You look like a bum. Cheap clothes because you keep ripping them, hair hacked short because otherwise it gets tangled when you change. Everything bent around the need to Change, everything distorted by the Wolf. A warped-mirror you. Like the real one is somewhere else, wearing chinos and a sweater at a college party right now instead of a dirty parka and a torn black fleece covered in stains.
But back to business: this place has a Tim Horton's and a Subway. The overwhelming urge for raw meat you experienced after your First Change has faded, along with the desire to rip small animals apart with your bare hands, but shapeshifting still leaves you ravenous. You sniff the air, looking for something you can get for ten bucks that won't taste too bad.
Though raised halfway off the Map, you still knew enough about regular human life to enjoy the occasional grounding experience: a dinner out, a YouTube tutorial. You order a turkey sub from Subway, because you read somewhere that it's the most popular, Sun Chips and a Coke. You eat standing up, still jittery from the fight, and for a few minutes you imagine that you blend in. Maybe you look like a runaway or a street kid, but you're one of them. And then a woman a few years older than you orders a caramel latte supreme and a sesame seed bagel with strawberry cream cheese from the Tim Hortons and you think—it's the clearest thought in the world, like an old-timey radio guy announcing it to your brain—that you could rip her head right off. She'd never have a chance, soft and clueless, don't even know what they're doing as they bumble through life, flinging their trash everywhere, shitting up the earth…
She walks back through the sliding doors, hops in her Honda pickup. The headlights burn your eyes. You're not one of them, never will be.
The rest of the turkey sub tastes like grass and sawdust. You eat what you can and ball up the trash—more poison for Gaia to process, like a drunk guy's liver working on overdrive—and step outside into the icy air. That's when you spot movement on the far side of the parking lot, where the semis are parked.
Black Tarn darts between two trucks, still in the form of a huge wolf. She freezes, bewildered, as if she's never seen a parking lot before, never seen the normal world of signs and maps. Then Scarper appears, dragging what at first glance looks like a huge black plastic trash bag with someone in it. Did they bag another monster? But then you recognize the screams and growls coming from the thing Scarper is dragging: it's Clay. A moment later, you realize that it's not a trash bag at all. It's Clay's flesh, shifting and sloughing off, leaving a trail of black filth between the semis.
Next
The Bane fight felt slowed down, as if it took hours, but now everything is happening too fast. Black Tarn is in the middle of the parking lot, near the diesel pumps, howling as if she can summon all the spirits of northern New York. Scarper, seven feet tall and shaggy—still in his near-human form—keeps trying to drag or carry Clay. And Clay is a nightmare, a tangle of shifting flesh, black as oil except for occasional white glimpses of bone or teeth. Where is his blood?
You scan the parking lot. Someone is going to see Black Tarn. In fact, a truck driver is slip-sliding through the snow around his cab now, and if he gets near her, you fear what she'll do. She already walked under a camera pointed at the pumps, and the other two will be there in a moment. A "huge dog" recorded on camera is bad enough, but what happens if someone sees Clay?
And what happened to Clay? Can you help him? Should you? As you watch, the now-familiar face of "Uncle" Clay bursts out of the black tangle, expression twisted in a rictus of agony. You finally see blood around his lips.
Maybe eating the horse was a bad idea.
The change hurts more because of the cold than because of your shifting flesh as your muscles bulge and your nails harden into claws. The trucker is a big guy in a black winter jacket, moving fast to get out of the cold. You intercept him between two cabs, with Black Tarn just around the corner.
"What the fuck are you—"
"There's gonna be a fight," you say, holding up both hands. "Go around! Go around!"
What you're saying doesn't really make sense, even if it's technically true, but tired, angry people don't react to stuff that makes sense. They react to urgent commands. The trucker stops.
"Just go around," you say, making a "circle around the truck" gesture with your monstrously huge hands as you keep moving forward into his personal space. He backs off, turns around. Maybe he thinks you're nuts. Maybe he thinks someone has a gun. Doesn't matter: he leaves. When you hurry back to Black Tarn, she's reverted to her homid form. Stark naked, heedless of the cold, she's standing in a daze as Scarper loads what's left of Clay into the back of the van.
"Keys!" Scarper shouts. You toss him the keys, then hop into the passenger seat while Black Tarn follows Clay into the back. The van peels out of the parking lot; you don't see the trucker.
"Did you do something about the camera?" Scarper asks.
"There was a trucker who almost—"
"You didn't?" the other galliard snaps as he blows through the red and turns left. "Fucking idiot, now I'm going to have to deal with that, too! Why do I have to deal with everything?".
"'Get off my back! Get off my back!'" Scarper yells, a crude impression of your voice. "I clean up after you, and now I'm cleaning up after Clay." His will to argue seems to go out halfway through the sentence. He's afraid for Clay. You watch him from the corner of your eye as he slowly deflates, returning to his scrawny homid form.
It's a frantic ten-minute drive to the auto recycling center where some corrugated fencing and old trailers mark the home of northern New York's greatest champions of Gaia. A blackened chunk of the pipeline hangs like a trophy over the main gate. The garage door opener in the van isn't working again, and Scarper starts screaming and ripping at the steering wheel until you hop out of the van and throw the door open manually. Scarper almost clips you as he guns the engine and the rusty yellow van lurches into the garage. He stumbles out of the driver's-side door, swearing about the snow around the garage door that you didn't shovel.
