"Well now what the hell are we supposed to do!?" Fade-to-Black kicked at a tumbling newspaper in irritation. Then growled and snarled at it unintelligibly as she tried to get it back off her claws.
"You are overreacting. You get so worked up over nothing at all." Sweet-Luna's-Smile was a calm as her pack mate was frantic.
"Nothing!? Nothing!?" Fade hurled a beer bottle at wall and seemed quite satisfied with the bang it made as it exploded into tiny fragments. "They were shooting silver bullets. The COPS. Not special muckety-muck-high-faluting-I-got-my-melted- down-silver-crucifix-bullets-and-I'm-wearing-an-entire-wreath-of-garlic-and-wolfsbane- because-I-can't-keep-werewolves-and-vampires-straight hunters, but our standard parking ticket issuing, skateboarder hassling, donut eating cops!"
"You're still over reacting. They did afterall have two fomori with them."
"Great, so we've got Wyrm-tainted silver bullet spewing fomori cops!" Fade made to grab another bottle.
"Drink it first, then throw it." Fine Whine moved the bottle out of Fade's reach.
"I don't want a drink! I wanna kill something!"
"Maybe if you didn't insist on ranting and raving in Crinos, you wouldn't be so worked up. Wear something with a little less madness under the skin." Cheesy Poofs declined the bottle Fine Whine offered him. Fade and Lone Wolf Circles were the only ones in the gathering not in Homid. "'Sides, if you don't drink it, Fine will, and you know what an awful temper he has."
"You shut up or I'll show you awful temper…" Fine Whine glared at his pack mate and took back his beer.
"So, this is how you come up with a plan?" Azhar was eyeing the whole goings on quite suspiciously, particularly the beer. The expression on his face clearly said he was not entirely sure it wasn't going to leap out of the bottle and bite him.
"Yup. Beer and pretzels. And other snack foods. Twinkie?" The massive Bone Gnawer offered him a rather flattened but still wrapped one.
"And the beer and pretzels do what?" Azhar's expression had grown even more grave. Clearly the Twinkie was the mortal enemy of all Gaia loving creatures from the look he was giving the snack cake.
"Fine Whine drinks the beer and gets himself all worked up to really cut loose and kill something. Sweet Luna gets her whole self-rioteus Zen master thing going. Fade rants and raves and works herself into a good proper frothing state and then takes the pretzels and chucks them and reads the patterns and decides what we're going to do, you know like throwing bones or something to predict the future.."
Azhar looked amazed. "She can really read the future by throwing pretzels?"
"Ask him what he does during all this." Ghiyath poked Azhar in the ribs.
"Oh yes, so what do you do during all this?"
"I eat the Twinkie so if I gotta bite a fomor, it's a relief. Gets the Twinkie taste to go away!" Poofs whacked Azhar on the back and roared with laughter.
"He really had you going there." Ghiyath looked amused.
"So there is no pretzel tossing?" Azhar looked miffed.
"Nah. Though if she gets worked up enough she might throw some garbage cans. If she settles down, she'll eat some of them. The pretzels, I mean." He looked at the frothing Glass Walker. "Hey, Fade, wanna pretzel?"
"NO!!" Fade threw a garbage can lid at Poofs, which he noisily deflected.
"Aren't you at all concerned someone will hear all this noise and call the police?" Azhar looked towards the alley entrance nervously. They sat in an empty lot in between several gutted warehouses. They had started a fire in a steel drum from some of the trash piled in the lot.
"Nah. Who's going to hear and care? Nobody but the homeless and junkies here. They sure ain't calling the cops."
"No, no, I suppose not. But when are we going to figure out what to do?"
"About which problem?" Lone Wolf peered out of the cardboard box he had holed up in with Paradise. The pup was happily curled up between his forelegs.
"Well, any of them."
"I do not think that the police problem is something we will be much help with. We do not know anything about the area. It is best left to them."
"Damn skippy. We've been dealing with the police all by ourselves for a good long while. You guys have yourselves a furry little problem of your own to deal with, plus several big furry problems that are interested in it too." Poofs fell silent as he started in on the offensive Twinkie. Azhar watched in disgust.
"Yes. Very talkative ones. Usually they come and kill and maim and don't talk. He is very odd. He likes the sound of his own voice, I think." Lone Wolf rose, careful not to disturb the cub. It was difficult to speak properly as a wolf with his tail stuck in a box.
"Yeah, he was a little weird for a Spiral." Ghiyath commented, having now given up watching Fade savage a used tire.
"Not from around here, that's for sure." Fine Whine chipped in. Everyone seemed to have agreed huddling together around the fire was a much better idea than attracting Fade's attention right now. Hopefully she would spend her fury on inanimate objects.
"He is not from the west of the city either. We had never seen him until he attacked our caern." Lone Wolf sat down at Poofs' feet like a dog before his master. "Give me a pretzel."
The Bone Gnawer looked at him like he had two heads. "You aren't gonna eat a pretzel. You're a Red Talon."
