Chomp.

Radiant Honor

[I believe Radiant Honor walks in wherever the hell she wants.]

Radiant Honor

[*Z-snap*]

Radiant Honor

Quite often, Ms. Avery Chase can be found in her office at Cold Crescent. Its sleek desk, its high windows, its cabinets full of both weaponry and items for gamecraft: not all challenges are martial. On one occasion she presided over a four-day-long game of chess. One of the chess sets was broken, but that is why a conscientious Master of Challenges keeps extras.

Often enough, Mr. Erich Reinhardt can be found wandering the hallways of the upper floors, on his way in or out from a patrol. He does not live in the tower, but he was perhaps the most vocal proponent of keeping the sept open; he has not wavered in his committment to patrolling its borders.

And not very often, but occasionally, and often near the full moon, one or both of them may happen upon each other and see a familiar gleam in the other's eyes or hear a familiar edge in the other's voice, and they will decide it is high time they went on a hunt.

Tonight they tracked a bane all the way from downtown Denver to the south suburbs, past the Park Meadows Mall, the end of the light rail lines. It was dispatched readily, quickly, a snap here and there and no real burn of effort or energy. No real relief from the heaviness of rage behind the eyes, thudding in the skull.

Avery, all gleaming white fur still, stretches, shaking out her coat. It is thickening with winter, growing ever whiter -- if such a thing is possible. Her tongue lolls, and she prances over to Erich, butting her head into the side of his ribs.

Son of Rage

Erich, whose fur does not exactly gleam, but whose fur is indeed thick and thickening with winter, and whose fur is dappled and grey-black-white-brown-everything, and whose fur is, despite not being all-agleam, full and healthy and impressive armor against cold and enemy-teeth alike,

is butted and lolls his tongue out as well. He is smiling; you can see it, the corners of his maw turn up. He blinks slowly, contentedly, but not-quite because there: there is that gleam. It's in his eyes, hot and not yet sated. This month's moon was so full, so strange, so blood-red that he can't help but feel it still in his veins.

He scratches his claws on the ground. Leaves rakes there, marks. It's a primitive thing to do: dominance, victory, territory. He stops shy of pissing over it, though, thinking perhaps Avery would not appreciate that. Instead: he turns on his haunches, rubs past his friend, and puts his nose to the ground again. Sniffsniffsniffs in a widening circle: surely there is more.

chomp

The bane was dispatched readily, easily. The bane somehow dissolved itself into a puddle of shadow on the umbral ground. It is no longer, or rather it is slumber, and its viscous substance is slowly dissolving into this kind of nether-substance of which so many things in the umbra seem to be "made" of -

Avery bumps Erich.

- and that shadow-puddle starts to, well, bulge outward. Like something pushing on, or through a membrane. Like something crossing over - like something coming through.

The first part is a ragged maw, all needle-teeth and blooded, lolling tongue. Scissoring into existance and snarl-snapping and -

chomp

Head 1: + 6, Head 2: + 4; Tail 1: +6; Tail 2: +4

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

Son of Rage

[+19 CUZ HAH I AM IN HISPO.]

Son of Rage

[o right a roll.]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )

Radiant Honor

Avery, wagging her tail, notices the puddle. She dances backward from it, fur standing up a bit, ears folding back. She growls, a warning and a call to Erich, and her fur bristles, her ears twisting agressively forward to listen, to sharpen, to attend.

[Already in Hispo

-1WP for ResistPain

-1WP for Fangs of Judgement

-1G for Luna's Armor.

First roll is for Luna's Armor, then will come init!

Stamina + Survival]

Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Radiant Honor

[mmph.

now init! +10]

Dice: 1 d10 TN7 (2) ( fail )

chomp

Erich: 24

Avery: 12

Tail 2: 11

Tail 1: 10

Head 2: 8

Head 1: 7

chomp

Head 1: 1. BITE AVERY. 2. BITE AVERY.

Head 2: BITE ERICH. 2. BITE ERICH.

Tail 1: Umbralquake!

Tail 2: LASH Erich.

Radiant Honor

[1a.

1b.

R1.

R2. -- all bites on Head 1, Switching to Head 2, Tail 2, Tail 1, in that order.]

Son of Rage

[erm, RETROACTIVE FROM BEFORE :D

-1wp resist pain

-1gn luna's armor]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Son of Rage

[1a. chomp head 1!

b. pin head 1 down for Avery's 1a/1b!

R1. bite

R2. bite

same kill order as Avery!]

Radiant Honor

[retracting fangs of judgement, I was not thinking clearly.]

Son of Rage

[-2 dice]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Son of Rage

[dam +2]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

chomp

SOAK.

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

Radiant Honor

[1a. bite head 1. dex + brawl -2]

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 2

Son of Rage

[-3; str specialty: sustained]

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

chomp

SOAK. EDITED.

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

Radiant Honor

[Diff -2 for opponent being held; actual attack suxx = same!

DAMAGE]

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

chomp

SOAK.

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

Radiant Honor

[1b. dex + brawl -3 / diff -2]

Dice: 5 d10 TN3 (1, 1, 2, 3, 8) ( success x 2 )

Radiant Honor

[damage!]

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

chomp

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

chomp

Tail 2: LASH ERICH.

Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

chomp

Damage!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )

Son of Rage

[soak!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

chomp

Tail 1: UMBRALQUAKE

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

Radiant Honor

[dex + ath to stay standing!]

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

Son of Rage

[keep footing!]

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

Son of Rage

[soak 4!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Radiant Honor

[soak 4 bashing!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

chomp

Head 2: CHOMPPPP.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

chomp

Damage!

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

Son of Rage

[NO FEAR!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 7 )

chomp

Head 1: change action. Shake off hold.

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

Son of Rage

[hold on!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 )

Son of Rage

R1 CHOMP

Dice: 10 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 7 )

Son of Rage

[dam+6]

Dice: 15 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 12 )

chomp

Soak!

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

chomp

Head 1: x.x

Radiant Honor

[R1. Nomfing Head 2!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Radiant Honor

[damage!]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 6 )

chomp

Soak!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

chomp

Head 2: CHOMP ERICH.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

chomp

Damage!

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Son of Rage

[soak!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Son of Rage

[R2: CHOMP HEAD 2!]

Dice: 10 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 8 ) Re-rolls: 2

Son of Rage

[dam +7]

Dice: 16 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

chomp

Soak!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Radiant Honor

[R2!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

Radiant Honor

[damage! I AM EATING YOU, HEAD 2. MUPPET HEAD.]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

chomp

Soak!

