W20 Song of Unmaking (Final Download)

Bill Bridges
Author: Bill Bridges
Copy-Editor: Jessa Michalek
Managing-Editor: Matt M. McElroy
Cover Artist: Ron Spencer
Art Direction and Design: Mike Chaney
Creative Director: Richard Thomas
Special thanks to Joshua Gabriel Timbook, who originally birthed Albrecht and
Mari from his drawing pen, and Daniel Greenberg, who set the stage with Rage
Across New York, those many years ago.
© 2016 White Wolf AB. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the writ-
ten permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of
reviews, and one printed copy which may be reproduced for personal use only.
Exalted and Storytelling System are registered trademarks of White Wolf AB.
All rights reserved. This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and
themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are fictional and intended for en-
tertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discretion
is advised.
Check out the Onyx Path at http://www.theonyxpath.com
2 The Song of Unmaking

Chapter One 4
Chapter Two 11
Chapter Three 15
Chapter Four 25
Chapter Five 34
Chapter Six 39
Chapter Seven 50
Chapter Eight 60
Chapter Nine 67
Chapter Ten 72
Chapter Eleven 76
Chapter Twelve 82
Chapter Thirteen 92
Chapter Fourteen 100
Chapter Fifteen 103
Chapter Sixteen 108
Chapter Seventeen 113
Chapter Eighteen 121
Chapter Nineteen 128
Chapter Twenty 133
Chapter Twenty-One 136
Chapter Twenty-Two 141
Chapter Twenty-Three 144
Chapter Twenty-Four 155
Chapter Twenty-Five 160
Table of Contents 3
Chapter
One
The moon tracked her every move. Even here she wasn’t alone.
Her feet fell heavily upon the silvered earth. The pathway, radiant with the
captured glow of the crescent moon, barely lit the way. If not for its ghost light,
she would have stumbled blindly, with only strange scents to guide her. She might
have become lost in trackless wastes or dizzying woods. A part of her wanted that.
Wanted it badly.
But even without the moon path, she sensed the ways, the endless airts of
the spirits, the snaking paths formed by the scurrying passage of wild, ephemeral
creatures – the natives of this shadow realm. She, too, was native here, in a sense.
Born of two nations, the material and the spiritual, a refugee from each. Wolf and
human. Garou.
One-Song walked the Umbra. Packless. In sorrow.
For many moons she’d walked. And walked. She couldn’t remember how long
it had been since she had last smelled the lake waters and pine sap of her caern,
had last heard the howls of her sept mates. All she knew now was shadow and
moonlight.
“Where do your steps take you, old one?” a voice said.
She didn’t stop. She didn’t even look for the source of the voice. “That’s my
business, gaffling.”
A blur of red fur rolled past her feet, throwing off her gait. She hissed and
planted her gnarled staff into the glowing grit of the moon path, leaning on it for
balance. “I am not amused, fox.”
The fox spirit crept from the shadows at the edge of the path, smiling in that
way only a she-fox can. “Your kind call me Tumbler.”
“I call you ‘menace.’ Now leave off.” One-Song set forth again, speeding her
pace.
Again the ball of red fur tumbled across her path. This time she didn’t flinch.
Her foot swept up under the fox and flung it ahead. It landed like a rubber ball,
bouncing to and fro. Laughing.

One-Song stopped. She closed her eyes. It had been so long since she had
heard laughter.
“Again!” Tumbler cried, suddenly weaving in and out of One-Song’s legs,
rubbing silken fur against the bare ankles of her sandaled feet.
One-Song smiled. She gently shoved the spirit with her foot and it leapt down
the path in a ball, rebounding back and forth against invisible walls. A laugh es-
caped One-Song’s lips and she stared in surprise at the air in front of her face, as if
the sound had become visible.
Tumbler rolled to One-Song’s feet and unfurled herself into a long, sleek fox.
“Where do your steps take you, old one?”
One-Song tapped her staff against the fox’s side. “You’re a cheeky one. If
you’re so curious, then come along. We’ll find out together.”
Tumbler leaped into the air and yapped then fell-in alongside One-Song as
she resumed her march.
“What do your kind call you, old one?” Tumbler said, her head cocked, alert
for One-Song’s every facial expression. Even in the dimness, the fox could make
out her lined, ebony face, bordered by braided, black hair.
“I am One-Song.”
“Ah. A good name.” They walked for a while in silence.
“What does One-Song mean?” Tumbler said.
“It is what my tribe call the First Song. The original song. The song Gaia sang
to awaken all life.”
Tumbler’s eyes widened. “Oh. That song.”
They walked some more, the sliver of the moon sank in the blackness and the light
of the path began to fade. One-Song stopped, planted her staff with a twist and sat down
cross-legged in the middle of the path, drawing her batik skirt underneath her.
Tumbler curled up beside her. She could no longer see the Garou’s face in the
darkness, but she could smell her and hear her breath.
One-Song felt the slight pressure of the fox spirit against her leg and smelled
the earthy scent of her, a mixture of grass and freshly opened dirt. She sighed.
She’d been alone for so long, always passing without greeting the spirits whose
eyes blinked at her distantly from off the sides of the path. She wasn’t sure what
to do about this one. It seemed genuinely curious about her. She chided herself for
thinking too hard. Something to worry about tomorrow. The moon is waxing. There
will be more light at moonrise. Not much, but more. Perhaps the fox will wander
away, lured by a vole or mouse. Time for sleep.
She closed her eyes and began to slip into a gentle bed of dreams — and woke
up, alert, at the sharp sound of a snort inches away. Tumbler’s gentle pressure and
scent evaporated instantly.
“Blocking the path!” a gruff voice said. “It’s not proper!”
One-Song smelled the stringent musk of the spirit in front of her. Badger. She
sighed. “Go around. Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”
Chapter One 5
“Sleeping? Then how can you be talking to me? You’re clearly awake!”
“I am now, no thanks to you. Now, go away.”
“This is my route to my sett. You’re the interloper. It’s not right.”
“Go away or I’ll eat you.”
“Garou don’t eat badgers. Ridiculous. Now, move on. You’re disturbing my
routine.” The badger then yelped and growled. His claws dug into the earth, throw-
ing up dirt as he spun around.
Tumbler barked. The sound came from past the badger. “You’ll get another tail
bite if you don’t go around!”
“I don’t take orders from foxes! You’re all thieves! Stand back or it’s your
throat that’ll get bitten next!”
One-Song stood up, grasped her staff, and thumped it down. A golden glow
poured over the path, revealing the hunkered-down badger and the prancing fox,
both of whom froze, blinking, in the sudden light. A hawk feather hung from the
tip of the staff, secured by deer sinew, its delicate vanes emitting the solar glow.
“Leave off fighting. I’m not going to get any more sleep anyway.” One-Song
lifted her staff and began walking down the path, its borders now clearly marked
under the bright rays of the hawk feather.
“Wait for me!” Tumbler said, leaping to follow.
The badger watched them for a few minutes. The light began to fade around
him from its growing distance. “I’m coming, too!” he cried, scuttling forward on
his powerful legs.
One-Song stopped and turned around, brow furrowed. “Your way is clear now.
No need.”
“I…” the badger said, slowing as he approached, looking to either side, as if
worried someone might be watching. “I lied. That’s not my route. Or, it was. But
my sett was destroyed. I don’t have a home now.”
One-Song put her hand out. The badger waddled up to it and she stroked his
chin. “I’m very sorry to hear it. But you can dig another. There’s nothing for you
with me. I am an old woman, worn out and soul-sick. I can’t give you a home.”
“But… you can give me company. At least, until I find another glen. The crea-
tures… they destroyed all of it. The whole woods.”
One-Song frowned. “What creatures? How far?”
“Many days ago. That way.” He pointed his nose off the left-hand side of the
path. “They smelled very badly. Like dead things. But they weren’t dead.”
“The Wyrm.” One-Song grimaced and spat off the path. “Come along then.
This place isn’t safe.”
The badger snorted and fell in behind the garou and the fox. “No place is safe
these days.”
• • •
The moon came and went, the only sign of the passing of day and night in the
Umbra. The path glowed brighter as the moon fleshed out. One-Song shared her bare
provender with her companions, although it was more ceremonial than sustaining. It
was dried fruit and kibble from the material side of the Gauntlet. They couldn’t eat it
in their ephemeral forms, but they did gain some small bolstering from the ritual offer.
When the moon was nearly full, One-Song ate the last of her crumbs and stood
up. “Well, I shall have to leave the path and see what lies in the wilds.”
“Oh, I can tell you that,” Tumbler said, her tail pointing off the left-hand side
of the path. “It’s an old glen, long untended by totems. It has become quite rank,
stinking even from here.”
“And this way,” the badger said, pointing his snout off the right-hand side, “is
another glen, but I smell flowers and morning dew.” His name, as One-Song had
learned, was Grumblepaw.
“Then to the right we shall go,” One-Song said, lifting her staff and stepping
from the path, swishing through the weeds and vines that had become apparent.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw bounded and waddled closely behind.
One-Song swatted aside a thick branch and beheld the glen. Dappled sunlight
fell through the leaves of a small wood, brightening a tiny pond fringed with ferns
sparkling with dew. Fat, full fruit hung from trees, with a variety and abundance
impossible in material soil.
“A totem protects this place,” One-Song said. “I wonder who.”
Tumbler stuck her face in the pond and began lapping up water. Grumblepaw
approached slowly, his snout sniffing and sensing for enemies. He shrugged and
gamboled to the edge of the pond, where he dipped his hands and began washing
them vigorously like an OCD patient long denied hygiene.
One-Song stepped to a smooth rock beside the pool and sat down, resting her
staff in the dirt. She unbuckled her sandals and slid her tired feet into the cool water.
“Oh, my,” she said, eyes closed and smiling wide. “These workhorses needed
some serious dipping.” She looked around, a mischievous grin growing. “Might as
well.” Her arms and legs melted into four stout, hairy limbs as her face stretched
forth a snout and long ears. She dove into the pond in wolf form, sinking up to her
neck.
She howled in joy. Tumbler yapped, leaping into the air and somersaulting.
Grumblepaw stared aghast and looked away. “Well… I suppose it must be refresh-
ing.”
One-Song smiled at him. She rose up on all fours, the water reaching to her
stomach, and shook her black-furred body. Water sprayed in all directions, drench-
ing Grumblepaw, who sputtered and spat and ran in circles.
“Uncalled for! Uncalled for!”
One-Song barked and sat back down, luxuriating in the water. “I’m sorry,”
she said in the spirit tongue, a language of subtle sounds and gestures, not fully
telepathy but not un-telepathy-like, either. “Couldn’t be helped. And you needed it
as much as I did.”
Chapter One 7
Grumblepaw frowned and dug a shallow depression with his rear legs and
settled into it. “Perhaps I should be the judge of what I do and do not need.”
“Aunt Luna called me into life under the crescent moon — the spirit doctor
moon. I’ve been around for a long time, child. You let me tell you what’s right and
you’ll be better for it.”
Grumblepaw blinked but did not argue further.
Tumbler was sniffing the ground near the stone where One-Song had been
sitting. “Where did it go?”
One-Song cocked her head. “What are you looking for?”
“Your staff. It was right here, and then it was gone. About the same time you
spun into a wolf.”
“Spun? I like that. But don’t you worry about my staff. It’s dedicated to me. It
comes and goes as I need it in different forms. I can’t very well hold on to it with
four paws, now can I?”
“You garou have so many tricks!” Tumbler ran around the edge of the pond,
closer to One-Song’s head. “Teach me some!”
“I doesn’t work like that. I don’t know why. So many of our tricks come from
your kind — “
“Foxes?!”
“Sometimes. But from all spirits is what I meant.”
Tumbler nodded. “But where did the staff actually go? I can’t even smell it!”
One-Song laughed. “I’m not sure anybody really knows for sure. It’s part of me.
I guess it goes to the same place that all my body mass goes when I change from a big
form into a smaller one. I knew a Glass Walker once — Kleon Winston — who told me
that dedicated clothing and fetishes enter a state of ‘quantum uncertainty.’ That means
they’re both real and not-real at the same time, until I need them to be real again.”
“What kind of animal is a quantum?” Grumblepaw said. “And why can’t it
make up its mind?”
“It’s a very, very tiny being, I suppose. Oh, Kleon would say it’s not a being
but a scattering of tiny particles. We’re all made of them. Put all those pieces to-
gether and you get us.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I am a badger, not a cete of ‘particles.’”
“You’re a spirit. I don’t think you can be reduced down to a collection of at-
oms. You’re wholly what you are. But material creatures… well, matter is made
up of many tiny things. Ephemera — what some garou call ‘spirit matter,’ what
you’re made of — is a single thing, extended into different shapes. It all gets rather
complex.”
“I don’t like these ‘quantum’ creatures. They sound like they’re up to no good.
I shall have nothing to do with them.”
One-Song smiled and closed her eyes, soaking up the sunlight. “Let’s all
pledge to have nothing whatsoever to do with quantum creatures and all their ilk.”

“Amen,” Grumblepaw said, placing his head on his hands and closing his eyes.
Tumbler had already curled up into a ball and slipped into a nap.
• • •
One-Song woke at dusk, as the sun within the small glade realm began to set.
She had earlier crawled up onto the smooth stone to sleep. She stretched her paws
and looked around sleepily.
The fox and the badger still slept. She watched them for a while, wondering
why she had let them come with her. Loneliness, I suppose. But it won’t end well.
They don’t need to go moping around with me.
She looked up at the sky, at the stars that began to blink in the purple dusk.
Constellations she’d never seen before. She wasn’t sure what forms they shaped.
Antonine would know. He knows all the star lore. But I probably won’t see him
again.
Grumblepaw was staring at her. She frowned. “What’s on your mind, badger?”
“I was wondering. I mean, I haven’t asked yet.” He looked down at his paws,
which he rubbed together. “Why are you walking? Why are you walking alone?”
One-Song looked away from him, into the woods. “My pack is dead. I’m not
worthy of another. I have no place else to go. So I wander.”
“Are you one of Owl’s people?”
“A Silent Strider? No. My people don’t like wandering so much. We tend to
prefer home. Family.” She barely got out that last word without choking back a
sob.
“Why can’t you go home?”
“I was the lorekeeper of my people. The Finger Lakes Protectorate. It was my
duty to hold the old stories, the old knowings. To tell them to the young. To tell
them in times of need. I… failed. My forgetting got my pack killed.”
Tumbler appeared by her side, her snout sneaking up under her paw. “I forget
things all the time. They can’t blame you for that.”
“You weren’t the lorekeeper.” One-Song shifted from wolf into human form,
her paw becoming a hand, which rested lightly on Tumbler’s brow. “I don’t deserve
to carry the stories. Not any longer. My pack….” One-Song closed her eyes. “My
pack’s story must never be told. It’s too terrible. Let the others hate me. Let them
blame me. But they won’t speak ill of my pack mates. Their story dies with me.”
“It’s a secret then?” Tumbler said. “Something you know but others must
guess?”
One-Song forced a smile and scratched the fox’s head. “No. It’s not a game.
It’s a tragedy.”
Grumblepaw kicked his rear feet in frustration, spraying dirt behind him.
“You’re a garou! Death does not separate you from your kind! Their names must
be sung by the fire.”
Chapter One 9
“Oh, honey, there’s no more singing for me. If I could sing it all away, I would.
But folks have to earn tidy endings like that. I haven’t earned nothing.” She stood
up, grasping her staff, which had reappeared when she shifted forms. “Enough! I’m
done talking about what’s behind me.”
Chastened, the fox and badger said no more. They followed her around the
small glade as she picked fruit from the trees and collected them in her satchel.
When the bag was full, she marched out of the glade and back onto the moon path,
which glowed like white neon under the newly turned full moon.
“Tell us a story,” Tumbler said, almost whispering.
“What? A story?” One-Song said, shaking her head. She looked down at the
fox, walking sheepishly by her feet. She looked over at the badger, waddling beside
her, his head raised with expectant eyes. She sighed. “What kind of story?”
“The one about your name. The one about the Song of Creation.”
“Oh, child, that’s a mighty story. It takes the proper setting to tell that one. This
old road ain’t that place.”
“Please!” Tumbler said, weaving in and out between One-Song’s marching
legs.
“Great grio, you’re a cheeky one. All right. I’ll tell one about the Song. Know
now: you can’t sing the Song. Only Gaia can do that, and only ever once. At the
start of Creation. This here story is about the Song, but it ain’t the Song. Get it?”
Tumbler and Grumblepaw nodded, their steps picking up pace.
One-Song stared into the moon as she walked. “I heard the Song once. During
my First Change. A holy chorus of… of everything. All singing at once. Every-
thing in me that hurt — all my pains, all my sore feelings — just evaporated away.
My whole body and soul sang that Song. The Children of Gaia elders knew. They
couldn’t hear it, but they could tell what was playing in my ears, in my belly. That’s
why they called me One-Song.”
Tumbler leapt up and yapped at the moon. Grumblepaw’s face stretched into a
terrible grimace — a badger smile. His eyelids squinted with pleasure.
“No matter how hard you try,” One-Song said, “you just can’t keep such a
thing in memory. This life ain’t made for holding such a holy thing. I’ve been
chasing it ever since, hoping to catch a snatch of it one more time.” She tightened
her hand on her staff. “Now I’m old and forsaken, and I’ll die without ever hearing
it again.”
She took a deep breath and let it out. Tumbler hung her head. Grumblepaw’s
mouth opened and closed, unable to make a noise.
“But you wanted a story. Let’s start this the way they all do. Once upon a
time…”

Chapter
Two
Way back before you first opened your eyes — far, far back, before even your
many-times great grandparents opened their eyes — there was only darkness. This
wasn’t darkness as the absence of light. No, this was darkness as a presence, a
substance, a curtain wrapped around all the world that was.
Everybody these days thinks there was nothing and nobody before the Song.
That ain’t true. There was lots of folks. But none of them were happy.
They couldn’t see anything. Oh, they could smell, hear, touch, and taste. But
that ain’t enough for most folk. Bats and moles, I suppose, but not folks like you
and me.
These folk started crying, wailing to their mother. Gaia. They begged her to
do something, to make it so everybody could see. How did they know what seeing
was when nobody could do it? I don’t know. They just did. They had eyes in their
heads, didn’t they?
Gaia doesn’t like to hear babies crying. She goes to her sister, Luna. Now Luna
wasn’t full then, or half-full, or crescent. She was invisible, like everybody else.
Only you couldn’t touch her or even smell her. She was too far away.
Luna tells Gaia that Old Man Darkness had to be tricked into lifting up his
curtain. Gaia sighs and then nods. She knows what she has to do.
Gaia goes whistling into the darkness. She starts humming a tune — not the
Song, mind you. Not yet. Just a melody, but it gets Old Man Darkness’s attention.
“Who is that making that lovely noise?” he asks.
“Oh, it’s just me,” Gaia says.
“Who’s me?”
“The beautiful one. The one who is so pretty the whole world holds its breath
when they see me.”
“See you? Nobody can see nothing! I got everything covered up!”
“I guess that means you can’t see me either. You don’t know what you’re
missing!”
Chapter Two 11
Well, Old Man Darkness gets all hot and bothered. “I want to see you! It ain’t
fair!”
“Then lift your curtain up.”
“If I do that, then everything will escape my grasp.”
“Just a little. Just a corner. That’s all you need.”
“Just a corner? All right. Just a corner then. Then I’ll be able to see you?”
“That’s right.”
He lifted up a corner of the vast, endless sheet of himself, and from under that
corner… there shone a bright light. You see, back then, everything shone with its own
light. It came from within. But folks had forgotten that. Darkness had covered it all up.
Now they knew. They saw that little slice of light that escaped when Old Man
Darkness lifted up his curtain, and they all said to themselves: “So that’s where it
went! That’s where my light had gone to!” And they all flung off the curtain that
was covering them, and they all shined forth, a radiance like never ever seen before
or since.
Now Old Man Darkness was melting away just looking at Gaia. She was in-
deed the most beautiful there was. But when everybody threw off his mantle, he
wailed. He couldn’t stand all that light. He ran away, dragging the rest of his curtain
with him, pulling it off of fields, off of mountains, off of the vast ocean. Soon, ev-
erything was light, everywhere.
Now, that’s just too damn bright. Nobody could see anything anymore. They
all had to shut their eyes tight against that blinding light. They were back where
they’d started, only this time it hurt to put all that effort into shutting their eyes all
the time.
They started hollering and wailing again, crying to their mother.
Gaia sighs and heads back to talk to her sister. On the way, she passes the great
serpent, the mighty, coiled creature that was wrapped all around everything.
“If you’d come to me first,” the snake said. “I could have told you what would
happen. Your sister’s crazy. Don’t listen to her. Now…”
“Shut your mouth, snake. Nobody trusts you. You shed your skin too often.
Nobody knows who you are.”
The great serpent scowled but said nothing.
Gaia goes up to her sister again and asks her what to do about all the light.
Luna says: “You have to trick Old Man Darkness.”
“He’ll just cover everything up again!” Gaia cried.
Luna whispered for her sister to draw close and then told her what she needed
to do. Gaia sighed and nodded.
She wandered around humming her tune again, until she heard Old Man Dark-
ness humming it with her. He was hiding in a cave.
Gaia laid down on the ground and spread out all over. “You saw how beautiful
I was. Why don’t you come out and kiss me?”

“I did see you. I can’t ever forget. You’re the most beautiful of all things. But
you tricked me. I ain’t coming out.”
“I’ll let you cover me up.”
Old Man Darkness couldn’t resist. Who could? He ran out of that cave and
laid himself on top of Gaia, covering her up completely. He sat there for a while,
smiling to himself, but then felt the ground move underneath him. He was rising
up. The ground was growing. He jumped off and ran back into the cave. “Another
trick!”
“It’s no trick, Old Man Darkness,” Gaia said, holding her swelling belly. “It’s
our son, getting ready to come out.”
And he did. The baby boy flowed out of Gaia and covered up the world — but
only half of it. He was smaller than Old Man Darkness, and laughed a lot more.
“I’m going to call you Night,” his mother said. The boy giggled.
“What have you done, Gaia?” the great serpent said, sliding up from a hole.
“Now, half of everybody’s going to be blind from the darkness and the other half
is still blind from all the light.”
“You shush, worm,” Gaia said. “My sister is going to raise Night. She’ll hold
his hand, so as he wanders around with her, everybody will get covered and un-
covered equally.”
The snake scowled and slipped back down his hole.
But it was still too dark wherever Night walked and too bright wherever he
wasn’t. Gaia sighed. This time, though, she didn’t listen to her sister or to the
snake. This time she looked deep within herself until she had an answer.
She stood up and began walking, stopping beside each and every creature —
animal, mineral, element — and plucked a single hair from each.
Of course rocks and water don’t have hair. Not as we know it. But if they’re
made of music, then they’re all just strings humming away, right?
Anyway, she gets that hair from everybody, and whenever she plucks it out of
someone, their light comes with it. Not all of it, just the brightest part. Everybody
still glowed, but it was a faint light, one most folk these days can’t see anymore.
I don’t know whether it’s because we’re all getting blinder or if our lights are just
guttering out, like candles run out of wax. All except for the Sky Peoples’ lights.
They still glow up there like fireflies. Gaia couldn’t be bothered to reach way up to
pluck them, so they kept their hair.
But those hairs she did get? Those hairs glowed like furnaces. Gaia sat down
and started sewing. She braided them all together and then she rolled it all tight up
into a ball. And then she ate it.
Everybody watched to see what she’d do next. Even Luna scratched her head,
curious.
Gaia’s belly started to swell again. Spilling out of her came a bright ball of
light. “My second son,” Gaia said. “I’ll call you Sun.”
Chapter Two 13
And she picked up her baby and tossed him, laughing, high into the air. He
never came down. He stayed up there where she put him, rolling around, smiling at
everybody, shining back some of the light Gaia had taken from them.
It was only bright now directly under the bouncing baby, the way a lantern
casts light out. When he wasn’t over top of you, the light softened, and when Night
came along, it was still just bright enough now and then to see the shapes of things.
Now, Night followed Luna around, and Luna soaked up some of Sun’s bright
light, keeping it for herself in a bag. She couldn’t hold it all, though. She used it up
slowly, so that her bag got emptier and emptier as she wandered, until she could
catch more of Sun’s light and begin filling that bag up again. What did she use it
for? That ain’t for you and me to know.
Gaia was tired now. She’d worked hard. It ain’t easy having two babies! But
that new one, the Sun, he wasn’t very tame. He rolled everywhere, all around, with
no rhyme or reason. It drove everybody crazy. Even Luna started bitching a fit
about chasing him around all the time.
So Gaia, she starts singing. Not humming. Singing.
You know the way you can’t help but dance when certain songs start playing?
You have to tap your feet and move to its timing.
That’s what the Sun did. He stopped his crazy rolling around and he danced to
his mother’s song. And Aunt Luna did, too. Night held her hand, and they followed
the Sun in a marching procession.
Everybody danced. That song was the ordering of all the world. Its melody
made everybody smile and its rhythm beat out the timing of the world, like your
heart beats out the timing of your life.
That was the first Song, the Song of Creation. The Song that made the world.
But I lied.
I said everybody danced.
Snake didn’t dance.
He hid in his hole. He hid so deep that Gaia had forgotten to pluck a hair from
him. None of his light went into the making of the Sun. He kept it to himself.
He crept up into the cave where Old Man Darkness slept and he ate him.
Swallowed him whole. This covered up his own light, and he became a thing of
darkness in a world of luminosity.
“You should have listened to me, Gaia,” he whispered, as he slipped back
down his hole. “Because I had no part in birthing your sons, I have no part in your
Song. One day, I’m going to silence it. And that will be the end of Creation.” He
spat out a gob of venom, which boiled away a bit of the dirt of his tight, dark hole,
and opened up a void to nowhere. “Maybe then you’ll listen to me.”

