Thirst Ch. 15

The Offices of Grisholm and Grisholm were the site of her first mortal kill, many years ago. Theirs had been the sin of extortion through the law, casting a stern eagle's shadow over the bundled little knot of online illegalities that fattened her bank account back in the days when all those little rackets had seemed her most pressing concern...back before she'd Changed, and even shortly thereafter.

Naturally she'd been drawn back to the place after she'd sealed them inside with her teeth, her claws, and her ill-will, gorging herself on their flesh and their assets.

Gone were the soulless steel cabinets stuffed with case files, the heavy wooden desks and laminated, wall-hung certifications, replaced with sound proofing and insulated wire, dweomer-inscribed mainframes whose electric hum broke the monotonous silence. Cords, wires, braided chains and ropes of sinew led from the server banks, tangled in impossible knots and pooling spirals that crawled toward the center of the room. It all connected to the paper-light laptop perched on a three legged wooden stool; for seven days straight Ariadne's eyes had devoured the text flashing across the wafer-flat screen, searching for any spoor mystery-girl might have left in her online wake.

She found nothing that connected with that face; a foggy, echoing memory of passionate embrace...a coy smile she remembered that would have stood out in any public or private database - none of which were safe from her prying. A smooth, charming alto, and of course...

Clitter-clack

The gold bead that had once been threaded through the girl's braids rolled between Ariadne's sharp, ultra-hard teeth. She worried it gently as she would the knucklebone of a long-dead meal, the neutral metal carrying that smokey, feminine taste...the bouquet of her scent, but only a faint glimmer; like pencil etchings scoured from a drawing pad.

Almost everyone left some sort of electronic fingerprint but apparently not the girl from a fortnight prior, and while that alone was a notable little puzzle for her to chase, of greater concern was a question she'd been unable to solve for two weeks now:

Why didn't mystery girl dream?

It was little secret that Outsiders tracked their favored prey - Werewolves - through the phantasmic substance of their dreams; predator was different little from prey in this context, and she herself had grown adept at chasing down and even invading the self-contained little Hunting Grounds of her quarry's nightmares. With the golden bead from mystery girl's hair, Ariadne had all she needed to track her by sympathetic resonance.

But there was nothing. A glassy, black silence in place of the stuttering imagery of the dreamscape.

Far too many blank spaces for her mind to ignore, especially as one memory stood out amidst the fog of that misadventure: she distinctly remembered catching sight of Yusuf Mizrah's driver's license tucked away in Mystery Girl's wallet.

"What did you take from me?" Ariadne whispered at the vast nothing masquerading as a beautiful, rainbow-braided woman with an infernally silvered tongue and other delightful attributes. Nothing crawled forth from the shadows and disappeared without clawing something back...but what?

Why did so many strange, potentially dangerous events seem to circle around Mizrah? Shamrys had disappeared, and seeing as the Enkindled had been spotted in West Cardiff it wasn't hard for her to connect the dots there; there was only one reason he'd have killed the other werewolf, and that sort of selfish violence she understood well enough.

But he hadn't been alone, and that was all she'd heard about his Hunt for about nine days until...this. Again.

"Why...don't...you...dream?" she asked the void. Already intent on plunging down another rabbit hole to search for a fluttering scrap of identity, Ariadne's ears perked at the wracking-twist of the security lock - an old fashioned, mechanical monstrosity of pig iron that was utterly immovable by any magic, sorcery or even lockpick; only the ugly pig iron key it'd come with worked. There was only one key, and she knew whose hand turned it.

Ariadne smiled patiently as his broad shadow fell over her, footfalls on the carpet deceptively quiet given his towering frame. She smelled the light dash of cologne he used to conceal the scent-trails of violence that followed Adam Godwin everywhere he went, as well as the ozone storm-stink rolling off the Gulf. Her neglected stomach twisted with hunger when she smelled the gory contents of the bag he carried, and a wry, guilty smile spread across her face.

"It's the waning half moon," his deep, powerful timbre shattered the serene quiet; in her screen, glazed over the endless tabs and password crackers, she could see his crimson eyebrows furrowed at her in disappointment; rainwater disturbed the disciplined stillness of his crimson hair.