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

chomp

Erich: 24

Avery: 12

Tail 2: 11

Tail 1: 10

Head 2: 8

Head 1: x.x

chomp

Head 2: 1. CHOMP ERICH. 2. CHOMP ERICH.

chomp

Tail 1: 1. LASH AVERY WTF DID YO?U DO TO MY HEAD.

chomp

Tail 2: LASH ERICH LEAVE MAH HEAD ALONE.

Radiant Honor

[1a. Stay on Head 2.

1b. Kill it til it dies from it.

1c. +WP Seriously bite it. And if it dies or is dead (go Erich), move on to Tail 2 because it is meaner.

R1. Tail 2! EAT IT. Like lobster.]

Son of Rage

[dropping another 2 rage!

1a: spur claws on tail 1!

b. bite head 2!

R1/R2: bite head 2! then tail 2! then tail 1!]

Son of Rage

[spur claws: -1R

-2dice from splitting]

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

Son of Rage

[dam+3]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

chomp

Soak!

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

Son of Rage

[chomp!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Son of Rage

[dam+3]

Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 3, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

chomp

SOAK!

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

Radiant Honor

[1a. Bite on Head 2 / -2]

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Radiant Honor

[are you... are you serious.]

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

chomp

Soak!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 7 )

Radiant Honor

[Re-doing 1a since I botched it! -3!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Radiant Honor

[PLEASE]

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

Radiant Honor

[1b. -4!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Radiant Honor

[you can have my slinky it is rainbow and has stars on it too]

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

chomp

Soak!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 5, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Radiant Honor

[1c. -5] +WP!

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Radiant Honor

[strength + 1 + 1 + suxx -1 maybe kahseeno likes math]

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

chomp

SOAK!

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

chomp

Tail 2: what the fuck am I doing do Erich!

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

chomp

Damage!

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

chomp

Tail 1: LASH AVERY. +2 spur claws.

Dice: 7 d10 TN9 (1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Son of Rage

[soak!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 5 )

chomp

Damage!

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )

chomp

HEad 2: CHOMMMP.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 5 )

Radiant Honor

[SOAK]

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

chomp

Damage! ERICH.

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

Son of Rage

[soak again!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

Son of Rage

[R1: GRR KILL IT]

Dice: 10 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Son of Rage

[fine. fine. we send this one out to the old school:

HAIL KAHSEENO.]

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

chomp

Soak!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 5, 5, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Radiant Honor

[R1. only rage action!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 8 ) Re-rolls: 1

Radiant Honor

[HAIL!]

Dice: 14 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

chomp

Soak!

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

chomp

Head 2: x.x

Ergo: Tails: x.x

Ergo: BOOM

Dice: 14 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 6, 6, 6, 6, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 11 )

Radiant Honor

[oh my fucking god. HAIL!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Son of Rage

[HAIL KAHSEENO.]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 8 )

Son of Rage

[aww, kahseeno. you do love me :]]] ]

chomp

That membranous bulge resolves itself into this amorphous blob of a two-tailed, two-headed, needle-toothed monstrous thing with slimey purple fur and these crowning antlers and spiked, barbed tails and immediately they are in the thick of battle again. The first head Erich holds down for Avery and they tear into it together and then he tears it fucking off. Black blood like a geyser behind it.

The second head: hard, more solid, snarling, stinking breath while the tails rain down blows and Son of Rage sheds his claws into the tail attacking his Silver Fang companion and together they tear into the head -

which comes off, almost cleanly from the body, while the tails are still lashing. This time ther eis no spurt of black blood, no geyser, just this sort of terrible internal spasm before the whole.

thing.

explodes.

A searing, vomitous torrent of burning-acid-black.

--

They are both still breathing in the aftermath.

Though one:

barely.

Son of Rage

Well.

That was unexpected.

In the aftermath, Erich-wolf -- who was about to lunge in again, about to grasp something in his great teeth and just CHEW IT TO BITS -- stands there with his forepaws spread for balance, his ears pinned back, and his eyes wide as saucers.

Seconds go by before the shock passes. Then he gives one long protracted shake of his fur: head to toe, flinging off bits-of-monster that have caught in the density. He bounds a little, then, celebratory, yipping and yelping until

he realizes

Avery is not celebrating with him. That is when he begins to nose through the slop. That is when he finds her, his friend, his sister-in-arms, beloved-of-Falcon and respected-by-all: singed and acid-burnt, in a sorry state indeed. Erich-wolf noses her, whining in his throat. He puts a paw on her and pushes, awkwardly, and when she doesn't rouse immediately he turns, he twists a small something from his fur and crunches it in his teeth over the Silver Fang.

[-1Gn! Heal for 4!]

Radiant Honor

There is a period of the battle when Avery is bristling, thinking of the dishonor of a pretended defeat, and then a period when she is not thinking at all. She is instinct and reaction; strategy lives in her bones and her nervous system and requires no conscious thought to be put in action. Erich holds down the throat of their enemy and she bites at it.

Truth be told, she will reflect later that they could have done better. Been more clever, perhaps. Used tactics. But truth be told, she will also reflect later that at no point did she feel afraid, or concerned that Erich would turn his back on her, or leave her to fight one enemy while he fought another. She trusts him.

And that is a good thing.

Because at the end of the battle, she has nothing left but her life. Bear's gift guards her from pain, the searing and all-encompassing, mind-shredding pain she would feel, but she knows what is happening to her. She knows that her fur is burnt off in a split second; she knows that the skin underneath is charred to nonexistence in many places, knows that blood is trickling, burning, turning black in the crevices of areas that should never see light. She feels the ichor of the two-headed, two-tailed creature clinging to her, burning and burning and burning. Some part of her wants badly to roll on the ground, try and get it off, dry it off, scrub it off with the earth as her ally but whether she feels the pain or not, her consciousness is slave to her body.

It submits. She does not know that she twitches, or that she breathes; she is emptied out, and if she were aware enough to realize it, she would be grateful.

--

The first thing she feels after that is cleanliness, and she is grateful for that, too. A washing, even though the water is only a sprinkle. It feels like a flood. She breathes the suddenly clean air, unable for a few seconds to smell the carcass of the thing they just dispatched. Skin reforms, as though it was never gone; burnt and dried flesh flakes away, pushed off of her by the new skin she grows by the good grace of Gaia.

And a little slip of a Theurge that Avery is particularly fond of, even when she isn't being blessed by that Theurge's work.

Avery opens her eyes, glassy but clear, and saturated with blue color. She looks at Erich and determines that he is... all right, enough. She has regrown fur, and it thickens as she rolls to her paws, shaking out a bit. She leans toward Erich, sniffing at his muzzle. Finds a bit of gourd stuck in his fur and nudges it away, grooming him. Standing right beside him, close enough that they might look like pack, she looks past him at the black spot where the thing was, and where its pieces are.

