Wolves and Men

He arrived a short time later, the familiar sounds of the City and the people and animals living in it were a comfort to him. He had been away for a little while and it was good to be back surrounded by the deep polished black obsidian of his room. He reached around and pulled the soft, warm deer furs that covered his bed, around his tired body. It was good to be home.

“So? What happened?!”

The voice startled him and he threw off the furs and looking around wildly. Katherine and Charles stood just outside his doorway with Aceso in werewolf form standing just behind them.

He shouldn’t have been startled, he could feel all three of them standing there, and he must have just not been paying attention. “What do you mean, what happened?” he said rolling back onto his bed and burying himself in furs.

The sound of footsteps came straight at his bed. He knew what was coming. What he didn’t expect was his soft furs to be yanked away from him and thrown to the side. “HEY!!” He sat up on his bed and saw a very satisfied Katherine smiling down at him.

“You have been gone for several days, my friend,” Charles stated. “What has happened to you in all that time?”

William sat up in his bed looking at his pack mates. Aceso was the only one who hadn’t spoken. She stood in the middle of the room with arms crossed and her gaze fixed directly at him. Her golden eyes shone with curiosity and questions. He wasn’t going to get any rest any time soon. Well, if they wanted the hammer dropped, he thought. “Ansuya was taken.”

Katherine gasped and the smile fell from Charles’ lips. Aceso had a poker face made of carved marble.

“What do you mean, ‘taken’,” Aceso asked evenly.

William sighed tiredly and recounted the events of the last few days. His escape from Kenneth and his vampire thugs, his flight from the city with Nicholas, the raid on the night club, everything. When he was done there was silence in his room.

Aceso finally broke the silence. “So, Kenneth was waiting for you.”

It wasn’t a question.

“It would seem so. I didn’t get a chance to ask him, you know, with the whole running for my life thing,” William replied. Charles gave his friend a small smile.

“So, wait, do the Elders know that Ansuya has been kidnapped?” Katherine asked. “Shouldn’t we go and tell them?”

“Yes, even though, I’m pretty sure they know roughly where she is. The Elders can probably feel each other the same way we can. Even if thay can’t Efraim and Ryan and Pepromene went to meet with the Elder’s before I came back to my room.” William looked around at them. “I know Ansuya can take care of herself, if it was up to me we would be mounting some kind of rescue right now. But there’s a more pressing issue that was brought up to me during my time away from here. We need to learn as much as we can about the Whyte Plain and how to kill those Shadows that live there.”

“I see that this is something we must do,” said Charles. “But, wouldn’t our time be better spent doing other things like searching for Elder Ansuya, or perhaps help Nicholas learn what he has to learn so he can fulfill his purpose as a Scout?”

William looked over at Aceso who was nodding her head. He shook his. “Charles believe me, I want to and I want to agree with you with everything in my being. But hear me out. I learned today that the Whyte Plain isn’t just some infinite space of nothingness. It has a shape and size. With a finite size the inhabitants also must finite in number. Also, if what Katherine told us a while ago was true and from what Pepromene told me today, the Whyte Plain used to be a place to exchange information and discoveries. It won’t do us any good to help Nicholas learn his lost ability, if he even can learn it, if we don’t have a way to get to these unborn Shape shifters before the vampire do.”

The thought sunk in to his pack mate’s heads. “But the Shape shifters here and everywhere else have been fighting to clear the Whyte Plain for a hundred years or more,” said Katherine. “What difference do you think we can make when compared to that time frame? We’re not even a whole pack.”

William nodded. “I hear you Katherine, but this City is dying. Who was the last Shape shifter brought here?”

“You,” Charles answered.

William’s face dropped, “No, I wasn’t.” He looked his friend in the eye. “Have you forgotten Chelsea already?” The three standing around him grew silent.

“What are you saying, William?” asked Aceso.

William stood and walked to his open doorway. He looked out over the City. “This city can’t keep fighting a double front war. It will eventually destroy everything that has been built here. If Efraim is right, and there really are dozens of night clubs around Los Angeles run by the vampires, then they have an endless supply of recruits and slaves. For every one we kill, they can be replaced by ten, while our own numbers dwindle down to nothing. There had to have been a balance at some point, an equal amount of vampires and Shape shifters. Nature doesn’t know how to work any other way.”

“And that is relevant…how?” asked Katherine.

William gave her a sharp look. “What happened to upset that balance?!” He took a deep breath and continued, “The Whyte Plain was lost to us and there’s a pretty strong correlation that it caused the Scouts to lose their sight.

“Yes, my friend, we know this,” replied Charles. “What we are asking is how are we, the five of us, going to be any help to a battlefield that has been bloodied and fought on for a hundred years?”

William faced his pack mates, “We don’t have to retake the place by ourselves. But we need to learn, and not be afraid, to use it. Once we can move through the Plain at will, maybe we can get Nicholas and the other Scouts to pool their collective resources and maybe we can jumpstart our…recruiting, if you will? If nothing else, maybe we can figure out why there hasn’t been any mass sightings of monsters terrorizing people every full moon.”

Charles blurted out without thinking, “But I was reborn on the crescent moon.”

William laughed and said, “I was making a reference about bad horror movies, not us.”