thirty-three hours. [attn: errin, kai, liz!]

[Damon]

It's well past midnight when those two kids living on the beach -- those blond-haired, pale-eyed, white-skinned kids who showed up two weeks ago with their garish yellow truck and their absurd little house-on-wheels, who've spent those last two weeks or so riding the waves, lazing on the beach, eating homemade-by-the-kettle food from that little shack on the pier -- burst into a sudden flurry of excitement and activity. They're far enough down the beach that their voices don't carry often, but even so the boy can be heard whooping, shouting, laughing.

At one point, inexplicable: he takes that handsome little bird-bead he always wears around his neck on a leather strap

and he STOMPS ON IT.

The girl is quieter. She usually is, but recently they've heard her laughing as she came into shore, delighted with herself and the spindly strength in her limbs, her balance, her ability to ride a wave. She helps the boy: taking down that tarp he's stretched from the side of the tinyhouse like an awning, rolling it up and stashing it away, grabbing their sandals off the porch, packing it all away.

There's a third with them. She is aloof and she is dressed sharp as a blade. Her hair is black, at least in this light: sleek, tumbling waves of black that catches the light sometimes like a raven's wing. She seems a little skeptical of that tinyhouse.

Yet when everything's packed away and the boy and the girl jump into the cab of the black-racing-striped yellow truck, she goes with them. She gets into the back, and they trundle slowly down the beach, and as they pass the shack where they rented their boards and bought their food the boy rolls down the window and yells,

GRACIAS.
HASTA LA VISTA.

which may be two of the only spanish-esque phrases he knows. And may or may not be welcome notice of their departure at wtf'o'clock on a school night.

--

They drive. They drive in shifts, the three of them: one in the driver's seat, one keeping the driver company, one sleeping in the backseat or in that tinyhouse rolling behind them on its trailer. And behind the tinyhouse, an absurd sort of caboose to their equally absurd train: Ingrid's sleek little Nissan roadster, jet black, gorgeous, worth more than Erich's truck and his house and all his belongings put together. Times two.

Through the night they drive, north from that southernmost tip of the Baja peninsula where they found themselves. They reach the eastern shore at dawn, taking a ferry from La Paz, crossing the Gulf of California to the Mexican mainland. It is by far the slowest leg of the journey. Erich is beside himself with impatience on that ferry, wondering why it goes so slowly, wondering why it takes nearly eight hours to go across a hundred forty miles of ocean. He paces the bow. He paces the length of the ferry. He paces the stern, and he wanders the dining room; he doesn't sleep, though really, he probably should.

Because when they finally reach Los Mochis, it is past noon. They have twenty-two hours of their thirty-three-hour journey remaining. They follow the coastline for much of the afternoon, Erich behind the wheel, passing through a string of tiny, destitute villages without stopping. Around four in the afternoon their road turns north, and inland. Around six, they turn northeast, into the foothills of north-central Mexico,

cross the border at Agua Prieta, Sonora, and Douglas, Arizona two and a half hours later as night falls. It's a small highway that leads them into American soil, Arizona-80. Erich doesn't have a passport. An illegal emigrant and an illegal immigrant both, now, he crosses the border on the Otherside, meeting them by the roadside like a hitchhiker. He flashes his thumb at a few passing cars for larks. None of them stop. Several of them snap their locks shut just in case.

He sleeps for the next leg. He's been up all night, up all day; the exhaustion finally drags him under. He sleeps curled up in the backseat, wolf-shaped, warm and furry and secure in the presence of two friends he trusts implicitly, thoughtlessly.

Out of the flat limitless deserts, then. Into the sere mountains and the scrubland of New Mexico. There isn't much to see by night, though the view is awe-inspiring at times by day. They drive northeast, northeast, always northeast, find an interstate at last. It's midnight. They're on the I-25, on the southernmost tail of what becomes the Rockies, farther north.

Albuquerque, two and half hours later. They've been away from civilization so long the city seems huge, enormous, though it's not even a fraction the size of Los Angeles. Dawn finds them crossing into Colorado, finds Erich rising in the backseat like a zombie from the grave, shedding his fur and his fangs, rubbing his rumpled human face in his hands as he asks them where they are.

Four hours. That's the answer he gets, and the only one he needs. He's hungry, so he digs around in the noms-bag they have in the back, finds some beef jerky and some fast-food hamburger remnants Charlotte and Ingrid stopped for in the middle of the night. He chews, scooting aside while one or the other climbs into the backseat to shift and sleep, then clambering awkwardly forward to slump into the passenger's seat.

"Four hours," he repeats, quietly, happily, like it's the happy ending to his favorite story.