She chuffs a breath. Her tail wags. She seems to be saying:

we did quite well, didn't we?

But this is followed by a nuzzle, a tucking of her head against his ruff for a moment. That seems to say something else. That something else is thank you.

Elementary.

Éva

The building itself is redbrick, solid, three stories, foursquare, with stone lintels over the doubledoors leading inside and framing in all the oversized windows. An old elementary school transformed into low income apartments with grants and redevelopment. The money did not go all the way to ripping out the old asphalt playground and installing the parklike setting that was shown on the diorama presented to the Denver Housing Authority to show how beautifully the place would be finished out, so the building proper is surrounded by a weedy asphalt and the rusting A-frames of old fashioned swingsets. The swings long, long gone.

The lighting is shit and half the streetlights are out and dusk comes ever-earlier. It is already September, and once the heat of the day is gone there is a distinct chill in the air.

Saturday.

There are kids on the corner, two blocks down, young enough that they should be playing, old enough that in this neighborhood one is certain that they are doing no such thing. We'll call it work, instead.

They pull up in a mid-2000s Chevy, dark and completely unremarkable, slightly dented, the sort no one would care to bother with. Not even here.

Éva kills the engine, sits for a moment with her hands on the wheel, watching sunset flood the sky with its peculiarly bloodied light and gives Erich, in profile, the sort of smile that feels both false and absolutely real.

"I don't want to spook Ramón if we can avoid it. I don't mind company inside, but if he's in, perhaps you should wait outside while we talk."

Erich

Erich doesn't really know what he's doing here, truth be told. Which might imply that he's not pleased to be here, or that this wasn't his idea, or that he didn't come here for a reason, but none of that is true. He wants to be here. He's sort of even pleased that he is here, because that means Eva -- that paragon of Shadow Lord-ness -- has deigned to accept his help. He also came here for a very good reason, and that reason is simply:

Eva is going somewhere bad, and

Eva is his kin, and

therefore Erich should Do Something.

But therein lies the question. What, precisely, is he to do? He has never played bodyguard before. He thought perhaps he should stand over her shoulder and glower and generally look menacing, but then: no, she tells him that is exactly what he doesn't want to do. He thinks; he looks out the window at the building which was once a school and is now what might simply be termed A Project, as in A Low Income Housing Project, as in The Projects. He looks over at Eva, all cool and self-possessed and efficient and Thunder, Thunder, Thunderous.

"Should I walk you to the door then? Or just sit here? I think sitting here would make me pretty useless. If I'm supposed to be useful, I mean."

Éva

Erich's question makes her smile, quite suddenly. Quick and sure and unselfconscious. She slides the keys out of the ignition and turns them over in her hand. There are just three on the ring, and only one works.

She does not know why they keep the others there.

"Come with me inside. Be alert. Nothing's going to happen. I do this all the time. But you'll be close then, in case."

A pause. She is slipping the keys into the right pocket of her jacket.

She is opening the driver's door.

"All right?"

Erich

His door pops open as soon as the word inside leaves her mouth. Erich climbs out of the mid-2000s Chevy, which even Erich knows isn't her usual car, shutting the door with the heel of his hand as he stretches the kinks out of his legs.

"Right," he affirms. Then a quirk-grin: "Funny you're the one reassuring me that nothing's going to happen. Isn't that my line?"

Tucks his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and, unlikely duo that they are, follows Eva building-ward.

Éva

Per + Alertness

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

Erich

[per+PU]

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

Éva

At this hour even in the heart of the city there should be birds singing. Erich cannot hear a one.

Éva

Éva takes in his quirking grin with a side glance that is composed enough that it could be taken as supercilious, quite nearly sly, except for the supple threads of humor that she allows to leak through, like light from inside a shuttered window, diffused and redirected by the slats.

And she is out of the car as well, pulling an attache case from the back seat before closing the door behind her.

The weekend. She wears sleekly fitted jeans and a soft white blouse with a pinstripe beneath a dark gray jacket, with menswear details and menswear styling. And books, a well-worn black, without much of a heel at all and just enough of a retort on the sidewalk that one knows that she is coming.

They walk in the building's shadow, following the line of the old fence, which was topped with failing coils of razor wire no one bothered to take down when this became a series of residences rather than a reform school.

Except for the retort of her heels on the pavement, it is quiet.

They climb the steps, from the sidewalk into the asphalt schoolyard. Éva's eyes narrow on the windows as they walk.

"Someone in there is watching us," Éva tells him, lifting her chin subtly in the direction of one of the blanket-covered windows on the second story. "Could be their cable's been cut, for non-payment."

A quick, subtle little smile.

"Could be they haven't sensed you yet, and we look like prey."

Erich

"Like you're not a predator, yourself," Erich retorts,

which may just be the most astute thing he's ever said about Eva. They climb the stairs together. His sneakers do not click smartly on the pavement; they make little enough sound at all, cushioning his long stride, the agile animal motion coiled under his affable nebraska-boy facade. He knows well enough not to look right at the window as soon as Eva points it out, but he does, after a while, flick his eyes up that way. And again.

Then they're at the door. Erich's last step up is a bound, taking him ahead of Eva. He pulls the door open and -- apparently having forgotten all his mama's manners -- barges in ahead of her.

Éva

A doorway.

A stairwell.

Industrial and clinical, made to be used. Wide-open steps rising a half-flight to the first floor and sinking a half-flight to the darkened basement. On the wall: a row of locked mailboxes that seems equal to the vintage of the school and must have been salvaged from a tear-down somewhere.

Flyers litter the floor. For cheap pizza and cheaper pho. Specials on plasma donations. Get an extra five bucks on every fifth visit!

"You have me wrong," she tells him, as she walks in after him. Her voice is quietly composed and her humor is strange and is dark and she means it too, though perhaps in this she is utterly incorrect.

A flick of a glance up the stairwell.

The old fixtures were taken out. Left behind: naked bulbs hanging from wires, an ugly wash of too-white light.

One of the bulbs is strobing.

"Ramon is on the second floor," she tells him as she starts to climb. Fingertips trailing on the balustrade.

A moment later, "You weren't born to us, were you?"

Erich

A startled glance. If she'd meant to turn the spotlight squarely back to him, take it off herself, she's succeeded. If she's trying to make conversation -- and an odd time for conversation it would be -- she quite fails. He's so taken aback that he pauses a second, his footsteps faltering on the stairs. Then he trudges on, making no attempt to disguise his gait. On these hollower steps, he's quite audible. It's still moments before he speaks again.

"Nope." Forced-light, that. "Blond hair, blue eyes, and I hulk out like nobody's business. I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count."

They pass that strobing light. Erich thinks of smashing the bulb. Maybe a real Fenrir would. He, however, passes it; leaves it be.