Chapter
Three
“And that’s how it happened. As it was told to me by my elder, as it was told
to her elder, and so on back all the line of lorekeepers of the Children of Gaia.”
One-Song planted her feet in the luminous dirt and looked down at her spirit-an-
imal companions. They looked at her with wide eyes, still entranced by the story.
One-Song smiled. It was nice to have an audience again. Stories don’t end. They
fade into life, so tightly woven that teller and talegetter can’t know where one ends
and the other begins.
“That’s wonderful,” Tumbler said, eyes sparkling.
“Astonishing,” Grumblepaw said, his nose twitching.
“But that’s not the way it happened,” Tumbler said. “The original darkness
was swept aside by the Fox Mother, with all nine of her tails. She sang while she
cleaned—“
“Hogwash!” Grumblepaw apoplexed. “The Badger Crone dug a hole in the
world and hit a deep vein of light—”
“Ridiculous! Light isn’t in the earth — it grows from the Fox Mother’s rice
stalks!”
“All those stories are true!” One-Song said, plonking down her staff. “Arguing
won’t change none of it. You weren’t there, so you can’t say. Just trust that there’s a
kernel of truth germinating at the heart of each story. Water it. Let it grow. It’ll give
you shade, and clean air, and a place for the birds to roost.”
Tumbler licked her lips. “Birds?”
One-Song gently tapped Tumbler’s tail with the butt of her staff. “Not from
my story tree, you don’t!”
Grumblepaw let out a slow breath. “Who… who is that?”
One-Song glanced down at the badger and saw him staring, mesmerized, at
something down the path. She looked up and saw it.
At the edge of the path, amidst a swirling white cloud of snow, stood a pale
bison.
Chapter Three 15
One-Song peered at it, seeing its tired eyes, crusted with ice, and its broken
left horn, leaving it with only one full, curved ivory-white horn. Its front right hoof
stamped and it grunted, its breath a cloud of steam.
One-Song dropped to one knee and bowed, a tear falling down her cheek.
Tumbler looked from One-Song to the bison and back again, perplexed. She
also lowered herself, and now kept both eyes on the bison.
Grumblepaw squatted frozen, transfixed by the spirit’s raw power. He did not
need to bow, since he was already low to the ground.
“My totem…” One-Song whispered. “I thought I had lost you.”
The one-horned bison snorted again and, like a large ship changing course,
wheeled around in a wide arc and walked slowly into the swirl of snow, its ancient
eye turned back to watch One-Song.
One-Song rose up and walked to it, stepping without hesitation into the icy
winds, and was swallowed from view.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw looked at one another, and then both of them bolted
forward, diving into the diminishing flurry.
The wind abated and the snow drifted down, melting on the moon-soaked
path. Only silence remained.
• • •
The snow had nearly covered up One-Song’s tracks before the two spirits
caught up to her. She doggedly followed the bison through the winter blizzard,
silent, desperate. The fox bounded behind in her wake, leaping from footprint to
footprint, while the badger plowed through the snow alongside them.
And then the snowstorm ended and they stepped onto green grass.
The bison turned to look at One-Song and then gestured with a tilt of its head
toward green fields, surrounded in the distance by a wall of white-capped moun-
tains. Deep ahead, stretching across fields and through woods, was a vast hoop, a
faintly glowing, pulsing rope of fine filament tightly bound together, laid across the
land like a wreath dropped from on high.
One-Song stared at it, trying to understand what it was. She was too far away.
She looked back to the bison, but it was gone. She felt her heart constrict again, the
same tightness she had carried for so long, but she knew it was looser now, more
relaxed than before. I know what I have to do.
She began the long walk into the wide meadow, toward the distant circle of
light.
“What is it?” Tumbler said, bounding out in front of One-Song. “Where did
the bison go? Who was she? Where are we?”
One-Song chuckled. “You did a good job keeping all those questions in that
mouth of yours ’till now. I’m proud of you.”
“That was a totem,” Grumblepaw said, waddling next to her. “We’re mere
gafflings. We show respect where it is due.”

“Yes, you did. And yes, it was a totem spirit. My totem spirit. I thought I was
unworthy of her, but she came. She heard my story and she came.” One-Song held
her head higher as she walked on, her staff barely touching the ground. “Unicorn.
The totem of the Children of Gaia. My tribe.”
“But… that was a bison,” Grumblepaw said.
“Didn’t you see the horn? Only one of them.” One-Song smiled and winked as
she looked down at the badger.
“Yes, but… isn’t the horn supposed to be on the forehead?”
One-Song gently tapped the badger on his forehead with her staff. “You make
all the rules, now?”
Grumblepaw huffed but said nothing.
“She wants me to investigate that ring of light. I can’t tell from here what it is,
but I have a suspicion it ain’t natural, that it doesn’t belong here.”
“Where is here?!” Tumbler said somersaulting in front of One-Song.
“Well, I don’t have to tell you spirits that we’re still in the Umbra. We didn’t
cross the Gauntlet. This is the Penumbra, the spiritual atmosphere that hugs the
material world. Judging from those mountains and the looks of this grassy plain,
I’d say we’re somewhere near the Alps.”
“What are Alps?” Grumblepaw said, his nose sniffing the air as he waddled
along.
“Mountains in Switzerland and France. In Europe.”
Tumbler let out a spitting raspberry with her tongue. “Human words.” She
rolled her eyes and took up a regular, four-legged walking pace beside One-Song.
“That they are, child. That they are.”
• • •
It took nearly half an hour to get close enough to the nearest curve of light to
make out what it was made of: spider webs. Spider silk that acted like fiber optics,
glowing with electronic light.
“Pattern spiders,” One-Song said. “High-tech ones, at that. Definitely not na-
tive to the region.” She stood watching the web as bright bursts sped through it
from both directions. “What the hell is it doing here? It’s huge!”
Grumblepaw sniffed at it and then began digging at its base, furiously kicking
up dirt.
“Be careful!” One-Song said. “Pattern spiders tend to be real defensive about
their webs.”
“It goes down deep,” the badger’s voice rose from the hole he’d dug and
crawled into. “You’re only seeing the top. The webs are thicker down here. It just
keeps going.”
“Look!” Tumbler cried. She was standing a ways off to One-Song’s right,
peering closely at the web. “It’s a door!”
Chapter Three 17
One-Song walked over and tried to see what the fox had seen. It took a few
moments, but she finally discerned the pattern within the pattern, a doorway on the
side of the webbed hoop.
“I suppose we should try it. But… it all seems too quiet. I mean, where are
all the spirits? This place should be teeming with meadow life. It ain’t like pattern
spiders to chase everything off, only what gets in their way. I don’t like all this.”
She looked around in all directions. “But I also don’t feel like spending the next
day and night walking around this whole thing, looking for some other clue. So,
let’s try the door.”
Tumbler hunched her back in a defensive posture and nodded, alert. Grum-
blepaw climbed out of his hole and squatted at One-Song’s heels, teeth bared.
One-Song planted her staff and stretched her free hand out to touch the door
knob. Like the rest of the closely wound fibers, it was made from the pattern spi-
ders’ fiber-optic webbing, but it performed just like a door knob. One-Song turned
it and pushed the door inward.
A corridor ran to the right and left along a catwalk, made from firm metallic
webbing, less yielding than the exterior fiber. A set of stairs burrowed below into a
deep well of metal and fiber-optics.
One-Song frowned. “You hear that? That deep sound, almost too low to hear.
A bass vibration. I don’t like the way it rattles my bones.”
Tumbler frowned but said nothing. Grumblepaw rotated a claw in his right ear,
as if digging out a bug, then grunted and readied to follow One-Song.
The garou stepped into the corridor and looked both ways. No sign of any spi-
ders. She looked through the stairway grill — it resembled a factory catwalk — and
saw no movement, besides the regular pulse of lights.
“Well, down I go.” She stepped upon the first step and stopped, turning to face
her companions. “You’ve all been real kind to me. I thank you. But you don’t have
to follow me here.”
Grumblepaw looked at Tumbler, and both looked back at One-Song. “Where
else would we go? Besides, you might need our great skill and tactical bearing.”
One-Song stifled a laugh and nodded sagely at the spirits. “That could be. That
could be. All right then, fall in behind.” She descended the steps, followed by the
fox and badger.
The stairs went down to a platform, where another set of stairs hooked back
and down again. They kept going. Three more platforms and turns and they came
to another door.
“An elevator,” One-Song said. “That’s odd. Usually tech like that don’t make
its way into the Penumbra until a long time after it’s been around. This whole
place… it seems too new. I guess I got no choice: I got to step sideways and see
what’s going on in the material world.”
“We’ll come too!” Tumbler said, looking around nervously.

“Don’t waste your energy. I got a feeling the Gauntlet’s really thick here.
Don’t worry, I’m just taking a look. I’ll step right back as soon as I figure out
where we are.”
The spirits hung their heads but accepted her words. One-Song grasped the
hawk feathers dangling from the end of her staff and parted them to reveal a small
mirror hanging in their midst. She rotated it to catch the pulsing lights just right
and stared into the reflected light, imagining — feeling — that she stood on the
other side of the mirror, and letting that feel pull her across the silvered threshold.
Her body began to fade from the platform and then took on weight as it filled out
into flesh, blood and bone on the other side of the mirror — on the other side of the
Gauntlet that separated the world of spirit from the world of matter.
One-Song stood in the material world for the first time in many moons. She
took a deep breath, feeling her body, its heaviness and achiness, unused to its ma-
teriality.
She looked around her, then above and below. She stood on a metal catwalk,
erected inside a concrete tube descending into the earth. The pattern spider webs
were gone, replaced by whitewashed, smooth concrete walls. Before her stood the
elevator doors, next to a wall hung with rows of red plastic hard hats. A series of
signs hung on the walls and the elevator door. She read them and gasped, and then
fumbled with her mirror, hurriedly trying to catch the light again. She stared into
the sparkling glare, and cursed at how long it was taking for her to reach through, to
make the spiritual connection to the reflection, to be where the reflected light was
cast instead of the actual, material light. Just as she finally felt the tug and her body
began to unravel, passing through the thick curtain, she heard a door open on one
of the levels above her and then voices.
Then she was back next to the pattern webs, in the Penumbra, the fox and
badger waiting breathlessly for her to speak.
“I know where we are. I don’t like it. This is beyond me. This is Glass Walker
shit.” She leaned against the catwalk railing. “But I guess I got to keep going. Uni-
corn brought me here to see something and I got to see that something.”
Grumblepaw cleared his throat, a gruff grunt that was half cough, half bark.
She looked down at him and the anxious fox.
“This won’t mean anything to you,” she said, “but this place is called the SPS.
‘Super Proton Syncrotron.’ It’s a particle accelerator.”
The spirits looked at each other, shrugging. They looked back at One-Song.
“It’s human tech designed to break apart tiny pieces of the world, to find out
what makes it tick.”
“You mean…” Grumblepaw said, hesitantly, “the quantum creatures?”
One-Song sighed. “Yep. The quantum creatures.” She leaned forward and tried
to plant her staff, but the catwalk grillwork was too wide to keep it from slipping
through. She dangled it by her hip. “I can’t go back to the material side. They must
have had a camera watching the elevator. I think I surprised them by showing up
all of a sudden. They’re probably freaking out about security now.” She noticed the
Chapter Three 19
confused faces of her companions, blinking up at her. “The humans, that is. I don’t
know if that’ll affect things here on this side or not. I still haven’t seen a pattern
spider, so I guess we haven’t done anything wrong yet, not by their book.”
She stepped forward and the pressed the elevator button.
“If that doesn’t rile anything up, then it’s probably safe to take it down.”
They waited in silence for three minutes, listening for the scuttling sound of
spiders, when an electronic bell dinged and the doors slid open. One-Song stepped
in, the spirits closely shadowing her steps, and examined the button panel. There
was only one. It had no label. She took a breath and pressed it. The doors closed
and she felt the slight lurch as the cage began to slide down the shaft.
The two spirits circled the cage, sniffing, anxious. They all felt it begin to slow
down and readied themselves for whatever came next. The cage slid smoothly to
a halt and the doors opened onto a tight passageway. Like everything else here, it
was made from pattern spider webbing.
One-Song stepped out, followed by Tumbler, curious but not bold enough to
bound ahead. Grumblepaw stayed in the cage, shivering, unable to even whimper.
One-Song turned and frowned down at him.
“What?”
“That smell… oh, that smell,” the badger said, quaking.
One-Song’s head snapped back around to peer intently down the corridor. She
took in a deep breath, calling on the wisdom taught to her by the spirits. Her nose
wrinkled instinctively and she stifled a gag. Wyrm. This is what I’m here to see.
She tightened her fists around her staff and stepped slowly forward. “Stay
behind,” she hissed. “Keep the elevator door open.”
Tumbler seemed torn, worried about her friend’s behavior, but overcome by
curiosity. She padded from one side of the corridor to the other.
“Do as I say,” One-Song said, without turning to look at the fox.
Tumbler lowered her head and shoulders and slunk back into the elevator cage,
where Grumblepaw was backed against the far wall, hunched and alert.
One-Song’s sandals made very little noise as she stepped lightly down the hall,
coming to an intersection. She could see now that a large pipe ran from left to right
down the center of a tight, circular passage, a horizontal tunnel running through the
deep rock. The particle accelerator pipe.
As she approached, it began to glow from inside, at first a faint pulse and then
a mighty heartbeat, brighter and brighter. The Umbral hoop’s surface was translu-
cent, unlike its opaque earthly counterpart.
One-Song heard the skittering before she saw them, coming in waves from the
left. The pattern spiders had arrived. She stood perfectly still, watching. They ig-
nored her, rushing to check every nook and cranny of the machine as it powered up.
They’re turning it on. Readying to throw particles at each other. None of that
should have any effect here, on this side. So why the hell are the spiders involved?

As the wave of spiders passed to the right, around the curve and out of One-
Song’s sight, a sudden burst of electronic squealing hit the air, like a dozen loud-
speakers dying at once. Pattern spider screams.
One-Song slipped down the curving corridor, her staff before her. As she
rounded the curve, she saw the sight of a miniature battle. The pattern spiders
were beating themselves like an ocean wave against a wall of three green, fester-
ing crabs. The crustaceans, dripping with toxic ooze, batted aside the pattern spi-
ders, disrupting their delicate, ephemeral bodies, disintegrating them. Each spider
sparked and sputtered, emitting its feedback screech, as it fell.
The rear of the spider army retreated. There were only a handful of them left,
scattering back the way they had come.
One-Song stared at the crabs. Corrupted Weaver spirits, from Gaia knows
where. What the hell are they doing here?
The crabs spread out and hunkered down in defensive positions, their claws
raised and frozen, ready to snap at any intruder.
What are you guarding? Let’s find out. One-Song approached. The nearest
crab scuttled forward, its claw stretching out. One-Song’s staff was quicker. She
brushed its top carapace and the crab slumped, all limbs going limp. It slid down
from on top of the particle accelerator pipe and hit the floor, fast asleep, its claws
tucked tightly to its belly.
With a fast snap of her wrist, she tapped the other two crabs before they could
react, and they also fell, wrapped into balls, slumbering.
One-Song stepped past them, looking at every crack and crevice for some clue
about their ward. The accelerator hoop was now glowing brighter, its pulses lasting
longer. In the Umbral environment, the light seemed now to expose the interiors of
whatever it fell upon, like flashes of an X-ray machine. She could see the bones in
her hand, clutching her staff, as the light irradiated it. She could also see the faint
outlines of her spirits, her sleeping fetish and talen helpers, bound into the staff and
its accoutrements.
Then the pulses came faster, beating out an accelerated lightning storm, a man-
ic rave. An unholy whine grew, from a slight headache to an ear-splitting howl.
One-Song dropped to her knees, cradling her staff in her elbows as her palms tried
in vain to cover her ears.
A bullet tore through the fabric of the world. She saw it, moving at impossible
speed and yet, in the Umbra, revealed to her mind as if it moved in slow-motion. A
single tiny spark of light rounding the far bend of the hoop, shooting past her, and
colliding with another spark.
She shut her eyes and held them shut as tight as she could, and still couldn’t
block the x-ray view of the war of the particles. Their clash supernova-ed a ball of
expanding energy in all directions. One-Song tensed, readying for the blast, but it
bounced against the inner walls of the pipe — the weird, tightly woven, ballistic
spider silk, protecting One-Song from its quantum fury.
Chapter Three 21
And just as the conflagration receded, in that momentary blink, a shadow be-
came visible, a shape attached to the inner wall of the pipe. Oblong, fastened with
thousands of worm-like tentacles.
An egg.
And in the egg, revealed in the X-ray revelation of that moment, a shape. A
moving, breathing shape. A creature gestating, incubating in the terrible forces un-
leashed by the particle bombardment.
A baby. A baby waiting to be born.
A nexus crawler.
In that terrible, endless moment when the egg was revealed, she heard the
sound emanating from it, its heartbeat melody, its dirge of unlife. She knew that
sound, that song. The Song for which she was named.
A twisted mockery of the world’s birth trumpet, the Song that made the world.
This dread score was a backwards, distorted, and discordant string of notes that re-
versed the One Song, rewound the unfolding of Creation, unmaking it. If time was
a vinyl record, playing the world into being in a steady spiral procession across or-
dered grooves, this was a needle ground into the record like a seismograph, pierc-
ing and scratching the grooves, melting the wax.
The Song of Unmaking. The unholy aria of the Wyrm.
The whine receded. The light faded. The accelerator began to wind down.
One-Song opened her eyes and clutched her staff with both fists, her hands
shaking so vigorously that the butt of the staff beat out a rhythm on the floor. Her
face was ashen, a mask of horror.
I can’t do this. This is beyond me. She shut her eyes and shook her head. In the
blink of an eye, she shifted to wolf form and ran. She ran back down the corridor
and turned back into the side passage, panting, tongue hanging out.
The elevator doors stood open, trying to close, blocked by Grumblepaw,
whose head snapped from side to side as he chomped down on a pattern spider.
More spiders spilled out of the elevator, trying to move the immovable badger, the
glitch in their system.
One-Song howled and slid into a pod of spiders, smashing her paws into them.
Her hair stood on end and her eyes widened with a hunter’s fury. Her jaw snapped
down on the spiders as they flowed over her, their thin webs trailing behind, trying
to wrap the wolf in a cocoon.
She spun, leaping up and down, shifting forms again, growing into the mas-
sive, prehistoric hispo wolf. Her weight crushed a small legion of spiders, but the
hoard kept coming.
From within the elevator, Tumbler whimpered, practically engulfed in a blan-
ket of spider silk.
One-Song stilled her fury, taking a deep breath. No. Not now. It’s not time for rage.
She shifted back into human form and stepped over Grumblepaw into the ele-
vator cage. She reached down and pulled the badger’s tail, dragging him fully into

the car. The doors slid closed with a ding. The spiders instantly scuttled into the
corners, disappearing into the network of wall fibers.
Grumblepaw grunted, surprised to finally be free of the crawling things. “I
held the elevator.”
“That you did,” One-Song said, hooking the crook of her staff under the web-
bing that encased Tumbler. She tugged at it, stretching the tough fibers, enough for
the fox to wiggle itself free. She whimpered and slid between One-Song’s legs,
refusing to come out from under her skirt.
One-Song hit the button and the elevator began to rise. She leaned back against
the wall, exhausted. She wiped her brow with her scarf and began to cry, sliding
down onto her knees. Tumbler curled against her legs, watching the old garou as
she came undone.
“I can’t do this,” One-Song said hoarsely. “I’m too broken-down. I’m all
alone. I don’t… I don’t have my pack.” She sobbed, shoulders heaving and then
shuddered as unbidden memories flooded her mind, ghosts of the past, beyond her
control. A sulfurous battlefield buried under dark clouds, the crackling of balefire,
the coppery smell of blood. Blood on her hands, gore on her claws, bodies lying
beneath her, their wolfish snouts frozen in agony, their limbs broken and misshap-
en, their torsos gaping wide, exposing impossible organs. Behind her, hovering
over her, the clacking of giant claws, a geiger-counter morse code, telling her to
surrender, to give in as her pack did.
She snapped her eyes open, roaring. She was instantly in battle form, a giant,
bipedal wolfen shape with muscular arms and stout legs, claws popping out of her
fingers. Her head shot around, sniffing, her eyes locking onto the two spirits press-
ing up against the elevator door. In an instant she was again in human form, sliding
back down to the floor, sobbing, her animalistic mien banished.
“I’m so sorry, Unicorn,” she whispered. “You chose the wrong child. This
penance… it’s too much.” She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Her shoul-
ders relaxed. She opened her eyes and looked at the two cowering spirits, her face
softening. “Oh, would you look at me? Threatening two good friends. What an
ungrateful wretch I am.” She stretched out her hand to the badger. “I’m not like
most garou. I’m a Child of Gaia. I don’t bite.”
Grumblepaw edged forward, rubbing his cheek against her open hand, wary.
One-Song smiled. “If you’d seen what I saw, you might have snapped, too.”
The two spirits looked at one another and then back at One-Song, waiting.
The elevator shook and stopped. The door slid open. One-Song stood up, lean-
ing heavily on her staff, and stepped out of the car. “Come on, then. I’ll tell you
about it. But not here.”
Tumbler and Grumblepaw slunk from the elevator car, ears and noses twitch-
ing for signs of enemies. Nothing moved but them.
One-Song led the way up the staircase and out the door, back into the wide
meadow. She marched away from the hoop, which had grown dimmer, as if it was
cooling down, the light dissipating like spent heat.
Chapter Three 23
Once well away from the hoop, One-Song stopped and looked down at the
spirits. “That thing — that particle accelerator — is hosting one of the nastiest spir-
its of all. I ain’t going to say its name, not here. But it does one thing and it does it
well — it tears reality to shreds and puts it back together all wrong.”
Grumblepaw harrumphed. “Everything seems the same to me.”
“That’s ’cause it ain’t hatched yet. It’s incubating. Soaking up all those phys-
ics, that quantum energy. Those humans have no goddamn clue what that stuff
really does. Hell, I don’t know if anybody does.”
Tumbler pranced in a circle. “An egg? Let’s eat it! Eggs are delicious!”
“This is a Wyrm egg, you fool!” One-Song said. “Ain’t none of us strong
enough to crack it on our own. Maybe if there were more of us, some powerful
ahrouns. A lone theurge like me ain’t much good here.”
Tumbler swatted her tail at invisible enemies. “Then we will gather garou! We
will bring an army!”
One-Song nodded. “Now you’re talking. We’ll let folks know about it. Now,
you coming? Or do I drop you off back where I found you?”
Grumblepaw and Tumbler clambered closely to her legs. The badger stood on
his hind legs, his paws reaching up to her thighs. “You can’t leave us! We’re part of
this! The Unicorn appeared to us, too!”
One-Song leaned down and rubbed her hands in the two spirits’ fur. “I won’t
leave you unless you want me to. You’re right about Unicorn. She chose you for
this mission as much as me. I guess we all got to see this through together.”
“Then where are we going?” Tumbler cried, weaving in and out of One-Song’s
legs.
One-Song stood up full, both hands on her staff. “Home. We’re going to my
sept, my caern. They don’t much respect me anymore, and that’s as it should be, but
I don’t know where else to turn. We’ll tell them about what we’ve seen, and then
leave it to them to gain the glory.”
She tapped her staff on the ground and swiped her right hand in a wide circle,
as if smudging a windshield. Behind her fingers, a faint light trailed. As she repeat-
ed the circle, the impressions in the air grew brighter, until a third and final sweep
opened a hole in the air before her, a tunnel of silvered moonlight.
Tumbler leaped into the air, somersaulting in imitation of One-Song’s ges-
tures. “A moon bridge! A moon bridge!”
“Follow close, spirits,” One-Song said, as she stepped into the moonglow tun-
nel, “we’ve got some walking to do.”
The fox leapt beside her, keeping pace, while the badger waddled quickly
behind.
Once they were all on the silvery path, the hole in the air closed, leaving a
silent, empty field behind.