"Yes it is," she confirmed calmly, drawing her bare feet together and linking them at the ankles; she felt distinctly underdressed in his presence, caring only insofar as her predator instincts called attention to the difference in the eyes of prey. His silver blazer, tailored to his massive frame stood in stark difference to her off-white, sleeveless T-shirt, torn at the midriff.

"You know the rule," he pressed calmly, trailing up to her side as she tapped a new search query with equally futile parameters into the engine she herself had coded and witched into being. The ache of her canines sharpening in her gums grew to a bell-like ring; she willed herself to ignore the contents of the bag, completely aware of the situation's irony that he'd no doubt point out, blunt as a jackhammer.

"I know the rule," Ariadne answered, tsking and flashing a violet warning glare his way as he shut the lid of her laptop...no other Firstblood (aside from Mizrah, perhaps) would dare act with such impudence before her, and no other was permitted; she knew the true source of his motherly nattering.

"It's your rule." He pressed the leather backpack her way, whatever unfortunate Werecreature he'd butchered wrapped in rustling tin-foil within; she could hear it twitching for freedom, which meant the Metavolis was still burning in its meat.

Ariadne accepted the satchel and pushed her laptop aside, lowering the bag to her lap - her long, sun-kissed legs were mostly bared but for bright green, high-cut running shorts. "You don't have to bring me my meals like I'm sick and dying," she pointed out coolly.

"You haven't Hunted since the Full Moon." Adam stepped carefully over a knot of cords, dragging an office chair into position to sit next to her. He unscrewed the lid from that ridiculous steel canteen he favored - the Rabid insisted it kept water purer and colder - and set it at her side with a thud.

"I've been on the Hunt this whole time." Despite her own off-kilter pride she lifted the canteen to her lips and realized she was, indeed, parched; steam rose from beneath her skin as the dread alchemies that flowed through her heated veins reacted to the water.

"Addy," the massive Werewolf sighed with the soft disappointment of an older brother for his younger sibling's perceived foolishness. "This isn't what the Hunt is for...again, you made this rule. We don't use it for fishing out mortals that sink their hooks into us - "

"Adam," she tried in her traditionally soft tone but he barreled over her, pinning her in the caustic weight of his acid green eyes.

"There are far too many Nachten flying through Overtown and nibbling at the edges of the Rivieria. We need to get on Barlowe and Hassert and Mizrah for not hitting quota - "

"Adam." Her voice came out more forcefully as she gave in to temptation and lifted the top off the brown bag, a wave of warm, iron-rich stench wafting from freshly cloven, still-murmuring meat...she recognized a folded patagia, the shape of a bat-like head yawing its jaws beneath the foil; always trying to drive home his point.

" - Vasquez showed me that video he'd been making a fuss over, the one he says is proof Argent Creed marksmen are recruiting in Pomdufond...gimme the word and I'll check it out - "

"I think something attacked me." Ariadne took advantage of the sudden quiet, carefully withdrawing a foil-lined strip of fat-lined meat she recognized as abdominal flesh...she thought about what it would be like to throw it on a grill with onions and peppers the way her uncle Lucas cooked pork-belly. 'Bat-belly', the word made her chuckle internally.; it flexed in her palm as she unwrapped it with a clinking, metallic shiver. "I think it was her...I don't know, I'm not sure. I don't remember her name, what we did, and I can't find a trace of her online."

"You look fine," Adam commented warily - not out of any disregard for her safety but from an understanding that this was dangerous ground for their pride...predators didn't relish the display of wounds. "Besides, almost...I dunno, 10% of people don't use the internet. Maybe she's one of them."

"She wasn't seventy years old Adam, and there are too many red flags to just let this go." Ariadne clicked on a tab that displayed a security-footage still of Mizrah's driver's license, caught at the DMV years ago. "She had this in her wallet, that I remember with crystal clarity, and..." she trailed off, her mind circling back around to the biggest mystery of them all.

"...please, just leave me in suspense, you know that's my favorite thing," her Logas - her Chosen - cleared his throat, bringing her back to his presence.

Ariadne turned her ultraviolet gaze from the exposed, nerve-shot flesh in her palm with a grinding effort, staring squarely at Adam. "She doesn't dream."