Éva

A sore point.

She apologizes with silence, you understand. She does not guess. They circle the first floor landing and glance at one of the fire doors, propped open, and keep walking. The noise echoes remarkably in this open space. Close to the railing and in the center as well, the hollowed grooves worn by thousands of feet into the stairs.

They have rounded the landing between the first and second stories, still in silence. Erich still leading the way, when Eva's voice floats up from behind.

"Ellie's father was - " a mildly ironic pause. Who knows who may be listening. "Nordic. I don't think he was born to them, either."

The firedoors leading to the second-story hallway are not propped open. They creeeeaaaak as Erich pushes them. The hinges want oiling.

Inside: a long hallway, dark and stuffy. One light at the end of the hall casts an ugly white pool of illumination on sickly sea-green paint. A door half-way down stands open, warmer light from within.

"We're looking for 2-C."

Erich

"Huh." Interest, a glimmer. "What was he born to, do you think?"

They're looking for 2-C. Right. Eyes on the ball. Eyes on the prize. Erich turns around. He's gotten ahead of her again: because that's all he knows to do, see. Stand in front of the weaker. Shelter them, protect them, tear anyone that tries to get to them to little bloody pieces. He hulks out like nobody's business.

They pass 2-B. Loud music blasted out of shredded speakers. Erich rolls his head on his shoulders. He's wearing his throwed-rolls t-shirt again; thinks to himself he should've left it at home. Wouldn't want to get bloodstains on it. Eva says she's done this a thousand times and nothing's gone down, but Erich: Erich likes to be ready for trouble. Erich attracts trouble. Erich is trouble, sometimes.

Éva

"Nothing," she says, quietly. There is a thread of speculation in her voice, a coil of it, which has the tincture of nostalgia and the weight of a rope. This is: far in the past, and yet the past is ever-present in us.

Not precisely a weight.

Perhaps it is even a lightness.

"That was always my guess anyway." Her voice contrapuntal against the bass blaring from that room. That noise, that too-human noise is not precisely enough to disarm her, but it does ease the tension that has crept in to the facet joints of her spine. "The truth is I don't know."

2-C.

The door stands open.

And Erich is going ahead because he knows nothing else; because that is what he does: he shields the weak. The weak-er.

"Wait," she says. "Let me."

And Éva knocks, lightly on the open door. It is hard to hear over the noise from the stereo in 2-B, so she repeats the knock, and then decides to let herself in.

The door is open, after all.

Erich

Oh the curiosity.

Oh the burning questions.

Erich's too polite to ask, but Eva's too astute not to notice the curious gleam in his eyes. Who what where why when how. Okay, maybe not the how. No, not the how, he doesn't want to know the how of Eva's acquaintance with the father of her first child, that would be way too much information. But still: the who what where why when. The why, especially; someone she knows so little of, not even a history, not even a birth tribe. A guess, that's all. Erich ponders, briefly, what it would be like to be born of that sort of skimming uncertainty. Erich ponders, briefly, what it would be like to be associated with that sort of skimming uncertainty. A one-night stand. Has he had them? He supposes he has, by definition. But they felt different; awkward and fumbling and few and far between. They weren't really one night stands. They were girls he liked who liked him until they were scared away.

Anyway.

All that in the past now. He has Melantha. Right? Only no one ever really has Melantha, except herself. She is free and wild as the wind. As honey harvested from the summer blossoms.

Now they are at 2-C. He has no time for questions, anyway. he is about to go ahead -- but she stays him. He pauses, turns his head, his profile so fucking -- how did she put it? Nordic. All deep brow and strong nose and those lean cheeks, that strap of muscle from zygomatic arch to angle-of-jaw. He steps back, and so she steps ahead. She lets herself in and he hesitates;

hangs back. For now.

Erich

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

Éva

He has the briefest view of her profile as she slips past him. The sweep of her winged brows, the quiet slant of her gaze. The tension light and fine as it frames her dark eyes. The faint webs of lines in her skin, made more prominent by the angle of light coming from inside the apartment.

High ceilings recede into shadows. A narrow corridor illuminated a lamp at its end.

The watery reflection of an unseen television in the dark windows. The shifting sunset framed beyond.

Éva walks down the hallway. She is not trying to sneak up on her quarry. She does not want to be shot for an unannounced intruder. Her step is deliberate and she calls out the man's name - "Ramon?" in a fair approximation of its actual Spanish origin as she goes.

She disappears around the corner into what must be the living room, reaching a hand beneath her jacket to the weapon holstered there as she goes - just in case.

It feels so strangely quiet in here.

--

The air is still. Erich hangs back, for now. Watching.

The bass next door throbs.

The floorboards creak beneath Eva's weight as she moves. He notices something that he is just starting to process as blood smeared on the plate framing the lightswitch inside the narrow hallway when he sees Éva reflected in the windows sink to a crouch somewhere in the living room. Saying again, "Ramon?" this time with a very specific note of inquiry in her voice.

Something is wrong.

He knows, something is very, very wrong.

Erich

Wrong.

It beats in his blood like a pulse. Wrong: the silence. No birdsong. Wrong: the blood on the baseplate. Wrong: no answer inside. His kinswoman's cautious-confident stride, coming around, swinging around. If this were a horror movie it'd be time for the fast zoom. The close-up of some horrid murder, some terrible distortion.

This isn't a horror movie. This is his life, and something is wrong, and Erich, who never was one to stop and think anyway, shoves that door open so hard it dents the wall. Catches up to Eva in the space of three, four strides, inserts himself between her and --

whatever it is he might find.

Éva

Erich charges down the hallway, that wrongness beating a thread in his pulse that seemes to match the bass from next door. Cheap particle board bisecting the old classroom to make that hall, nothing on the walls except for stains, the smear of something just over waist high and he rounds the corner and finds -

- Éva, crouched over the body of a dead man, sunk down to her haunches. Weapon in her hand but held carefully, the safety still on, alert. Bloodstains on the cheap shag carpet someone slung over the linoleum, all the cheap cabinets in the kitchen open, the door to the bathroom open, dark inside, the television mute and inane, this hum hum humming noise coming from somewhere,

and nothing, nothing there. Nothing for him to shove himself in front of. Nothing at all.

She is cursing beneath her breath, trying to check his pulse, but she is no doctor, breathing out sharply as Erich comes in behind her, glancing up at him, as his shadow spreads over the scene.

"I think he's dead." Quiet. "Be careful what you touch."

Something is wrong. Something is wrong wrong wrong.

Erich

"He's dead all right."

That at least he's certain about. He doesn't need to check a pulse. All Erich needs do is take a breath.