Chapter
Four
Lord Albrecht scowled and shifted in his seat, the oak bench groaning under
his fidgeting. Pearl River, sitting next to him on the long bench, coughed a warning
at him but did not look away from the rite her sept was performing by the lakeside.
Albrecht forced a smile and a deep breath, and nodded at the heads that were turned
toward him. Most of them were frowning, but they now turned back to watch the
midnight proceedings.
He hated this sort of stuff, the long, boring ceremonial rites of other septs.
Dancing in the face of danger. But as the leader of the region’s Silver Fangs, he
couldn’t very well refuse the invitation without bruising some egos and despite
their image to the contrary, the Children of Gaia, in Albrecht’s experience, had
quite well-developed egos.
So he sat on the ancient bench between the sept’s two leaders, Pearl River and
True Silverheels, flanked on either side by the caern’s Black Fury representatives,
led by the venerable elder, Alani Astarte. Albrecht’s tall figure presented a contrast
to the women, although the blond True Silverheels, the only other male on the
bench, shared Albrecht’s height and came close to his build. He was the sept’s war
chief, although his executive duties were to enact the decisions of the sept’s peace
chief, the olive-skinned Pearl River.
The Silver Fangs did not go in for such divided leadership. Too much delib-
eration and “sharing.” Their tradition demanded strong, singular leadership from
the alpha most fit by blood right to rule. While Albrecht was certainly among the
forefront of the modern movement to question and criticize this age-old, genetic
obsession among his kind, he knew he couldn’t overturn millennia of tradition
overnight. Besides, he hated being questioned, and so found the tradition rather
helpful now that he had ascended to his grandfather’s high estate.
The downside of such an estate, however, was state affairs, such as this cere-
monial rite among the garou of the Finger Lakes Protectorate of New York State.
The Hand of Gaia sept was composed mainly of Children of Gaia and Black Furies,
although they hosted quite a few multi-tribal packs and had become experts at ac-
commodating the ways of others and easing tensions between them.
Chapter Four 25
Tonight’s rite was a cleansing of the caern, a sacred duty too often overlooked
in these hectic times. Done properly, it could often require the closing of the caern
to outside traffic, forcing its participants to shut out the outside world for days. This
rite was being done properly. Albrecht was here to stay for at least two more days.
Alani Astarte, the old black woman who had become quite an underground
icon during the civil rights era, had insisted that participants and visitors arrive
by material means, which meant that the sept was refusing to open moon bridges
into the caern. Their security was at an all-time high, with even newly ranked cubs
brought in from allied septs to patrol the perimeter and to subtly guide any humans
away from the area. Despite the Finger Lakes attracting a good amount of tourists,
the sept had deep connections to the human community and practically owned the
national park’s rangers, so it wasn’t hard to temporarily close travel to those por-
tions of the park that surrounded the caern.
Albrecht had ridden in by car, his old SUV. Two Silver Fang guards accom-
panied him – Greatheart Gulyas and Thomas Cordain – but his own packmates
couldn’t make the trip. Mari Cabrah, despite her Black Fury heritage, which would
have come in handy to Albrecht, was involved in Pennsylvania for a campaign
against something called fracking, a new scheme oil companies had come up with
to squeeze oil from the ground. Evan Heals-the-Past was in the Catskills, study-
ing under Antonine Teardrop, the garou mystic. Albrecht particularly missed Evan,
since he was a philodox, born under the diplomat’s moon, the balance of light and
dark. He wasn’t a hot-head like Albrecht or Mari for that matter. Albrecht worried
that without him, he’d manage any number of ways to give offense without even
realizing it. Albrecht didn’t really give a damn as far as he was concerned, but as
far as his tribe was concerned, it was his job to watch his Ps and Qs.
Another faint cough from Pearl River jolted Albrecht back into the present
moment. He supposed he had to pay attention at some point, so he focused on
the rite participants and what they were doing. It had initially looked like some
sort of performance art dance to him, something well worth tuning out, but as he
watched he realized that each move was precisely choreographed to reflect some
sort of mystical meaning. Garou in various forms — human, wolf, brutish glabro,
prehistoric wolf hispo, and war form crinos — wove in and out in a spirograph,
their hands, paws, arms, and legs bending and joining one another, contorting into
strange patterns and then melting into new, equally strange shapes.
“Have you guessed it, yet?” Pearl River whispered, leaning into his ear.
“They’re reenacting the birth, life, and death cycle of the caern’s spirit protectors.
The allies of the great Life of the Nation spirit that overlooks this land — all of this
land, from ocean to ocean.”
Albrecht grunted with the effort he needed to avoid rolling his eyes. Of course.
Who wouldn’t have figured that? Great Luna on a pogo stick, what next? “I hadn’t
realized that. How… brilliant. I’m sure the spirits are pleased.”
Pearl River smiled, but Albrecht knew he hadn’t fooled her. Very few people
got anything past Pearl River. For all her talk of “balance” and “heart wisdom,”
she was one of the keenest observers Albrecht knew. She knew people — garou,

humans, animals, even spirits — and what made them tick. More than that, she had
an uncanny knack for knowing what they wanted, even when they didn’t. She’d
once said to him “Our identities are armor we wear to protect our wounds, even
long after they’re healed.” She had x-ray eyes, looking right through everyone’s
barriers and facades to their true selves. That greatly unnerved Albrecht. He didn’t
need anyone excavating his inner child.
The dancers suddenly dropped to the ground where they were standing, like
marionettes with cut strings. The audience howled in appreciation. Pearl River and
True Silverheels rose to their feet and clapped.
“Thank you, my friends,” Pearl River said as the rite participants began to
stand up again, their ordeal now over. “Beautiful! We have seen where we come
from, where we are, and where we will all one day go. Tomorrow we will begin the
cleansing proper. Please get some rest. It will be a long weekend.”
Albrecht stood up, stretching his arms and shaking a kink out of his leg.
“Thanks for that. Not sure sitting down for two hours after a long car ride is what I
needed most, but the rite was quite… sincere.”
True Silverheels slapped Albrecht’s shoulder. “You did well, O Silver Fang
lord. Far better than I expected.” He fished his wallet out of his front pocket and
took out a twenty-dollar bill, which he then gave to Pearl River. She took it with a
wide smile.
“I believed in you, Albrecht,” she said as she pocketed the money, “even if
True did not.”
“I almost considered those little coughs and ahems of yours to be cheating,”
Silverheels said. “Otherwise, I doubt he would have made it through without
slumping off to sleep.”
“You guys are real comedians,” Albrecht said. “Let me know the next time
you’ve got a bet going on me. I want a chance to make some of that sweet dough
myself. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to return to my cabin, where I hear some
cold suds crying my name from their lonely ice box.”
“Oh, no,” Pearl said, frowning. “No hangovers. I need you alert. You have a
role to play tomorrow, when your klaive cuts away the foul aethers.”
“Relax, it takes more than two beers — let alone a six pack — to get anywhere
near to pounding my head. After all this playing nice at the opera, I need to kick
back for a bit. Ahrouns can’t be too tight, you know, just in case trouble shows.”
“Or too loose,” Silverheels said.
“Tell it to your yoga teacher. Good night, lady and gentleman.” Albrecht
turned and hopped over the bench and headed up the rise of the hill, toward the set
of cabins on the other side.
He relished the reprieve of the silent woods as he crested the hill, moving far-
ther away from the murmur and activity of the sept, as the sept mates came together
to congratulate one another on tonight’s rite. He wasn’t completely alone — garou
scouts patrolled the perimeter, far beyond this camp — but he at least had some
time to himself now.
Chapter Four 27
Between one step and the next, he shifted from his native homid form to the
sleek, four-legged lupus wolf, his brilliant white fur a flash of moonlight as he dart-
ed forward into the trees. He bounded over fallen limbs and mossy rocks, exulting
in the feel of his paws bouncing off the earth, the hot prickling of his blood pump-
ing, the scent of pine sap, lake water, and — more distant — deer musk.
He shot down and up tree-laden rises, not even sure where he was going, just
following the need to move, to run. He salivated at the deer smell, but resisted the
urge to hunt — his hosts had not extended that right. This was their land, their ani-
mal neighbors. He knew many of the Children of Gaia affected vegetarianism, but
even they hunted to control the herd, and to indulge the ancient ways. Garou were
both human and wolf, and both sides had to be honored. But they did so following
their own codes and it wasn’t Albrecht’s place to disrupt their caern cleansing by
bringing down even a single deer.
Besides, he wasn’t hungry for food. He just wanted release from the excessive
formality of a garou rite.
He slowed and panted, circling around a grove of hardwoods, catching his
breath. Keep going or go back? The night is still young. He shifted back to his hu-
man shape, rolling his right arm like a guitar hero until he heard the satisfying pop
as it settled properly into its shoulder socket. An old wound poorly healed, barely
worthy of mention as a heralded battle scar, but one of the many minor quirks he
had to live with as the years and their endless fights wore at him.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and sighed. He noticed a faint path wind-
ing through the woods, a hikers trail. Guess it’s time to turn to back. I did promise
myself a few beers, after all. He stepped onto the track and headed back in the
direction he’d come, when the scent hit him. Even with his human form’s weaker
olfactory gifts he could smell death.
He growled involuntarily, the low rumble escaping through his gritted teeth.
He reached over his shoulder, gripped the leather-wrapped handle of his grand
klaive, and swiftly drew the silver sword from its sheath.
He stepped forward lightly, sniffing. Exposed intestines. Fresh.
His eyes shapeshifted into wolf pupils, a hunter’s eyes. With his increased
acuity, he now saw the shape lying on the path ahead. Human, lying on its back,
its torso torn up, bleeding, shedding steam. Whatever was eating it, I interrupted.
Couldn’t have gone far.
He stepped closer, his eyes shining as they caught the moon. It was a park
ranger, obvious from the uniform. A male, perhaps mid-30s. Probably Kinfolk to
the sept, considering how close he was to the caern. He was on patrol, where it was
supposed to be safest.
A branch snapped behind Albrecht and he whirled, raising his klaive to impale
the oncoming shadow. It was heavy as it met the blade, but Albrecht deftly shift-
ed weight so that its momentum carried it past him rather than into him. He held
on tightly as the shape slid off the wet silver, thudding to the ground, unmoving.
He kept one eye on the dead thing while his other senses opened, searching for

anything that might have accompanied it. There was no sight, sound, or scent of
anything else alive nearby.
He poked the thing with the tip of his klaive. No motion. It was dead. He
slipped his steel-reinforced boot under it and flipped it over. It was a cougar. That
is, it had once been a cougar. It was now clearly oozing from corruption, the kind
that comes from permanent possession by a Bane, a Wyrm spirit. Its blood con-
gealed like taffy, and Albrecht could see maggots squirming in its wound, spilling
out as if freed from a prison. No way those things just appeared; they’ve been
festering inside for a damn long time. How the fuck did this thing get so close to
the caern?
Then the ranger stood up. The dead ranger whose guts now plopped to the
forest floor, unraveling from him like a bungie cord. He lunged at Albrecht but
tripped on his own slick colon, tumbling down onto his face with a loud crack, his
nose shattering.
Albrecht buried his klaive into the ranger’s still twitching skull and twisted
it, fracturing skull bones and pulverizing gray matter. The ranger stopped moving.
Albrecht stood still, listening, his nose twitching. There — faint, almost il-
lusory: the smell of burnt ozone. He crouched, instantly reshaping into the crinos
war-form, his massive size taller than his human form even on bent legs. He stifled
a growl and waited, eyes darting, ears twitching, snout raising, nostrils wide.
In the air to his left, about chest height, a glowing crack appeared. It was as if
the air was a two-dimensional surface, its face towards Albrecht. It cracked across
that face, like a pane of glass that someone had punched from the other side. A
fierce, bright light shone from that other side, escaping through the brittle lines
radiating from the point of impact. A red, throbbing light.
Albrecht backed away, raising his klaive between him and the red crack. What
the fuck is this? That isn’t the Gauntlet. Something’s trying to pass through, but
pass through what? From where?
And then a voice spoke, from past the crack — not from inside it, but a few
yards distant from Albrecht, on the other side of the invisible plane that was being
shattered. It was a word Albrecht didn’t understand, some foreign command, an
imperative.
The pressure forcing the crack stopped and the bending surface snapped back
flat, the creases of the crack evening out, closing.
A man stepped out from the trees, his hands up toward Albrecht to show he
was unarmed. He approached the crack and ran his hands over it, smoothing it out.
As his palms rubbed the creases, they disappeared, until the red light went out, and
all signs of the solidified air — If that’s what it was, thought Albrecht — vanished.
The man turned to look at Albrecht and smiled. He spoke again, in his foreign
tongue, shrugging. Albrecht placed him about five-foot two, 120 pounds, mid-60s.
Graying hair on the sides, no hair on top, white beard, thick glasses. He wore a
poorly fitting suit, perhaps one he used to fill out better but which now hung too
loosely on him.
Chapter Four 29
“I am sorry you saw that,” he said, in heavily accented English. Russian?
Czech? “My experiment is testing his cage. It’s much too soon to let him out,
though. And certainly not here! He misunderstands time and space, you see.”
Albrecht stood up to his full crinos height, scowling at the stranger. His words
came out strangled, forced through his crinos-form mouth. “Who the fuck are you,
pops? And what the fuck are you doing here?” He didn’t sense Wyrm sign from the
man, but the scent of the dead cougar and ranger was so ripe, it was hard to tell.
“I am Basil Czajka, but that is not important. We won’t be getting to know
each other.” He lowered one of his arms swiftly and bullets ripped out of the trees
and into Albrecht from too many directions.
He howled in pain as silver slugs slammed into him. His armor only blocked
a handful of shots, leaving far too many to fly into him, knocking him back and
covering him in his own blood. His head shot back and he roared. His body began
to shimmer, a misty glow wrapping him in lunar armor. Bullets bounced off his
chest as he glared at the man in the suit, teeth slavering in his widening jaw as his
fur stiffened, a molten liquid spreading across his body, each bristle sharpening
into metal.
The man’s eyes widened, clearly shocked that the garou was still standing. It
was his turn to step back, away from the gleaming wolf who quivered in barely
suppressed rage. Albrecht’s entire body was now encased in silver. The bullets that
broke through the shimmering moon armor barely phased him, as his regenerative
powers took over, treating the silver slugs as mere insect bites.
The line of attackers could be seen now, slipping out from behind the trees, still
disbelieving their weapons’ impotence. They wore combat fatigues and night-vi-
sion goggles, and as they advanced, they each began to shut off the belt-mounted
devices that had cloaked them from Albrecht’s keen senses, baffling vision and
smell.
From one eye blink to the next, Albrecht was on them, covering the distance
between them with impossible speed, his klaive mowing through three of them
with one swing, bisecting one from his lower torso and amputating arms from the
others.
They were clearly trained and equipped to fight garou, but Albrecht’s sudden
speed and fury after absorbing a barrage of silver broke their training and resolve.
They scattered, retreating in three directions, yelling in fear.
Albrecht spun around to deal with the suited man. Czajka backed away, wide-
eyed, but with a trace of awe. He then melted away, dissolving into dust. Albrecht
roared in anger, swiping his klaive through the scattered motes. Bastard stepped
sideways! Who the fuck is he?!
He spun around again and started to bound after one of the soldiers, but stopped,
shaking his head. No. They’ll get away. Time for reinforcements. He snapped back
his head and let out a huge howl. It reverberated through the woods and was im-
mediately answered by other howls, some near, some more distant. Howls from all
directions, surrounding the fleeing assault team.

Idiots. Invading a fully active caern. What were you thinking?
Albrecht took off on all fours after the nearest combatant and closed with him
fast, his jaws shredding the man’s left hamstring. He went down screaming, his
hand fumbling with a grenade strapped to his chest. Albrecht casually swiped it
with a claw, detaching it and sending it flying away, its pin still attached. His other
hand swept across the man’s throat, opening it up and sending an arterial spray in
a wide arc across the undergrowth.
He leaped onward, barreling after the next nearest target, who glanced over
his shoulder to see the massive silver garou closing fast. He spun around, still run-
ning, and shakily brought his weapon up, the flares of the muzzle flash strobing his
view of Albrecht. Albrecht shifted forms to the dire wolf hispo, his lowered profile
avoiding most of the bullets, and leaped onto the man’s chest, his claws contracting
and tearing gouges in his flesh, the man’s rib bones cracking as his sternum col-
lapsed under the weight.
Without losing any momentum, Albrecht bounded forward, his four legs
pounding after a cluster of soldiers. As he gained on them, their forms shimmered
and disappeared, their scent also vanishing, as if they had stepped sideways into
the Umbra. Albrecht sped up, his eyes watching the undergrowth snap and sway as
the invisible soldiers continued to run forward. They weren’t gone, just concealed
by their tech. But the tech couldn’t conceal the plants they disturbed in their mad
flight.
Albrecht vaulted into the air and slammed against the invisible bodies, knock-
ing them down like bowling pins. He snapped his teeth in all directions and hit
prey, his metallic fangs tearing out strips of bloody flesh, which became visible as
soon as they were ripped from their owners’ bodies.
Albrecht felt a sharp pain in his leg and kicked out. His paw connected with a
sharp snap and thump. A man-shaped depression appeared in the grass, the invisi-
ble body dropping dead with a broken neck.
Spinning in place, his rear claws kicked out and connected with the other sol-
diers, who were now certainly a bloody mess. Albrecht stretched out his snout
and began to snap at the still-invisible dead body, searching for the belt-mounted
mechanism. His teeth vibrated as they closed down on it, too hard to snap unless he
applied massive pressure. He shifted into glabro form, his brutish hands fumbling
with the device. He found a dial and turned it. The dead body shimmered into view,
along with the coppery smell of spilled blood.
Albrecht dropped the device, spun around again, and reached out, grasping for
the two other soldiers. Judging by the animated jiggling of the undergrowth, one
of them was on his feet and running away, but the other’s arm fell into Albrecht’s
questing hand. He tightened his grip, feeling the soldier’s hands trying to pry it
loose, and with his other hand reached for where he guessed the belt device would
be. As soon as he brushed against it, he yanked it away, tearing it from the belt. The
soldier shimmered into view, his eyes wide with terror, his hands desperately trying
to break Albrecht’s iron grip on his arm.
Chapter Four 31
“Lucky you,” Albrecht growled. “You get to live.” He smashed his free fist
into the man’s face, crushing his nose and sending him into the oblivion of uncon-
sciousness.
Dropping the limp soldier, he rose up on his two feet and surveyed the imme-
diate area. Shapes were appearing between the trees as garou answered his sum-
mons. They formed a cordon in all directions.
“First Team soldiers!” he yelled to his reinforcements. “They’ve got silver
bullets and some kind of invisibility tech. Cloaks sight, sound, and smell. Watch
for movement in the undergrowth.”
He noted two areas where the grass had been swaying and then stopped. The
First Team soldiers had frozen in place, hoping not to be noticed.
“Hey, idiots! You can’t possibly get out of this. Turn off your tech and we let
you live. Five seconds. Five… four… three…”
The seven remaining soldiers all shimmered into view, clustered into three
groups scattered to Albrecht’s left and right. Their hands were raised in surrender,
sweat beading down their faces, teeth chattering.
Garou moved forward and surrounded them, growling. Wolves, humans, cave-
man shapes — all sizes of werewolf.
“It’s the boxes on their belts,” Albrecht said. “Get those off of them before
they decide to get stupid again.”
He reached down and pulled up the unconscious guard and slung him over his
shoulder. He scanned the crowd of garou until he recognized someone. “You —
Sky-Sips-the-Spring-Waters, right? How do we get back to the caern?”
The young theurge, in human form, a young woman with hair tied back into a
ponytail, shook her head. “We can’t take them to the caern center. We’ve just spent
days prepping for the cleansing. They’ll taint everything!”
“Right, right. Okay then, where do you take malcontents when something like
this happens?”
“Kula’s cabin.”
Albrecht nodded. Of course. Kula Wiseblood, the Black Fury ahroun and leg-
endary Wyrm slayer. “All right. Everybody grab a soldier. Sky, lead the way.”
Sky-Sips-the-Spring-Waters nodded and headed through the woods, her sept
mates following, surrounding the soldiers and force-marching them ahead.
Albrecht took one more look around the area. He gestured toward a lupus
who was sniffing at one of the fallen soldier’s bodies. “You should stay here, keep
watch. Make sure nobody tries to come back for the bodies. Call for some back
up.”
The wolf howled, and two of the garou who had been following the others
broke away and spread out, on guard.
“Hey, make sure you watch for any movement at all. Most of your senses are
useless against these boxes. And do not hesitate to call for help. The best way to be
a hero in this situation is to alert everybody else. Got it?”