--

It is nine in the morning. They are a mile above sea level. The Dodge is hot under the hood, hot from running nonstop for a day and a half, hot from dragging a house and another car up the gradual ascent to this city. It parks under the gleaming monolith of the Cold Crescent building, ticking as it cools, and three Garou in various states of rumpledness (Ingrid: not. Charlotte: somewhat. Erich: very.) blink up at its heights. They go in, and there's all this business of security and verification because things are gettin real in Denver, yo, but eventually they're cleared, they're allowed access, they're escorted up.

And up.

And up.

And up. To the dormitory floor, the hostel floor, the temporary-holding-cell floor, whatever you might want to call it. Erich is looking every which way, head swinging left and right like one of those den-den daiko drums, until

all at once he sees her. Melantha. Persephone returned from the dark; a flower reborn into silver. She can see him take a big breath, heaving his shoulders like words are suddenly way beyond him. And then

he's grabbing her in his arms, swinging her around, putting her between himself and Charlotte and just hugging her, holding her, bowing his head to her shoulder

rather like a bird, twining necks with its beloved.

[errin]

It's a long trip, and one that's made immediately following another long trip. Erich and Charlotte have had days to rest and relax, to soak up sun and build up balance and muscle riding waves and playing in the ocean. Ingrid only just joined them when they started packing up their things, and after her own drive across the country to find them. And after a brief but brutal skirmish on the beach, she finds herself stowing away in the backseat of the truck for that first leg, sleek and lupus shaped, head tucked almost daintily atop her front paws. She does not sleep in the tinyhouse, but surprisingly prefers to keep quiet company with the other wolves.

She finds a space on the ferry to sleep, too. No one bothers her, at least no mortals do. She is small and slender and graceful like a dancer, and she is terrifying. Where the boy in her party feels like a thug, this beautiful, elegant, obviously rich Asian woman has the presence of an animal, and a predatory one at that. Only the boy comes near her, and she doesn't let him stay there long. When she can take no more of his ceaseless pacing, she tells him to Go away. Catching up on her sleep puts her in better spirits for the next leg of their journey, not that it shows much on the outside.

By the time they reach the Broadway building, Ingrid is not so sharply dressed as Erich might expect. He can count on one hand, leaving off thumb and pinky, the number of times he's seen the Shadow Lord Ragabash looking less than impeccable. That includes this time. When they pile out of the truck her hair, short and choppy around her heart-shaped face, is disheveled. Her clothing is wrinkled, her sleeveless shirt untucked from the hem of her high-waisted, navy blue shorts. Even looking rumpled Ingrid holds herself with dignity while she looks up and up at the great black monolith of glass and steel and concrete.

They make their way inside, and they clambor into the elevator where the panel slides back and examines them and chirps at them oh so cheerily. When the doors open onto the dormitory floor, Ingrid waits for Erich and Charlotte to step out first, but she doesn't follow them out. Instead she presses the 'door close' button, leaving friends and lovers alike to their reunion with a relative sense of privacy. She'll rejoin them after she's offered her services and skills to the Warder.

[mnemosyne]

Charlotte does not like to drive.

The first half-dozen times Erich tried to get her behind the wheel, the theurge refused to touch the keys, her arms crossed firmly over her narrow little torso, looking tense. Not the shell-shocked tension that turns her stiff as a corpse and saucer-eyed some small prey animal, but the other tension, sullen and sulky, some adolescent protest against the world. The pedals were too far away. She couldn't reach. She didn't like the engine or the noise it made. She didn't -

- he convinced her, eventually. Took some time to find the right tack. Asked her what she would do if he was hurt and she told him: she'd heal him. Asked her what she would do if he was tainted and she said: she'd cleanse him, or summon a spirit that would. Asked her what she would do if he was poisoned or - well, Charlotte-wolf had an answer for every scenario until Erich asked her what she would do if he was dead. They were in one of those cheap hotels off the side of an interstate, somewhere in one of those long states that remain nameless to this day in her head - just long expanses of mostly flat though sometimes rolling land covered over with corn, bisected by long, straight stretches of asphalt. The sort where Charlotte never disturbed the sheets and refused to bring her pillow in from the car and slept curled up on her bed, a small white wolf, noise tucked beneath her tail. She charged him, then, the way Erich Storm's Teeth charges his enemies. With a sort of abandon, a thoughtless commitment to -

--

So she learned.

Plowed her way into a half-dozen cornfields and took her turn thereafter, very occasionally, on the road. Places where the traffic was light and the lines were straight, in broad daylight because, well. Charlotte all too often has many other things on her mind.

But still: Charlotte does not like to drive.