With the quiet that came after, she finally sank her sharpened, wolven teeth into the Nachten's carefully pared flesh, her eyes rolling into the back of her head as her near-starving body relished it, though a part of her still quailed that she herself hadn't hunted it herself. The ensorcelled, accursed meat released its Metavolis as it traveled down her throat, quenching the gnawing ache in her belly; she'd lived and tracked Prey long enough in The Jungle that if she didn't Hunt at least once every moon phase, the consequences for her self-control were dire.

This mystery, however, had been gripping enough that even the risk of giving in to the Hunger - of losing her control and devouring whichever mortal happened to be nearby - had become a far-off, plaintive cry rather than a constant din.

"Alright," he conceded, probably more out of relief at the sight of her finally eating the kill he'd brought than any suspicion. "What doesn't dream? I know Daemons don't, but they don't sleep."

Ariadne didn't respond for some time as she ate. The Oneiric Paths were considered by many of the Conspiracies to be a sort of forbidden science; those who knew how to Hunt along those hidden roads only knew a shadow of those truths, especially as they related to the other Big Game that Afflicted preyed upon.

"We know she's connected to emo-boy Lone Wolf somehow...isn't he always at the epicenter of misfortune." Adam made no secret of his disdain for Yusuf, even as she knew he admired his resilience, his strength, and his pride to a degree.

Fat crackled, rubbery and tough between her teeth as she nodded, savoring the fresh kill, even as she endeavored to keep blood from dripping over the smooth linoleum floor; cleaning up would be a bitch with all the cables. "Mm-hmm." She swallowed, suppressing a stentorian growl of pleasure. "He is, but I don't have reason to think he's the cause of it; sending someone to do his dirty work isn't his style and if it was..."

The both of them let that hang there in the LCD-lit darkness; she would have been dead, most likely, if Yusuf had wanted it.

"I'll drag him down here." The enormous Rabid rose, his presence filling the room like a grizzly bear out of its cage, but she stopped him with slender fingers on his forearm, shaking her head.

"No...leave him be for now. He's a liar, and a persistent one. Whatever we get out of him will be useless or misleading." She spoke as if she had some sort of plan, but in truth she was lacking options - Adam knew this, of course.

"Then you'll have to dig it out of him, or trick him, or...I don't know, we could always have Celais hook him up to that 'Excoriator' of hers, he'll talk eventually." Adam settled back on the creaking chair, drawing a look of admonishment from his Behexxed packmate.

"Adam," she purred dryly. "He's not our enemy."

"He's certainly not our friend," the red-head pointed out, punctuating the statement with a lupine sound. "And it isn't like we can just...become friends with him like that." He snapped his fingers poignantly.

For the rest of the time they sat together and spoke, while she grudgingly and gratefully ate and their topics ran the gamut of new prey to the upcoming season of their favorite Netflix series (Criminal Indulgence, with all its romantic 1940s political drama), the Wolf in her mind sank its teeth into that statement.

It isn't like we can just...become friends with him like that.

Its truth was ineffable, like a turtle-shell she couldn't crack to reach the animal shuddering inside; Yusuf Mizrah chose his friends sparingly and was by nature distrustful, but the people he was close to had his absolute loyalty.

When night fell and Adam left to join his other packmates patrolling the breadth of their expeditionary zones, she shut her laptop and instead opened youtube on her phone, navigating to his band's channel and watching videos of INSTRUMENT OF AGGRESSION thrashing upon the stage. She didn't watch just to hear Yusuf roar melodically, like a gladiator before a crowd hungry for noise, although he certainly was...distracting on stage with his roguish visage, his sweat-slicked muscles or the sheer masculinity he projected, like steel bleached hot in a blast furnace.

It was his bassist who drew the Huntress' dread gaze...her quiet, unobtrusive calm. Her height, rather similar to her own. The smooth, tight quality of her skin, earth-toned and pliant.

"You're going to get me close to him," she whispered. "And we'll see...why...doesn't...mystery-girl...dream?"

Later that night

Mortals were often the architects of their own doom; Delilah D'artagnen - a pleasant name, one Ariadne regretted stealing in the end - was no different. Ariadne wasn't the finest tracker in the city, that honor was given over to the Chosen of another pack, the Lakefront Cartel, but she was still Afflicted; the reason and wisdom of a human, the inescapable sensory capacity of the Wolf, and the reality-warping power of the Curse were the triple sunset over Delilah's existence.