The garou nodded, although they were clearly annoyed at the lecture. Albrecht
didn’t care. He shifted the dead weight of the limp soldier on his shoulders and
followed the trail made by the departing garou toward Kula Wiseblood’s place.
The battle was over. The silver sheen on his skin melted away, as did the misty
lunar glow. His armoring gifts were no longer needed. He felt the sudden lurch of
exhaustion as the adrenaline surge wore away. Blood still leaked from his bullet
wounds. There were almost certainly silver slugs still deep in his flesh. He’d need
a healer. They wouldn’t close up on their own, not like most of the battle wounds
the garou typically suffered.
But he didn’t care about all that at the moment. He wasn’t going to die from
his wounds. He just had to endure them for a little while longer. What worried
him wasn’t shredded flesh but cracked air. The bizarre cracks that had appeared,
punched into reality by something on the other side. He’d seen a lot of the spirit
world and the ways the Gauntlet between worlds could stretch and snap, but he’d
never seen that. He couldn’t shake the sense that it wasn’t coming from the spirit
world, but from someplace else.
And he had no idea where that place might be, what it might be, or what was
trying to bust free from it.
Chapter Four 33
Chapter
Five
Albrecht paced in a circle outside of Kula’s cabin, grinding his teeth. It wasn’t
that the screams coming from inside the cabin bothered him — those were un-
avoidable unpleasantries, as far as he was concerned — it was that he was impa-
tient. Kula’s interrogation was taking too long for his taste.
The loose gathering of curious garou parted as Pearl River came storming out
of the woods, followed by Alani Astarte, moving slower as she hobbled on her
cane. Albrecht could feel Pearl’s seething anger from where he stood and wasn’t
surprised.
“Stand aside!” Pearl yelled as she vaulted up the steps to the cabin porch.
Three Black Fury guards stood blocking the way to the door. They didn’t yield an
inch. These were pierced, inked, and leathered-up biker women — Kula’s crew.
They were among the fiercest, most implacable Wyrm fighters the garou could pro-
duce, and they didn’t take orders from a Child of Gaia, even if she was the leader
of the sept.
The Furies’ unyielding stances and withering gazes brought Pearl up short,
shocked and hurt. “How dare you! You are in the Hand of Gaia caern bawn — you
will yield to her leader!”
Alani Astarte, the alpha elder of the sept’s Black Fury contingent, limped over
and stood at the base of the steps. Her low growl drew the attention of the guards.
“You stand aside, like the lady says,” Alani hissed, gripping the head of her
cane so tight the tension in her arm set the stick vibrating.
The guards looked at one another, wondering what to do. They were Kula’s
pack mates, sworn to her. But Alani was the elder of their tribe. To ignore a direct
order from her would lead to a mess of fights, possibly finally sparking that lead-
ership challenge Kula had long sought. Kula had danced around that challenge for
years now, out of respect for Alani, but the longer Alani refused to step down, the
nearer that time would come. But that was Kula’s choice to make, not theirs. The
guards relaxed their shoulders and each stepped aside.
Before Pearl could take one step up the stairs, the door opened and Kula saun-
tered out. In the heat of the confrontation, nobody had noticed that the screams
from within the cabin had stopped. Kula wore her glabro form, nearly seven feet
tall and brutish. The “Mr. Hyde” form of the garou, still human but far closer to ne-
anderthal than homo sapien. She was wiping blood from her sharpened fingernails
with an old rag and curled her lip at the sight of Alani at the bottom of the stairs.
Standing wide-legged on the top porch, blocking Pearl’s path, she shook her head
slowly. “You don’t want to go in there.”
Pearl clamped her fists, leaning forward. “You know our rules, Kula. We do
not torture. It is an offense to the Life of the Nation spirit that overlooks this caern.”
“I think the Life of the Nation has changed her mind,” Kula said, smirking.
“Judging by what her apes do these days, I think she’s just fine with it.”
Pearl growled, hair bursting from her skin, beginning the transformation into
the crinos battle form.
Albrecht marched over and up the lower steps, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Not here, Pearl. Not now.”
Pearl’s head snapped to look at Albrecht in surprise. She immediately shifted
back into homid form, an embarrassed look on her face. Albrecht didn’t know
whether it was because she prided herself on never giving in to her inner rage or
whether she was ashamed to lose control in front of an outsider.
Pearl turned around slowly and walked back down the steps, crossing her
arms. She seemed to be preparing to make a speech, which is the last thing Albrecht
needed at that moment.
“Kula,” Albrecht said, “what did they tell you? Who the fuck are they?”
Kula smiled and nodded appreciatively at Albrecht as she walked down the
stairs, and then turned to address the gathered garou, ignoring Pearl and Alani.
“They’re a Pentex First Team, although they’re new at it. Poor training. As-
signed to somebody named Basil Czajka, a big wig in their tech development di-
vision.”
“Yeah, that’s the guy!” Albrecht said. “The one in the suit. The one who plas-
tered over the rupture with his hands. Smarmy bastard.”
“He’s not Pentex. That is, he’s only recently been brought in, given a high-lev-
el position. He came from some outside organization. Those pikers in my cabin
weren’t cleared to know any more than that.”
“Damn right he’s not Pentex,” Kleon Winston said. Albrecht turned to see the
Glass Walker at the edge of the crowd. Medium height, medium build. Black, bald,
dressed like any techie hipster you’d run into in New York. He was holding one of
the First Team’s stealth boxes, with one of its sides removed, revealing a mess of
wires and diodes within. “But he might be even more dangerous.”
Pearl River raised her head. “Welcome, Kleon. I didn’t know you’d arrived
yet.”
“I just pulled in from the city when all this mess started to go down. Thanks for
the invite, Pearl. Not all the local septs think to involve the Glass Walkers in their
rites. It’s appreciated and won’t be forgotten.”
Chapter Five 35
“We’re all brothers and sisters under Gaia.” Pearl glanced back at Kula, and
then turned back to Kleon. “How do you know about his Czajka person, Kleon?”
“I got my Weaver spirits to dissect these boxes, and then I coordinated some
info gathering over the Weaver-net with my colleagues.” Kleon walked over to the
circle of elders and offered the box to Albrecht, who took it and peered at its ma-
terials. Steel casing, some sort of computer motherboard, and a fuck ton of wires.
“This thing?” Kleon said. “It’s not Pentex tech. It’s stolen — from a bad ass
group called Iteration X. The kind of bad asses you do not want to fuck with. From
what I can glean, this Czajka was one of them but he went AWOL, joined Pentex,
and took a lot of this kind of experimental candy with him.”
“Experimental?” Albrecht said. “Looks like it worked perfectly well to me.
Hides sight, sound, and smell.”
“Yeah, until it glitches. One of my associates on the Digital Web — don’t ask
— hacked a report about Czajka’s robbery. These things work by altering quantum
super-positioning. Its wearer is partially in a state of pure potentiality, which means
he’s partially not actual. Not real. The reason the tech hasn’t been widely released
even among Iteration X is because when it glitches, its wearer ceases to exist.
Schrodinger’s Cat becomes truly and actually dead.”
“Which means we can’t use this shit for ourselves.”
“Not unless you want to flirt with non-existence on a quantum level. But that’s not
all — there was an It-X A.P.B. out on Czajka, but somebody at a high level squashed
it. Maybe Pentex pulled some strings, I don’t know. The brief report I got referred to
Czajka’s last psych eval, where he was diagnosed with ‘urobic psychosis’.”
“Uro what?”
“It’s their way of saying he’s gone to the Wyrm. ’Subject exhibits a belief in a
world-devouring entity that takes the form of a cosmic serpent’, etc., etc.”
“Fuck Czajka,” Kula said. She reached out and knocked the stealth box from
Albrecht’s hands. “And fuck his tech. I didn’t even tell you guys where these fuck-
ing soldiers were from.”
“Just say it,” Alani said, weary with Kula’s grandstanding.
“Endron Oil Seneca Storage Facility,” Kula said, relishing the anguish that
appeared on Alani’s face.
“That’s not possible!” Pearl yelled. “How do we know you’re not just making
that up to press your agenda?”
“I don’t lie about anything involving the Wyrm!” Kula screamed, her claw
pointing at Pearl.
“Hold on!” Albrecht said, stepping between them, arms pressing them away
from each other. “What the hell is this Endron facility?”
Kula gestured to Pearl, palms up, inviting her to answer the question.
Pearl took a deep breath, eyes closed, clearly tamping down anger. “It’s one of
a series of natural gas storage centers here on the Finger Lakes. They’ve converted
some of the old salt mines to hold methane and liquefied petroleum gas.”

“Holy shit. You mean nearby to this caern?!”
“Yes, Albrecht, nearby to this caern.” Pearl’s eyes smoldered as she met his
shocked gaze. “But we’ve sent in patrols and infiltrators many times. There’s been
no trace of Wyrm taint and no trace of any First Teams.”
“Fools!” Kula said, throwing up her hands and walking back to her cabin.
“I’ve warned you over and over that they were going to try something there. We
should have hit those places long ago. We’ve let them act in secret all this time,
under our noses. And now they’re even corrupting the local wildlife! Or have you
forgotten about that cougar Albrecht took down? I will not wait for you to come to
consensus on this — my pack will hunt this down!”
Albrecht frowned, resisting the urge to yell at all of them. Nobody else spoke.
Everyone was lost in their own thoughts, a mix of shame, anger, and disbelief.
Neither Pearl or Alani resisted Kula’s claimed course of action. How could they?
Somebody had to track down the source of the corruption that had tainted that
cougar — And gaia knows what else, Albrecht thought — and there was no better
Wyrm foe in the caern than Kula.
“Okay,” Albrecht said, pacing in a wide circle. “Okay. Okay. We’ve got a ren-
egade — what? A mage?”
Kleon nodded and Alani groaned.
“He joins up with Pentex and they give him a First Team of his own. But
they’re newbies, untrained. He makes up for that with the tech he stole. These sol-
diers come from nearby, from some place none of you guys even knows about yet.”
“Albrecht,” Pearl said, looking more tired than Albrecht had ever seen her.
“We will find this place and we will end it. Be assured of that.”
“Sure. I get that,” Albrecht said, still pacing. “But I need to focus on this Cza-
jka guy for now. I’ll want to double-check this with those First Teamers, but my
guess is that they were only assigned to him recently, maybe in the last few days.
He’s not from around here, that I know.”
“You’re right,” Kleon said. “His report had him stationed in Europe.”
“So, he came here for some reason, and they assigned some of the local boys to
escort him. Now, we got to figure out what the hell that thing was, the thing trying
to bust through from… somewhere.”
“Uh,” Kleon said, looking around at everybody. “I’m lost. What are you
talking about? Remember, I only just got here an hour ago. I missed all the fun.”
Albrecht stopped his pacing. He looked at the Glass Walker. He’d worked with
him before and found him way more relatable than some of the other Glass Walk-
ers. That tribe was renowned for embracing technology and modern urbanism, both
anathema to the more old-school tribes.
“Okay, here’s the skinny. Just when I’m dealing with a Wyrm-mad cougar,
these… cracks… suddenly appear in the air. Kind of like something is about to
break the Gauntlet — literally — except it clearly wasn’t the Gauntlet. Didn’t feel
like it. Smell like it. Look like it. There was this weird light coming through the
cracks. It felt… wrong. Like if I’d looked at it too long I’d get a headache.”
Chapter Five 37
Kleon had an alarmed look on his face. He whipped out his PDA and started
typing. “Go on…”
“So this Basil Czajka guy appears and introduces himself. And then he uses
his hands to press the cracks back in, like he was putting the wall back together.
The wall of air.”
Kleon began to pace excitedly, more of a jig-jagging hop than Albrecht’s ear-
lier, more direct pacing. But Albrecht could see a trace of fear in the man’s eyes.
“Windowpanes. I call them windowpanes. There’ve been reports of them from all
over.” He typed furiously, bringing up a graphic on his PDA. He held it out to show
Albrecht and the others. It was a world map with certain spots marked with red
circles. “This is a map we’ve been working on, showing where other windowpanes
have been sighted.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Glass Walkers. And… others… on the Weaver web and the Digital Web. Al-
lies, Albrecht. These windowpanes aren’t just showing up in the material world.
They’ve been seen in the High Umbra and even in a crashed node of the Digital
Web.”
“Okay. So what are they?”
“I have no idea. They appear, for a few minutes at most, and then seal up.
Gone. Yours is the first instance I’ve heard where somebody was involved who
knew what they were. Czajka.”
“I know what they are,” a voice said, from outside the crowd of garou.
Albrecht looked over to see an old black woman, not as old as Alani, more fit,
but still silver-haired, her face lined with years and worry. She leaned on a shoul-
der-high staff strung with a hawk feather and bunch of trinkets. Her dark arms were
covered in tattoos, pictograms Albrecht didn’t recognize. She wore a batik dress
and there appeared to be two animals hiding in its folds by her ankles.
Alani gasped and held a hand to her throat, tears welling in her eyes. Pearl
River frowned, crossing her arms, her chin rising.
“One-Song,” Pearl said, flatly. “Why have you come back?”
“Because, dear Pearl,” One-Song said, “I came to warn you. Those ‘window-
panes’? Those cracks y’all are talking about? They’re cracks all right. Cracks in an
egg. And ain’t none of us is going to like what comes out of it.”

Chapter
Six
One-Song pressed forward through the crowd to stand before Pearl and Alani.
Two garou cubs — ahrouns, by the look of them — moved aside to let her through.
She didn’t recognize them. She didn’t recognize a lot of the gathered garou. It had
been too long since she’d been home.
Alani limped over and wrapped her arms around her. “Sister. I have missed
you.” They weren’t literally sisters; it was a term many within the sept used with
each other. The place had once been a feminist collective and it still displayed
many of its ’60s-era traditions. One-Song hugged Alani back, glad that the old
Black Fury had stepped over the gulf of their estrangement to greet her.
“How can we trust what you have to say, One-Song?” Pearl said, still frown-
ing, her body language guarded. “Your pack disappears and you refuse to tell us
what happened and then you leave, without even designating a successor lorekeep-
er. What are we to think? You might not smell of the Wyrm, but your actions are
suspect.”
“I know I don’t hold much cred here no more,” One-Song said, scanning the
faces of the elders. Kleon smiled at her, an old friend, but even he kept his distance,
watching her curiously. Lord Albrecht frowned at her, waiting for her next move.
She’d never actually met the Silver Fang before. She’d certainly heard of him —
everybody had — but their paths always seemed to somehow lead them in opposite
directions whenever he came to the caern. “I do, however, know what’s behind
those ‘windowpanes.’ Seen it with my own eyes, though I wish to Gaia I hadn’t.”
“This seems like quite a coincidence.” Pearl said. “Our caern is attacked, a
threat’s been hiding under our noses for Gaia knows how long, and then you arrive,
the Prodigal Daughter, to clear it all up for us.” She waved her hand as One-Song
opened her mouth to reply. “No — you don’t get to say another word until you tell
us what happened to your pack. Why haven’t their death songs been sung? Why
hasn’t their tale been told and entered into the annals of glory?”
Alani reached out and grasped One-Song’s hand, pressing it in support. “Sis-
ter, Pearl is right. We have a right to know. They were our sept mates. Our cubs
grown into warriors.”
Chapter Six 39
One-Song shut her eyes, unable to keep a tear from escaping down her cheek.
She nodded and met Pearl’s judging gaze. “All right. I knew I’d have to do this
when I came back. It’s not why I came back — that’d be the egg I mentioned. But
we’ll do this first. Clean the slate.” She looked around at the gathered garou, who
pressed in, curious, trying to hear her. “But not here. This isn’t for everybody. Not
yet.”
Pearl nodded, uncrossing her arms. “Okay, I understand. We’ll adjourn to the
council hall. You’ll get your say.” She turned to address the sept members. “Go
back to your duties. We’re all on heightened security now. The caern cleansing is
delayed. Until this crisis is over, we keep all our senses open for threats. Nobody
else comes in or out without direct approval from an elder. Now, go.”
The garou dispersed, although some of them clearly weren’t happy about it.
They wanted answers now, not later, filtered through whatever speech Pearl would
give them then. But they knew their duty, and most of them were Children of Gaia,
so they didn’t express their displeasure through conflict. They would bitch about it
all, certainly, but always respectfully.
Pearl stepped away from the elders and called out a number of garou from the
departing crowd, whispering instructions to them and pointing at Kula’s cabin. The
garou nodded and headed toward it, taking up places at the base of the steps. Pearl
came back to the elders and motioned them to follow her.
“What’s up with those guys?” Albrecht asked, looking back at the garou sur-
rounding the cabin.
“They’ll make sure Kula does not continue to torture the prisoners,” Pearl
said. “I will not have it here.”
“And if she does? You think they’re up to taking on her pack?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not the point. That they stand against it is what’s
important. If Kula presses this too far, the rest of the sept will turn against her.”
“This is not a good time to be drawing lines,” Alani said, her brow furrowed
with worry. “Kula grows more and more impatient. She thinks she deserves to lead
my tribe, as well as this sept. Her renown is undeniable, but her anger is too strong
for the Hand of Gaia. I fear the Life of the Nation spirit will not accept her. It has
already steered her away from the caern before on distant quests.”
“She’s always been a hot head,” One-Song said. She didn’t have much right to
speak about sept matters these days, but she’d spent years as their lorekeeper and
she just couldn’t keep quiet about one of the key divisions in the sept. Her voice
dropped as she continued speaking. “But you’re going to need her.”
“One-Song,” Pearl said, tight-lipped. “Please hold your tongue until we are in
council.”
One-Song nodded and sighed, but didn’t say anything further.
The elders moved slowly, to accommodate Alani’s limp. This allowed One-
Song’s spirit friends, Tumbler and Grumblepaw, to stay well under her skirt, with
only Tumber’s tail occasionally flipping out. One-Song watched as Albrecht stared
at her feet, clearly trying to figure out the spirit animals, but when he saw her

watching him, he grunted and looked away. Kleon winked at her. He was a fellow
theurge. He was used to having spirits swarm around him.
Of course, the animals hadn’t been silent the whole time. They’d complained
and tried to interject when Pearl spoke, each defending One-Song. But they spoke
in the spirit speech, which wasn’t always comprehensible to other garou. It sound-
ed like animal grunts and moans, punctuated by paw raising and dirt scratching.
But since they were hidden under her skirt, nobody had seen those gestures.
Kleon leaned over to her as they walked. “What’s up with the ‘Wind in the
Willows’ spirits? It’s kind of odd how twee that fox and badger are acting.”
One-Song smiled and pulled up her skirt a bit with her free hand as they
moved, showing Tumbler’s curious face.
“When are we going to be there?” the fox asked. “I’m tired of all this walk-
ing!”
“Soon, my friend,” One-Song said. “Soon.” She felt bad about the tireless
march she’d put them through, but they had chosen to follow her. She was glad
they had. Her heart was heavy with the revelation she’d seen. There were a number
of times on the journey that she felt like just giving up and curling into a ball, but
she didn’t want to do that in front of them. They’d kept her moving on.
She tapped Kleon on the wrist. “I’m glad you noticed their comic proclivities.
It is unusual. They don’t act like normal foxes or badgers. But that’s because…”
She looked around, embarrassed, and leaned closer, whispering. “…because Uni-
corn sent them to me.”
Kleon’s eyes widened. “The totem herself?”
One-Song nodded. “She knew. She knew how cussed lonely I was and so she
sent these two clowns to me. I didn’t get that at first, but they coaxed a story out of
me. The right story at the right time and Unicorn showed herself to me because of
it. She’s the one who led me to…. Well, there’ll be time for all that when we get to
the council.” She leaned back away from Kleon and looked at Pearl, who hadn’t
glanced back at One-Song even once during their walk.
One-Song and the Child of Gaia elder had once been tight friends. Pearl would
often ask One-Song for advice. She was the lorekeeper. It was her duty to keep the
knowledge of the past alive. One-Song was a theurge, a garou shaman, and the
Hand of Gaia caern was deeply tied to the ancient, inscrutable spirits of the land,
the Pure Ones who once kept the continent clean of the Wyrm. While tale-telling
was the gift of the galliards — those born under the gibbous moon — it was spirit
lore that was of chief importance here and so it was the theurge lorekeeper’s job to
hold the stories in mind and safeguard them for the next generation.
One-Song had failed at that. It was no surprise that one of Pearl’s chief complaints
against her had been that abdication. She should have chosen an apprentice and handed
on her lore, night by night, through many moons, before she gave up her post.
But how could she have continued on, in the face of what had happened? In
face of the pure horror she’d seen in her packmates’ eyes — in their bodies. She
shuddered and gripped her staff tighter, using the plodding rhythm of the elders’
Chapter Six 41
march to calm her. And now she was going to have to live through it again, to tell
the story. The story that could not be told.
Gaia help me. One-Song looked down in despair and saw Tumbler’s snout
peek from out her skirt, followed by her sparkling eyes. The fox whispered, so that
even Kleon, who knew the spirit speech, couldn’t hear her.
“I have to pee.”
One-Song burst out laughing. Pearl stopped and stared at her, aghast. How
could she laugh at a time like this? Even Alani frowned, like she’d caught a cub
with her hand in the candy jar.
Albrecht shook his head, smiling. “Thank god somebody cut through that.
Tension was driving me crazy. Hell, it’s always the end of the world. Why should
today be any different?”
One-Song covered her mouth, embarrassed. She shooed the fox back into hid-
ing with the butt of her staff, but kept smiling. I think I’m going to like this Silver
Fang, she thought.
• • •
The council lodge was modeled after the local Native American lodges of old.
It was somewhere near this place, under the influence of the caern and its spirit,
that Hiawatha had formed his confederacy, whose example then inspired Benjamin
Franklin and the Constitution of the United States. The Children of Gaia were con-
vinced that the caern spirit — the Life of the Nation, as it was called — was tuned
to the soul of the land and its people. What liberty they had, what equality and
happiness they pursued, was in some fashion vouchsafed by this spirit.
Unlike many caern spirits, nobody had directly talked to the Life of the Nation.
It had no form, no singular voice. Instead, it conveyed its desires in dreams and
visions, and in some mysterious fashion aided from afar these endeavors to form a
more perfect union.
Pearl took one of the two seats at the head of the lodge, gesturing for One-
Song to sit on one of the long benches that ran the length of the lodge. Alani sat
next to her, and Albrecht and Kleon sat across, on the far bench. A fire pit separated
them, but it was cold and would not be lit until the next council.
The seat next to Pearl remained empty. Seeing One-Song’s inquiring glance,
Pearl placed her hand on the seat. “True Silverheels is seeing to caern’s defense.
As our war chief, he will not join us until he is convinced there is no immediate
threat.” She crossed her legs and placed her hands in her lap. “Now, One-Song, you
must account for your pack and your long absence.”
The others all looked at One-Song, waiting. She settled onto the bench and
leaned her staff against it. Slowly, cautiously, Tumbler and Grumblepaw poked
their heads out from beneath her skirt and scuttled out, sniffing the air and looking
around them.
“Excuse my companions,” One-Song said. “They’re shy.”

“Materialized spirits, Albrecht,” Kleon said, watching the two creatures as
they hopped and waddled around the large room, poking their noses everywhere.
“I figured that,” Albrecht said, shrugging. “I knew they were acting kind of
weird. Not like real animals. One-Song is a theurge, right? Makes sense she’d have
some spirits hanging around.”
“Kleon, are they clean?” Alani said, looking guilty for asking it.
“Yeah, no Wyrm taint. I scanned them.” He patted his PDA, which One-Song
knew was a powerful fetish, full of technology spirits.
“I wouldn’t bring evil in here. Not anywhere,” One-Song said, standing up. “I
might as well just come out and say it in the straightest way I can. If I tell the whole
story, fleshing out every detail, well, I think I’d just about fall to pieces. I can barely
stand to put it into words as it is.” She noticed her hands were shaking as she began
to circle the ashen fire pit, and clasped them together to hide it.
“A while back, my pack set forth to track down and end a particularly vile
individual who called himself Akbright. He was a servant of the Defiler Wyrm,
that terrible spirit and mask of the Corrupter that had hidden in plain sight for so
long until the Order of the Rose finally exposed it and its servants. As you might
recall, they were involved in kidnapping and terrorizing children, opening them up
to Bane possession.”
“The Seventh Generation,” Alani hissed and spit. “They are broken and de-
stroyed. Kula herself ripped out the heart of their warrior caste’s leader.”
“Yes,” One-Song continued, “we found the same. Akbright was already dead,
eviscerated by the very Banes he commanded. But our hunt for those Banes led us
deep into the Umbra, to a realm we’d never before heard of. It was clearly a frag-
ment of Atrocity, the Far Calumn that leads to Malfeas, but it appeared as a twisted
mirror of a child’s playground. The details aren’t important — the realm no longer
exists. It was a product of the Banes, woven from the nightmares they had instilled
in all the children they had haunted and possessed. It was their place of power, so
naturally they fled there when they knew we hunted them.
“We entered the realm and stalked our prey, one by one taking them down.
What we had failed to realize was that each time we killed one of them, the rest
of them gained their dead brother’s power, so by the time we cornered the last of
them, it was insanely mighty, crackling with the stolen essence of all our kills.
“We were already wounded and tired by that point. Too few. We needed re-
inforcements. Retreat wasn’t an option. The Bane would escape to Gaia knows
where and begin its reign of terror again. We knew this might well be our last
battle, but like all garou, we welcomed that knowledge, knowing we were together.
We howled in grim solidarity and fell upon the thing.
“It tore us down. Bold Eyes was the first of us to fall, our ragabash, our jester. Our
soul. Breaks-the-Spine fell next. Our ahroun. Our mighty one. Bloodied and broken.”
One-Song sobbed and wrapped her arms about herself. Alani began to rise, to
go to her, but a gesture from Pearl stopped her. She sat back down, chin trembling.
Chapter Six 43
“The twins fell together. Thank Gaia for that. Robin and Roberta Hidalgo. Our
galliards. Our voice. Silenced.”
She went back to her place and sat down again, deflating. “Sees-the-Sun
begged me to run, to escape. Our philodox, our rock, had broken. The Bane was
like nothing we’d ever seen. It’s as if all the horror seeded by the Defiler Wyrm had
been harvested in this one vile spirit. It reached out with one of its seven limbs and
snapped Sees-the-Sun’s neck. Like that, I was alone.
“Even then, despairing and scared, I stood my ground. I gathered my power
and I prepared to hurt that thing before it ended me. I couldn’t end it, but I could
make it pay for what it’d done. It backed away. It didn’t come at me. It sat back and
watched, waiting. I marched forward, heedless of its caution.
“Something grabbed my leg, pulled me down. I looked. It was Sees-the-Sun.
Except it wasn’t. Not anymore. It was her body. It was even her mind — I could
see her in there, behind those eyes. But it wasn’t her soul. No, the Bane had taken
her. It had released one of its slain comrades — one of the ones we’d killed — back
into her body, animating it, making it its own.
“And then Bold Eyes rose up. And Breaks-the-Spine. Wobbly on unsure legs,
strings pulled by the Banes who’d been killed by the very claws they now con-
trolled. Then Robin and Roberta. All of them. My pack. Dearest hearts of my heart.
My enemies.”
Alani wrapped her arms around One-Song and held her. One-Song almost
broke, almost fell sobbing into her friend’s embrace. But she wasn’t done yet.
Pearl sat straight-backed, unmoving. But tears streamed from her eyes. Kleon
had his head in his hands, slowly shaking it as if to say ‘no, no.’
Albrecht sat leaning forward, his chin resting on a fist, elbow resting on his
knee. It was the same stance he took when he sat on his grandfather’s throne. His
eyes burned with suppressed fury, but his body didn’t move an inch.
One-Song stood again, needing to move, to circle. “Their bodies changed as I
watched, shifting into obscene forms, mockeries of our five shapes. They howled
and hooted at me, in familiar voices, braying their victory.
“And me? I raged. I flew into them like a storm. They shattered before me.
They were so sure they’d won. Only one more garou to take down, to corrupt. But
just as they had gained more power from each of them that had fallen, so had I. It
was as if all the rage of my brothers and sisters was in me. I was their claws, their
fangs, their steel sinews. All I knew was an endless howl and the feel of flesh part-
ing before my claws. I shifted forms madly, dodging their efforts to snatch me, as I
felled them — felled my packmates — one by one.”
One-Song shivered and then screamed, and vaulted across the room, instantly
in lupus form, her eyes shooting left and right, saliva flying from her wide-open
snout. She ran like a caged animal, desperately looking for an escape. She growled
and slavered at the others.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw fled under the bench beneath Kleon, curling up into
tight balls.