"I'm okay," is the first thing Clay says when you throw open the back of the van. "Don't worry. It's fine."
It's not fine, though the old werewolf has returned to his homid form—that's all four of you now. His face is streaked with black veins, and his teeth are bloody. A gray film covers his eyes.
"I told you not to eat," Black Tarn tells the old man.
"The First Share of the Kill for Greatest in Station," Clay whispers. Maybe that part of the Litany made sense once, a thousand years ago. Clay tries to spit at Black Tarn, but only vomits blood.
"What do we do?" Scarper whispers, on the verge of panic.
"Watch him," Black Tarn says. Her eyes are clear, her voice firm; her madness has passed and she's the pack theurge again, mistress of spirits and secrets. "You, cub, come with me."
She heads into the breezeway, stumbling over old phone books you're not allowed to throw out, and hastily dresses in cast-off clothes. You make sure she's wearing boots.
"Correlation is not causation," Black Tarn says. "Aha, you don't expect that sort of clear-headed analysis from a crazy old theurge, do you? Think of this ruined world as a spiderweb smeared in shit: touch any part of the web, and the whole thing vibrates, and also shit flies everywhere. Cause and effect are trickier to discover than you think, cub. But maybe we can learn something."
You follow her from the breezeway into the cluttered and filthy living area—old sofa, wood-paneled walls, the smell of wet animals—through Black Tarn's kitchen with its hanging dried herbs (sage, parsley, others that don't go in food and don't have names) and its overflowing trash can. You've been focused on that Bane and haven't cleaned all week, which means nothing has been cleaned. Black Tarn kicks some cardboard boxes out of the way and opens the cracked storm door that leads into the garden.
"Do not fucking leave!" Scarper shouts from the other room. "We need to clean up that mess in the woods!" But Black Tarn yanks you outside.
Even under a blanket of snow, the garden is beautiful: stark blue-white under the starlight, as the moon set an hour ago, shaded by three old and gnarled apple trees. Low stone walls wind around the garden, also snow-covered, a gentle and natural counterpoint to the hard, ugly lines of the recycling-center-turned-lair. The air here even feels warmer, and though you're covered in blood, you feel pure here.
A crystal-clear stalactite spills from the gnarled limb of an apple tree all the way to the ground. When you catch your ghastly reflection in it, you know enough to fear what Black Tarn plans.
"Come, little cub," she says, "we must learn more. We must enter the Umbra, the world of spirits. And there is no time to delay."
Next
The Umbra: the spirit-shadow cast by the Living Earth. Once a place for Garou to heal, seek enlightenment, and—if you believe Scarper—ambush enemies from the fourth dimension—now it is nearly inaccessible. You heard vaguely about the "Umbra," the spirit world, before your First Change, but even then, you struggled to understand what werewolves really were. The movies talked about flesh and Rage and madness, and yes, there's plenty of that, but also much more. Werewolves are the warrior-mystics of the Living Earth, heirs to a spirit tradition that stretches back before recorded history.
"The spirit of my pack has been asleep for a long time," Black Tarn says, her voice tired. "The spirits sleep because they are too weak to act. But we may be able to awaken them for a time. They alone can help Clay."
You start to contemplate how much that matters to you. Then Black Tarn squeezes your wrist hard enough to bruise. "Tell them who you are, cub," she says.
You are no true Garou yet, and have no deed name. You hope the spirits will react to either the first name on your New York state ID, or the names your normal friends called you back when you had normal friends, because you don't have anything else.
It's no "Black Tarn." Even Clay is really "Eyes-of-Clay," a deed name earned for brave deeds before your parents were born. But the old theurge waves you toward the apple tree and you say your name. Then again, louder. The air feels thin. Your vision sparkles.
"Good," Black Tarn says. She laughs, then howls. "They hear us, Morgan Teegarden! The spirit of this place hears us. Now follow, if you can." She stares at her reflection, then…she's gone. The icicle cracks and spills onto the ground, and for a moment you see a thousand Black Tarns reflected in their facets as she disappears into the Umbra.
But you remain where you are. Black Tarn told you only that the spirit world was now so toxic that only the greatest theurges could enter on their own. And you're an untried galliard. But if you are to help rebuild the packs and the tribes—to restore the Garou Nation—where else should you start except here, with the door to the Umbra half-open and a fellow werewolf in desperate need of help?
You stalk through the snow-covered garden back the way you came, unwilling to chase someone who almost certainly does not want to be found.
But you can't go back into the house without answers. Eyes-of-Clay awaits answers that can save him, and I bet you'd like answers, too, wouldn't you?
Who said that? Who thought that? Your head swims.
Don't you know who you are? Where you begin and end? Perhaps you don't have my clarity of will. At least not yet. Sitting on a crumbling brick wall is a little gray house cat. That's right, here I am. Well, here is a body. A bit scrawny. Sick, I fear—one last moment of glory before the end.
Next