That she was innocent and harmless, undeserving of her fate never occurred to Ariadne, to whom Humanity had long been relegated to a place on the Food Chain somewhere in the midst of Prey, mating chattel, and danger. The notion that one of her own kin, alone and without pack, was involved with some nameless, shadowy enigma of a woman - a true, possible threat - was all that occupied her mind.

The steps had been almost prosaic; Delilah loved her ganj, and she loved it rolled into joint papers, the stubs of which she discarded like cigarette butts. The chemical signature of her marijuana of choice, and some liberal twisting of probability in the Wolf's favor at the cost of others' misfortune, led her to the single-story bungalow up in Parker's Canal where the bassist's dealer hid.

On a warm Friday night, she waited for the musician in the rushes at the edge of a patch of swampland wearing the shape of a dun-colored wolf, cloaked in shadows. It smelled like moist, turned mud and cloudy sky; the paintjobs had mostly flaked off the sides of miserable, impoverished businesses and homes, leaving them gray and ugly like flat, worn teeth jutting from the earth's rotten gums.

Twisting, blackened syllables that could not arise naturally from the maws of wolves or men slashed through Delilah's fortunes, addling her senses and throwing a curse upon her that could have easily been mistaken for the effects of cannabis laced with unclean additives...by the time her malediction had settled into the electrical-snapping of the mortal's gray matter, the Prey was already doing half the work by stumbling into the mire.

The Kill was not of a sort she'd become accustomed to; where normally Ariadne would have torn out her throat, smashed her skull, or even ended her quickly with a long, stabbing needle through the brainstem, the wolf opted for the 'cleaner' route. Delilah thrashed and kicked, she threw up a mess of bubbles and her dreadlocks whirled upon the surface of the filthy swampwater as the Werewolf held her head beneath...out here in the wilderness she wouldn't have been heard, even if her deathscreams could have broken the pond's scummy surface.

Ariadne needed the skin intact, and sure enough the Prey's flesh was taut and tight. It took the entirety of the bug-infested night to painstakingly carve slits and incisions in the dead girl's chakras, tugging and slicing centimeter by careful centimeter; once it had been artfully removed, and the unidentifiable, human shape of exposed muscle and rictus-grinning teeth had been offered to the water as a feast for the alligators, it fit like a warm, reeking wetsuit over her body.

After all, Ariadne and Delilah were of similar height and build. The Curse did the rest as she walked out of the marsh, tangling and lengthening her hair into dreadlocks.

From her scent to her appearance, to the voice she emulated with the careful shifting of her protean vocal cords, none would know the difference; not even Yusuf.

Two weeks later, when the New Moon occupied the sky with its penumbra of nothingness

Ariadne was not a creature of the stage and venue; at least, not as a performer.

She'd been an observer on the sidelines, even since her youthful days when she was merely a girl with a different, forgotten name and the shadows had been thrown by palm fronds rather than the eaves of skyscrapers. Standing before thousands of exultant, black-clad, steel-pierced and brightly inked humans, cast unto savage exultation before the conflagration of his musical brilliance, was a challenge; the sorcery required to fool them all into thinking she was, in fact, an accomplished bassist called for such constant concentration that she almost missed the details she sought.

Even more distracting than that was Mizrah, of course. Percy's percussionary work was magnificent but the Enkindled Werewolf's showmanship, his sheer masculine appeal took her breath away whenever he sang and played; no wonder his claws were sunk so skillfully into so many minds.

Nowhere was safe from her Hunt, however, and fitting in among the Herd was the whole purpose with which the Curse had shaped her kind.

After they'd played before a raving audience that chanted for an encore, Ariadne was almost grateful for the part of her charade that involved rolling a spliff afterwards. Seated in the back dressing rooms, the little white cylinder burned a cherry red between the lips she'd stolen, her gaze flitting between Mizrah and Percy as they critiqued each other's playing, shared a swig from a Jameson bottle (she pretended to gulp it down when passed her way, never partial to hard liquor) and celebrated another performance.

"One more rung," Mizrah quipped, a fat, stinking permanent marker in his hand as he added a bar to the ladder they'd scrawled upon the thoroughly vandalized wall. Ariadne's eyes idly tracked it to the top, where 'THE BIG BREAK' blared at them in letters drawn like crude blades. "Percy, Delilah, we're almost there. I can feel it in my ribs." He made his point by smacking his palms against his ribcage with a -THWOCK-.