner. If she were wearing a shorter skirt she might wager to herself that his eyes make it to her shins, but she's not. He sees the hem of her skirt draped so that only the toe of a boot is visible and the kid looks away.

On the other side of Tommy, Ingrid smiles a secretive smile.

With the door open, Tommy steps in and his shadow follows after. One might expect that, given her appearance and her attitude, Ingrid's nose would scrunch at the sight of this place, that she would grimace or maybe even make some sort of noise at the sight of cockroaches.

She doesn't, though. She steps in and she peers around, dark eyes taking in everything. Nose taking in everything. Crossing her arms beneath her smallish breasts, her gaze returns to the kid and it stays there. She watches him with a kind of animal's curiosity, head tilted a little, eyes blinking a little less often than one might find natural. She's studying the kid who don't need no fucking religion, who shivers in their presence.

"It would be unwise to lie," says she, voice low and quiet.

Twilight

"She at church," the boy returns, and the response is automatic and has that feel. Like Where's your grandma? is just one of those questions that gets answered, and more-or-less truthfully. Any damned invocation of the woman or her station requires at least that degree of respect, doesn't it? The answer comes at virtually the same time that Tommy tells him not to answer that.

But then his eyes narrow and see, the kid's taller than he seemed framed in the door. He's maybe 5'11" or so and still growing, but skinny and stretched out looking, the way adolescents get when they are putting on inches, and he has that near-baby face beneath his close-shorn hair.

He cuts a suspicious glance at Ingrid, mouth tucked into an edgy frown as he glances between them, which strays to Tommy but then cuts back past his shoulder to Ingrid as she tells him that it would be unwise to lie.

Warren shivers.

Visibly.

Doesn't notice but he shivers and he's backing again and licking his lips and cutting a glance from one to the other but always back to Ingrid, never long away from Ingrid, refusing to show her his back.

"Wasn't even s'posed to be there. They mixed up the fucking paperwork I am free and clear legal-like. I ain't goin' back there. You creepy religious fucks can't make me."

Afro Daddy

"I look like the religious type to you, boy?"

There was a finality to that sentence, that word 'boy' sounds more like a foot stomp than a word. Tommy glances over his shoulder at Ingrid, then at the shivering kid. What was that? Was that fear or something else? Well, lets start by eliminating what we know.

"Step outside" he says over his shoulder, and to Darren he raises his hands up in a non-threatening gesture.

"Now nobody's tryin to take you anywhere. We got people on the case. We're lookin to shut that fucker down, you understand me? Now you know me. I'm one of you. I'm just tryin to look out for our people. Now they got somebody out there and they're lookin for him, and we gotta find him first to keep him safe you understand?

"So I'm gonna ask you some questions Darren. And what that lady said? She's right. I'm gonna know if you lie to me, son. I'm gonna know. So I want you to tell me the truth. Do you know Dmitri?"

[Truth of Gaia activated]

Afro Daddy

[Truth of Gaia (int+emp) diff Daren's Manip+sub]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Hurricane

The boy looks at her and he shivers a little more, scared maybe? Of Ingrid? Quite possibly. She's dangerous without trying, he can feel it on an instinctive level.

There's a reason Ingrid doesn't spend time among humans. There's a reason she doesn't spend time with Kinfolk. There's a reason only Garou are ever worth her time.

But then she's being sent away. Tommy tells her to step outside, and Ingrid's gaze lifts to his face, her own expressionless. That gaze drops to the boy again, and then, without a word, without barely even a sound of footsteps crossing whatever passes for flooring in this place, the Ragabash steps back out into the hallway.

The door closes quietly behind her.

Twilight

"Shit can't tell 'em by the way they look." The kid - well, mutters. Yes, mutters, rather stonily and beneath his breath. He is still keeping his distance from the pair of them, and has that eye on Ingrid until she steps far enough out of his awareness that he isn't being shaken by that predatory aura she carries around with him. "S'the way they feel man."

This is still muttered, but less stonily. There's truth here. The disturbing sort of truth, the sort that crawls underneath your skin and turns foul and ugly, turns sick. "Not just like they gonna fuck you up, you know. But like her, man.

"Like they gon' eat you."

--

A snapping look, from the closed door to Tommy and back again. Still wary. The kid looks skeptical when Tommy assures him that there are people on the case. People figuring this shit out, but that skepticism skims into something sharper and warier with the question:

Do you know Dmitri?

"Shit, he dead."

The autonomic response. It is speculation - enough that it tugs on the gift, though faintly - but the kid believes that to be true so there's no outright falsehood. "They say he fucking run away? Escaped? He got asthma. Needs inhalers and shit. Way out in the middle of nowhere the fuck's he gonna go? Bunch a fuckin' liars.

"His moms is one'a them Jehovah Witnesses so he wouldn't go to the fucking vespers. Said that shit was of the devil and fuck if he wasn't right. S'what my grams says, too."

Afro Daddy

"Mm-hm." He says, mulling this over. What if he did. Where you think he would go? There's gotta be somewhere. C'mon, where would you go if you got away?"

Twilight

"Me, I'd call one of my boys and have him drag his ass out to the boonies and pick me up. Go over and hideout at my auntie's 'til the coast was clear," the kid - well, he's feeling easier now, with Ingrid out of the room. He's maybe a little bit boastful, even. He has boys he could demand that they drag themselves out to the middle of nowhere to effectuate a rescue. Except: he's also hiding out in his grandmother's Section 8 apartment scared of religious sorts. So.

" - but Dmitri, man. He didn't have fucking noone. Not like that. Shit, you know how everyone's always like 'not my dope' when they get collared? I'd believe it if Dmitri said 'not my dope.'

"There's fences and shit all around that place. How the fuck's he s'posed to climb 'em? You do shit wrong they put you in solitary.

"But fuck. Maybe if he got away - there's this hike, man. Goes past this old cemetery and this old fucking, house or something, all falling apart. I mean, maybe he'd go hide there? Spend some time before trying to cut over to the interstate and hitching a ride back to the city?"

Twilight

WP for second trip to hospital!

Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 3, 7, 7, 7) ( fail )

Afro Daddy

Finally, he got what he wanted. It was a long shot, but it was a shot. Tommy went into his pocket, pulling out a roll of bills and peeling off a couple hundred. He leaves them under a lamp near the door as he heads out.

"Thanks Daren. That's for your trouble. Wash up before your grandma comes back. She don't need no extra stress. And if you need anything, you come lookin for me, alright?"

But he didn't wait for an answer before closing the door behind him. To Ingrid he simply says.

"I got us a place to start lookin. We're goin on a little trip."