Ornature

It is six-thirty, nearly seven p.m., and clouds are streaming in from the southwest. Charlotte secures her seatbelt because Erich tells her to, and not before. She does not like the seatbelt; if feels like being bound. The sunlight cuts through them in blinding patches, setting aflame the windshields of all the westward bound commuters. The interstates, the expressways, the beltways, the feeder roads are all jammed. The evening commute is underway, and so too is the ritual weekend retreat from the city. Well to the north, two and three hours away, cars with Virginia and Maryland and DC plates will be stacked to a standstill on I-70 in what are otherwise the wilds of rural western Maryland.

It takes them two, two and a half hours to go thirty miles, and Charlotte is tense the whole time, her nose pressed against the window of the Mustang, her reflection ghostly against the stacked taillights of half-a-million commuters.

They have no place to go, and there is no map to follow. Erich takes I-66 all the way to I-81. They are in the mountains now; the interstate parallels long ridges and valleys of Western Virginia, shoulders the Allegheny front to the west.

Somewhere south of Strasbourg, Erich pulls off the interstate, finds a road plunging west, right into that rising ridge and valley wall, and heads out of the Shenandoah Valley into the highlands.

The sun has set by now, and that brief taste of summer is long gone. A wintry front pushes across the Appalachian plateau, and there will be a dusting of snow on the ridgetops tonight. Choked as DC and its many crawling feeder-roads were with fleeing urbanites, these roads are virtually deserted, crooked and crawling, climbing the spines of the mountains like switchbacks, illuminated only by the shine of the moon and the flash of the Mustang's headlights over the marching trunks of the dark trees.

The forests around them are still winter-bare, though the shocking violet of blooming redbuds dot the understory. The road just climbs and climbs and climbs. There are no more signs, and no signs of civilization. Near midnight, Erich pulls into the first open gas station they've seen in the past hour. The pumps are old-fashioned, a sign on the door says CASH ONLY. Inside, two old men sit playing cards, listening to the drone of a country station. One of them has a lump of chewing tobacco tucked heavily beneath his front lip and spits foul-looking fluid into a used Mountain Dew bottles. They are not discussing the latest scandal out of Washington, which broke perfectly that Friday afternoon. In time for the writers at SNL to change the cold open to cover it, soon enough that everyone heard it before fleeing the city, so that they could talk about it all weekend long and be ready for fresh gossip come Monday morning.

These guys, though. Spring hunting season's on their mind. It opens Monday. There's some grumbling about the trout-stocking schedule for local streams, too.

They eye Erich and Charlotte; assume that the two are brother and sister. Blond and blue-eyed and familiar as they are.

"Y'all goin' fishin'?" says the one with the mouthful of chewing tobacco, grinning a stained smile while Erich pays for gas and a bag of beef jerky. "Ain't stocked none of the lakes 'round here 'cept Spirit Lake. Cain't even get in ta Holly River."

Later, Erich will understand the question. Charlotte emerges from the small quick-mart not with the milk and eggs she meant to buy, but with the shops entire stock of NIGHTCRAWLERS, which are prominently advertised in a handwritten sign on the marquee below the price of gas.

It will be another hour, another hour and a half before they find a place that seems safe to pull off, set the parking break, and sleep. Snow is falling by now, fat, gray flakes that melt on the warm hood, but begin to accumulate on the rapidly cooling trunk.

"Where do you think she is, now?" Charlotte asks, watching the snow spiral downwards from a dark gray night sky. The question is rhetorical, but there is a plaintive shine to her voice. Before she can sleep, Charlotte has to set all the worms free first. Dash out into the woods, her teeth chattering, and dig little shallow holes for them with her toes and hands, upending the plastic contains into the cold earth, again and again and again until she has freed every last worm from its plastic prison. When she returns, she is shivering visible, her fingers bright red with cold, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright. She shifts gratefully into lupus, a small wolf the color of untouched snow glazed by moonlight, curls up in the back of the car, and sleeps.

Erich, of course, doesn't discourage the liberation of the earthworms. He personally thinks it's a little silly, but then so is sharing your birthday with one of your two bestest best friends in the whole world. He doesn't blame her for being silly. He imagines, despite being young and wild, Charlotte has had very little time to be silly.

So she frees the earthworms. And he helps, digging with his paws in his wolf-form, grinning up at her as she dumps them container by little container into the ground. He wonders if they'll survive this weather. He decides they will, because they must have come up out of this weather. When they're done they go back to the car, which is very small with two wolves and all their belongings inside. It's not worth it to juggle things from the back to the front to make more room, not when they'll be driving again come morning, and so

they both curl up in lupus. He is quite a bit larger than she is, with shaggy, thick, dappled grey-and-white fur that speaks of Fenrir breeding, but nothing that would really even ping a Silver Fang's radar. They sleep curled in opposite directions, but with their sides pressed together for security and warmth. It has been a very long time since Erich has slept with a packmate like this, and he is grateful for it.

In the morning the windows are fogged over, and there's ice on the windshield. Erich paws the doorhandle open, bounds out, and hikes a leg against the nearest tree trunk. When he comes back they dig around in that bag of snacks and find something that passes as food. A little later it's time to go again. She doesn't know how to drive, he's discovered. He promises he'll let her try when they hit the Great Plains. Has she ever seen the Great Plains? They're pretty ... flat, he says. Especially in Nebraska,

but then he changes the subject and starts telling her how they're actually pretty close to where he and Melantha went camping. A lot of rabbits in these woods, he says, sounding hungry. And so they pull over again, and wade into the woods, and snap into their wolf-forms.

It's the first time they hunt as a pack. It seems sweet and right, somehow, that they hunt food instead of wyrm. She harries and he intercepts, he chases and she cuts off, a snap of teeth, the kill. They feed together, gorging themselves hungrily on a small mammal that, in truth, barely qualifies as a midday snack for them. Afterward he's licking blood off his muzzle as he trots back to the car.

By midafternoon they're on the western slope of the Appalachians. The scenery is beautiful, so they stay off the interstates, veer close to the mountains. They ask each other where they think their friend is now, and they make up stories of the glamourous spy-movie escape Melantha must have made. They try not to think of those lurid, awful photos, the lurid, awful headlines. Blood on the tooth of the hunter, Erich thinks to himself. That's something he can understand.

Eventually they find the interstate again. It's the I-64, passing through Charleston. A different one from the one Charlotte must have seen at some point over her nineteen years. Erich asks her if she had a debutante ball, and he's only half-joking. They're starving again by then, though, so they find a little diner just west of town and pull over.