Hates the truck, all metal monster, the way it cages them in. When she's a passenger she can tip her forehead against the windowglass and watch the countryside roll by, all dreamy, half here, half on the other side, her breath fogging the window and distorting her view, giving everything a foggy halo. When she's driving, she has to sit up close, both hands on the wheel, and remember eight things too many at the same time. And roads: roads as black and yellow and far too straight. They make you follow them when maybe you'd rather go some other direction. Full of laws and directions and signs and instructions and demands, roads, and on the otherside, Erich, they are bright humming blue corridors of Weaver energy, and even the most minor ones are crawling with spiders, and sometimes you can feel the layers of earth beneath the asphalt, shivering with potential energy, aching shrug them off. Shrug them all off.

--

In the cab of the truck, Charlotte's quiet around Ingrid. Alarmed and slightly-in-awe of the Shadow Lord Ragabash, with her sleek clothing and that animal presence that drives away all human beings. Charlotte feels neither like a thug nor a predator: she is skin-and-bones, stark as a starving bird, all angles and edges with strangers - strange humans and strange wolves, all borderlands. All boundaries. All places-where-things-meet, and only wolves can see the glory of her blood, the way it limns her with that halo of Luna's promise: Falcon's wayward daughter.

As a passenger she sits with her seatbelt fastened and her heels on the seat and her knobby knees sharply bent and her farmer's tan (because all that time she spent learning to surf, she did it wearing an oversized t-shirt over her bathing suit, shrouded in it, and her tan covers her arms up to her elbows only, and her legs from mid-thigh down. Odd bits of her shoulders and all of her face and neck) and her arms wrapped around her calves and her nose against the glass. Quiet with Ingrid (maybe she says, "Uhm, that's a nice sword." Or "Uhm. That's a tinycar." Or "Uhm. Erich really missed you. He talks about you all the time.") and chatty with Erich. Chatty chatty chatty, watching the bird's trail on the otherside or discoursing at great length on subjects he cannot really follow, these flights of ideas that come and go. The way trees remember slow and how sap moves and why the desert through which they are driving feels so much more alive than Iowa (cornlandia!) and and and -

Erich paces and paces and paces on the ferry but Charlotte loves it, finds a place as close to the prow as she can and sits where she can smell the ocean and watch it coming toward them in dark, swimming waves, her face turned into the wind. Is delighted when they make landfall and on and on.

--

1999 Broadway has Charlotte looking up. Up and up and up. She's doubtful; she does not understand how a Sept can be contained somehow in one of those things but she can feel the potentiality up there, someplace above, someplace high, someplace where winged things and soar and stormclouds reign and lightning splits the night, coruscant.

Spends all that time in security rigid and wide-eyed but the delay, this last obstacle is just enough to spark the faint corona of her rage so that when she gives them her deedname she says it not with her usual half-swallowed shame over it but a sort of growlingly adolescent energy that makes it sound - well, defiant, like a mantle or a promise rather than an anchor.

And, and, and - upstairs, our Charlotte hangs back, like she doesn't want to intrude on the reunion between Erich and Melantha - except, this is no intrusion at all, and after Erich Storm's Teeth swings the kinswoman around Charlotte grabs her from behind and aslant, wraps spindly arms around the Fury's strong, familiar form, buries her face in Melantha's hair and just -

- breathes.

[kai]

The bird flies faster than the wind through the penumbra, darting around storms, soaring over pits of darkness, diving beneath predators. It is small and bright-eyed and it no longer feels quite like a normal pigeon. Cooing has been turned to adoration. Hunger has been transformed into longing. It is filled with dreams of a goddess and dreams of another winged creature. It is filled with love for a blue-eyed Shadow Lord and a pink-haired Silver Fang, and when it finds them, oh

when it finds them, it circles and circles and lands on their shoulders, nuzzles their skins, fluttering happily and cooing, cooing.

It sees: the whooping boy smashing the bead that the quiet girl made. It sees: its twin fly overhead, circling them until they are ready to go, then darting eastward. Towards the mountains, towards tomorrow's sunrise, towards Melantha. The pigeon is perched on Charlotte's shoulder at that point, watching, feeling curious and delighted. It does not understand anything: it is a bird. But it knows that it aches for reunion, and now that reunion is to be had, it feels a sort of desperation.

--

In Denver, Melantha sleeps on a narrow bed that thankfully is not fashioned after those in Victorian orphanages. She sleeps high above the city, which makes her feel strange indeed after so long spent in the wild. She dreams of birds in flight and dancing wolves. She has no idea they've been surfing. What. She has no idea they are coming with a third.

--

The second pigeon leads them as best it can; they have to interpret how to follow it when it is used to flying, not attending to the roads of humans. Charlotte has to talk to it a few times, tell it to slow down, and the second pigeon does not understand this madness. The first pigeon tucks its head under its wing to sleep whenever Erich or Charlotte sleeps, resting in one of the rafters of the tiny house. A couple of times it peers curiously at Ingrid, but she is not familiar to it.