He sinks to his haunches. His knees don't pop. Garou genes. Jeans too, if we're being witty. He's reaching out toward -- something, maybe some speck of blood or something, but again Eva's word stays him. He withdraws his hand.

"Was he important? Any idea who did it?" The questions are half-assed. He's restless, craning his head around. What is that sound. "Do you hear that?"

Éva

"You know Darling Annie?" He may know her; he may not. A bone gnawer kin, sometime stripper, occasional prostitute currently facing the death penalty for murdering a cop 2 or 3 years ago. "Prosecution finally turned over the logs of the investigators interviews. He was on it. I hoped he'd be able to corroborate her story that the officer attacked her. Because right now we're not getting any traction - "

And she is explaining, and she has no idea who did it, and she is shifting in place, frowning down at the body, then glancing blankly over the depressingly cheap apartment, speaking in that low murmur that slides beneath the hum hum humming and above the reverb of the bass next door, reaching back to reholster her weapon -

when the dead man starts to move.

Erich

[inits! +17 cuz fostern ahroun]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )

Éva

Ramon +7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )

Éva

Eva +7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )

Éva

Order:

Erich: 20+

Eva: 14

Ramon: 11

Éva

Ramon:

1. Bite Eva.

Rage 1: Bite Eva.

Éva

Eva: 1a. Dodge. 1b. Shoot Ramon.

Erich

[-1 for resist pain!]

Erich doesn't know Darling Annie. Erich doesn't know the trial, doesn't know the story, doesn't know the sentence.

Erich does know, suddenly and with the fierce-bright burn of conviction:

that they are fighting for justice. So when the dead man starts to move -- well. He turns, rage crackles in the air like lightning, he falls on the not-dead man like a sack of bricks.

[3 rage.

1. tackle ramon to prevent chomping on eva!

R1. bite it!

R2. some more!

R3. he's not very creative: bite!]

Erich

[oh i should have also noted: 1 rage to hispo.

str+brawl!]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 7 )

Éva

Ramon: uhm, str + ath to escape?

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

Éva

Eva: holds action b/c she is afraid of shooting Erich. He is giant and Ramon is small.

Éva

Ramon: change action to bite Erich! +1 dif to change action. +2 dif because held.

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (3, 5, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )

Éva

Damage!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Erich

[soak!]

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

Erich

[CHOMP!]

Dice: 10 d10 TN3 (2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 9 )

Erich

[dam]

Dice: 17 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 9 )

Éva

Soak?

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

Éva

Ramon: Rage 1. Dif 8

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (1, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Éva

Damage!

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

Erich

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

Erich

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

Erich

[CHOMP MOAR]

Dice: 10 d10 TN3 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 9 ) Re-rolls: 2

Erich

[dam]

Dice: 17 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Éva

Soak?

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

Erich

[SRSLY, CHOMPING NOW]

Dice: 10 d10 TN3 (4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 13 ) Re-rolls: 3

Éva

Éva is holstering her weapon, glancing up, canting her head (animal, you see, beneath her skin) to listen to that whining note of something that drifts above everything else in here and she wants to attribute it to one of those pulsing bulbs in the stairwell but the moment feels wrong and then the dead man at her feet is lurching upright, this schcliking noise as he does not so much inhale as he gasps out some lingering bubble of gas from the corpse and he is reading for her and opening a mouth full of jagged teeth and she is stumbling backwards, inelegant in this because avoiding those teeth is her first and absolute priority and then she is leveling her gun but before any of that has even seemed to happen Erich is in motion, suddenly wolfen, filling the room, snarling and jumping on the animate corpse and here is the battle, one to one, in bloody place. Two deep bitewounds in Erich's neck are the only source of bloodspatter. When Erich bites Ramon: he tastes the grave, and the blood inside the veins is already turning to dust in the Ahroun's mouth.

It has not been a moment; it has not been a minute. Three heartbeats have passed.

Instinct has Éva lifting her weapon from the fight between her tribesmate and the corpse to aim it at the darkened open door to the bathroom. Something comes shuffling out, staggered on a broken limb. She shoots a three-round burst. The bullets dot-dot-dot: the eye, the cheek, the ear.

The thing staggers. Erich leaps.

It goes down.

Another three heartbeats.

And still the whining sound. Something in the hallway outside the apartment.

"You're hurt. We have to get out of here."

Éva

Éva is holstering her weapon, glancing up, canting her head (animal, you see, beneath her skin) to listen to that whining note of something that drifts above everything else in here and she wants to attribute it to one of those pulsing bulbs in the stairwell but the moment feels wrong and then the dead man at her feet is lurching upright, this schcliking noise as he does not so much inhale as he gasps out some lingering bubble of gas from the corpse and he is reading for her and opening a mouth full of jagged teeth and she is stumbling backwards, inelegant in this because avoiding those teeth is her first and absolute priority and then she is leveling her gun but before any of that has even seemed to happen Erich is in motion, suddenly wolfen, filling the room, snarling and jumping on the animate corpse and here is the battle, one to one, in bloody place. Two deep bitewounds in Erich's neck are the only source of bloodspatter. When Erich bites Ramon: he tastes the grave, and the blood inside the veins is already turning to dust in the Ahroun's mouth.

It has not been a moment; it has not been a minute. Three heartbeats have passed.

Instinct has Éva lifting her weapon from the fight between her tribesmate and the corpse to aim it at the darkened open door to the bathroom. Something comes shuffling out, staggered on a broken limb. She shoots a three-round burst. The bullets dot-dot-dot: the eye, the cheek, the ear.

The thing staggers. Erich leaps.

It goes down.

Another three heartbeats.

And still the whining sound. Something in the hallway outside the apartment.

"You're hurt. We have to get out of here."

Éva

STOP.

Éva

Éva is holstering her weapon, glancing up, canting her head (animal, you see, beneath her skin) to listen to that whining note of something that drifts above everything else in here and she wants to attribute it to one of those pulsing bulbs in the stairwell but the moment feels wrong and then the dead man at her feet is lurching upright, this schcliking noise as he does not so much inhale as he gasps out some lingering bubble of gas from the corpse and he is reading for her and opening a mouth full of jagged teeth and she is stumbling backwards, inelegant in this because avoiding those teeth is her first and absolute priority and then she is leveling her gun but before any of that has even seemed to happen Erich is in motion, suddenly wolfen, filling the room, snarling and jumping on the animate corpse and here is the battle, one to one, in bloody place. Two deep bitewounds in Erich's neck are the only source of bloodspatter. When Erich bites Ramon: he tastes the grave, and the blood inside the veins is already turning to dust in the Ahroun's mouth.

It has not been a moment; it has not been a minute. Three heartbeats have passed.