The waitress looks at him strangely when he makes his order: meat, meat, more meat. And ice cream. Charlotte's may or may not be any better. Tired from the drive, Erich stretches his legs out onto the opposite bench in their booth, leans back, and looks out the window at his Mustang.

"I'm thinking about getting a trailer or something," he reveals. "Like one of those classic Airstreams, you know? Let's stop by a library tomorrow or something and google it. Or maybe we can even find like a used RV salesman and look at a couple."

A lot of rabbits in these woods. Wild little things, tucked up in their burrows. Opossoms, shrews and voles, groundhogs and squirrels, muskrats, maybe too, pushing up their muddy-little mounds at the edge of forest pools. The pair catch the scent of a black bear that rumbled through the little valley two days before them. The spoor is old but still sharp with musk in the cold, bright morning air. Deer and badgers and field mice and squirrels and hawks, high up in the clear blue sky, circling on thermals. Once, the shadow of a bald eagle sweeps across the dappled valley floor as they harry out their prey. Vultures will come for what they leave behind; and coyote, too.

In another of the long north-south valleys on the western edge of the Appalachian front: wild turkeys, just visible in the verge, nesting in the thick tangle of mountain laurel at the forest's edge. The laurels are just coming into leaf, not yet into bud and bloom. They think about pulling off into the graveled shoulder and hunting again, but this road is a full two lanes, paved, curving off into the long morning shadows that edge the sweep of the valley. The field in almost full view of the road, the risk of exposure is far too high. So it's rumbling bellies and what remains of the dry food from the snack bag. Beef jerky for Erich, Reese's Puffs for Charlotte as the ridges of the Allegheny front descend into the deeply folded hills of the central Appalachian plateau.

Here the hills are so steep and narrow that - mid-fucking-summer - the valley floor might get direct sunlight from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Each one seems defined by a narrow creek, running silver through the tangle of opportunistic trees and scrub, and an equally narrow road, blacktopped but otherwise undefined. Here and there, make-shift suspension bridges cross the creek to the bottom land on the other side, where a cluster of rusting trailers blooming with plywood-and-siding additions sit, right in the floodplain. Everywhere green is beginning to intrude. Locals call these places hollers. Outsiders have no idea what the fuck the locals mean, but each one just seems too mean a place to be called anything so fanciful as a hollow.

The hills seem primeval, but the forests in which they hunt in the highlands, and through which they pass as they descend the western slopes are no more than a hundred or a hundred fifty years old. The pockets of old-growth Eastern hardwood forest are so few and far between - no more than a few hundred acres across the entirety of the Eastern seaboard. Even the most remote, serene shoulders of the most remote, serene Appalachian mountains were clear-cut in the 19th century. This is what comes, after.

Timberwolves used to roam here. And mountain lions, and great herds of elk. There were woodland bison lumbering through the folded valleys, mink and otters in the shallows of the swift-running rivers. All gone: left behind only as names: Panther Ridge. Elk River. Mink Shoals. Big Otter. Half-a-dozen towns named Buffalo.

No, Charlotte has never been to the Great Plains. Erich will let her drive when they get to flat land, where crashing means merely mowing down a line of winter wheat. Charlotte lifts both her blond eyebrows, flashing him a doubtful look. Unlike virtually every other teenager in history, she is perfectly okay with other people driving her around. A-okay. Hell, Erich has to show her how to answer her iPhone when it rings mid-afternoon. Then she holds it three or four inches away from her ear and sort of shouts into it, like an old woman who has to be careful about feedback from her hearing aid.

And she notices but does not remark upon the cleft in the conversation - the jump-shift from the plains of Nebraska to the night Erich and Melantha camped in the Appalachian mountains, somewhere nearby. There's more speculation, then. Where she might be, and what she might be doing. Right now. How strange the world is, that it goes on when our eyes aren't on it. All of these things happening in the lives of people we love, that we can never see.

--

And no, Charlotte never had a debutante ball. She gets that stiff, wary posture when he (half-joking) asks her about it, too. Her shoulders are forward, her head canted and still - posture just at the edge of songbird / raptor. Whatever she is, in that moment, she is hollow-boned and fragile.

It wasn't - , she starts to tell him, frown edging itself way between her pale brows. Then stops, and says, No. She hates balls, remember? They're stiff and stupid, full of false faces. People smiling when they want to show teeth. People showing teeth when they mean to smile, until it is impossible to know what is a threat and what an invitation. Cordelia and Theodosia will have one, but they're kin anyway. Charlotte, she's a wolf. Wolves aren't debutantes, Erich.

--

Maybe it's nothing. Maybe she was on edge from hunger, then. She's more pleasant after they've eaten, and gods she can eat, especially for such a skinny little thing.

Charleston just strings itself along, and endless parade of dumpy little weirdly-named town after dumpy-little weirdly-named town, which have grown together, merged into a chemical conglomerate. They're in a town called Nitro, which used to be so poisoned that a chemical scent enveloped you as you drove across the Kanawha River. That's mostly gone, but maybe Erich can still sense the irritation of it against his skin. The diner is local, serves down-home food and Coke products in waxed paper cups. The walls are plastered in kitchy, hillbilly themed merchandise. Charlotte eats biscuits and cornbread and home fries, but refuses foods-masquerading-as-other-foods, like chicken-fried-steak. Is it steak or chicken? Why is there that WHITE STUFF on it. For dessert, she has peanut butter pie, which has enough sugar in it to keep her going for hours. The hosts bring out something called the HOMEWRECKER for Erich. Which is a giant hamburger topped with a giant rasher of bacon and slices of giant hotdog and a giant slab of ham.

So Erich gets the homewrecker, minus the bun, the ketchup, the mustard, the cheese, the lettuce, and the onions, followed by ice cream.

Then leans back, says he's thinking about a trailer where they would have more room.

Charlotte, of course, has no idea what a classic airstream is. Maybe Erich shows her a picture of one on his phone, or hers. Like a magpie, she admires it, so sleek and gleaming, so neatly compact, a half-human den-on-wheels.

When they're leaving the diner Charlotte remembers something with an Oh! I forgot! and digs something out of the mysterious layers of her little messenger bag: an Amex card, in Eric (NO ATCH) 's name. Charles told her to give it to him. For emergencies. She forgot last night, she says with a little shrug. Erich is left to do with it as he pleases.