Albrecht rose up and tried to block One-Song’s mad run. “Jesus, she’s raging
out just telling the story!”
One-Song snapped her jaws at Albrecht and leaped away from him.
Pearl was also in lupus form, walking calmly toward the scared wolf. An aura
of serenity lapped from her in gentle waves, as she evoked a mystical teaching — a
gift — of her ancestors. As she approached, One-Song stilled, standing in place,
her wide eyes staring suspiciously at the approaching wolf. Her sides heaved, but
as Pearl came closer, speaking lowly in the garou tongue, she calmed, her eyes
growing heavy.
“You are home, Sister,” Pearl said. “Among your kind. The past is past. Now
is for the living.”
One-Song dropped to the floor, exhausted, her tongue hanging out. Pearl
nudged her neck with her snout, and licked her forehead. She shifted back to homid
form and wrapped the wolf in her arms, cradling her head on her shoulder.
One-Song let her. She lay in Pearl River’s arms and breathed and let go. It was
useless to run, to fight. The time for all that was done.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw crept from beneath the bench over to One-Song,
sinking their snouts into her fur.
She slowly slipped from Pearl’s hug and shifted back into human form, rub-
bing the fox’s and badger’s backs with her hands.
“Thank you, Sister,” she said, wiping away the saliva that had run down her
chin. She stood up again, straightening her skirt.
“So…. When the haze of rage left me,” she continued, “I stood in an empty
realm. Baneless. Garouless. All of the place’s features were gone, drained away
when the last of the Banes that had sustained them was destroyed. Only gray mist
remained.”
She walked over to the bench and sat back down, picking up her staff and
cradling it. “I limped away and walked and walked, beyond tired, until I wandered
into a glen somewhere. Then I slept for days. After that, I came here. I came home.
I gathered my things and I left.”
She looked fiercely at Pearl and then Alani, and then turned her righteous
gaze to Albrecht and Kleon. “I was damned if I was going to let my packmates be
remembered that way. They died, but goddamn it, nobody has the right to see them
as what they became. To judge them. To write them off as… as failing.”
She lowered her head and stopped speaking. The room fell silent.
Pearl, now back in her human form, walked wearily back to her seat, folding
herself back onto it with a pensive, far-off gaze, aimed at distant memories. She
lowered her head and placed her hands on her knees. “There will be a moot to hon-
or them. Their names will be sung and their deeds heralded. Bold Eye’s child will
be given a fetch to watch over him.”
One-Song looked at Pearl, then Alani, astonished. “A… child? I didn’t know.”
Chapter Six 45
“He impregnated his Kin girlfriend before you all left on your hunt. He never
knew. She had a boy. We all hope he will breed true.”
One-Song buried her face in her hands. “Oh, dear Gaia, how did it all go so
wrong?”
Albrecht, who had remained standing, watching respectfully, threw up his
hands. “It always goes wrong! I’m sorry for your loss, One-Song. All of your loss-
es,” he added, looking at Pearl and Alani. “But there isn’t a garou alive or dead who
hasn’t suffered through acres of shit. It’s not easy. It never is. I don’t blame you
for losing it. Hell, if that had happened to my pack? Well, I’d sure as shit become
a total wreck, too.”
He began pacing, a wolf in a cage. “We can’t let that slow us down, though.
We get passed it. Keep moving. Keep fighting. Do as much damage as we can.”
Pearl slowly shook her head. “Albrecht, you council the same answer the other
tribes always give: fight. Endless fighting. That is not our way. It should not be the
way for any of us. It isn’t working.”
“Look, I’m not saying we don’t mourn our dead, or step away every now and
then, like One-Song did. I’m saying we can’t get lost in this moping. One-Song,”
Albrecht said, turning toward the theurge, “you got over it. You came back. For a
reason. So, now that we’ve got all that other stuff out of the way: What the fucking
hell was that windowpane?”
“Albrecht, give her time,” Pearl said.
“No,” One-Song said, “he’s right. I came here for a reason. And it can’t wait
any longer. I told you those ‘cracks’ you saw were cracks in an egg. I know that
sounds ridiculous, but this egg isn’t just sitting in a hen house somewhere. It’s…”
she threw up her hands, trying to find the words to explain it. “It’s like it’s existing
in more than one place. And it’s starting to hatch.”
Kleon leaned forward, his discomfort at the recent baring of souls giving way
to his curiosity. “Hold on. What do you mean ‘more than one place’?”
“You’ve surely got better words for it than me. This is quantum physics kind
of stuff.”
“How do you know? What the hell is this egg?”
“I know ’cause I saw it. It’s hidden in the tube of a particle accelerator over in
Switzerland. It’s incubating in the bath of broken particles they keep throwing at
it. By ‘they,’ I mean humans, and they don’t know the egg is there. Hell, we didn’t
know. It’s hidden deep. I only found it because Unicorn wanted me to.”
“Unicorn?!” Pearl said, sitting up straight. “I think you’d better start at the
beginning.”
One-Song sighed and nodded. “I was wandering lost in the Umbra, far out.
Unicorn came to me and took me to the Penumbra around that particle accelerator.
I didn’t know what she wanted, but I knew I had to explore it. I encountered the
egg and got a vision of what it was — what it will be. I had time to think about it on
my way here — and thanks to you shutting down all moon bridges, I had to walk

farther than I thought. Had to come out all the way over in the Montezuma refuge
and hitch here. Wasn’t easy with a fox and badger tailing me.”
Tumbler and Grumblepaw peeked out from under the bench. She bent down
and scratched behind Tumbler’s ears and stroked Grumblepaw’s neck.
Pearl watched them, head cocked, paying full attention to them for the first
time. “They’re part of Unicorn’s brood.”
One-Song chuckled. “You picked up on that quicker than me. But yeah, they
are. She sent ’em to me.”
Tumbler frowned. “Why do you keep saying that? I just found you. Nobody
sent me!”
“And I bumped into you,” Grumblepaw said. “No totem told me to do that!”
Pearl smiled, and One-Song knew she had understood the spirits’ speech. Al-
brecht looked around quizzically. He knew the mewling animals were talking, but
he didn’t have the gift for understanding them.
“Well, as I was saying,” One-Song continued, as Tumbler leaped into her lap
and curled into a ball and Grumblepaw settled between her heels, “I had a lot of
time to think about it on the way here. You see, when I caught sight of that egg, it
was like I wasn’t just seeing it then, but seeing it as it was going to be some time
from now.”
“You saw its timeline,” Kleon said. “It’s still in a state of quantum uncertainty.
Its wave function hasn’t collapsed to a single, actual position. That is, it hasn’t
hatched yet.”
“What the fuck kind of language are you speaking?” Albrecht said, sitting
back down next to Kleon.
“Remember what I said about the stealth devices? The ones Czajka stole?
They work by manipulating quantum superpositioning.” He sighed, seeing the in-
comprehension on everybody’s faces. “It’s a state where something is pure poten-
tial. It could be anything — until it becomes actual. Then it can be only one thing.”
It was Kleon’s turn to stand up and he swept his arms out as he spoke. “What
I’m saying is that Czajka is clearly heavily involved in tech that operates at this
quantum level. He must be behind this egg somehow.” He stopped, looking at One-
Song. “Wait a minute. You haven’t told us what’s in the egg.”
One-Song sighed. “A nexus crawler.”
Albrecht grunted, unconsciously curling his lip to show his teeth. He instinc-
tively grasped his sheathed klaive’s hilt.
Kleon frowned. “That’s not good. Not combined with whatever that particle
accelerator is doing to it.”
“It’s supercharging it,” One-Song said. “Like out of a Godzilla movie. This
ain’t no regular nexus crawler. Hell, it’s not like any nexus crawler is what you’d
call regular, but this one is… well, bad. We know crawlers can warp reality, stretch
it like taffy and fuck things up. This one is going to undo everything.”
Chapter Six 47
“That sounds hyperbolic even for a nexus crawler,” Kleon said. “I’m not
downplaying the threat — we’ve got to act to stop this — but not every crisis is a
world-shattering moment.”
One-Song shook her head slowly, with the infinite patience of the school marm
dealing with a child’s misplaced beliefs. “You all know my name. Most of you
know how and I got it and why. It’s my one moment of grace in a life full of shit. I
heard the One Song. Her song. The song She sang to usher in the world as we know
it. It’s why She chose me to find this thing, because I’d recognize it for what it is.”
“I don’t understand,” Pearl said. “What does this vile creature of the Wyrm
have to do with Gaia’s Song of Creation?”
“‘Cause it’s humming the song backwards. It’s resonating at a frequency that’s
going to break reality the way an opera diva can break a glass. When it hatches and
comes out into the world, its keening wail is going to rewind the One Song, undo
it. It’s a song of unmaking.”
Nobody spoke. They all tried to digest what One-Song was saying.
“I’m telling you, I heard it,” One-Song said. “Oh, it was a cruel trick Unicorn
played on me. I thought I’d reclaimed the Song. My birthright. But that was only
so that I’d recognize its sick parody when I heard it.”
Kleon shook his head, his hands chopping the air. “No, it doesn’t make sense.
There’s a reason nexus crawlers are usually only effective in their local range.
Reality can be bent and broken, but only in small territories. The whole of it is too
large, too resilient. It resists too much sudden change to its laws. Just ask any mage
— magic isn’t easy, because reality resists being rewritten.”
“Except this one doesn’t exist in just one place. All those windowpanes? Those
are the places it’s going to be when it hatches — all at once. Sure, the world might
not end — but it’s going to be torn and tattered like a blanket that tried to smother
a tiger. Full of holes. Gaia knows what it’ll take with it.”
Kleon rubbed his forehead. “Good god. That’s what this Czajka is doing —
applying his quantum tech to the hatching of a non-local nexus crawler. There are
mages I know — they call themselves Virtual Adepts — that have a whole science
of this they call the Correspondence Point. They say that at the deepest level, all of
space is really just one point. This nexus crawler is an attempt to unmake as many
points in space as possible.”
“Unravel enough of ’em,” One-Song said, “and might be the whole thing starts
to come apart.”
“But it hasn’t hatched yet,” Albrecht said, his hand still clutching the handle
of his klaive. “You said the windowpanes were — what? Glimpses of the future,
where it’s starting to bust out of its shell?”
“I speculated,” Kleon said, shrugging. “I assumed, based on all the visuals
coming in from the sightings, and what One-Song said, that they’re ripples from
the future, from the moment the nexus crawler’s beak breaks through. Just as it’s in
more places than one, it’s in more times, too.”

“Well, hold on,” One-Song said. “Will be in more places. For now, it’s just in
one. The egg is in the particle accelerator.”
“So we get it before it hatches,” Albrecht said. “We smash the egg and slice up
the thing before it’s loose. How long do we have?”
One-Song shrugged. Kleon threw up his hands.
“Great,” Albrecht said. “Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow. Could be next
year. Just fucking great.”
The door to the council hall slammed open and Kula Wiseblood stormed in,
pointing at One-Song.
“You!” she hissed. “They were here for you!”
Pearl and Alani stood up, growling.
“Kula!” Pearl yelled. “This is a closed council!”
Kula marched up to One-Song, who simply sat with half-lidded eyes, uncon-
cerned with the warrior’s claw inches from her face. “Czajka and the First Team
were hunting you! They’ve been chasing you across Europe! What the hell do they
want with you?”
One-Song casually knocked aside Kula’s clawed finger with the tip of her
staff. “Child, they want me to teach the Wyrm how to sing.”
Chapter Six 49
Chapter
Seven
Albrecht seethed, his teeth grinding, his hand clutching and unclutching his
klaive. All this talk. Too much talk. And now Kula comes in picking a fight.
Kula recoiled at One-Song’s remark, growling, taking it as an admission of
guilt. Albrecht stood up, released his klaive hilt, and sauntered over to the two
garou.
“Kula, you’re missing the context here,” he said. “So let’s just chill.” Kula
remained in her leaning-in stance, ready to press the issue, but she nodded slightly
at Albrecht, conceding. Albrecht looked down at One-Song, who still sat unmoved
on the bench. “And One-Song, don’t be so damn cryptic at a time like this. What
the hell do you mean they want you to ‘teach it to sing’?”
“I mean just what I said,” One-Song replied, her gaze drifting out the now-
open door of the council lodge, to the nighttime clearing outside. “The baby nexus
crawler instinctually knows its own song of unmaking, but like all babies, it’s go-
ing to need practice to get it right.”
“Nexus crawler?!” Kula yelled. “What are you talking about?”
“Sit down and you might learn something, child.” One-Song waved her hand
like swatting a fly, dismissing the fuming, tattooed-and-pierced warrior standing
before her.
Kula’s eyes narrowed and she stood her ground, staring down the old Child of
Gaia theurge. She failed to notice that Alani had stood up and limped over until the
elder stepped between them.
“Sit down, Kula. Or leave the lodge,” Alani said, her eyes shifted to wolfen
pupils, code for We can do this in crinos next, if you’d prefer.
Kula barked, which was either a laugh or a concession — Albrecht wasn’t sure
— but she raised her palms in mock surrender and moved to take an empty place
on the bench across from One-Song.
Alani limped back to her seat, but Albrecht remained standing, a ward between
Kula and One-Song.

“As I was saying,” One-Song continued, “the baby — or monster, whichever
you want to call it — needs training. Its handler — that’d be Czajka, I guess; I ain’t
met him — thinks I can teach it, seeing as I know the One Song.”
“Sure,” Albrecht said. “They know it won’t have time to mature before we
take it down. They get one short window for it to do its damage, and they want it
to be perfect.”
“How do you know this, One-Song?” Kleon said, sitting back down, hands up
in an I-got-nothing gesture.
“It was all part of that vision I got when I found the egg. Well, when they
turned on that accelerator and bathed it with primal energy. I saw the crawler slic-
ing my head open, extracting the piece of me that knows the Song and eating it up.
Digesting it. Gaining my knowledge.”
“Jesus,” Albrecht said. “This just keeps not getting any better.” He walked to
the door and looked out on the wooded clearing, its open fire pit, and the garou
filling its crackling fire with fresh wood, waiting for the coming moot. We’ve got a
mess of garou from every protectorate in New York and it’s not going to be enough.
He turned around and walked toward the far end of the room, to where Pearl
sat. “Okay, we’ve got to make a battle plan. We can’t just sit here and talk all day.
Every second could lead to that thing hatching.”
“You said Czajka covered over the windowpane,” Kleon said, staring into his
PDA as he typed with both thumbs. “What if he’s delaying its hatching? Waiting
until they’ve got One-Song near?”
“Then she can’t get near!” Kula said. Albrecht knew she was a quick study.
She’d missed all the preamble about the egg, but had picked up the essentials any-
way. “We can’t let them get her.”
One-Song smiled at Kula. “Thank you for your concern. We agree on some-
thing. I have no intention of going back. I’m done. Out. This task falls on you
now.” She gestured at all of them in the room.
“You’re one of us,” Pearl said, shaking her head: No.
“Was one of you. Not anymore. Not after what I’ve done.” She looked at Kula.
“They’ll fill you in. You won’t like it.” She looked back at Pearl and Alani. “I’ve
done my part, coming here to warn all of you. I did my duty to Unicorn. I’m going
away again, deep into the shadows. They won’t find me.”
“You don’t know that,” Albrecht said. “They tracked you here. Who knows
what kind of tech they’ve got for finding you? I don’t know how they even knew
about you and your connection to the Song, but if they could figure that out, they
can probably figure out how to hunt you wherever you go.”
“Wait a minute,” Kleon said, looking up from his PDA. “They’ve seen the
future, too. That must be it. If One-Song got a vision of things to come, it makes
sense that this Czajka has also seen a glimpse. Maybe more than a glimpse.”
“He didn’t see me coming,” Albrecht said. “He expected me to be paste by
now, but all I got are scratches. So he doesn’t know everything.”
Chapter Seven 51
Pearl stood up and went over to Albrecht, who had paced near to her in his
deliberations. She had an apologetic look on her face, and placed her palms on two
of his bullet wounds. “Hold still. I should have tended to you first off.” She closed
her eyes and whispered something that Albrecht couldn’t make out, but he became
suffused with a profound relaxation, like a shot of heroin (he regretted that he knew
what that felt like). His wounds began to knit together, but not before two small
slugs of silver popped out and hit the floor with two soft clinks.
“I guess I needed that more than I was willing to admit,” he said, clutching
Pearl’s arm as the dizziness hit him. She helped him over to True Silverheel’s seat
and gently lowered him into it.
One-Song stood up and tapped the butt of her staff on the floor. “I’ve told you
all I know. It’s time for me to leave.”
“No,” Pearl said, taking her seat again. “We need you, lorekeeper. You must be
here to sing the dirges of your pack, of our fallen.”
One-Song’s shoulders sank. “I don’t deserve that. I killed them. Each and ev-
ery one. Me, a theurge. Maybe I could have exorcized one or two of them, and they
could have helped subdue the others, until we could get help. But I lost it instead.
Tore ’em all to shreds.”
“You saved them from corruption,” Alani said.
“I didn’t save anyone. And now I’m endangering you all. They’ll come back
for me. I can’t have anybody else die for me.” She spun on her heels and headed for
the door. The fox and badger spirits followed behind her, with the badger taking a
glance back at Albrecht, who wished he’d understood what the creature was trying
to tell him with that gesture.
“One-Song!” Pearl said, standing up. “Don’t walk away from me!” One-Song
stepped out through the door, ignoring the sept leader.
Albrecht put a hand on Pearl’s wrist, gently urging her to sit back down. “Let
her go for now, Pearl. Can’t you see she’s almost at a breaking point?”
Pearl sat, her mouth hanging in a silent, anguished cry.
“Don’t worry. She won’t be allowed to leave the caern boundary without
True’s permission. With the heightened security, nothing’s getting in or out. Let
her — and you — cool down. We’ve got a lot to process here.”
Pearl looked at him, one eye-brow raised. But she sat back and crossed her
legs again, waiting for him to continue.
Albrecht was proud of himself. Some of Evan’s philodox ways were finally
rubbing off on him. His packmate was even-keeled and was good at coordinating
around others’ passions. He would have handled this council a lot better, but Al-
brecht could borrow some of his words now and then.
But it didn’t change his own raging impatience, which he’d managed to tamp
down and cover up under the cover of calling for a battle plan. Plan? What plan?
We need to break into that place and break everything until we get that egg. That’s
the fucking plan.

“Kula,” he said, looking the Black Fury warrior in the eyes. “This kind of thing
is right up your alley. It’s a crash and smash. Are you and yours up for this?”
Kula sneered, but Albrecht could tell she was hiding a genuine smile under it.
“We were born for this, Silver Fang.” She stood up and bowed to Pearl. “With your
permission?”
Pearl closed her eyes and nodded. She knew Kula would do what she wanted
anyway.
Kula spun around and headed out the door. Alani shook her head, looking at
Pearl. “It’s coming soon.”
Pearl stared into the distance. “Everything was going so right just a few hours
ago.”
“Don’t kick yourself,” Albrecht said, his hand on her shoulder. “You’re their
leader, not their Mommy. Some things they’ve got to work out for themselves.”
He stood up, shaking his limbs, his balance restored. “We know what we’ve
got to do: take an army to Switzerland and make scrambled eggs. Send out a call to
battle. We’re going to need a lot of able-bodied garou — every auspice. We need
new moons to get us in there, crescent moons to find the damn egg, half moons to
maintain discipline, full moons to kick ass. And gibbous moons to take notes and
sing our glory when it’s all done.”
He marched toward the doors. “I’ve got calls to make. So do all of you. We
need to march out no later than tomorrow.” He stopped and turned around, pointing
at Pearl. “Open the moon bridges. Guard them, but let our army through. This caern
is now a staging ground for war.”
Alani groaned but didn’t argue. Pearl nodded, looking like she’d been punched
in the gut and had no fight left in her.
I know this has to hurt, Albrecht thought, turning one of the foremost peace
caerns into a military camp. But their tribe’s own totem led us here.
He walked out the lodge door and surveyed the garou around the clearing. Most
of them were young or old, with very few experienced packs in their vital prime
among them. And many were Children of Gaia to boot — sworn to find peaceful
solutions where possible. No strangers to a fight, but certainly not renowned for
producing the most hardened battle troops. Even the Black Furies among them
were used to more intimate conflicts and weren’t the type to take orders from some-
one like Albrecht. They’ll listen to Kula, at least.
“My lord?”
Albrecht turned to notice his tribemates, Greatheart Gulyas and Thomas Cor-
dain, approaching.
“Good to see you two,” Albrecht said. They were solid warriors. Not the best
— Albrecht had seen no need to bring his sept’s best to another sept’s cleansing
rite — but he was glad they were there. “I need you to call back home, sound the
alarm. We’re going to war.”
Chapter Seven 53
Greatheart nodded stoically, but Thomas couldn’t hide the surprise and anxiety
on his face.
“My lord,” he said, “who are we fighting?”
“A nexus crawler. Guarded by Pentex First Teams. Led by a tech-savvy mage.
On the other side of the world. I’ll fill everybody in on the details soon. Just get our
best and brightest here. The bridge will open for them.”
The two Silver Fang guards nodded and pulled out their cell phones. Albrecht
slapped Thomas on the back and moved away, fishing his own phone from his
pocket. He had to call Evan and Mari. Part of him didn’t want to. They were safer
being left behind. But they were his pack. He had no right to protect them that way.
Before he could look up their numbers in his quick dial list, a hand landed on
his arm. True Silverheels caught Albrecht’s eye and nodded toward the tree line.
Albrecht followed the Child of Gaia war chief to the edge of the clearing, away
from earshot of the other garou.
True had his arms crossed, his head tilted downward, pensive. “Albrecht, I
want to thank you for your help here. I’m sorry I couldn’t be at the council meeting.
Pearl filled me in by phone.”
“Understood,” Albrecht said. “Somebody’s got to manage things on the out-
side.”
“Yes. Manage things. That’s what I wanted to talk about. I realize this threat
extends well beyond this caern, and I have no illusions about my role in leading
it, but…”
“Uh huh. But what?” Albrecht crossed his own arms.
“I’m asking you to slow down, Albrecht. I know time is tight on this, but
squeezing everybody into a ball and throwing them at the problem isn’t a solution.
There are variables here we haven’t figured out yet.”
“Variables? It’s simple: A Wyrm creature that’s going to rip pieces of the world
to shreds is about to hatch and we’ve got to get it before it does. There are no vari-
ables!”
“Really? Where is it? Exactly? That particle accelerator is huge, Albrecht. It
stretches for miles. I know nothing about its geography. Do you?”
“That’s Kleon’s job. Maps and security systems.”
“With the speed you’re moving? You’re taking a risky situation and increasing
the risk factor by a hundred.”
“And so what the fuck do you want to do, True?” Albrecht said, pressing a
finger into the ahroun’s chest. True didn’t yield. “Have another meeting, where
everybody gets to bare their feelings about it?”
“Ask yourself why you’re leaping into this, Albrecht. You’re pissed. Angry.
And I’m not just talking the normal, background level of anger any garou has to
live with. Something’s working away at you, inside, and this current threat is an
excuse to avoid looking at it.”