Instinct has Éva lifting her weapon from the fight between her tribesmate and the corpse to aim it at the darkened open door to the bathroom. Something comes shuffling out, staggered on a broken limb. She shoots a three-round burst. The bullets dot-dot-dot: the eye, the cheek, the ear.

The thing staggers. Erich leaps.

It goes down.

Another three heartbeats.

And still the whining sound. Something in the hallway outside the apartment.

"You're hurt. We have to get out of here."

Erich

He's hurt. He's hurt? Erich-wolf laughs; it comes out a snarl. He struggles; so hard to speak like this. So much easier to bite-bite-bite-kill.

"I maybe hurt. He very dead."

Point made, he shakes out his fur. Takes a long damn time of it too, all that thick musk-pungent fur foofing out this way and that: head to toe he shakes, and as he does his pelt -- that dappled pelt, more grey than black, mostly grey with splashes of black, white, brown, cream -- takes on a glow, takes on a light of its own.

He chuffs his agreement. Well, sort of. He chuffs but he eyes the hallway and he wants to stay wants to bitebitebitekill but then he is not alone, and Eva has kids, and he has some sense of responsibility and so:

"You ... stay behind."

He starts toward the hallway.

[-1gn! for luna's armor. here is a roll.]

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

Éva

"Wait." There is a degree of authority in her voice; she incises it into the moment. Tells him to: wait, you understand, - and she is on her feet now, still holding the weapon, scanning the space, licking her lips because she finds them - and her throat - suddenly dry.

"The window. We're alone and you don't now what's out there. How many.

"We can get out the window. You can come back with a pack."

Erich

A low twisted-twisty sound in his throat, somewhere between whine and growl. Tastes so much like retreat, this. Tastes so much like tuck-tail-and-run. Erich wavers; Eva can see it. He looks between door and window and his body leans this way, then that.

Then he decides. He wheels around, massive, heavy, big paws lifting and body swiveling and big paws coming back down, one-eighty. He trots toward the window -- his passage is a small earthquake -- he noses it open or, if necessary, he dashes it asunder with his paws.

"How ... you jump?"

Éva

She has already started fumbling with the frame, which is badly hinged, reluctant, the sashes stiff as corpses when Erich comes back down the hallway to the wide, wide windows overlooking the dark, weedy asphalt that was once the recreational area for the juvenile delinquents. The metal frames of the old swingsets. All of it.

It goes up like a dream when he noses it open.

She is at his side, wary and aware, glancing behind him down the narrow apartment hallway, toward the yawningly dark opening beyond.

"I'll try to climb," she tells him, exhaling. "And if I can't climb, I'll try to fall as well as I can. The lower I am the less likely I am to break something badly. Alright? If I hurt myself when I fall, I'll need your help to get to the car. We don't want to be found here."

Erich

It crosses his mind to offer -- he doesn't even know -- a ride? Piggyback? Horseback? Crinos-back? Something. He doesn't. He wouldn't presume, he wouldn't dare, it would be so fucking humiliating for the both of them. He chuffs again, which is easier than speaking, and then

that enormous wolf-beast rears up on his hindlegs, paws on the windowsill. He looks out over the would-have-been playground, schoolyard. His ears swivel -- that noise behind, whatever it is that lies without. Violence and rage and death beckon him, but he doesn't turn around.

He jumps. Just as smooth-swift as that first time he met Charlotte, that first step-step-leap he took that launched him up, up onto that fountain. He launches himself out of the window, parabolic, reaching the top of that arc and hanging for an endless breath before he drops,

lands with a grunt on the pavement below.

Éva

Climbing down. Str (2) + Ath (3). She needs 6 success to make it all the way down, and can have a second roll if she gets successes on the first.

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (5, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Éva

And again.

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (3, 5, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )

Éva

Fall damage the last 10 feet.

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Éva

Soak!

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

Erich

[soak!]

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

Éva

He jumps. Falls, that perfect arc, that perfect, impossible atheleticism.

She does not have such gifts. She holsters her weapon and climbs over the windowsill and picks up her attache case and drops it over the edge, down into darkness.

Then she starts to climb, eases herself over the lintel, strains for toeholds against the brick. Feels the mortar crumbling beneath her fingers, cannot breathe and regularly reminds herself to remember to keep doing it.

Her fingertips are raw and her shoulders are number and her arms feel like water before they finally give out. She misses a hold and overcorrects and cannot hold her own weight with just one hand and so -

she falls, the last ten feet to the solid asphalt, twisting her ankle badly with the impact that sends her rolling into another prone corpse.

Which is: awakening.

This one Erich dispatches with one great snap of his jaws, quite literally tearing the head from the body and throwing it like a child's beachball, up up and away.

Eva has regained her feet - and her briefcase - by the time Erich wheels around. She is standing on her left leg, favoring the right. "I think you're going to have to drive."

There are: more noises from within, which she quite resolutely tries not to hear.

Erich

Okay. One risen corpse: that's just a risen corpse. Two? Three, four, more inside? THE PENNY DROPS. They're standing on a goddamn zombie farm. Or something.

Erich is down there, giving little hops of his forepaws in excitement-or-something at the realization, when Eva slips-misses-falls and his heart goes hammering into his throat and in that split-instant when Eva is in the grip of gravity Erich's life is flashing before his eyes, or at least:

the images of Eva's little kids and the thought of going to them and saying I'm so sorry but your mommy died because she fell out a window oh god the inglory and then he'd have to tell them why he couldn't just give her a crinosback ride.

But then she lands, and it is not a pleasant landing, and perhaps there are noises of pain but regardless: she is moving. She rolls into another corpse and the corpse is moving too and Erich is dispatching it with brutal, nearly joyful efficiency, and then Eva,

Eva is getting up and he will not be telling her next of kin after all, and

he is so delighted that he headbutts her, gently, but it is still a headbutt from a direwolf. The top of his head solid and thud against her midriff.

Then they have an escape to complete. She thinks he's going to have to drive. He sniffs at her ankle, delicately, and then he turns and pushes off and flows upward and then he is an Erich again. A very hirsute, slope-browed, cro-magnon Erich, but close enough. There is blood oozing from two deep bites to his shoulder and neck, but already it is slowing.

There is no blood in his mouth. His mouth tastes of ashes and decay.

"I'll drive," he agrees. Very agreeable boy, Erich. "Do you -- uh. Need a shoulder to lean on?"

Éva

"Please."

Her voice is tight from the pain, but beyond the mild, natural strain there are few signs. She swallows them. Maneuvers herself somewhat awkwardly as she pulls her keys from her right pocket and hands them to him and then - one arm draped around his hulking shoulders - hobbles with him toward the car.