The next fifty or sixty miles are too populated, too developed for them to just pull off the road and find someplace to park the car and sleep in lupus, so they stop at twilight in some overbuilt suburb full of McMansions and fast-food places and rent a cheap motel room. The parking lot full of tractor trailers, the rooms full of all the oddments of the American highways. Sometimes whole families renting a single room, not by the day but by the week. Their doors open, children scampering up and down the concrete tarmac, laughing and barefoot despite the cold and the broken glass glittering everywhere. Laundry drying on the scrubby boxwoods that serve as landscaping, a prostitute leaning against one of the wood columns supporting the second story walkway, eyeing the trucks as they turn into the parking lot, the flare of their headlights brilliant against the scratched and fogged over windows.

Charlotte is delighted only by the MAGIC FINGERS on the doublebeds in the room. The mattress is lumpy and gross and she fusses, doesn't want to bring in her pillow to touch the mattress and in the end she sleeps in the middle of the sheets in lupus, nose tucked under her tail, the curtains drawn tightly across the windows. Maybe they should've gone to the Greenbrier, instead.

Somewhere at the heart of that ugly suburban landscape is a charming little town bisected by train tracks. The next day, they find the Hurricane town library and Erich shows Charlotte what 'google' is and that 'google' lives on her phone, too, when she has bars or Wifi. When there are invisible waves spreading google stuff through the air. Charlotte gets a shivering, spidery feeling when she thinks about the invisible waves and comes to the conclusion that perhaps her mother - who swallows her paranoia about modern technology beneath an icy sea of propriety, but ruthlessly excises as much of it as she can from the lives of her children and family - isn't crazy after all. It makes her think about Melantha, who told Charlotte that crazy isn't necessarily crazy. It just is.

So Charlotte asks Erich where he thinks Melantha is now and they make up someplace lovely and wild and they look for an RV place on their way out of town.

This time they go south rather than west. Down into the southern Appalachians, where the roads disappear again among the thick hills and they can 'camp' the next night in the Mustang on some deserted road, without much fear of discovery.

They're deep in the coalfields, now. The few towns they pass through are old and brick and gutted from population loss. By afternoon, they cross the Big Sandy River into Kentucky. The hills and landscape don't really change. These are still the coalfields. That night, they camp again. Some deserted road up a holler, which dead-ends at an abandoned clapboard home, the windows gone, weeds grown up all around it. This time dinner is a campfire and hot dogs roasted on sticks over it. Erich picked up marshmallows at the little grocery, just so Charlotte could try them burnt crispy and oozing. She's never had Smores, but the store didn't have graham crackers so marshmallows will do.

The cold creeps in with the darkness, so they sleep in the car, the same way they did the first night. This time, though, the night is not uninterrupted. The holler is too narrow to track the progress of the moon across more than a sliver of the sky, but it is sometime after midnight, in the hollow part of the night when the nightthings have slunk back to their burrows, before the earliest of early birds have started to sing.

Erich wakes first, something in the underbrush pulling him to consciousness. The sweep of a flashlight in the woods outside the Mustang, the low, tidal rhythm of hushed conversation. Maybe he wakes Charlotte with a nip or a low warning growl, and the first thing on his mind is discovery, the Veil, ready to snapshift back to humanskin, but Charlotte wakes, huffs a breath in, thumps her tail quietly against him and snaps a quiet, one-word warning.
Wyrm.

RV "shopping" takes them the entire morning. They're all so awesome. Erich is all but running from one to the next, climbing into the sleeping lofts of the smaller, van-chassis ones; pushing out the sides and unrolling the sunshades on the big, bus-chassis ones. They marvel over the satellite dishes, the TVs, the showers and the kitchenettes and the big, comfortable, infinitely adjustable captain's chairs. They spend so long there that none of the salesmen have even the faintest illusion of their ever meaning to buy anything, though no one tells them to get lost, either. No one, frankly, dares.

They do leave, eventually. It's nearly one in the afternoon then, and as they're driving away from that magical lot full of magical transforming house-cars, Erich bats his sunshade down against the glare and says,

Well, that was fun, but totally unaffordable.

So it's back to the drawing board on that idea. And the truth is over the next several days he'll mull over cranky, falling-apart old RVs; he'll look at ancient ratty conversion vans; he'll look at the iconic VW campers; he'll consider some sort of large tent; he'll even consider buying some sort of hitch-trailer and sawing windows into the sides before he'll finally stumble onto a website full of the most awesome tiny houses-on-wheels ever.

But that's in the future. Tonight, they're still sleeping the way they did that first night: curled up in the back of the Mustang, noses tucked into thick tails, like sled dogs in the snow. Or well. That's how they started. By now Erich has entirely stretched out -- is sprawling on his side crosswise in the back, his head wedged against the side of one of his dufflebags. Something, some sweep of a flashlight or crack of a footstep just out-of-the-norm enough to ping on his subconscious, pulls him out of sleep. He lifts his head, eyes gleaming in the darkness, ears up and swiveling. The warning growl doesn't make it out of his throat; it's a rumble in his ribcage where he's pressed against his packmate. He's turning onto all fours, preparing to shift, when her tail thumps him and she warns him back:

Wyrm.

His ears fold back. This time the growl is low but audible, raising the hackles on his back. He wiggles past her, all the way to the very cramped back of the Mustang, his paws scratching at the hull several clumsy times before two claws manage to catch on the mandatory safety-release handle on the inside. This more than anything tells Charlotte just how long he's been alone and how used to it he's grown: he doesn't so much as whuff to see if she's ready before he simply yanks the catch, rises smoothly and suddenly to all fours, pushes the hatch open on his back and

leaps out of it, hitting the ground one shape and several sizes larger, snarling.

The muffled conversation is more immediate and more distinct as soon as the the hatch sweeps open. The night noises are few at this hour; and more than that, whatever animals might have been discovered in the darkness have deserted this particular stretch of woods by now. Even the insects are silent. There's just the call of a Chuck Will's Widow haunting the air and the snap of uncareful feet in the brush.

Which stops as soon as the hatch pops open, and the wolf emerges, growing into something monstrous and prehistoric and full of inherent, immediate threat. Erich has the impression of three or four men as indistinct shapes in the darkness. He catches their scents - the sourness of their body odor, stale clothes, acrid tobacco spit out in a long stream, cheap bear and cheaper meat, gristle and blood. The dull, oiled immediacy of a well-cared for weapon.

(Behind him, too: the scuff of movement. Charlotte worming about through the car, finding the strap of her messenger bag, nosing her way through the path he made, a dull thump-thump as she drags her little bag-o-tricks behind her. It's dedicated, but she doesn't sleep with it tattooed into her skin.)

If these were ordinary rednecks, out in the woods beneath a waxing moon, with booze and guns, hoping to roust a couple of strangers, lovebirds maybe, from the den of their car parked way up this hollowed, tainted only tangentially by the deep thrust of the mines snaking underneath the slattern mountains, by the acid drainage from the mines, the seep of taint into their drinking water, their fast foods, their cheap tobacco, they would turn, right now.