"And I want a pretzel."
"Wolves shouldn't even be able to say 'pretzel'"
"I am very talented. Give me a pretzel for performing a very clever trick."
"Next you're going to want a beer"
"No, I want a pretzel." Poofs gave in and gave the Talon a pretzel. He proceeded to sit there and lick the salt off the thing.
"I'm not giving you another one if you're just gonna lick the salt off."
"I am. Too much salt is bad for her. These will go soft if I lick them enough and the pup can eat them. Because I am not giving her any of the other things you have to eat."
"Hey, guys, now that we've finished our little pretzel licking sidetrip, could we get back to the actual subject? Where the hell this guy came from." Ghiyath meanwhile had claimed a beer for himself.
"Well, you should know best, shouldn't you? He was after all chasing you when he attacked the Red Talons." Azhar was still strictly hands off the snack food.
"I don't know where he came from either. I'm minding my own business, puzzling over this prophesy an Uktena witch gave me, I find Paradise and what's left ofher mother and suddenly a few hours later, I have a horde of Spirals chasing me."
"He really seems to want her back." Lone Wolf nudged an unlicked pretzel towards Azhar's foot. The Silver Fang was looking at it like it was a cockroach.
"Yeah, I guess. I didn't hear all of the conversation."
"He said he really didn't want you, he was chasing something else and you just interfered." Azhar flicked the pretzel back at Lone Wolf.
"Yeah, with his plans to torture and murder other Garou. You didn't see what a mess that place was, she'd been pinned down with her own Klaive, the pup with a short dagger she had." Ghiyath pulled the dagger in question out and idly flipped it through his fingers before putting it away again.
"Are you sure it wasn't another Black Spiral Dancer?" Lone Wolf shoved the pretzel back at the Silver Fang, daring him to reject it this time.
"She didn't look like one…" Ghiyath started to say before Azhar cut him off.
"And neither does he. The ones with him, they looked, well like they should. We have them in Israel too, and they look very similar. Their skin is just a different color when they are human, and they wear different clothes. They look the same otherwise. He did not look right. He did not belong with them." Azhar eyed the pretzel and picked it up.
"Great, so we've got funny looking Black Spirals nobody's ever heard of chasing us because we might be carrying around a Spiral cub. Or we might not. Who can tell?"
"A Theurge could, by asking the spirits. Or summoning the spirit of the mother, if he knew her name." Fine Whine chimed in.
"I suppose. The spirits here are kind of strange, and I don't know the mother's name. Doesn't you pack have a Theurge?" Azhar seemed genuinely curious.
"Yeah. Haunts-the-Skyline is still off looking for Sweet-Luna though, hopefully picking up David too." Fine Whine seemed amused by the fact their pack mate had missed the entire fight.
"Yeah, maybe David would know how to tell!" Poofs perked up at the thought.
"If he doesn't punch your lights out first. He's a Child of Gaia, not a Spiral. It's not like he actually really knows that much. He's just got really gross parents." Fine Whine explained.
"Oh." Azhar contemplated his feet, all too familiar with the shame of having less than perfect parents.
"And David isn't all gross looking either." Fine Whine continued on, ignoring Azhar's sudden quiet.
"So the cub could be a Black Spiral pup." Lone Wolf looked into the box at the sleeping pup.
"But she's so cute!" Ghiyath protested.
"She's still a metis." Lone Wolf shook his head, correcting him.
"She's still cute." Ghiyath glared at Lone Wolf, daring him to argue further.
"Yeah, it's odd, but there's nothing obviously wrong with her. Metis Spirals are supposed to be really super deformed and insane but there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with her." Poofs ignored everyone else's moodiness.
"She is very quiet. Perhaps too quiet. It is as if she has no fight in her." Lone Wolf got up to check on the pup at his comment.
"She's got plenty of fight, she survived getting skewered on a big silver dagger." As Ghiyath pulled out the knife is question.
"Yeah, tough little thing." As Poofs examined it and then passed it on for other people to look at. "Maybe she just hasn't recovered yet."
"Well there must be something wrong with her and we just don't know what it is yet. Sometimes it takes awhile to show up." Azhar nodded as if this explained everything.
"And we're right back on square one. We've got a metis pup that might or might not be a Black Spiral pup and a big, mean, definite Black Spiral who wants her back." Ghiyath sighed.
"After he tried to kill her. Which is very odd. This Spiral gets odder and odder the more I think about him and what he said. I'm not sure he's evil. I'm not even sure he's really a Black Spiral." Azhar absentmindedly ate the pretzel Lone Wolf had spent so much time trying to get him to take.
"Well the ones with him sure were!" Ghiyath jumped up, unfortunately attracting the attention of Fade-to-Black.
"What are you lot talking about? You plotting trouble!?" Fade stormed over.
"Calm down. They were merely talking, Fade." Sweet Luna, Fade's perpetual shadow, appeared out of the gloom.
"Yes. Have a pretzel. They are very good." Azhar smiled sweetly.