Albrecht laughed. “Do you hear yourself, Dr. Phil? The question isn’t about
my anger — it’s about yours. Why the hell aren’t you getting worked up about
this?”
“We suffer an endless stream of threats. If it wasn’t this, it’d be something else
— a return of the Seventh Generation. Or a Pentex board member being elected
President. Any number of outrageous scenarios that always seem to come true.”
Albrecht frowned, glaring at True.
“This is personal for you,” True said. “Ask yourself why, Albrecht. And who
is going to get hurt by you not asking that question.”
True put a hand on Albrecht’s shoulder, but Albrecht shrugged it off. The Child
of Gaia nodded and walked back toward the clearing. “Think about it, Albrecht.”
Who the fuck does he think he is? Albrecht fumed. Asshole. Analyzing every-
body as a way to assert alpha dominance. He kicked a rock into another rock. He
leaned back against a pine tree and looked up at the sky, which was beginning to
brighten, the dark indigo of night giving way to the sea-blue before dawn.
No. Don’t let him get at you, Albrecht told himself. You need momentum now.
If you start doubting yourself, it’s over before it starts.
“No way we’re getting in there,” Kleon said, startling Albrecht. The Glass
Walker hadn’t even tried to approach quietly and still Albrecht hadn’t heard him.
See? Don’t get distracted. Albrecht stood up and headed back toward the clear-
ing, motioning Kleon to follow. “One-Song got in. So can we.”
“That’s just it,” Kleon said, waving his PDA at Albrecht. “The Super Proton
Synchrotron stretches for miles underground, and I don’t have the slightest idea
where One-Song found that egg. The Weaver-net has no clues. If she wasn’t a re-
spected elder here, I’d wonder if she hadn’t been hallucinating the whole thing, for
all the evidence I can uncover, even from spirit sources.”
Albrecht stopped and looked at Kleon. “We need her, don’t we? Shit. I
shouldn’t have let her walk off.”
“No, it diffused the situation. And she’s still in the bawn somewhere. Maybe
now she’s had some time…?”
“Yeah, I’ll find her. Convince her to come. If she won’t take one for the team,
surely she’ll do it for Unicorns and rainbows, right?”
“I wouldn’t be so deprecating,” Kleon said, frowning.
Albrecht nodded, knowing he’d stepped over a line. He knew intimately how
holy tribal totems were. At his own worst moment, rock bottom, his tribe’s totem,
Falcon, had pulled him from the brink and led him to redemption and a bond with
his future packmates. If Unicorn had seen fit to draw One-Song back into life, she
didn’t need Albrecht making cracks about it.
“Okay,” he said. “You do what you can to get some of your fellow New York-
ers here. I’ll sniff her out.” Without waiting for Kleon’s reply, he shifted into his
white-wolf form and widened his nostrils, casting about for One-Song’s scent. It
wasn’t easy picking up on it so near to the other garou, but he caught the pungent
Chapter Seven 55
smell of a badger, and then the softer, more skunky scent of a fox. One-Song’s
materialized spirits weren’t real animals, but their material bodies gave off similar
scents, which stood out at the edge of the clearing for being so incongruous with
the bustle of coming-and-going garou in human and wolf forms.
Albrecht trotted after the trail, following it into the pine woods. He could hear
the movement of patrolling garou and human Kinfolk on all sides, but they receded
as he moved deeper into the woods. The badger’s and fox’s scents led off the trails,
into brush. Once away from the well-maintained trails, Albrecht picked up One-
Song’s scent and followed it to a creek line.
He pricked his ears up. He couldn’t hear anyone from here, just the natural
sounds of birds and insects, coming awake as dawn’s fingers slowly crept through
the towering trees to the forest floor. The scent followed the creek line and then
stopped. Albrecht looked out over the slowly flowing creek to the other shore. No
footprints. Huh.
He circled the spot where the scent dead-ended, carefully filtering out scents
one by one. Fox. Badger. One-Song. Dried leaves. Mud. No hint as to where she
and her spirit companions had gone. There were faint footprints in the dirt, but no
indication of which direction their owners went.
Albrecht growled and paced. And then halted, eyes closed. Stupid. You’re such
a damn idiot. He shifted into human form and walked to the edge of the creek,
dropping to one knee. He stared at the water’s surface, bending his head to catch
it at just the right angle for the sunlight to sparkle over his reflection. And then he
stepped in. Not physically, but imaginatively, and by doing so his body shimmered
away, dissolving sideways.
He looked around at the Penumbral creek, the spirit-world version of the
stream, beside which he now kneeled on one bent knee. It looked nearly the same,
just lusher. The canopy was denser, the tree trunks thicker and closer together. The
proverbial forest where a squirrel could travel across states without setting foot on
the ground. The world as it once was, before humans whittled it down.
Albrecht listened and peered into the gloom. The sun did not rise here, and the
moon had not yet set. No sound or sight of his prey. He waited, wanting to be sure
there was nothing hiding nearby – another tainted cougar or the like – and then
shifted back to wolf form, dropping his snout to the ground.
There. All three of them. And…? Albrecht growled. The scent of rubber and
metal. First Team smell. He shifted to crinos battle form and drew his klaive, turn-
ing slowly in a circle, searching for the intruders.
He squinted and froze – movement, off to this left, ahead. On the ground.
Something in the dirt. He crouched and prepared to leap, raising his klaive.
A flat, squat, furred head popped out of a hole in the ground, its badger nose
sniffing at Albrecht. The spirit scurried from the hole and barked at Albrecht, scratch-
ing his paws on his boots, looking back the way he’d come and then up at Albrecht.
“I don’t know spirit speech, badger,” Albrecht said. “What? You want me to
look at the hole?”

The badger bared its teeth and ran back to the hole and then circled it, gestur-
ing with its nose towards empty air.
Albrecht approached, shaking his head. “Uh, I have no idea what you’re trying
to tell me. I don’t see anything there and I just came over from the material side, so
I know there’s nothing over there.”
The badger stood still, staring at Albrecht, snorting. It scratched a line with its
claws on the other side of the hole. It then leaped over the line and began to dig a
fresh hole. It backed out of the shallow depression and then pointed its snout at the
line drawn in the dirt.
“Are you trying to say ‘gauntlet’? The dividing line between the worlds?”
The badger nodded its head vigorously and pointed at the empty air.
“Wait… a windowpane? There was another windowpane there?”
The badger stood up and began furiously scratching at the air and to Albrecht’s
surprise, he saw a shimmering for a moment, a faint hint of a curtain.
“A pericarp!” He clutched his klaive tighter. There was a second gauntlet there,
hiding an Umbral realm in the midst of the Penumbra. A very rare phenomenon,
and not a natural one. Something Albrecht would have never figured out on his
own. Mari would have picked up on it immediately, he thought. And then groaned.
Shit. I forgot to call them. They’ve got no idea what’s going down.
These hidden realms didn’t just happen. Someone had to make them. If Pearl
or True had known this was here, surely they’d have set a guard nearby.
The badger began his frantic scratching again, trying to get into the invisible
realm.
“Okay,” Albrecht said. “Stay back. I’m going to try and step through that.”
The badger scuttled away, off to the side, pacing back and forth. Albrecht stepped
forward and pressed against the air where he had seen the curtain, using his klaive
to catch the faint light of the lowering moon and provide a shimmering reflection of
his own face. It felt like walking through a wall of wet cement but he felt it slowly
give way. And then, without warning, the resistance suddenly dissolved and his
momentum sent him tumbling to the ground.
Right at the feet of a skrag Bane.
The thickly carapaced, sharp-snouted creature snapped a lobster claw at Al-
brecht’s face but it jerked back at the last second, right before its pincers clacked
shut, thankfully on empty air rather than Albrecht’s nose.
“Control your beast!” a voice yelled. Czajka. Albrecht recognized him imme-
diately.
Albrecht could now see the chain around the skrag’s neck, held tightly by a
First Team soldier, some sort of creature handler. The skrag hissed and snapped its
beak at Albrecht, but it obeyed its handler.
“Don’t move, Silver Fang,” Cjazka said. “Or I will let you die.”
Albrecht remained motionless but moved his eyes around, trying to get a pic-
ture of the scene, supplementing his vision with smell. He caught pine scent to his
Chapter Seven 57
left, mixed with the strange, almost metallic yet watery smell he associated with
the dust of Umbral moon paths. One-Song. At least she’s alive.
Cjazka stood a few meters away, flanked by two First Team members. These
weren’t standard-issue grunts like the last ones. They wore exosuits of leather and
metal, a shimmering around them signaling some form of energy aura. Their arms
bristled with weaponry, ready to unlatch and deploy: guns, knives, needles drip-
ping with some sort of dark fluid.
The ground was metal, some sort of circular prefab dome habitat. The whole
thing was maybe 30 meters from edge to edge, the walls studded with monitor
screens and control displays bearing icons Albrecht didn’t recognize. The screens
revealed scenes from outside the habitat dome, in both the Penumbra and the ma-
terial world.
“You are more resourceful than I had counted on,” Czajka said, “but this is
most fortuitous. You can perhaps convince your fellow lycanthrope to cooperate.
Otherwise, I will kill you. Myself. Do not for a moment doubt that I can, garou.”
Albrecht opened his hands and let his klaive drop. He looked up from his place
on the ground. “Can I at least stand?” he growled from his crinos-form snout.
Cjazka winced, clearly from an aesthetic distaste of Albrecht’s speech. “You
can. And you will assume your breed form.”
Albrecht shrugged and shifted back to homid form. He sighed and stood up,
scowling at the skrag handler. “Good thing you kept your pet in check. I would
have had to slice it to ribbons.”
“Shut up, deviant!” the man said, grimacing. “I can chain you as easily as this
creature.”
“Enough,” Czajka said. “I hate dominance rituals. Now, as you can see, your
colleague is a guest of mine. Please join her.” He gestured toward One-Song, who
Albrecht could now see was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She didn’t have her
staff, and she shook her head at Albrecht.
“I guess I was wrong,” she said. “I didn’t get very far after all. I still wish you
hadn’t followed me.”
“And miss out on this? Not me, sister.” Albrecht walked over and sat down
next to her.
“You might as well know now that gifts don’t work in here,” she said. “Some
sort of spirit shield. No one gets in, no one gets out.”
“I got in.”
One-Song gave Albrecht a demeaning look. “He let you in.”
Albrecht looked at Czajka. “Why? How do you know I won’t tear this place
to pieces.”
“Because I’ve had many guests like you here before. I’ve studied your kind.
This is cutting-edge anti-reality-deviant technology. I bet you haven’t had many
encounters with enlightened scientists like me. You’re used to Pentex and its…
shall we say, creative… field operatives.”

“Those First Teamers you used were Pentex.”
“Yes, on loan. I’m working with them for now on a joint project. My own…
institution… has little vision when it comes to truly world-shattering experiments.”
“Iteration X, right? You went AWOL with some of their tech.”
Czajka’s eyes widened and he smiled. “My, you are informed. That is… dis-
turbing. But of no account. Let’s get back to the matter at hand. One-Song has
certain skills that I cannot replicate on my own, skills for which I need her full
cooperation. She has proved recalcitrant. When I saw you outside, I decided to see
if my torturing and killing you might change her mind.”
“I won’t do it,” One-Song said. She looked at Albrecht. “Sorry. I expect you
understand.”
Albrecht smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, I’d think less of
you if you gave in on my account.”
“If you cannot change her mind,” Czajka said, “then it will not be pleasant
for you, her, or any of the garou who are so stupidly ignorant as to miss an enemy
sitting in their midst.”
“Make up your mind,” One-Song said. “We’re either ‘informed’ or we’re ig-
norant. Which is it?”
“Far too informed about me, completely in the dark about my enlightened
technology. Both are true at once.”
“Well,” Albrecht said, “if gifts don’t work and stepping sideways is no escape,
then…”
Czajka waited, his eyebrows raised, for Albrecht to continue. But the Silver
Fang just sat there, his eyes half closed, his breathing regular.
And then he was up and chewing the face off of Czajka, his body snapping into
crinos form in mid-leap, his snarling howl echoing through the dome, his mind and
body completely and totally given in to rage, the bottomless anger at the base of
garou existence. His mad eyes rolled in all directions, taking in all his enemies, as
his teeth sank into Czajka’s head.
Czajka cursed and tumbled to the ground under Albrecht’s weight. Albrecht’s
teeth kept gnawing frantically at his face, but only one errant fang had managed to
draw blood. Czajka’s energy aura had protected him, but it was weakening before
the onslaught.
“Get him off me!” he yelled.
Chapter Seven 59
Chapter
Eight
When One-Song had left the council lodge, she had headed away from the
bustle of her fellow — former? — septmates. She sought a quiet glen where she
used to go to meditate, back when she was the lorekeeper of this place.
She had walked to the stream and stepped sideways with barely a conscious
thought about it, her mind returning over and over to her trauma in the Wyrm
realm. She was so absorbed that she completely failed to notice Czajka’s hidden
room, something that would never have gotten past her – an elder theurge – if she’d
been at all cognizant. The skrags and their handlers had her surrounded in the blink
of an eye and she was quickly ushered into the shuttered room.
They failed to notice that the badger and fox spirits were nowhere to be seen.
The badger had dug its way into a hole, covering even its scent from the skrags
through the smell of the dirt. The fox had disappeared from sight.
Inside the room, One-Song marveled at the technology. It was something like
a Quonset hut, an easily mobilized military outpost. While everybody at the caern
had been so worked up over the First Team attack, these men had been setting up
their stealth hidey-hole away from eyes, ears, and noses. The walls held banks of
monitors made of some sort of thin film, plugged into multiple, large canisters that
appeared to be both power sources and computers.
Czajka stood up from a stool positioned in front of a small, fold-down desk
with a keyboard. “Ah, our long-awaited guest. Please,” he gestured to a space on
the floor. “Sit.”
She shrugged and folded herself down into a cross-legged position on the met-
al-plated floor, adjusting her skirt around her. One of the skrag handlers snatched
her staff and handed it to Czajka. He held it with both hands, examining it like an
antiques appraiser, rolling it around to see all its carved glyphs.
“Your kind’s way with spirit tech is quite incredible,” he said, carefully lean-
ing the staff against the far wall from One-Song. “How you fit so many bound
spirits into a single stick is a trade secret I have yet to crack.”

“Is that what you’re here for?” One-Song said. “Corporate espionage? It ain’t
hard. There’s a simple little trick your ‘kind’ seem to never get the hang of: the
spirits have to want to do what you ask them to.”
Czajka smiled and nodded, sitting down again on his stool. “Yes, I admit that
eliciting these entities’ cooperation has not always proved easy. Of course, it’s eas-
ier with the urobic ones. But, as you’re aware, they do present problems of toxin
containment, both physical and mental.”
“If you mean that Wyrm Banes are fucking radioactive, then you got that
right.”
“I need your help, One-Song. And I think that, despite what you believe you
know about the situation, you will agree.”
One-Song snorted. “Oh, do tell. I’m sure you’ve been waiting to give your
speech for some time now.”
“No speech. No prepared words. Just simple logic. The entropic force you
call ‘the Wyrm’ possesses, contrary to the limited laws of science known to even
many in my former organization, a sort of personality. I concede with your religion
that dealing with it as a person rather than an impersonal force has proven to be
far more effective a tool. Perhaps it is like an artificial intelligence that has trained
itself to develop a persona, I don’t know. What is inarguable is that it bears no good
will to this world. Not as we know it.”
He leaned back on his stool and laced his fingers together. “It seeks to break
this world down into corruption. But what is rot and putrefaction except a neces-
sary stage for alchemical rebirth? I seek to hasten the end of this world so that we
might make a better one.”
One-Song shook her head. “Why does none of this surprise me?”
Czajka held up a hand, as if begging patience. “You have lost what is dearest to
you. As have I. My mother developed cancer. It was slow and painful and nothing
– nothing – my fellow enlightened scientists could do saved her. She fell victim to
the one fundamental of this world: decay. The way of all things.”
He stood up and walked over to One-Song, lowering himself on bended knees
to her level, meeting her gaze. “It doesn’t have to be this way. The world can be
unmade and rebuilt, this time without death.”
One-Song shook her head, her shoulders slumping. “You crazy motherfucker.
You’re just like all the other megalomaniacs, convinced they’ve got the wisdom
and power to fight what they don’t understand. I’m not even going to try lecturing
you on what death is and why it turns things over so new things can be born. You
are clearly beyond the listening stage.”
“The Wyrm is always delivering a new world-shattering threat that you garou
must then marshal all your forces to combat, yes?”
“Oh, like the one you’re protecting? The damn egg?”
“Yes. Exactly. I could not have created it on my own. I needed to ally with
Wyrm forces for it. You see, they specialize in apocalyptic threats. But not because
they will ever bring such a threat to pass. It’s how they control you.”
Chapter Eight 61
One-Song frowned. “They don’t. It doesn’t. It only controls those fools and
unfortunates who fall to its corruption.”
Czajka shook his finger slowly. “No. It uses these threats to keep you in mo-
tion, always moving, never able to slow down and deal with the real threat – your-
selves.”
One-Song couldn’t help looking surprised.
“You see it, yes? Its long campaign is not to end the world, but to prolong its
misery. Your misery. The endless misery of your kind, always fighting and failing,
crying for the fallen.”
Czajka stood up and walked back to stand before his keyboard. “If you want to
truly break the Wyrm’s power, you must break it. You must end the world.”
One-Song let out a breath, one she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Is that
what your egg is all about? A bomb meant to blow up the Wyrm?”
Czajka nodded. “Yes. Of sorts. I have used the Wyrm’s own tricks against
it. I placed the egg inside the particle accelerator. But I need you to hatch it. You
must sing the song, the one hidden deep inside your head. It will then, like a mirror
reflecting time, mimic your song in reverse, unraveling all of creation. At the last
possible nanosecond, before everything is rendered void, my final biospiritual-pro-
gramming will kick in and it will execute a new song, rebuilding the world. This
time without entropy. I won’t bore you with the physics, but entropy is only one of
the nine elementary processes in the universe. It will be replaced with one of my
own design.”
One of the skrags, chained on its leash, growled and took a step toward Czajka.
Its handler yanked on the leash, pulling it back. It snarled but sank to its belly on
the floor.
“I don’t think your pets like your plan,” One-Song said, shifting her cramping
legs and readjusting her skirt.
Czajka looked at the skrag handler. “Explain.”
The man shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. There’s no way it has any real compre-
hension of what you’re saying. It’s just not that intelligent.”
“Well, keep its leash tighter. Now,” he turned back to One-Song, “as to how
you will help me.”
“Uh huh, I was wondering when you’d get around to that.” She smiled, wait-
ing.
“They’re not dead, you know. Oh, their bodies are. But their souls are intact.”
One-Song swallowed, her heart beginning to race. “Who?”
“You know who I’m talking about. Your packmates. The Bane that rode their
bodies? It didn’t kill them. It couldn’t kill them, not if it meant to possess them. Its
particular powers required that it exchange their souls for part of its spirit. Their
souls still exist, in its grim realm, trapped there now that their bane captor is dead.
Trapped because you killed it.”

“You’re lying,” One-Song hissed, although she knew he wasn’t. “I would
have… I would have known somehow.”
“In your enraged state? Not likely. You are a formidable shaman, yes, but your
anger is your undoing, always. You missed the clues. I’ve researched this. My re-
cent alliance with Pentex comes with access to archives and…interviews…. The
Bane you fought was a spawn of the ‘Defiler Wyrm’, especially adept at hiding
itself even in plain sight. This one was called a ‘masquer,’ for its ability to present
multiple personas – and to possess many victims at once. I sent a spirit servitor to
its realm and verified that its captive souls — your packmates — still exist there. I
can show you how to get there.”
One-Song was silent, staring blankly at the floor.
“All you have to do,” continued Czajka, “is come with me while the egg hatch-
es. I suspect that you do not even need to sing the song for which you are named;
the hatchling will take it from you. I can’t guarantee that it won’t hurt, but I can
guarantee that you and your lost packmates will survive into the new world.”
One-Song shook her head. She looked up and met Czajka’s eyes. “No. I won’t.
It tears me up no end to say it, I abandoned my pack once. I… I can do it again. I
ain’t going to be your tuning fork.”
Czajka frowned. “I’m sorry that reason has failed and that you just don’t love
your pack enough.” One-Song growled, but Czajka kept talking. “What about
threats?” He pressed a button on his keyboard and then swiveled a monitor so that
One-Song could see it.
On the screen, Lord Albrecht and Grumblepaw were standing where she had
been when she’d stepped over, just outside the hidden room. Albrecht was clearly
trying to step sideways through the pericarp that protected the hut. He was a pow-
erful ahroun, but slipping through spirit matter was clearly not his forte. One-Song
felt sorry for him. He’d come looking for her and he was about to find something
even he couldn’t fight his way out of.
Czajka motioned to his men and they took defensive positions, standing be-
hind their leashed skrags, who were pointed at the spot where Albrecht was about
to step.
With all eyes on the immanent arrival, One-Song risked a glance at the wiring
underneath Czajka’s desk. A barely discernible shape hid in the shadows, its eyes
gleaming at One-Song. She raised a finger. Wait.
Albrecht fell into the room and began his sarcastic parley with Czajka. This
complicates things, One-Song sighed to herself. Now I have to rescue his ass, too.
At least he’ll provide a distraction. Which he did, when he raged out and flew into
Czajka.
One-Song knew she only had a few seconds to act before the skrags tore Al-
brecht to pieces. She knew Czajka would survive the attack – there was no way that
someone of his caliber didn’t have defenses – so the first priority was the goons.
She winked and Tumbler, hidden amidst the wiring under Czajka’s desk, bit
into the complicated tangle and severed it. Nobody had noticed the fox spirit hud-
Chapter Eight 63
dled under One-Song’s skirts, even after she’d darted out and over to the desk,
briefly capturing the attention of the skrag before disappearing from its senses. Her
bite sparked an electrical whine and then all the power went out, plunging the hut
into complete darkness.
One-Song had already slipped into her wolf form. In the darkness, her keen
lupine senses picked out the exact locations of Czajka and his team. She leaped
over the combatants, her jaws clamping down on her staff. She whirled around and
unleashed two of its bound spirits.
A sleek, thin, translucent white figure shot forth into the air, wings spreading.
The heron spirit flew in the face of one of the skrag handlers, its beak piercing the
man’s visor. He yelled and dropped his leash as his hands shot to his face, protect-
ing it.
On the ground, another ephemeral spirit slithered toward the second handler,
its coils growing as it went. The handler swung his baton but the giant Python slid
aside, its tail reaching around and snatching the handler by the ankle, hauling him
to the ground. He released his leash as he fought to keep the snake’s coils from
wrapping tighter.
Albrecht’s jaws broke through Cjazka’s protective magic and drew blood. The
man cried in pain and genuine shock. In an eye blink, he was gone. Albrecht thud-
ded to the floor as Czajka’s body disappeared from beneath him, wisps of dissipat-
ing mist the only sign he’d been there. The ahroun was still caught in his blind fury
and now screamed as the skrags pincers snapped at him. One of them clutched his
left hand, crunching bones as the grip tightened. The other snapped at his right side,
opening deep gashes, releasing gouts of blood and bile.
One-Song shifted into homid form, drawing back and letting loose a slow
breath, sweeping her hand in the air across her view of the skrags. As her hand
passed over the first skrag, it shuddered and began to unravel. Its carapace cracked,
its legs gave out, and it disintegrated with a look of surprise on its beaked face.
Surprise and, perhaps, relief. “Go home, tortured soul,” One-Song whispered as
she performed her mystic gift. “Reform away from here.”
Her hand continued its slow sweep, catching up the second skrag. It stepped
away from Albrecht and brought its pincers up in a defensive stance, trying to resist
the theurge’s power. Its hard shell began to fracture, the snapping sound startling its
handler from his struggle with the python. He reached for the leash, which would
allow him to break the mystic assault, but the snake’s tail lashed out and knocked
the leash away.
The skrag charged at One-Song, pieces of its body falling off and crumbling to
dust. As its beak nearly touched her, she tapped it with her staff. It exploded into a
cloud, its motes slowly drifting down and settling onto the floor of the hut.
Albrecht was howling and writhing in pain, saliva frothing from his bloody
jaws. He slashed out at the nearest handler, his claws tearing instead at the heron
spirit. The noble bird faded away, its duty dispatched, a look of disdain directed at
the berserk garou.