Turn and break and run. They'd have stories in the morning about a frickin' cougar in the woods up above Scarey Creek, a lion escaped from some hippie fuckin' sanctuary. Like that damned weirdo in Steubenville who kept a menagarie, then killed hisself and loosed all these exotic predators on the woods around him.

They are not, though. Taint grows like cancer cells, metasticizes, crowds out whatever remained that was human, that remembered anything but a sort of virulent hunger to spread their sickness to the world.

The biggest one steps forward, into the clearing, just to the left of the ivy-colored ruins of an outbuilding. He is huge, fat, greasy jeans sliding down a hair beer-belly, smiling a sudden, viscious kind of smile, which is missing at least half of its teeth. Shotgun in one hand.

Can of beer in the other.

And a third hand, empty, growing flaccid and useless out of the middle of his chest.

There's a weird growth on his neck, too, bulging like a goiter gone untreated. Another step or two, he cracks his head, side to side, loosening the joints of his spine and that - bulge - reveals itself as a second, vestigal head. The second mouth a dark slash, full of needle teeth and a fat, lolling tongue he does not bother to try to hide.

Erich-wolf's eyes are gleaming, adjusting to the darkness. He senses the others spreading out, a bit behind the big one, a sort of semi-circle. One of them curses, shit, low. Taken aback. Hisses to the others that they oughta git back, go git - and there's a sort of murmuring hesitation to the rest of the group as the snarl, the size, the immediacy of what is before them registers fully.

But Tiny's already ambling forward another step, grinning that crazy grin. "The fuck do we have here." With both mouths.

The fuck do we have here indeed. Erich-wolf's teeth are bared, and they are huge and curving as daggers. His growl explodes into a short, coughing bark, a sort of retort to that taunt. He keeps his back to the car, his tail waving low and tense, side to side, side to side. His ears flick. Swivel. Hunt for sounds in the night, for numbers, for positions, for morale amongst the enemy. Which ones were swaggering. Which ones were flagging.

His eyes stay on the big one, though -- the clear Alpha of this twisted little pack. Those eyes are pale and clear in the night, almost colorless, glaring. And the truth is, he's never hunted with Charlotte before. Not just the two of them. He doesn't have her measure, doesn't know her capabilities; doesn't know how much he'll have to protect her, or what she'll throw into the mix. He wants to glance over his shoulder at the much smaller wolf, but

he doesn't dare take his eyes from Tiny.

A low chuff will have to do. A communication: We stay close to car. Together. Let them come to us. Not be surrounded.

The movement in the trees stops cold as the growl explodes into that coughing bark. The sudden eruption of sound freezes the group, disrupts that knit-and-honed familiarity of movement. The two stragglers of the group remain in the woods, behind the treeline. Uneasy and unsure. The rest pause in their spreading half-circle. Three more figures visible now at the edge of the wood. One more with a shotgun to match Tiny's - the most normal looking of the group. Another has a hunched back and yellowing skin and a machete in hand. The third carries a compound bow. The left side of his face is normal. The right side has been melted into a slagpile of concentric rings of ruined flesh, a topographical map made of human skin.

The dull wuff of breath from Charlotte-wolf's lungs as she hits the soft, trampled grass beside him. Then a thud. The fucking bag pulled off the tailgate behind her, hitting the ground.

Tiny opens both mouths. "Now that," he says, all posturing swagger, the sort that can put some backbone into his followers. Remind them that they are on their own ground. That they outnumber these wolves. That one of the damned wolves is dragging around its luggage. " - is fuckin' comical."

His voice rises, seems now to come more from the vestigial head than from his own mouth. They are moving out of time, the mouths. "Y'see that Cooter?" says the one mouth. Something in the reaction of the followers suggests that Cooter is one of the men in the woods, not yet committed to the fight. The bowman glances at machete, then cuts a look over his right shoulder, something moving in his ruined eye socket as does so. "Ain't that some comical shit right there!"

They are too far away, it is too dark, and they are too lupine to lip-read human language. But the other mouth, the real mouth, is now saying, again and again and again a single word. Run. Impossible to tell whether it is a plea or a prayer.

He chuffs instructions to Charlotte-wolf as she hits the ground beside him. Can sense her changing, too. Her tail hits his shank, just once, acknowledgment of her awareness of his instructions. They don't have the luxury of more.

Her shadow lengthens beside him. She goes upright - two legged, warformed. The posturing exchange buys her time to reach Crinos.

"The bitch brought its purse!" Crows Tiny's second mouth, spraying bloody spittle into the air, laughing in a high-pitched, hyena bray that pulls an uneasy chorus of laughter from the group behind him.

Erich-wolf's instincts are right. Tiny is the key; if he took his eyes off the big, twisted, greasy bastard for a split second Tiny'd raise that shotgun and spray them with buckshot. Or charge, all slavering swagger, drawing the rest after him like an inexorable tide. And Tiny is the only one so twisted, or foolish, or badass to think that wolves are his prey. That's the purpose of this display, this back and forth, this show of bravado. To strengthen the spines of the things behind him. To pull them forward, to call out their arrogance, their hunger, their bloodlust.

"And a fuckin' slingshot." Both mouths are moving in concert again. The resonance of Tiny's voice deepens with the re-union. His real mouth twists in a pulled smirk, but no matter how non-threatening he finds the slingshot, he's hitching the shotgun up to his side. Dropping the can of beer to free up a hand. Now that, that pisses him off. "I'm real fuckin' scared."

Erich-wolf cannot see what his packmate is doing beside him. Thank god Tiny is the vocal sort. There is a seized, hazy moment as Tiny is lifting the shotgun and the bowman is coming back to his bow and the pistol-guy looks uncertainly sideways at Tiny, back into the woods. The machete guy opens his mouth so wide he could swallow a yearling lamb whole. Flicks a forked tongue.

The faintest ping, as the Crinos launches something small into the air. It goes flying over Tiny's head. Lands, harmlessly, a foot to two behind him, close to the loose center of the group.

"Badasses my - " Tiny is scoffing now, as he levels his shotgun and blasts both barrels. The bowman has already loosed his first arrow at the Crinos, and is reaching for a second when -

that harmless little missle nestled in the grass in the midst of the group explodes. And the world goes red.