--

She is a tall woman, but still, he will have to put the seat back once she is safely deposited in the passenger's seat and he has taken the driver's side. While they drive she pulls out her phone to call the Sept.

They will be met in the parking garage, underground though not so deep underground as the pit against which they are there to guard - the city and the world from whatever lies on the other side. A small pack ready to return to the apartment block with Erich, to clean up.

the nameless house

wake

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

Except when they change it.

--

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

--

This is where they are.

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

I miss everything, he whispers back.

He is crying, too.

Melantha can taste his tears.

--

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

Somehow the morning,

shifts.

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

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

from up above.

--

And then there is one young man.

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

movement

in the ground beneath them.

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

--

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

Erich

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

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

Melantha is there

and Erich does not wake

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

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

Melantha

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

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

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

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

Tamsin

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

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

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

THE boy, maybe?

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

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

And so she does and so she will.

wake

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

Jack.

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

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

yes,

that house.

Where the dead go.

--

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

It will hurt everyone, everyone, else.

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

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

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

Erich

Erich-wolf,

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

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

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

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

Melantha

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

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

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

--

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

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

it won't even remember.

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

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

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

Erich

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

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

Tamsin

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

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

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

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

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

"You gonna be upset when it gets hurt?"

wake

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

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

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

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

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

"even when it's sleeping.

" - and now it's waking up.

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

"It wants you. It wants all of you.

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

Erich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melantha

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

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

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

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

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

Tamsin

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

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

But then the sad story;

and it is a sad story.

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

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

wake

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

wake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melantha

[willpower!]

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

Tamsin

[wp]

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

Erich

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

Melantha

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

She looks down at him. "First: "

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

Erich --

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

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

Erich

Now that.

was not.

okay.

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

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

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

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

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

Tamsin

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

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

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

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

and go for its filthy fucking death-taking

heart.

wake

And they

wake

up.

Friday night.

Erich

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

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

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

Eva

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

--

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

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

The briefest pause.

"Just for a moment."

Erich

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

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

Eva

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

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

Erich

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

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

"Where are your kids?"

Eva

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

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

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

Erich

Erich. Looks. Horrified.

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

Eva

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

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

Erich

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

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

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

Eva

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

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

Poker face.

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

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

The most minute pause. Then:

"How involved are your plans this evening?"

Erich

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

Obviously.

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

Eva

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

An arch of her brows.

"Your plans?"

Erich

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

And again, "Why?"

Eva

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

"His skin is too hot.

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

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

Erich

"Oh."

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

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

--

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

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

Just long enough for Eva to indicate the man,

mark the kill.

--

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

--

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

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

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

Eva

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

Says nothing, though.

There is nothing to say.

--

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

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

and then she feels naked.

--

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

She sees him, of course.

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

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

Is she returning the wave?

Perhaps; though he will never know.

She could have just been turning the wheel.

biscuits

wake

Here is the dream. It is the dream Erich remembers. It is always the dream: waking in that sunwashed room; the texture and weight of the quilt over his body, the clean scent of linen that has been washed by hand and dried in the sun. The dust in the air and the air in the dust and the boy and MA SAYS GET UP and the feeling of being a lazybones, of lazing in bed when the sun has already broken the horizon, when the world is up and working and you are still, deliciously, warm and asleep.

Still those slipsliding, slipstream names. The room and the frame of it and the windows, which rattle in casements with every shivering passage of wind.

Erich wants clothes wants to know if he can imagine clothes and finds that he cannot imagine clothes and he is not naked; he is wearing old fashioned longjohns, the one-piece sort with a fly and a button-up window in the rear and he can leave those on or take them off and dress in dungarees and a button-up shirt and suspenders that still have the scent of sweat and dust from yesterday and perhaps tomorrow but that is how one lives, here. Sweat and dust and sunlight.

There's a door. There are windows, too. The boy disappearing after Erich reassures him, instructs him to tell Ma I'll be down soon.

Erich

OKAY HE IS NOT GOING TO WEAR LONGJOHNS.

...now that that's clear: yes. He dresses. He dresses with the fluidity of dream-physics, just like how in a dream you can run farther than humanly possible, lift impossible things, fly across the sky if you wanted to.

He starts taking off the longjohns and then next thing he knows he is sliding the suspenders over his shoulders, amused because they feel so weird there, he hasn't worn suspenders since he was about five years old and going to that odd little church in town where all the pictures of Jesus looked unusually ferocious and toothy and all the sermons were unusually fiery and bloody and full of the End Of Days and Last Battles. The few humans living in town thought they were just some minor little presbyterian or methodist or anabaptist or something denomination, but everyone else, the real movers and shakers and owners and workers of the town,

knew that it was all code, really. They weren't talking about god and jesus and holy spirits and marys and josephs; they were talking about gaia and celestines and incarnae and fenris and all his brood.

Anyway.

Point is: he hasn't worn suspenders in so long. Some of the older men in his family still wore them, because they were old-fashioned, see. It makes him feel old-fashioned and Manly, somehow, to slide them over his shoulders. He stops by the mirror to see how he looks, but in dreams we can never really see our own faces, can we? He opens the bedroom door and follows the boy-who-is-but-isn't-his-brother downstairs.

Erich

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

wake

There is a mirror. The mirror is old; is silvered and black. The mirror is framed on the clapboard wall and what it shows him as he is slipping the suspenders over his shoulder is the impression of a -

- is an impression; is an impressionistic reflection of a blond man in sliding suspenders over his shoulders, this liquid movement, and beyond that, beyond that some hint of a sort of disintegrating longing. Some lingering desperation. Some note of despair. Behind the mirror, behind the walls. Beneath the skin of this place. Hard to place now and really no more than a niggling sort of shadow, like the silhouette of a black-winged bird etched out against the disc of a rising - or setting - sun.

- Erich dresses and follows the boy, out of the bedroom door and down the steps. The time it takes to dress, to dream-dress, he can hear the edge of another conversation, all muffled like the voices of the adults in a Peanuts holiday special.

---

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Erich rounds the corner of a hallway and finds himself heading down a simple, simply-planed stairwell.

The walls are plain; they are hand-hewn. They are not decorated, except perhaps with whitewash, which has absorbed though here and there unevenly into the uncured wood.

The foot of the stairs: the front door with its roughly made screen-door mostly closed, the heavier, solidly made door sagging open. The other directly, a long dark hallway that ends in a slow-closing door, the suggestion of a man; and light, and warmth.

Erich

Him and not-him in the mirror. Like-him but not-him. Something in Erich's mind niggles, wiggles, stretches for the truth. Brushes it, like brushing fingers against the underside of lake-ice. He hasn't broken through yet. Not yet. It submerges; he has to go find his brother who is not his brother.