The handler scrambled away from Albrecht and fumbled with his holster, try-
ing to draw his gun.
One-Song began to sing. She sang a lullaby, its gentle words and melody ri-
diculously out of place amidst the blood and screams of the feral werewolf and the
scared-shitless handlers.
“Rest up, cubs, the night is come. Rest up, cubs, you are still so young. Sleep
now, pups, the day was long. Sleep now, pups, your fears are gone.”
Everyone stopped what they were doing. Albrecht grew still, his eyelids heavy,
his breathing slowing, although blood still flowed copiously from his wounds. The
two handlers went limp, whimpering, crawling into fetal positions, reduced to pri-
mal womb memories.
As she sang, One-Song walked over to Albrecht and placed her palm on his
torn side. The flesh knitted and healed, the internal organs regrowing. Albrecht
collapsed, beyond exhausted.
One-Song surveyed the room. Her python slowly released its captive and she
nodded at it. “Thank you,” she whispered, and it faded away, released from its
promise made long ago when it willingly entered her staff.
One-Song had stopped her song but its effect still lingered. The human guards
were curled into their prenatal dreams and even Albrecht had fallen asleep.
Tumbler stepped cautiously from the shadows, her bushy tail twitching, look-
ing around for any lingering enemies.
“It’s safe now, dear one,” One-Song said. “You done good, fox.”
Tumbler bowed, smiling. “Where did the talkative one go?”
“I don’t know. Might be I could track him, given enough time, but I doubt it.”
She looked around the hut, at the now-dark screens and silent computers. “This
kind of tech stuff isn’t my thing.”
She walked over to the door, which was really a flap in the flexible material
that made up the walls. It was some sort of plastic made to look like canvas. She
opened the flap and looked out at the clearing by the stream.
A squat shape popped out of a hole in the ground and waddled quickly over to
her. Grumplepaw sat back on his haunches, his nose twitching, his eyes pleading.
One-Song smiled and rubbed his snout. “There you are. Smart not to come in
with Albrecht. It’s all over now, though.”
“Is…is Albrecht…?” The badger said, moving its head to peer past One-Song
into the hut.
“Alive. We’re all still here.” She stepped halfway out of the hut and whistled.
A hoot from the nearby trees answered. She whistled again, this time a complicated
tune. Two hoots answered, followed by a wave of tweets, chitters, and caws spread-
ing throughout the spirit wood.
She stepped back inside, Grumblepaw following closely behind. “Word’s gone
out. The sept wardens will be here soon.”
Chapter Eight 65
She looked down at Albrecht, who was sprawled awkwardly on the floor, re-
verted to his human form. He somehow managed, beyond all the physical trauma
he’d suffered, to snore. She reached down and hauled him onto his back, straight-
ening his limbs. “I supposed he deserves some dignity when the others arrive. He
did give you the distraction we needed.”
Tumbler padded over and sniffed at the fallen garou. “He’s so angry. All the
time. Even when he’s not biting people.”
One-Song sat down cross-legged next to Albrecht and brushed his hair back
from his face. “Boy’s got to learn that he can’t fight everything. And he can’t do
it all alone.” She took a deep breath and placed her staff on the floor next to her.
“Nobody can.”
She held out her hands. Tumbler and Grumblepaw came up and rubbed their
faces against them.
“Nobody can, child. Nobody can. Me, most of all.”

Chapter
Nine
Albrecht opened his eyes and groaned. A fox appeared inches from his nose,
cocking its head sideways and blinking at him. It sat back on its haunches and
barked at someone to his left. He turned his head and saw One Song sitting beside
him, with the badger spirit next to her.
“I guess we’re still alive,” he said, winching at the stabbing pain in his ribs as
he tried to sit up. She put her hand on his chest and pushed him back down. He had
no strength to resist and so went down, exhaling.
“We’ve got the luck of the gods, Albrecht,” One Song said. “I know why you
did what you did – throwing everything to the four directions and all – but all we
needed to do was distract Czajka and play for time.”
The fox barked again and tapped a paw on the ground insistently.
“Are you nuts?” One Song said to the fox. “Now?”
The fox whined, its tail swishing, it’s eyes blinking.
“Good Gaia, child. I don’t know if I have one in me right now.”
“What does it want?” Albrecht said.
“She wants a story.”
Albrecht laughed and then coughed, clutching his sides. “Hurts to laugh.”
“Hmm, hmm. That’s what happens when you rage out against a technomancer
and his pet skrags.”
Albrecht raised his head and scanned the room. He saw the two Bane handlers
curled up on the floor, unconscious, but no sign of Czajka. “He got away?”
“What do you think?”
The fox stepped between One Song and Albrecht and put her paws in One
Song’s lap, her back to Albrecht.
“Oh, all right. I owe you, I suppose.” One Song leaned to the side to look at
Albrecht. “She saved our meat, chewing through the wiring. She’s real good at
hiding.”
Chapter Nine 67
Albrecht nodded and lowered his head. “Help’s coming, right? Might as well
just tell us a story then, while we wait.”
One Song frowned. “Oh, you want to hear it, too? Gaia, save me from these children.”
She straightened up and the fox curled into her lap, no longer blocking Al-
brecht’s view.
“Let’s see. While you were out,” she cast a stern look his way, “Czajka said
something. He said a few things actually, but one thing he said kind of struck me.
Reminds me of a story I once heard. Local garou. Lived in town nearby, back a few
generations passed.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she began her tale.
• • •
The lightning rod salesman came to town. He wasn’t one of them old ec-
centrics with a wink and a smile, like you might be thinking. This one was well-
dressed, came from money. Shoes all shined, drove around a nice car. He kept his
rods in the trunk, all lined up pretty, not bunched together in a bag over his back.
He smoked cigars and offered them freely to anyone he saw eyeing them. That was
one way he obligated them to him. Just one.
Now, what was a rich fellow doing selling lowly lightning rods? He said his
factory made them, aways off in another state. He liked to know his customers, so
he went out across the land now and then and sold them personally, man to man,
man to housewife.
So this salesman comes to town and makes friendly with everybody. He sells
a few rods here and there, to those who are all impressed by him and who were
convinced these rods were special, being made in a factory by such an upstanding
gentleman. And then he heads on out of town and it’s soon all yesterday’s news.
But then he comes back. He’s all worried now, brow furrowed, full of concern
for the townsfolk he’d come to respect so. You see, his friends in the advanced gov-
ernment agencies, they told him a big storm was coming, like one nobody had seen
before. It was set to bring down lightning like a host of arrows from on high. Why,
the town was in danger. The houses would all burn down. Except, of course, those
that had lightning rods. These metal wands of his would catch those sky arrows
and send them straight to the ground, bypassing the combustible wooden houses.
Since he felt a special connection to those town folks, he offered them a good
deal on those rods, a deal that would leave him poorer after you considered how
much it cost him to make them and bring them all the way there. But at least the
town would be safe.
Of course, they all bought the rods, every last one of them. Well, almost every
one of them. There was one fellow in town who saw right through all this and
pushed his way through the crowd to the man’s fancy car.
“He’s a rotten liar,” he yelled, so everyone could hear him. “Sure, there’s a
storm coming, but it’s just a regular summer squall. Ain’t no different than the ones
before or the ones that’ll come after. This one’s got you all fooled.”

Some nodded, realizing they’d been had, but most of them frowned and point-
ed at the critic. You see, he wasn’t well liked in town. Lived out on the outskirts,
came in only for supplies. Didn’t show up in church on Sundays. And he was al-
ways angry, even when he wasn’t. That is, even when he smiled he seemed angry.
Least, that’s how the town folks all felt about it.
“Get out of here, Early,” the barber yelled. ‘Early’ was his name. James Early.
“It’s no business of mine if your house burns down by lightning, but nobody here
is going to lose their homes!”
The salesman smiled and tipped his hat to the barber. “That’s right, folks.
These rods are your shields. I stand by them.”
“Go on, Early,” the seamstress cried, and all the rest of them raised a hub bub,
yelling at Early to scat.
Early tightened his fists and everybody drew in a breath, but then he let them
loose. He turned around and walked away, and everybody let out their breath.
The salesman went around collecting his money, smiling and thanking every-
one by name, and then he drove off, waving out the side of his car.
Well, what do you know, he was right. A storm did come. It was a strong one,
but not the Biblical storm he’d promised. More like what Early had predicted. Still,
no house burned down. They all had the rods. The rods channeled all that electric-
ity into the earth.
And that was the last storm they saw. It took a while for anybody to notice, but they
eventually began to wonder when they’d finally get some rain. It never came. Weeks
without it, with the creeks shrinking and the soil cracking. It was a full on drought.
The man came back. This time he didn’t have lightning rods, he had water.
Bottles and bottles of it. The thirsty town folk bought it all. This time, though, the
price was high, more expensive even than those lightning rods. The town folks
weren’t too happy about that, but the salesman said there was drought everywhere
and it was hard finding the water. Took money and effort, so he had to charge a fair
price, didn’t he?
Early pushed his way through the crowd again. After that, well, the townsfolk
don’t remember rightly what happened. They tell all sorts of different stories and
argue about it. Nobody had the same story. It caused a lot of friction among them,
fighting about what had actually happened, about who had it right. But eventually
they forgot all about it and went on with their lives.
What really happened was this: Early walked up to the salesman and knocked
a bottle out of his hand. It smashed on the ground, the water seeping into that dry,
parched soil.
“Now what’d you go and do that for, friend?” the salesman said, taking off his
hat and placing it on the hood of his car.
“You know,” Early said, rolling up his sleeves. “You angered the spirits with
your rods. They’re due a sacrifice and they didn’t get it. Only one house needed
to catch their bolt, but you captured them all. Now, they won’t let it rain. Not until
they get their sacrifice.”
Chapter Nine 69
The salesman frowned and took off his coat, folding it carefully and placing
it next to his hat on the hood of the car. The towns folk were looking at each other
all confused.
“Well, now,” the salesman said. “How’d you learn all that? What kind of man
are you, Mr. Early?”
“I ain’t no man at all,” Early said, and shifted right quick into crinos form
as the salesman came flying at him, his skin stretching and tearing, his real form
coming out from underneath.
The salesman was some sort of lizard, with sharp teeth and long claws. He
landed on Early and dug his claws in, screeching loud enough to wake the Devil.
Early was ready for him. He sank his jaws into the lizard’s neck and at the
same time tore through the thing’s belly, gripping a handful of its tangled guts and
tearing them out. That quickly took the fight out of the salesman. He deflated like
a ripped balloon.
Early crawled out from under the salesman’s scaled body. The townsfolk stood
staring, frozen in place.
“You drop them bottles,” Early growled. “That water’s got to go back into the
earth, to pay the debt.”
The people all ran, screaming and bouncing off of one another. But they
dropped the bottles. The sound of all that shattering glass freaked them all out even
more and they shot off in all directions, running for home.
Early hauled the salesman’s body into its car and then he drove that car into
the lake at the bottom of the gravel pit. He then went house to house and tore down
the lightning rods.
That night, it rained.
• • •
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Albrecht said.
“Mean?” One Song said. “It don’t have to mean nothing. Least, not always
something you can tie up in a bow and present to somebody.”
“Then why’d you tell it? Why that story?”
One Song shrugged. “It’s what came to mind. I think we let these salesmen
come and sell us doom, getting us all worked up. We being garou. Us. In the end,
though, we just need to trust the spirits. Do right by them. Shit happens, but give
each its due.”
“And if not, raise holy hell.”
One Song chuckled. “That’s what you took from it? The fighting part? Once an
ahroun always an ahroun.” She smoothed Tumbler’s fur. The fox was still curled in
her lap, but she was now watching Albrecht with an inscrutable gaze.
He sat up, grunting, but felt much better. The minor bruises and fractures had
healed up. The major wound, the one One-Song had knitted with her gift, still ached.
He looked down at his right ribs and saw a jagged scar. “Well, that left a mark.”

“Something to sing about, I suppose,” One Song said, gently pushing Tumbler
from her lap. She stood up, leaning on her cane. “They’re coming. I hear them.”
Albrecht stood up, swaying. He waited to find his balance before stepping
toward the door. “Get ready, then. We’ve got to ship out. Czajka’s surely back with
the egg by now, beefing up security. We don’t have time anymore. We move.”
One Song muttered under her breath. “…always in motion…”
“What?” Albrecht couldn’t see her now. She was behind him as he stepped
out of the hut and into the clearing. In the distance he could see people and wolves
moving carefully toward them. He raised his hand and waved.
“Nothing,” One-Song said, moving up beside him. “Just something somebody
told me. Something true.”
Albrecht looked at her. “You okay? You were pretty distraught earlier and
walking into that ambush would have bent a lot of us out of shape.”
“I’m as good as I’m going to be, Albrecht.”
True Silverheels stepped from the woods, leading a contingent of warriors.
The clearing was now surrounded on all sides by garou.
“You’ll find two informants inside,” Albrecht said, motioning with a thumb at
the hut behind him.
True moved toward the hut, nodding at Albrecht. One-Song placed her staff
in the way.
“No torture.”
“That’s Kula’s failing,” True said, his eyes softening as he looked down at
One Song. “Not ours. Welcome home, One-Song. Welcome back to the Children
of Gaia.”
One-Song nodded but did not smile. She lifted her staff and stepped to the side.
Albrecht put his arm around her shoulder. “Help an old ahroun across the
street?”
She smiled. “You are the slowest Gauntlet crosser I have ever seen. Let me
show you how it’s done.” She placed her hand on his and in the space of a single
breath the silvery woods of the Umbra were replaced by the more solid trees of the
material world.
Albrecht stood once again on the proper side of the Gauntlet, in the physical
world. Proper to him, a full moon warrior. He wasn’t a mystic theurge like One-
Song. The spirit world would never completely feel at home to him. Besides, beer
tasted funny on the other side.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
Chapter Nine 71
Chapter
Ten
“I tried to warn you,” McAllister said. He punched his finger repeatedly onto
a small laptop keyboard. “This will put you dangerously close to exceeding your
budget. Do I need to explain to you again the consequences of letting the head
office take over this operation?”
“Shut up,” Basil Czajka said, waving a hand dismissively at the accountant.
His other hand gently pressed at the bandage on his left cheek, at the still-smarting
wound from Albrecht’s fangs. “It’s my project. They can’t do it without me. They
know that.”
“Ahem. Oh, they know that. They are quite eager to continue with your par-
ticipation — under the controlling influence of a Bane. It’s what they’ve wanted
from the start.”
“You think I don’t know that? I’m not a fool, McAllister. Don’t worry, by the
time they even come close to trying to take over, my timetable will have been well
advanced. I can head them off.”
“Not if you keep underestimating the garou. Lord Albrecht, especially. I
warned after the first encounter that his involvement was going to put this whole
thing at risk. He wears a goddamn artifact of the ancient days on his head, after all.”
Czajka spat. “The Silver Crown? At best it will let him cut through red tape
with his own tribe. He won’t find wrangling One-Song’s tribe so easy.”
“About her: You’ve failed to take possession of the one key necessity for the
plan and barely escaped, losing two soldiers and two skrags in the process. Not to
mention the occluded operations center, a priceless asset that the Board was count-
ing on inheriting. What now?”
Czajka grimaced and again waved away the accusations. “For one thing, I
have a backup. It won’t be efficient and could get quite messy, but we can still
proceed without her. Second, I’ll need you to acquire more assets from Corporate.
I’ve emailed you a list. I need them in Geneva. Yesterday.”
“You think the garou will assault the egg’s nest? Can they pull that off without
endlessly bickering about it before the next phase of the moon?”

“I can’t risk otherwise. I need to beef up security.”
“I can draw from the mutation pens around Chernobyl, but I can’t get them
there quickly.”
“I’ll handle that. I can move anything wherever I need it to go.”
“Too many displays of your displacement technology will only make the
Board of Directors more eager to seize it from you.”
“Enough with the advice. Just get me those assets. Now, get out of here. I need
to think.”
McAllister closed the cover on his laptop, gave Czajka a doubtful look, and
walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.
Czajka sank into the executive chair at the head of the conference table. He
was in a borrowed office, trying to manage affairs on two continents, all while
trying to stay off the radar of his former colleagues and keep one step ahead of his
new colleagues. He wasn’t sure who he was more worried about.
His former colleagues, enlightened scientists from the Iteration X convention
of the Technocratic Union, considered him AWOL. Which he was. With some of
their equipment. They wanted it, and him, back. He’d undergo new conditioning if
they caught him. That would erase all he’d achieved.
His new colleagues, the Board of Directors of the vast holding company called
Pentex, were only stringing him along, providing him material and spiritual assets
until such time as they could hijack his project for themselves. He had to stay well
ahead of their machinations.
He needed to outflank everybody. His only begotten son depended on it.
The Unmaker. The astonishing being he had birthed through his enlightened
science wedded to the toxic seed provided to him by the Wyrm. That seed, an
embryo of an ephemeral creature dubbed a ‘nexus crawler,’ had been augmented
by his genetic modifications. The true advancement, however, had come from his
superior knowledge of particle physics, and the breakthrough he had made when he
paired it with his understanding of dimensional science — the study of spirits and
the ‘Umbra,’ the term Pentex used for the mirror dimension of reality where beings
and things were made from a plastic substance called ephemera — spirit matter.
The final secret, though, had been his direct vision of the void at the end of
time. His technocratic colleagues did not approve of his entropic studies when they
veered from theoretical physics and chaos mathematics into territories more the
subject of the religion of reality deviants like the lycanthropes. He had to keep his
deepening understanding a secret until, finally, he had been forced to sever ties and
go rogue with his operation.
His great operation, his magnum opus. His alchemical procedure to produce
the fabled philosophers stone. Except that it wasn’t a stone at all — it was an egg.
A universe unto itself, one that would hatch into our universe and, in the meeting
of two worlds, overwhelm our fallen reality with a better one.
His mother would be proud.
Chapter Ten 73
He closed his eyes, his fist trembling. He still hadn’t gotten over her passing.
If only those damn —
The door slammed open and the First Team captain strode in, pointing a finger
at Czajka. He wore his duty outfit, a camouflage pattern, with a service pistol at his
side that Czajka knew fired more than mere lead bullets. He also knew that, beneath
the skin, the man was a true horror, a creature of acidic barbs and gnashing maws.
“Two squads! Two goddamn squads lost to your fucking mission! I’m not los-
ing a single other man for you, I don’t give a goddamn fuck what Corporate says.”
Czajka laced his fingers together. “I still have need of squads Zeta, Theta, and
Kappa. Don’t worry, captain, they will be held back and utilized only if needed. I
have fresh assets on the way to deal with unwelcome intruders.”
“The suits might have put you in charge of this shit show you call a plan, but
I still command my teams. Tactics is my job, and I will say which teams go where.
And my teams aren’t going anywhere until you and me make things clear.”
Czajka sighed and stood up. “I’ve already sent Theta to Geneva, Captain.” He
held up a hand to intercept the captain’s complaint. “I had to make the call in the
interest of efficiency. We don’t know how quickly the enemy will move.”
“We don’t know because you blew my men’s cover and now we have no one
watching those fucking werewolves.”
“No need for language.” Czajka walked over to a side table that held a wine
decanter and a number of glasses. He turned two glasses upright and began pour-
ing. “Wine, Captain? I know you’re on duty, but let’s all relax here. I can have a
beer brought in if you’d prefer.”
“Is this your way of diverting the issue of your complete incompetence? No
dice. I’ve seen a lot of your types come and go and I’ve outlasted you all. So damn
eager to work your way up to the head office with the next big scheme. Only it’s
always grunts like me who have to lose limbs to your ambition. Not this time,
asshole.”
Czajka glared at the captain. “You have not met my type. That I know for
sure. You underestimate me at your peril. Did your superiors not brief you on my
background?”
“That you’re one of those Technocracy wizards?” Czajka winced at the word.
He hated that word. “A bunch of Silicon Valley bros convinced they run the world
now because they made a fucking search engine in their mommy’s basement. Yeah,
I know exactly what you are.”
Czajka fingered one of the rings on his left hand, the one on his middle finger.
He wiggled it off and held it up, looking through its hole at the captain. “Do you
know what this is? It’s adamant, a mythical metal made real by my colleagues.
Here, feel its heft.” He tossed the ring at the captain, who caught it with his right
hand’s expert reflexes.
The air pressure popped Czajka’s ears as the captain disappeared and the air
rushed to fill the space where he had been standing.

Czajka leaned against the wall and sipped from his wine glass. He shouldn’t
have done that. He’d sent the captain to a truly nasty place, a shard realm of nigh
absolute entropy. Considering his pedigree, however — the dark spirit that lived
inside him — he might actually survive and return, eventually, to pester Czajka
again. But that would be well after the completion of his project, so the risk was
irrelevant. It wouldn’t, literally, exist anymore, once his child had hatched.
He leaned forward and pressed the button on the telecom speaker. “McAllis-
ter?”
A few moments passed and a voice replied. “Yes, sir?”
“Send for the sergeant of Zeta team. He’s just gained a field promotion.”
He stood up and walked to the window, opening the blinds with two fingers.
He looked out over the nightscape of New York City. So many things to juggle in
so many locations. He couldn’t do it all from here. He had to speed up the next
phase and to do that, he had a proverbial plane to catch.
Chapter Ten 75
Chapter
Eleven
Things moved quickly. One-Song let it all happen around her. There’s was no
need for her to get involved in the logistics of the expedition. Her role was to lead
everybody to the egg and then to help destroy it. She might have suffered a signifi-
cant loss of trust among her sept mates, but she was still an elder theurge, and there
were simply were too few of her kind to allow her to just sit back and point at the
thing. She’d need to read all the signs and portents along the way, and hope to Gaia
she got them right.
They set out at noon. Far fewer in number than they’d hoped for, but still a for-
midable force of garou, five packs strong. With Czajka’s escape, there was simply
no more time to wait for reinforcements from other septs. Even Albrecht’s home
sept had not yet arrived. Even his pack hadn’t made it through yet. One-Song knew
she’d have to keep an eye on him. He was a hot head and without his pack mates,
the heat would be turned way up.
There was some hope that his pack, along with other garou from New York’s
Central Park caern, would join them later, taking different moon bridge routes. She
knew that, in all likelihood, they’d either arrive to help clean up the mess or to bury
the bodies if they failed.
One-Song walked in the forefront of the assault force, with Kleon Winston
beside her. He was also a theurge, although not as experienced as she was. As a
Glass Walker, though, he knew techno-spirits in a way she didn’t really understand.
On her way from the particle accelerator to the Finger Lakes, she’d had to create by
herself three different moon bridges to reach the Sept of Mountain Springs, a Children of
Gaia caern in Switzerland. That was a rare feat usually reserved for galliards; most such
bridges needed to be opened at a caern using a preciously rare pathstone. As the lorekeep-
er of her sept, she had been taught that unique galliard gift, but only she could travel its
bridges. She couldn’t take another garou, let alone drag an army, with her.
In Switzerland, she’d convinced them to open a bridge for her to the Sept of
the Green in Central Park, and from there she created more of her own bridges to
reach the Finger Lakes. It had been exhausting, one of the reasons she had broken
down in the council lodge. She had been at the end of her rope.