The twisted men aren't the only ones caught by surprise when Charlotte's harmless little missile Hiroshimas the fuck out. Erich-wolf -- whose forepaws were lifting from the ground, whose hindpaws were launching him into a leap right in the face of that shotgun blast to rip that fucker's face off, both of them --

lets out an undignified, startled yelp as the world quite literally blows up in his face. A livid fireball belches out from that previously miniscule pebble. It singes the tips of his fur, stings his eyes, blows him back against the open trunk of the Mustang. It does much worse than that to the fomori: the guy with the machete is on fire, shrieking, rolling on the ground, while the bowman's arrow goes wide because he

is also on the ground, flat on his face, his hands over his head like maybe once upon a time he was in some war, he was shellshocked, he came home and then there was a recession and there were no jobs and things just spiraled down until

he ended

here.

They all have sob stories, don't they? Even Tiny, with his real mouth silently sobbing runrunrun while that second, twisted mouth leers and jeers and eggs them all on. They all have sob stories, and maybe there are times when Erich cares and Erich feels bad, but that time is not now. There is no room for pity in battle, not for an Ahroun, to whom pity is akin to mercy, and therefore weakness. He is not weak. No.

He hits the Mustang with his side. Then he hits the ground on all fours, and the moment his paws touch he's wheeling about. That blast from Tiny's shotgun caught him in the chest, but his fur is thick and his hide is thick and the truth is he barely felt it in the wake of that explosion. There's no room for cataloging damage in battle, either. That comes later. Now: now, he wheels, he leaps, he's snarling horribly when he lands square on Tiny's chest, knocks the big man backwards. He's clearly forgotten his own suggestion: stay together, let them come. He's forgotten and he's fells his prey and he's savaging him now, snarling, roaring, biting and grabbing and shaking until things tear and snap loose.

Machete man has stopped moving. He's a charred mess. The other guy with the shotgun wavers, unsure, wanting to run, but then the bowman whips an arrow from his quiver, nocks it, pulls it back in the same motion. He's standing so close to Erich-wolf that when he looses the arrow

the impact knocks even that enormous direwolf into a sideways stumble. The shaft buries itself almost to the feathers. Erich-wolf roars in pain and outrage, and encouraged, the other shotgun-toting fellow raises his barrels and: BLAM, this one knocks Erich-wolf entirely off his feet, sideways.

Tiny's not quite dead. He's mangled, he's spurting blood and coughing it up, but he somehow sits up and that second mouth is still talking: "GIT EM, GIT EM, GIT EM." His friend pumps his shotgun, stomping after Erich-wolf who's limping back to his feet, and the bowman is nocking another arrow when --

Charlotte-wolf, forgotten by the others; Charlotte-wolf, who does have savagery in her after all, does have wildness and rage in her after all -- lunges, swipes, claws the slagpile half of his face off. The bowman shrieks. He whips around and he looses the arrow and it punches through her left lung, but she's whipping out with her other claws. There goes his bow, smashed to smithereens. There goes his quiver. There goes the other half of his face. He drops.

The shotgun BLAMs again. Shot pings off asphalt, trees. Erich-wolf rolls on instinct, avoids the worst of the blast. He comes up snarling. Tiny is wavering, one hand pressed to the ground, one hand flopping uselessly, one hand lifting the wavering muzzle of his shotgun, going for another shot. The Ahroun corners hard, his claws grappling for purchase. When he leaps, he leaves a spatter of blood behind him, but his aim is true, and the second gunman is still pumping the action when Erich-wolf

basically

eats his head.

Then there's just Tiny. An epilogue of sorts. Who is still screaming, cursing, calling them all manner of horrible names. The shotgun tries to point. Erich-wolf, advancing on heavy paws, bats it aside with a short, impatient growl. Tiny tries to punch him -- last ditch efforts now, points for not giving up -- but Erich intercepts that, too. With his teeth. Tiny howls: Erich-wolf bites down, digs his paws in for purchase, those heavy muscles in his neck and shoulders bunch, he tears, it's brutal and it's hard to watch and half of Tiny's shoulder comes off with the arm. There's blood everywhere. The Ahroun drops the mangled limb and plants a paw on Tiny's chest, pushing him down.

The one mouth -- not the cursing, spitting one but the other one -- whispers something. Might be thank you. Might be please stop. Erich doesn't see it: he tears Tiny's throat out.

Quiet then. Erich-wolf's tongue lapping at his bloody muzzle, his eyes gleaming in the dark. They need to clean up, but he's not very good at this, and there are no convenient dumpsters to dump into, no convenient lakes to fill. He sniffs in Charlotte-wolf's direction.

"Fire-talen?"

Charlotte-wolf is still standing tall, resplendent in Crinos - white furred, silver limned when the fickle waxing moon deigns to shine down upon them. The glory of her fine breeding in perfect display. There's still an arrow punched through her chest, crimson spatter her lovely white fur, scrap of viscera clinging to her claws which she shakes off with the comic intensity of a cat trying to rid itself of an offending piece of scotch tape. Her chest rattles with every breath she takes, and a tinge of bloodied froth dampens her muzzle from the collapsed lung, but she does not seem to notice or feel her wounds. Not yet. Not for a while, yet.

Fire tooth talen.

- she clarifies, with a great big, rather endearing shake of her wedge-shaped head, which is much more specifically Charlotte than it is glory-of-a-Silver-Fang-in-Crinos-under-the-moon. She'll tell him more about that later, when she's human-shaped and can chatter. That it is something the Red Talons make, and she had to knock out a tooth to make it. It grew back but it still hurt and it's hard to pull out your own teeth, and firespirits are fickle, edgy things that just want to BURN STUFF RIGHT NOW which includes theurges if theurges aren't quick and sharp and wary and ready with distractions. She's trying to make something else too, with vines, that'll explode and entangle their enemies, but that's harder. She doesn't know exactly what sort of vines work best and anyway, things that are rooted are weird and alien and very hard to fathom. They don't like moving about, they can't necessarily come when you call, so she has to seek them out rather than call them to her. Most woods cannot move like Dunsinane.

Now, though - Charlotte-wolf lumbers over the distance between them, circles Erich-wolf, inspecting his wounds. The fletching of the arrow buried deep in his side. There are other arrows, spilled and broken from the quiver, scattered over the blood-stained and trampled ground. Hooked and cruelly barbed, she sees, to that they will do as much damage, more damage, coming out than going in.

The truth is, Erich-wolf looks wrecked. Hard to tell how much of that blood is his and how much belongs to his enemies, but he has taken the brunt of two shotgun blasts and been skewered by a barbed arrow.