"Ha!" Lone Wolf barked in amusement.
"Why are there a bunch of soggy pretzels on the ground?"
"You don't want to know. Just don't eat them. Do you know anything more about the Black Spiral that was doing the talking? The large black one." Azhar moved over to let the agitated Glass Walker sit. Sweet Luna settled on the cold ground, looking relieved that Fade was finally calming down.
"Him? Not a damn thing. It makes me so frustrated!"
"Fade, have a pretzel and calm down." Sweet Luna offered her a handful.
"I don't want to calm down. But I'll have a pretzel." There was a nigh audible sigh from everyone present. She had accepted the food offering. She'd at least be reasonable now.
"The other ones were yelling back and forth and I think I recognized the name. I think they're out of New York City. Kabula and F'Foeg something. Fine Whine, do you remember the story? The one the Grass Roots pack told us when they were visiting?"
"They told an awful lot of stories. I think I know the one you mean, the one with the battle with a Spiral called Hellroarer?"
"Yeah, I think Kabula and F'Foeg were names of some of the other Spirals."
"Spiral names are always so hard to remember. There was the Hellroarer, an albino, a tattooed one, a big muscle bound male, one with a big undershot jaw and I don't remember anything about the other one except that it drooled a lot."
"I don't suppose he told you his name?" Fade has settled into eating pretzels, her mood now as calm and carefree as it had been wild and surly a few minutes before.
"No, unfortunately." Azhar shook his head. "It didn't occur to me to ask. I think he would have told me if I asked. Stupid of me not to."
"I don't know. I didn't get a good look at him, but the Hellroarer was described as being a whole lot meaner and more disgusting, but that may have been Galliard embellishment. They were both dark furred though. I don't know why they'd be up from New York City though. Not like Rutland's a real exciting place."
"Yet suddenly we have cops packing silver." Poofs rubbed at the raw buller wound where he had taken a silver bullet.
"Yes, but they were also shooting at the Spirals too." Azhar scratched at an ear in a thoughtful motion.
"Hey, now that you got me thinking about someone other than the main guy, I think I recognized the fourth one." Ghiyath chimed in. "Not personally though. I heard a story from another Strider, Zoe Sense-of-Snow, who said she'd tangled with a batlike female Spiral while in the Finger Lakes area. The description pretty well matched the forth one, and Zoe said she hadn't killed it and couldn't find it again when she brought some Wendigo back to the area to root out the Spirals."
"And there are several dead Spirals back at the Sept of Luna's Den, and many more who got away. There were so many we thought we were being invaded. There are more than just the four we saw." Lone Wolf now sat taking pretzels from Fade's hand.
"Bigger than the pack the Grass Roots pack tangled with, the Hellroarer's pack?" Lone Wolf now had Fade's undivided attention.
"Yes, I would say fifteen or twenty of them." Lone Wolf nodded in an unwolflike gesture, to reinforce his statement.
Fade whistled. "Damn big pack."
"Like out of one of the old stories of the age of legends. These are not just common idiot Spirals either. The leader, if we are to believe him, said they were pursuing something far worse than themselves, something that used to be a Shadow Lord. What evil is loose that our enemies hunt it?"" Azhar seemed utterly amazed.
"Or is it just evil for them and good for us? He is a Spiral, he's probably lying." Sweet-Luna added, startling the rest of them as she had been so quiet as to become invisible.
"I am not entirely convinced he is a Black Spiral Dancer." Azhar scratched at an ear, very uncertainly, and stared at his feet.
"So who the hell else runs around with a bunch of Black Spiral Dancers at their beck and call?" Fade poked him in the nose to get his attention.
"I don't know. No normal Garou would. But… some tribes dance closer to the Wyrm than others, or so stories say." Azhar resisted the urge to go back to looking at his feet.
"Or slander." Lone Wolf nodded sagely.
"Well, yes. But even if I am wrong and he is a Black Spiral, perhaps they would know better who he is."
"So who you going to go ask? The Shadow Lords? The Uktena? Go track down the Grass Roots pack and see if this guy is the Hellroarer they fought and he's just got himself a big new pack?" Fade watched him closely, as did the rest of them.
"Um, I think we need to talk about that first. It's not as if I speak for Lone Wolf and Ghiyath." Azhar squirmed under the attention.
"You are a Silver Fang, and you led well enough in battle." Lone Wolf chipped in.
"That wasn't really leading." His gaze was creeping towards his feet again.
"Okay, herding people in the right direction then. I don't have any objection to following you, since you seem to have some mystical insight on the situation." Ghiyath nodded, agreeing with Lone Wolf.
"But… you're both more experienced…and… and… you're Philodox…and…" He was slowly turning crimson as he stared at his feet.
"And you are a Silver Fang. Don't you want to lead?" Lone Wolf cocked his head at him oddly, the gaze from his one good eye seeming to bore through Azhar's skull.
"No. No… I… I'm not fit to lead."
"But why?"
"I…"