So down the stairs, then. Down the stairs to the plain, rough-hewn, sturdily-built front room. Front door's open, that's weird. He goes over to it first, grabs the handle and pushes it firmly shut. Might be that next time he looks over at it, it will have miraculously come undone again. For now, though, he turns away from it, toward that long dark hallway with its slow-closing door.

"(...)?" He calls the name of the boy, but the word itself is blurred in his ears. He doesn't actually know the name, but in this dream he does. And, calling that not-a-name, he heads down the hall. Doesn't think the boy went that way, but still.

Erich

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

wake

The kitchen is a kitchen is the idea of a kitchen, warm and bright as anything. Light slants brilliant in through framing windows lined with hanging herbs. The deep abiding fragrance of drying herbs fills the air, somehow green and quick and dying and dry all at once. There is such implicit warmth, remembered and golden and delicious and there is the table set for a hearty breakfast, and there is a the woman removing something from potbellied stove and a screen door swinging shut (oh these doors, oh the way they swing) on the opposite side of the room.

Biscuits, the woman is removing biscuits from the stove.

They smell heavenly; entirely of home.

The woman with the biscuits pulls them out and puts down the hot skillet in which they have been baked on the scarred, much-loved table slab in the middle of the kitchen.

She looks: worn out, far away.

The woman pushes back a lank lock of hair and sighs, deeply. Golden seconds tick by and she breathes, more heavily than the task in which she was engaged seems to require.

She looks startled; she is looking right at a stranger whom Erich instinctively knows as his middle brother [word-slew], but there is something strange about the moment, as if it has been excised from one particular place and inserted here, where its meaning is wholly different.

What Erich hears of their conversation is - "... see you there."

It is clear that she does not know his brother's name.

Or why she is here.

Or when.

Or how to get anywhere close to home.

--

wake

Per + Alertness roll: is that other dude... Thomas Delacroix?

Erich

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

Erich

!!!

That is what is in Erich's mind at the moment. No words, no coherent thoughts even, just raw surprise and excitement and sudden-breakthrough and many many many many exclamations.

!!!!!!!!!

Like a gear clicking into place his memory clicks into place. He is not some longjohns-wearing, biscuit-eating farmer waking up in the idyllic ideal of a farmhouse. He does not have a little brother or a middle brother or any brothers at all. He is him, an Erich, an Erich very very far from home in this dreamscape, but astounding, bewilderingly, ever-so-excitingly,

he is not actually alone here. Is that Thomas Delacroix? He knows for a FACT he would not dream of Thomas Delacroix left to himself; I mean really. So: that must mean that IS Thomas. Right? And that is really Thomas. Which means maybe that woman is somebody too, and that little boy was somebody, and who really cares because that means somewhere in this dreamscape is Melantha and their dreams are actually interconnected.

He is a horrible person and a horrible Ahroun and really he should say something but: he grabs one of the biscuits still hot from the skillet (because of course he's gonna eat those biscuits in a dream where he won't get the runs if he eats biscuits) and yells something,

HEY THOMAS WAKE UP THIS IS A DREAM

and then he turns and runs for the front door. Runs for the outside. Looks for a forest, a trail of smoke, ashes in the air, something.

Thomas

[Perception+Alertness for Thomas is like the saddest panda of all the pandas.....]

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

wake

Thomas' brother comes in the door behind him. His brother his dream-brother the lazybones upstairs. Thomas is up before him and will get to eat all the biscuits if he hurries and there is a woman at the stove, a tired woman, a startled woman, a woman who looks at Thomas for a brief and startling moment, this narrowing and nearly electric connection, and whom he knows - as instinctively as he knows anything else - does not belong there -

And then his brother muscle through and picking up a biscuit and shoving it in his mouth and oh my god Erich that is the most meltingly delicious biscuit you have consumed in god knows how long, rich, flaky flayers of fat delicately suspended between the dough my god, my god, what you are missing out on and throwing another one at Thomas and yelling

HEY THOMAS THIS IS A DREAM.

And Thomas knows it is a dream.

And Thomas knows that that is Erich Reinhardt.

And Erich Reinhardt is running out of the back door and finds himself in a dry-dust farmyard in the shadow of a listing building and moving at a thundering run past a red-painted clapboard barn and out into a deserted ... street, of sorts, that is really no more than a rutted road lined with these half-memories of wooden buildings, the odd storefront without anything close to ordinary written words, the street and its houses deserted though here and there - a glimpse through the window, a drifting curtain, a stranger's face seen suddenly through a half-forgotten crowd before it disappears into the scrawl of ordinary life.

It is morning. It is morning, oh the ache of that slanting golden light. The certainty of it.

The street is a town is a memory of a town; the wooden sidewalks framing a rutted road, which disappears on both ends into a primordial, misty forest.

Black bunting is wrapped around the railings and support posts framing the simple porches.

And oh, oh, oh. Is that smoke in the sky?

Erich

Okay so we lied. He grabs a biscuit, throws another at Thomas, sinks his teeth into his biscuit and oh my god so he grabs another one, and another, and just one more and now he's cramming three biscuits into his pockets as he's running out the door, a fourth biscuit jammed in his mouth.

Outside. The threadbare impression of a street. One of those coal towns maybe, dying now that no one uses coal anymore. One of those grain towns, now that all the farms are bigass conglomerates. One of those dying towns, regardless, and the fading whitewash on the fading buildings, and the smoke in the sky. Strange that the morning should seem so golden-nostalgic, or maybe --

maybe that's just Erich's read on it. His own, unique impression of the world he inhabits.

Never mind. Hardly important right now. He sees it, the dense wood. The primordial forest threaded in mist. The smoke. Someone died, it's a funeral pyre, he knows this because it is all exactly as Melantha told it to him. And he's so excited now, his big pure good-hearted heart all but thumping out of his chest with it. He runs, following the smoke, whether or not Thomas is alert now, whether or not Thomas is following him: feet fleet on the sidewalk, arms swinging, mouth

still chewing that biscuit. It's so good.

Thomas

Thomas bats at the flying biscuits, because Thomas is in this dream again and he is not interested in eating dream food. For all he knows it is like fairy food or pomegranate seeds. But he does still smile faintly at the sight of Erich cramming biscuits into his mouth before he runs out the door.

He looks at the startled woman. The quiet of the kitchen in Erich's wake. And he will follow, but first...first one thing. Because each of these dreams seems to give him just one more thing.

"Hey," he says gently. "What's your name? Where are we?"

wake

The woman in the kitchen gives Thomas a brief, confused glance. She's starting after Erich and somehow it is only the startlement of his passage that allows her to access her memories.

"Amanda - A-amanda Jeffords."

And then: Erich and Thomas wake.