Her ears flick with consideration; then she makes a decision, closing her eyes and opening herself to her ancestors. Somehow, Charlotte-wolf is different when she re-opens her pale blue eyes. More settled, older, wiser, more finely drawn. It is Erich's first introduction to Coeur d'Hiver, and it is almost wholly silent. She assesses him, directs him to shift, to lupus, then shoves the arrow through his flank until the arrowhead has punched through the other side and she can break it off. Then she pulls the shaft back through the wound, and - finally - heals him. They will have to do same with the arrow in her chest; Erich if he can handle it. If not, Charlotte (or, to be fair, the ancestor riding her skin tonight - who moves with a delicacy, a prim and primal grace Charlotte herself has never shown) needs must do it herself.

--

Then there's work to be done. Charlotte (or Winter's Heart, who still seems to be a lingering presence behind Charlotte's pale eyes, and in her warformed frame) decides that they cannot risk a rite of cleansing these strange woods. The twisted men came out of them, and who knows how sound will echo over the compressed hills and valleys? They'll pile the corpses in the middle of the clearing instead, and she will try to summon a spirit capable of cleansing the blight. There are instruments she uses for the ritual - a silver bowl filled with clear water from sealed glass jar. A scattering of cress and a woven willow-wand. A cool stone the color of steel, retrieved from the bottom of a clear-flowing spring.

They cannot bury these tainted corpses in the ground as they are, so she takes her time with the ritual and Erich-wolf is left to stand a long, silent guard as a few stars wheel through the narrow strip of sky visible from the bottomland wherein they've camped. At some point, she indicates that the ritual is finished, and they can begin dismembering the corpses. They should bury them; they can't drive around with the bits in Erich's car and their other options are remarkably limited. Erich studies the crumbling ruin of the clapboard house, and realizes that the basement may will be no more than packed dirt, doubling as a root cellar.

They're break down the bodies into manageable pieces, then start digging, and they are no more than half-way through this grim work when the sky begins to lighten with false dawn, and the morning birds begin to sing, familiar, each to each.

While they work, there's rustling in the underbrush. Somewhere down the holler rather than up the hill, down the narrow, graveled track they drove up to find this camping spot. Strangers - no, wolves, four-legged and lean, spreading out in a wary half-circle some twenty-five feet away. Fur bristling, eyes gleaming in the dark.

Maybe Erich curses under his breath. Maybe he is still shifted, and his animal-mind does not have room for human curses. Either way, he knows immediately and instinctually that the odds here are much, much worse for them now. He counts four wolves, and there may be another hanging back. Both he and Charlotte-wolf are wounded, a fair amount of their rage exhausted by the earlier fight.

The lead wolf is bristling up into its motley-furred dire form while the others paw forward on the gravel and things are about to go from Okay, to very, very bad, when the smallest of the wolves barks out something to its Alpha. Something like, They're clean, boss.

A moment later, Charlotte-wolfe confirms the same for Erich. They're clean. Untainted by the wyrm.

This is their introduction to the Garou of the small Sept of Deep Hole. They meet Double Wide, the Alpha, a huge African-American man with ashy skin and a deep scar splitting his skull, and Ridge Runner, and Sweet Cheeks, who looks like a slightly trashier Daisy Duke, and Hern's Call. Double Wide recognizes Tiny, grunts pleasure and surprise over his demise. Speculates with his packmates about what brought the fomor so far out of the circle of protection of their mine, kicks the corpse. They were alerted to the presence of strange Gaians by the summoned spirit who cleansed them, Sweet Cheeks tells Erich.

They have a truck that they'll bring back, and a tarp to snap over the bodies. A place to dispose of them. Charlotte and Erich are invited back to their Caern, to spend a few days, healing. The Caern is a small one, Fianna and Bone Gnawer, mostly, with a lone and lonely Chld of Gaia, both led and Warded by Double Wide. Just two packs, who alternate working as guardians and going out on quests and missions and the like.

The Caern is tucked deep into a holler not unlike this one; at the center of the holler, a deep hole with a clear spring serves as the entrance to the Caern's heart. There is neither cell service nor internet availbility deep in the holler, but there's a ranger's cabin near the entrance with WIFI, and here Erich can hang out, surf the web, discover TINY HOUSES.

They have never seen a Silver Fang before; they marvel over Charlotte, her breeding, her blood. After a few days - enough for them both to heal - Double Wide asks if they want to join the raid on the mine where the fomor were holed up. He's understanding if they want to move on, but they could really use the help. Maybe there's a kin who can give Erich a hand building his tiny house. Or buying one. If they stay for the raid, then they're asked to stay for the moot - then sent on their way.

Erich is, of course, beside himself with glee when he first discovers the tiny houses. So much so that he's yelling at Charlotte to come look, look, look this this is amazing -- startles the off-duty ranger eating his lunch there, who's kin to Ridge Runner. And Charlotte comes, and looks, and they spend about three hours just clicking through pictures and plans and planning and discussing and deciding, finally, to do it. They're totally gonna build themselves a tiny house. The one with the extra "bedroom" downstairs, so Charlotte has a room to herself.

And they do end up staying for the raid, and the moot after. There's something like a barter hinted in Double-Wide's suggestion: maybe a kin can help him with his tiny house. But in the end they don't take Double-Wide up on it, because Erich's Mustang couldn't tow a tiny house right now if he had one. And also because it seems a little wrong, greedy somehow, for them to stay and help out just to get something out of it.

So -- they raid because they want to. And because it's the right thing to do. And the raid is a bloody, joyous thing, and the moot after is a drunken, trashy, informal, holy thing that ends with everyone howling through the woods half-crazed on awakened moonshine, harrying small animals and Englings and banes out, out, out of the bawn.

The morning after, they sleep until half past twelve. When Erich wakes up, Charlotte is cinching up some fresh-made talens into her bag and loading them into the car. Erich gets up and moves the few things they took into Caern for their convalescence back to the car, too, and while some of the locals help them out, no one asks them to stay. Neither Erich nor Charlotte talk about staying on longer, either, let alone settling down here. It's unspoken, and it's understood: they're passing through. They had a good time here, lent their strong claws. And now it's time to leave.

From there, they change tack slightly. Erich found some big full-sized pickups for sale on craigslist and various internet classifieds, and they have nothing better to do anyway so they drive hundreds of miles to look at them. The pair follow the slant of the Appalachians: to Knoxville, to Nashville, to Memphis where they change course and follow the lazy sprawl of the Mississippi up to St. Louis.

There, with great sorrow and reluctance, Erich sells his Mustang. He gets a pretty good price for it -- about five grand -- and turns around and buys a Dodge Ram truck. He gets over the loss of his Mustang pretty quick after that, and they camp in the outskirts of St. Louis for two weeks while he sands off the rust and repairs the drive shaft and repaints the truck in yellow and then puts down racing stripes. Because obviously every car Erich owns must have racing stripes on it, and then buys a trailer to serve as the eventual foundation of his tiny house.