It goes with Erich when he has to cross the border on the Otherside. He sees it there, cooing and trilling at him, fluttering its wings in hello. It perches on his shoulder and awkwardly tries to groom his hair with its beak as he walks. If he shifts to another form, it sits atop his head, which is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing anyone could see, if anyone were around to see it.

Maybe a Nuwisha does, and takes a mental snapshot of the image to share with their friends. You will not be-LIEVE...

--

They get some looks at Cold Crescent. Curious ones, interested ones, steady long looks as well, but not wariness. The Warder passed them. The elevator drags them upward, swift as flight, and now there is one spirit-bird on Charlotte's hand and one perched on top of the building, considering its next move or maybe just watching over the place, watching over all of them. It considers staying: this is a good roof. Pigeons don't need much more than a decent roof, really.

The other one, though, needs far more. It needs to stay near the two young garou in that elevator, though three now, even if the third is one it doesn't know yet.

There is always some amount of activity on this floor. There's a couple of cubs and there's kin and there's some others and there's people who have other places to stay but stay here most of the time, too. And there's a girl who stopped lifting her head from a book and looking expectantly at the elevator doors whenever they dinged some time ago, because her neck was getting sore.

She's in the lounge, at the apex of the building's triangle and the first wide-open room that one sees when one steps out of the elevator bays. She cannot see the spirit-bird on Charlotte's finger any more than she could see the one that flew towards the windows and then swooped up to land on the roof. She can, at the moment, only see the book in front of her, the one she started reading in D.C. and couldn't finish: the signal and the noise.

Her dark hair is longer, the way that hair is only noticably longer when you haven't seen someone for a few months. It has not been trimmed and the ends are split and it is not glossy and curled but held up in a plain ponytail and she hasn't even showered yet today. She's in pajama pants and a tank top and sitting in the sunlight coming through the windows, her legs tucked up and crossed on one of the lounge couches. She has lost weight, not frighteningly but enough to show that the softness she showed in her physicality in D.C. was as much an illusion as her painted lips, her silky hair. There is firm athleticism and a survivor's stamina in those arms, in that body.

Outside of the elevators, Erich is swinging his head around, looking til he finds her, but all he would need to do is close his eyes and inhale. Even after a short time, this entire floor is suffused with the scent and feel of someone of her breeding, someone of her inexplicable purity. He could find her in the dark; they all could. She doesn't see him, or Charlotte, or Ingrid, until a few moments go by. Then she senses the rage, the danger of a nearby predator rippling through the air, which is not uncommon here but is amplified by Ingrid's presence, and she looks up.

She used to wear makeup that made her eyes look rounder, look wider, look rather childish. She doesn't now, and the almond-sharp points at the corners of her eyes are more evident, the ancient wisdom and strength shining through, unhidden now. She looks more herself than either of them have ever seen her, except perhaps in one moment months ago, when she came back from pouring purified water from a vial over her head, praying for cleansing. That was in the dark, though. Now she's in sunlight, and she's widening those young-and-not eyes and her mouth is opening and her book is dropping to the floor.

--

The pigeon darts everywhere inside the building, freaking out. It is freaking out you guys it's freaking out she's here and they're here and they're all together and it just can't anymore it has lost its tiny mind with joy.

--

The truth is, Melantha hardly notices Ingrid. Of course she sees her, she's aware of her, but with the way the woman presses the Door Close button immediately and departs, there is nothing to suggest to Melantha that she even came here with her two friends in the first place.

Her arms and her body feel taut and strong and wild when she collides with Erich, yes, Erich first because Erich came at her like a madman and picked her up, squeezed her til her ribs ached, swinging her around. But when her feet touch cool flooring again she's between the two wolves and she's shaking like a leaf despite all that strength. Melantha is also crying, and it's uncertain if either of them have ever seen her cry except that one night out in the woods where she was a screaming, murderous, sobbing bacchante and Charlotte wasn't there but Charlotte was there in that vial of holy, holiest water, and Charlotte was the reason Melantha was out there to begin with, so if Melantha thinks that Charlotte has seen her weep, she may be right.

But now she is overcome, tears streaming openly down her face, her eyes red-rimmed with them, her body trembling as she is squeezed between boy and girl, storm and falcon. She turns her back to Erich, and this seems natural as anything else: he has long arms and a large body and when Melantha turns to Charlotte, it is like he becomes a shield for both of them. Melantha kisses Charlotte, adoring and tearful, kissing her brow and her temple and her cheek and her mouth and then hugs her, hugs her tight and puts her head down between the Theurge's neck and shoulder. She knows this is okay, even though her teeth are near Charlotte's throat, because if not her, no one.

They bow their heads around her and they breathe her in and Melantha shakes, and cries, and grabs Erich's arm and hugs it between her body and Charlotte's body and doesn't move for a very, very long time.

--

Pigeon finds a perch inside of 1999 Broadway. It looks down on the three of them. It is content. Finally.