They leave St. Louis, northbound. They go to Chicago, which seems enormous, sky-high, after weeks of tiny town and small cities. It's too expensive to stay long there, though, and so they move onward,

bearing west now, leaving those gleaming towers behind. Outside Chicago, civilization seems to plummet exponentially away. There's nothing in front of them but sundazzled, boundless Plains -- a land stirring finally out of a long, long winter now, hazy with heat. This stretch of the country is astonishing in its monotony. Even the highways seem too bored to meander; they carve straight across along roughly cardinal directions. It means their path, unless they deliberately drive across hundreds of miles of two-lane state highways, will take them through Nebraska.

Erich grows quiet as they cross the Mississippi again; drive through Iowa and its rolling farmlands. He's tense and uncharacteristically taciturn as they cross the Missouri River into Nebraska. Omaha sits on a hill overlooking the river and the pastoral hills of Iowa; the rest of Nebraska, however, seems to be nothing but corn.

[dammit! "look AT this this is amazing." also: "Because obviously every car Erich owns must have racing stripes on it. Later on, he buys a trailer to serve as the eventual foundation of his tiny house."

GRAMMUR = GUD.]

They're eating in a café right off the interstate, the city of Omaha spreading out to the east. It's mid-morning and the day and the great expanse of the midwest stretches out ahead of them, the cornfields that do not wave quite the way the prairie grasses did, when the pioneers sailed over them, seeing the ocean in their rippling movement in the wind.

Home of the Throwed Rolls, the place calls itself. And indeed - when someone calls for another basket of their hot, freshly baked white yeast rolls, the servers regularly throw them across the bakery, drawing a rousing round of applause from the tourists, and little more than yawns from the truckers who come in for the catfish rather than the entertainment.

Erich's quiet. Charlotte's alert, not trusting the waitress' aim when she lobs out a new batch of bread. She's putting a dent in the rolls all by herself, because Erich's ordered the hunter's breakfast special - which consists of all meat, at least once he is finished with the special instructions. Then she realizes how unfair it was that she insisted that they stop here. Erich can't eat the yeast rolls. He just has to dodge them when they come sailing through the diner.

"Hey," she says, pale eyes darting from the (potentially dangerous) waitress to her packmate, still and distant across the booth. " - uhm," then an awkward little pause, the twist of her shoulders beneath her Red Riding hood / wolf-girl t-shirt. " - are we getting close to your hometown?" She doesn't really have a sense of the distances these states cover, the endless, punishing expanse of the prairie.

Hey draws Erich's eyes, keen and very clear, very blue: a solar flare of attention bursting onto her. A quick frown stitches his brow.

"Not really. I mean, closer than when we were in D.C. But it's like five hundred miles northwest of here." He pauses. "Harrison, Nebraska. Last I heard population was about 220, and half of them were related to me somehow."

Another throwed roll goes sailing overhead. Erich doesn't even dodge. Grain does not frighten him! He saws at the meat on his plate -- it hardly even matters what sort, it's meat -- and then chews quietly for a while.

"I was thinking, though, we could just go north from here. Instead of keeping on going west. Go through Sioux Falls and Rapid City... check out Yellowstone. Maybe run with some real wolves, you know?" He summons up a smile. He's a terrible liar; terrible even when he's not outright lying. Anyone could see the wolves of Yellowstone aren't why Erich's thinking about a detour around the state of Nebraska.

Erich's lie has Charlotte twisting her mouth up in a strange little expression that looks like she's puzzling her way through a crossword puzzle in a foreign language. The deep blue intensity of Erich's stare, the brilliance behind them like the heart of some hot-burning flame.

"Okay," returns Charlotte, with the puzzled sort of equanimity that she greets most of Erich's discussions about cities and routes and highways and the human world around them. It is all so confusing to her, and she stares out the windows of first the Mustang, then the truck, watching the world depress itself and reform itself in half-a zillion shapes, sometimes seeing not highways and semis and commuters, but buzzing lines of brilliant blue light, networked a thousand times over again, crawling with every possible iteration of spider to keep it all going, keep the juice going. "I guess? But - "

Another damn roll; Charlotte eviscerates them the way a wolf does its prey, seeking the choicest and heartiest and most blood-and-protein rich organs. In this case: the sweet center of the rolls they keep throwing her way.

" - well, I thought maybe you might wanna see your sister? On our way through? I know you can't go in 'cos you'd get her in trouble, but," a neat, swimming little shrug here, her features still, her eyes big, focused but not entirely focused on Erich.

"They don't know me. I could go? And like," here she leans back, her gaze dropping from his face to the ruins of three or four rolls on her place. Charlotte also ordered a strawberry milkshake and corned beef hash, though she hasn't touched the latter and intends (it seems) to subsist on yeast rolls and milkshakes for the remainder of the day. " - say I didn't know where I was and I was in the umbra and I have to meet my packmate and could I have a ride someplace? I don't know how I'd get it so they'd let her drive me, but I bet they're let her if I asked."

Instantly that alert, wary stare again. A few seconds go by -- but he doesn't turn down the idea out of hand. Just says,

(moving his head ever-so-slightly to the right to avoid a poorly aimed throwed roll)

"I don't know. Ellie's got a pretty good head on her shoulders. Don't know how you'd convince her to drive a strange Garou all the way out to someplace where she could meet me. Plus I wouldn't want her to get in trouble."

"Maybe - " a twist of her mouth, here. The creature's pale blue eyes flicker up to catch the leading edge of Erich's alert stare. Charlotte has a mouthful of roll here. She's chewing around it, as if she'd never had to sit through (hours upon hours) of etiquette lessons in her life. To be fair, though, they did not cover how to catch your bread from the air in a dignified fashion. And she wouldn't've listened if they had.

She chews; she swallows. The movement is visible in her temples and the hollows of her cheeks, neck and jaw working slowly until her mouth seams together with thought. Her voice is quiet, now, her answering wariness easing into something else. There's something about the way she ventures the thought that suggests she is not entirely comfortable with anything that feels like contradiction. So her voice is soft, insinuating. " - maybe she oughta have a say in it. In whether she might be willing to get in trouble to see you.

"I mean, you could call her and ask. If she wanted to.

"Plus, I mean. They'd make sure I wasn't all gross, don't you think? But then I'd bet they'd be happy to help me. Offer hospitality and get me on my way. Back to my pack," Here she lifts her chin across the table in his direction, her expression mildly abashed. Charlotte's always been surrounded by Silver Fangs. Innured to the glory of their mad blood, the intoxicating effect of it on other tribes. "I mean, did you have any of my kind there? I could say I dreamed about her or something. Maybe I even will before I get there so it wouldn't be a lie or anything."

Erich's gone back to sawing on his meat. His eyes flick up again when Charlotte says maybe she oughta have a say. Despite himself, Erich smirks a little there: he sees what she did there. Charlotte, who used to be such a little mouse herself.

That was before the boys on the street, though. And before the night under the lanterns, under the tree. And before the fight on the mountain and the days at the Gnawer-Fianna Sept, and... certainly before today.

"You don't want to lie," Erich retorts. "My uncle, who's the head of my family, is a Half Moon. He'll string you up for lying, guest or no guest, Silver Fang or not." A pause. "Can you actually do that? Dream of something just 'cause you want to?"

Oh, she's still half-a-mouse, Charlotte. Look how she peeks up at Erich over the remains of her many slain throwed-rolls. Over the giant silver basin of corned beef hash that she still hasn't much touched. But she's remembered that she's a mouth with teeth.

She flashes them at him across the booth now. A quicksilver little grin of something-like-victory curling her mouth and disappearing in almost the next heartbeat as she sobers, listening. His uncle, the half-moon:

Charlotte nods, several quick little dips of her head. The pink dye is growing out a bit further, her crown is entirely pale, platinum blond now. The sort that shines silver in moonlight. The color usually only found on infants or in boxes.

"Okay. I won't lie then." As if her going had now been settled. "I could just say the truth without all of it. Or I could let Winter's Heart talk to them instead of me. Or maybe if I asked her she'd help me dream about your sister. Does she look like you?"

The portion sizes here, really, are rather obscene. Well; to be honest, they've been pretty obscene since they left the Chesapeake. But this is still a bit beyond the pale. They don't even eat off plates here. It's giant aluminum basins, the sort of thing you could wash your face in. Or possibly even your laundry.

Erich's is filled with meat. There's a huge slab of steak in there, so big and unrefined that it doesn't even look like steak; it just looks like MEAT. There are also sausages and meatballs and a couple chicken drumsticks. Oh, and bacon. Ridiculous amounts of bacon. It's quite possible that even Erich, big strapping lad that he is, will need to get a to-go container for this.

"Ellie? Um. I guess. I mean she's blonde and blue-eyed." Erich puts down his knife -- actually he kinda just jabs it into the steak -- and then pulls his little crappy phone out. It's an android, but it has a screen the size of a large postage stamp. If Charlotte squints, she can see the picture Erich pulls up: a girl that looks some three or four years younger than Charlotte herself, with that sort of flaxen blonde hair and wholesome all-american prettiness that one associates with Midwestern girls.

"That was like two years ago," he says. "She's about your age." And he gnaws on a drumstick, thinking. "I guess I could text her and see if she wants to."

Who ever, ever thinks about what his sister looks like? She's a fact of life; the other body in the house, partner and rival and deeply irritating burr under your skin. The person who finishes off your favorite cereal without telling mom so she can buy more, swipes your action figures or toy guns, drags you into fights, grows up, changes without you ever noticing it because she was right there, under your nose, the whole entire time.

There's no reason to think about what she looks like or who she is or why or how you love her, until you're gone and she's out of reach and -

Charlotte braces her forearms on the counter, leans forward, craning her neck to study the picture. Her eyes flick up at Erich mid-study, then back to the two-dimensional girl on the screen. The picture helps, but it isn't exactly what she needs if she's going to somehow get this strange girl that is Erich's sister embedded deeply enough into her subconcious that she might populate one of those strange, waking dreams that come to anyone with more than half-a-foot in this world's Otherworlds.

And Charlotte is more than half-a-foot across that barrier, at almost all times.

Like now: a distant cloudiness in her eyes as she leans back and Erich tells her that the picture is two-years-old. That Ellie's about her age. Maybe he'll text her.

"You oughtta. Text her." The phraseology sounds strange on her lips, even now, but Charlotte has learned to text. Charles has been inundated with pictures of every strange truck, every odd monument, ever crumpled wildflower or glowing neon sign they've passed that captured her interest. "Right now? and if she says no we can go around the whole state and everything."

A little shrug.

"But if she says yes, you can like, tell me something else. The first time you saw her, ever in your whole life, or the last. And I'll think and think and think about her."

Then maybe Charlotte really will dream that dream.

Erich has no doubt that Charles is getting inundated. It must be Charles, because Erich's fairly sure that other than her brother the only other contact Charlotte has right now is Erich himself. And there's no reason for her to send Erich all those random pictures she's been snapping this whole time, first through the steeply raked, sporty windows of the Mustang, and now through the big sturdy square windshield of the Ram. She doesn't really take pictures of herself, though. Erich has to press her to sometimes, or take the iPhone from her and turn it around to snap one of her. Erich, who knows what it's like to be half a continent away from his blood-kin.

"Right now?" he hedges, uncomfortable. He takes the phone back, weighs it in his palm, ponders. "I guess," he decides finally, and takes a deep breath, and

taps, quickly, with both thumbs. He's a lot better at this than Charlotte is. A few seconds later he sets the phone down a small distance away from his hand and tries to pretend he isn't waiting with bated breath.

"The first time I saw Ellie," he says, breaking into a grin, "I was like... four. And she was just this tiny squidgy wrinkled pink thing all wrapped and tucked up. They let me hold her for a while but I was so bored, she didn't do anything interesting at all. Later on she pooped and it was awful.

"And the last time I saw her," quieter now, "it was the night I came back from my Rite. And they'd already run me out of the Caern. I was just going home to... I don't know. I don't know if I was trying to run home, or if I was just trying to get my stuff. Anyway by the time I got there all my stuff was out on the curb. And my dad stood on the lawn and wouldn't let me in the house.

"Ellie was up in her bedroom, which used to be my bedroom before I moved out to be Fostered. I could see her in the window. She put her little hand on the glass and I never figured out if she was waving goodbye or saying don't go or what."

Erich's brow is furrowed now. He exhales shortly, reaches for his soda and takes a gulp. "Anyway. She's wicked smart. A couple months later she somehow tracked me down and mailed me a cell phone. How does a kid even get that done? I think she must've piggybacked me onto her school friend's mom's plan or something? I don't know. I've changed phones a couple times since, but it's still the line she set up for me."

His phone dings. Erich's eyes snap over immediately. He grabs the phone up, turns it over, reads the little message. Then he taps something back.

"She says she's down for it," he says. "She wants to know when you wanna pull it off."