The Hand of Gaia’s caern could open a powerful bridge, one that would take
them all straight to the Sept of Tolerance caern in England. A new bridge would
then be opened to the Sept of Sun’s Glory in the Alps. From there they’d have to
hoof it to the SPS on their own.
Her main concern as she took the lead through the moon bridge was if Czajka
knew anything about their route. Doubtful, but if so, he might try to ambush them
at the England or Alps caerns. She suspected that he’d instead save his forces to
shore up the defenses around the egg. He certainly knew they were coming now,
but she had no idea what to expect there. Czajka wasn’t garou – he was a mage, a
human who could wield sorcery. He was from a group that insisted that magic was
a form of technology, one that required rigorous regulation from elite authorities.
And One-Song knew next to nothing about them.
“So,” she said to Kleon as they marched down the silvery tunnel formed by the
moon bridge, “this Cjazka. What kind of defenses do you think he has?”
“Hard to say,” Kleon replied, pocketing his PDA. “He’s so far shown that he’s
mainly using Pentex assets, although that mobile headquarters he had you in was
pure Technocracy. Otherwise, the caern defenses would have detected it. So he’s
probably got a few more Technocracy wild cards that we won’t be able to predict.”
“But you can handle them, once they’re known quantities, right?”
Kleon smiled. “Let’s hope. Still, he’s going to have First Teams at least, may-
be more Bane handlers. Probably fomori, too. If we’re really unlucky, he’ll have
Black Spiral Dancers. But I think if he had those, he would have deployed them
back at the caern.”
“No. They’re too unpredictable. Sure, they could have caused us some more hurt, but
he couldn’t have guaranteed they’d keep his cover. He was after me, alive, remember?”
Kleon shrugged and pulled out his PDA again and began tapping on it. One-
Song shook her head. Everybody these days couldn’t keep their eyes off the
screens. She refused to own one of those damn things. Made you blind to what was
going on around you.
“We’re almost to the end,” Kleon said, eyes still on his device.
“Didn’t need a computer to tell me that,” One-Song said. She turned her head
and caught Albrecht’s eye. He was in the third line behind her. She nodded at him
and he nodded grimly back.
There was no time for a layover in England. They exited the bridge and Albrecht
greeted the caern’s leader, Anne Scott, an aging Children of Gaia ex-punk-turned
naturalist. One-Song stepped away from the formalities, letting the others handle the
rituals of chiminage. They had brought a set of talens that would purify lakes and
streams, in exchange for the opening of the next moon bridge to Switzerland.
One-Song leaned against a beech tree in the thick, ancient woodland, a pro-
tected preserve inland from Brighton. She closed her eyes and flinched. The image
of her packmates appeared unbidden. They jerked like puppets on hidden strings,
shuffling toward her, howling and pointing, mocking her tears. She opened her
eyes and tried to stifle a sob, her breath bursting out of her like she’d been gut
Chapter Eleven 77
punched. She’d seen them every time she closed her eyes ever since Czajka had
told her they were still alive, as spirits, in that cursed realm, trapped.
Was he lying? Was this a trick to distract her, to keep her off balance, drawn in
two directions: one the hunt for his precious egg, the other a desperate search for
her lost pack? She couldn’t let that bastard get to her. If he was telling the truth, if
her packmates still existed, she could find them after they had destroyed the egg.
If the egg hatched, it wouldn’t matter if Czajka was right; they’d all be dead. But
it was hard, harder than anything she’d done before, to put her pack out of mind.
She felt silk slide across her ankles. Tumbler wove between her legs, looking
up at her, eyes questioning. She’d heard One-Song’s choking cry and stepped from
hiding to comfort her. She heard a soft snort from under the bushes nearby; Grum-
blepaw letting her know he was near.
She had tried to leave the two gaffling spirits at the Finger Lakes, but they
would have none of it, demanding with loud harrumphs and barks their right to
accompany her and reminding her that if not for them she’d still be in Czajka’s
clutches. She’d grown quite fond of the two spirits and didn’t want to see them
hurt or killed. While she knew that they wouldn’t die in the same way she would
one day die, that like all spirits they would reform elsewhere in the Umbra, they
wouldn’t remember her or their time together. Sometimes it happened that spirits
would form such a strong bond that they would retain memories and identity upon
reforming, but it was the exception, not the rule.
She wondered at Unicorn’s wisdom in sending the two spirits to her. They
were ridiculous. Twee. But also endearing and comradely. They were exactly what
she had needed.
And now she worried that they were her Achilles heel. Would she be so wor-
ried about protecting them that she would falter in her duty to her fellow garou?
She knew it would break her heart to lose any one of them. But it was a sacrifice
she’d have to prepare for. It was quite likely that many of the garou wouldn’t make
it out of this alive. The spirits’ fates were no different.
A teenage girl stepped from the brush and smiled at her. “You’re a wolf,” she
said. “Like me.”
One-Song noted the girl’s t-shirt, loose pants, sandals, and hemp satchel. Her
hair was unkempt and her hands crusted with dirt, but her eyes gleamed and her
smile shone with sincerity. “You’re a lupus? What’s a wolf-born doing here in En-
gland? I heard there weren’t too many of you left here.”
“More than humans know,” the girl said. She laughed and crouched down,
holding her palm out to Tumbler. The fox slunk over, sniffed at the hand, and then
rubbed her tail on it. “I like your friends. These ones, not those,” she said, gestur-
ing with her chin toward the center of the caern, where Albrecht and the war band
parleyed with the sept leaders.
“They’re good people,” One-Song said. “Doing their duty.”
“They stink of anger.” The girl looked at One-Song, eyes narrowing. “You
smell of fear.”

One-Song turned away from her. “Just bad dreams, that’s all.”
The girl walked over and stood in front of One-Song. She reached into her
satchel and drew out a fistful of herbs. “These are blessed by the fae folk. Chew
them to stay awake on a long journey. No dreams.” She thrust her hand out, waiting
for One-Song to take them.
One-Song sighed and put out her cupped palm, letting the girl drop the herbs
into it. “Thank you. What’s your name?”
“Thistle. I am the Keeper of the Land here.”
“Ah. You look after the woods, then? It’s right that they let a lupus do that. But
you’re not very old now, are you? When did you have your Change?”
The girl frowned and crossed her arms. “I’m old enough.”
“Hmm hmm. Couldn’t have been but three, maybe four years back. Am I right?”
The girl’s eyes narrowed and her chin rose. “Five.”
One-Song smiled. Babies doing the work of adults. That’s the way of things
these days. “Well, that seems old enough to me. You got to realize, child, I’m an-
cient by wolf years.”
“Goodbye!” the girl yelled and stepped back into the brush, the leaves and
branches shivering briefly to mark where she had slipped through them.
One-Song slid the herbs into her bag, just as Albrecht was walking up.
“Time to move,” Albrecht said. “They’re opening the bridge now.”
“No rest for the weary.”
“Don’t tell me you’re wiped out after the first leg?”
“Soul weary, Albrecht. Soul weary.” She leaned on her staff and walked passed
him, toward the caern center.
Just before they entered the newly opened, luminous silver tunnel, she
snatched out a bit of the herbs and began chewing. Stringent, with a hint of mint.
But invigorating. Thistle wasn’t kidding — it’s like a mug of coffee. Fully alert, she
stepped into the portal.
Now that they were on the second leg, she once again fretted over the situa-
tion. She didn’t like that her staff had only five spirits left. Losing her heron and
python left her with less protection, and there had been no time to coax fresh spirit
helpers to take those departed spirits’ places in her staff.
“All right,” Kleon said, walking alongside One-Song again. “From everything
you’ve told me, I figure that you were actually in France, just over the border from
Switzerland. Near maybe a village called Prévessin-Moëns. The hoop you saw
was the Penumbral version of the Super Proton Synchrotron, a proton-antiproton
collider. They just used it to discover some boson particles.”
“And to incubate Wyrm monsters.”
“Yeah, that. But humans don’t have a clue about that part of it. It’s an under-
ground tunnel; you can’t tell it’s there from above ground. But from what you said,
it seems like the Penumbral version is visible from the surface.”
Chapter Eleven 79
“I think the Pattern Spiders that were crawling all over that thing have built it
out way past its earthbound limits. Or they were directed to do that.”
“You think the builders were working in more than just the material world?”
Kleon frowned.
“Why not? If these Technocrat wizards are all over this, then it makes sense
that it extends into different dimensions. There’s a whole lot of the Umbra you and
me never see.”
“We can’t worry about that right now. This needs to be surgical — get in, crack
that egg, get out. Any intel we get about what else is going on there will have to
wait for later review.”
“That’s your gig, not mine.”
Kleon nodded and tapped away on his PDA. One-Song saw the end of the
bridge ahead and raised her staff, pointing at it. Albrecht, behind her, yipped a
sharp bark, to let everyone know.
The Sept of Sun’s Glory nestled along a lake high in the Alps on the Swiss side
of the border with France. Traditionally ruled by the Silver Fangs, it had become
one of the rare European multi-tribal septs, renowned for both its neutrality in Ga-
rou Nation politics and its adept vampire hunters.
If things went as planned, the assault force would pick up two packs of Garou
— eight warriors — to add to their force. They would trek on foot to Champéry,
where they would convoy in a diverse collection of vehicles north, around Lake
Geneva, to the Geneva airport. There they would leave the cars at a car park and
set out on foot through the Penumbra to the field where One-Song had entered the
accelerator.
The cold air was a shock to the system even after the brief stop in England.
The sun was setting over a perfectly blue Alpine lake, surrounded by snow in all
directions.
“Lord Albrecht!” a voice cried. A gray-haired man in a gray suit opened his
arms in greeting, looking past One-Song and Kleon as if they weren’t there.
“Meister Sun-Runner,” Albrecht said, stepping past One-Song and hugging
the man. It was a rather formal, ritual hug, not a comradely grasp. “Thank you
again for opening the bridge for us.”
“Of course, of course. Dire times again.” Sun-Runner now met One-Song’s
eyes and bowed slightly. He put out his hand. “Greetings. I am the sept leader here.
You are One-Song, the Children of Gaia theurge, yes?”
One-Song took his hand and shook it, nodding with a wry smile. “That would
be me.”
“I welcome you to the Sept of Sun’s Glory.” He opened his arms, addressing
all the garou, who stood around in ranks, the moon bridge faded and gone behind
them. “I welcome you all!”
He led them to a large cabin where sept members had prepared hot drinks.
Albrecht, One-Song, Kleon, and Kula were invited into a smaller room, with a

large table and enough chairs for all of them. Two more garou were already seated.
“My sept mates, Kinsky Stormhold and Maia Grins-at-Death,” Sun-Runner
said, gesturing at the seated garou as he himself took a seat. “As you know, we’re a
multi-tribal sept. Although I am a Silver Fang, Kinsky is a Shadow Lord, and Maia
a Get of Fenris.”
“Kudos for making all that work,” Albrecht said. “It’s not easy.”
Kinsky smiled. “We have a unifying incentive. Leeches.”
“You fight vampires,” Kula said, nodding appreciatively. “You’re all renowned
for it. If we were staying longer, I’d love to have gotten some pointers.”
“Europe is rife with them,” Maia said, practically growling as she spoke.
“But that is not what you’re here for,” Sun-Runner said. “This egg you spoke
of on the phone is a matter of deep concern. Such a thing should not have been
able to exist without our discovering it ourselves. We’ve investigated the CERN
operation before. We didn’t find anything.”
“Not surprising,” Kleon said. “This kind of tech isn’t exactly in our bailiwick.
It’s not just the pattern spiders One-Song told us about, it’s the mages — the Tech-
nocracy. Not many of us have even heard of them, let alone know what to look for.”
“Yes, but there are three Glass Walkers in Geneva who watch over CERN.
When we told them about what you had seen there, they were alarmed, and refused
to wait for your arrival. I’m afraid they’ve already left to attempt to infiltrate the
complex on their own.”
“Goddamn it,” Albrecht said, pounding a fist on the table. “Herding wolves
shouldn’t be as hard as herding cats.”
“It might work to our advantage,” Kula said, her fingers laced together on the
table with what One-Song took to be as meditative a look as she ever got. “If they
aren’t captured and interrogated, they might provide just the distraction we need.
They can’t know where the egg is, only that it’s there. The odds that they’ll enter
the right place are low, which means they’ll draw the opposition off elsewhere.”
“And if they’re captured and spill the beans about us?” One-Song said. “This
all just gets harder. Already impossible, soon to be beyond impossible.”
“All the more reason for us to get you on your way,” Sun-Runner said, stand-
ing up and gesturing to the door. “Kinsky here and his pack will join you, along
with another pack. I will let them introduce themselves on your march down the
mountain. I am afraid we don’t allow vehicles this close to the caern. But there is a
fleet of cars waiting for you, as promised.”
So that’s that, One-Song thought. Can’t do anything now except march, ride,
and then march some more. All the while hoping our coming is still a surprise.
Right.
She stepped out into the snow, wishing she’d swapped her sandals for shoes,
but then shrugged and shifted into wolf form, padding forward on all fours. The fox
and badger fell in behind her.
Chapter Eleven 81
Chapter
Twelve
The three ragabash scouts crept back into the woods. One of them, Briga, from
Kula’s pack, had even slipped past the expedition force’s outer guards, appearing
right beside Albrecht and Kula between one eye blink and the next. Albrecht hoped
that meant she really was that good at sneaking, rather than the other option.
He tried to remember the names of the other scouts. Heraldo, from New York
City, and Iron Feather — or something like that — from the Finger Lakes’ Black-
light pack. Maybe it was Red Feather? He just hadn’t had time to memorize the
names and roles of everybody in his army.
Briga gave Albrecht a sidelong glance and then faced Kula. “There’s a line of
First Team soldiers positioned around the structure. They look normal, but some-
thing seems off. Probably fomori.” She spat on the ground, as if the word had dirt-
ied her mouth. That meant that once the fighting started, the guards would mutate,
revealing a host of body-warping powers. It’s what happened when humans were
melded with Banes, the Wyrm’s servitor spirits.
“That’s it?” Albrecht said. He stood in the midst of a circle of elders — Kula,
Kinsky, One-Song, and Simon, a Stargazer from the Blacklight pack. They were
surrounded by the twenty-six garou of the expedition force, with the heaviest hit-
ters on the periphery, in case they were attacked. The whole force stood in a forest
right on the border of France and Switzerland, invisible to the locals because they
weren’t actually there — they had stepped sideways into the Umbra once they’d
left the cars. They had marched to this strip of woods along the border, overlooking
a wide field between them the small village of Prévessin-Moëns.
Albrecht could see through the trees the glow of the particle accelerator’s
hoop, the electric pulses shooting through the pattern spider’s elaborate webwork.
It cut through the meadow in a vast curve, bisecting the field.
“That’s all of them positioned on the outside,” Briga said. “All of them who
are visible. Might be some surprises.”
Kula snarled. “They won’t put their best out here. They just need enough to
radio that we’re here and delay us while the inner force gets ready.”

Albrecht gripped his klaive’s pommel. “Then we need to make this as quick
as we can. Blitzkrieg in.”
One-Song cleared her throat. “There’s a whole field we got to cross first. No
way we get the element of surprise here.”
Kula nodded impatiently, peering out past the tree line to the glowing ring.
“We keep low, as long as we can. Wolf form. A single, wide line rather than mul-
tiple rows.”
Albrecht nodded, conceding. Kula smiled and broke the circle, gathering her
pack around her and giving orders, which they would spread to the rest of the force.
Albrecht put an arm around One-Song’s shoulder just as she was moving
away. “You’re with me. Stick close. Can’t have Czajka getting hold of you again.”
One-Song turned to look at him, gently moving his arm off her shoulder. “I got
it. You’re my bodyguard. What do you want to bet I wind up being yours instead?”
Albrecht chuckled. “Then we’re glued together.”
The force formed up quickly and set out, slipping from the forest into the
meadow, moving slow and low, every one of them in wolf form. It would have
made quite a sight in the material world, but in the Penumbra, only a scant few
meadow spirits — rabbits, voles, mice — saw them and took cover in burrows.
Even Albrecht noted how sparse the spirit life was. This close to Geneva and the
technological hub of CERN, the Gauntlet was certainly thick, but the spirit ecosys-
tem should have been more alive. One-Song had mentioned this before and she’d
attributed it to the overabundance of Weaver spirits around the accelerator.
Their goal was the doorway in the side of the hoop that One-Song had entered.
Kleon had figured out that it sat right inside a CERN facility, a small complex of
buildings. In the Penumbra, however, those buildings did not exist. Yet. Eventually,
their essence would leak over the Gauntlet and create shadow versions of their
structures. But that process usually took many decades. For now, they didn’t have
to account for the facility, only that small portion of it that had migrated itself into
the spirit world — the door and the stairway down into the accelerator.
To get there, they had to get past the First Team soldiers.
Albrecht’s keen wolfen scent picked them up well before his sharp eyes saw
them. The smell of gun oil, sweaty leather, and adrenaline. They were on alert.
Kleon, who padded along to Albrecht’s left, whispered in the garou tongue.
“I’m getting radio chatter through my fetish. There’s something going on down
south, at a different node in the facility. They think the attack’s going on down
there.”
“Could be those Geneva Glass Walkers,” Albrecht said, his pace steady.
One-Song loped along on his right. “Gaia help them.”
Kleon barked a laugh. “These guards want to head south, abandon their post
and get in on the fight. Their commander is yelling for them to stay put.”
“You think they’ll listen?” Albrecht said. If the soldiers ran off, it’d make their
job easier. But he really wanted to tear into some damn Wyrm creatures and wasn’t
Chapter Twelve 83
sure he wanted to let these ones get away. He doubted Kula would be on board with
avoiding a fight now anyway.
“Sounds like they’re buckling under. Well trained. But they are distracted.”
Albrecht smiled, his sharp teeth visible as his lips curled. “Their loss.”
Gunfire erupted ahead and to Albrecht’s right. A howl split the air, followed
by growls and roars, and further gunfire. Kula and her pack, Albrecht thought. She
had deliberately drawn fire, giving the less-experienced packs in the line a momen-
tary advantage as the enemy directed fire at one spot.
Albrecht broke into a full run and the First Teams became visible. Bullets
strafed his path and bounced off his fur, now wreathed in the armor of the moon,
one of the gifts he had called upon just before breaking from the cover of the
woods.
As he sped toward the line of soldiers, he saw the telltale signs of their inhu-
manity. Even though they wore uniforms with body armor and helmets, and fired
assault rifles, some of them had tentacles spreading forth from their backs, or spi-
der legs sprouting from their sides, or spikes jutting from foreheads and knuckles.
He targeted a large soldier with a thick carapace wreathing his torso and limbs.
Hopping left then right on his four legs, he dodged most of the bullets, ignoring the
few that pierced his moon armor. They weren’t silver. Didn’t have time to put silver
bullets in the budget, Czajka?
As he closed the space he grew, stretching and expanding into his crinos bat-
tle form, his right arm grasping his klaive in its sheath on his back. He drew the
massive silver blade and let out a sharp growl. The metal ignited into flame and
Albrecht swung it unerringly at the fomor’s neck. The creature’s eyes widened as
the sword melted through his carapace and severed his head from his body, leaving
a glowing, cauterized stump.
Without missing a beat, Albrecht stepped to his right and thrust the tip of his
burning blade into the torso of the next soldier in line, who screamed as his uniform
caught fire and the sword punctured his liver, spraying yellow bile that steamed as
it splattered onto Albrecht’s already retreating klaive.
Three fomori immediately concentrated fire on Albrecht, the hail of bullets
sparking as it hit his armor, overwhelming his lunar shield. Blood reddened his white
fur from multiple bullet holes, but he didn’t flinch or miss a step as he leaped forward,
swinging his klaive in a great arc midair and bringing it down in one clean sweep.
Two of the fomori’s torsos slid apart as the molten blade passed through them.
He stepped forward and to the right, to flank the remaining fomor. It pointed its
gun and pulled the trigger, but got only an empty click. Out of bullets. It threw its
rifle at Albrecht. He knocked it aside with his left arm and swung his fiery sword at
the soldier’s legs. Octopus-like tentacles shot out from its back, swarming to block
the burning metal from its deadly path. The hot blade sheared them in half. They
fell to the ground, leaking black, burning ink that became foul-smelling smoke.
The klaive thudded into the fomor’s leg. Albrecht pressed, both hands gripping
tightly, and pushed the blade through, a hot knife through steaming meat.

The fomor screamed and fell to the ground, his left leg severed. Albrecht drove the
tip of the klaive into his chest. Bone cracked and a red cloud of boiling blood erupted
as the blade sunk into the cavity and melted organs. The creature went limp. Albrecht
flinched as the red mist irritated his eyes. His fur was now more red than white.
He paused, frozen in action, reaching out his senses to find the next targets.
There were none.
All across the meadow, fomori bodies lay on the ground, either spasming last
breaths or lying deathly still. Exposed guts and viscera steamed into the night air,
and the gurgling of incomprehensible final words echoed throughout. Garou paced
about, as alert for enemies as Albrecht. Some were bloody and wounded, but most
had come through spotless.
It can’t be this easy, Albrecht thought. Kula’s right. These guys were just here
to alert the rest of them about us.
The flames on his klaive snuffed out, as if a sudden wind had smothered them.
He shifted into glabro form, his wounds already sealing up. The bloodstains weren’t
going anywhere, lending him the terrifying visage of a caveman soaked in blood.
He felt a hand on his back and began to turn around.
“Ah, ah — stay still.” One-Song stuck a finger into an exit wound that hadn’t
healed. He felt a warmth spreading from there, not the weakening of blood loss
but the calm contentment of spirit healing. “One of them had some silver rounds.”
“Huh. I didn’t notice. Must have been their captain.”
“I took care of it. Let’s get inside there, quick.”
Kula marched over, in glabro form like Albrecht. “Some wounded, but not
beyond healing. I want first crack at the door.”
“Be my guest,” Albrecht said. He looked at One-Song and nodded toward
some of the wounded garou, who were gathering together a few yards away, circled
by theurges tending their wounds. “Can you help out?”
“Don’t worry, they’ll be fine. We have enough spirit doctors to go around. I’m
going to save my mojo for getting you and Kula out of whatever mess you throw
yourselves into.”
Even Kula smiled at that and nodded at One-Song. “I’ll form up the lines of
attack. We go in three.” She turned and left before Albrecht could give his assent.
He was the leader of this force, but he knew better than to micromanage the tactics
of the assault when Kula was more than capable — legendary, even. His job, as he
saw it, was to keep the momentum up and not let anybody lose focus or give in to
fear should the tide turn against them.
He noticed Kleon walking along the edge of the hoop, examining it. “Don’t
get too close.”
The Glass Walker, now in human form, rolled his eyes. “You do know we’re
going into this thing, right? Define close.”
“I just don’t want you setting off some sort of alarm before we breach that
door.”
Chapter Twelve 85
“No danger of that — the pattern spiders are gone.”
One-Song frowned and stepped toward the hoop, peering at it as if she could
see through it. “I don’t see any, but that doesn’t mean they’re not ready to swarm
from behind the wiring at any minute.”
Kleon waved a finger and brandished his PDA fetish. “You don’t get it. I mean
they’re gone — down south. Whatever’s going on down there with the Geneva
Glass Walkers, they’ve drawn all the pattern spiders toward them. Now, that could
be bad — if the spiders are swarming to prevent a breach — or good, if my fellow
tribe members called them on purpose and are controlling them.”
“Hey, whatever widens our window,” Albrecht said, clapping his hands and
motioning north. “Our door awaits.”
He set out toward the gathering line of garou, who were filing into the places
Kula’s pack had set for them, forming their ranks of assault. The front was ahroun-
heavy, with all 10 of their full-moon warriors in the fore-lines, not counting Kula in
the lead and Albrecht, who took up the last line of ahrouns. He needed to be able to
see them all and guide the other auspices to help where they could. While the other
moon signs were not born as fierce warriors, they were still garou, which meant
they could kick most anybody’s ass and not break a sweat.
The theurges came next, since they’d need to reach the warriors to help heal
them, or step ahead to deal with any pure spirit threats that claws and fangs couldn’t
solve. The philodox half-moons weren’t as specialized for this sort of work, but
they could still supplement the fighters and make sure to keep them from breaking
ranks with their commanding gifts. The galliards would aid morale, and the ragab-
ashes would throw as many monkey wrenches into the enemy’s ranks as they could
devise, as well as give an alarm in case the enemy attacked from the rear.
After making sure that One-Song was right behind him, Albrecht gave a short wolf
huff at Kula, who spun and marched forward, the ranks of garou following her lead.
When they rounded the curve of the hoop, One-Song pointed at the door. Al-
brecht couldn’t make it out at first. The wall of pattern spider webbing, so thickly
tangled and pulsing with electronic flashes in all directions, looked like an elabo-
rate mess to him. Only when Briga ran her hand along the webbing and wrapped
her hand around a knob set within it did Albrecht see the shape of the door.
Kula growled. Behind her, twenty-eight garou shifted en masse into crinos
battleform. She nodded at Briga, who then opened the door.
A firehose of brown sludge spewed forth. It engulfed Kula in a cocoon of filth
and began dragging her, kicking and howling, inside.
Albrecht gagged as the stench hit him with the force of a fist. Week-old rotting
bodies smelled like roses next to this unholy miasma, a charnel effluvium that
crawled up his snout and choked his brain with its vapors.
The thick sludge exploded in a spray of slime as Kula tore her way free with
a frenzy of twisted, barbed claws, dripping with ugly black ooze. Albrecht knew
from experience that her venom — Black Fury tribal magic — was agonizing to the
touch. The scream coming from inside the door attested to that.

Kula leaped through the door, claws slashing. The garou surged forward in
their designated ranks, single-file. Two ahrouns broke ranks, dropping to their
knees and puking, overwhelmed by the stench. Four warriors made it through the
door before the line stopped, clearly blocked from advancing farther. A terrible
concatenation issued from within. Howls, screams, curses, and a few gunshots,
although far fewer than Albrecht had expected.
The unholy stench dissipated, leaving only a mild, unpleasant rotting. He
gnashed his teeth. He wanted to push forward, parting the garou aside, and press
into the tight space himself. But that wasn’t his role here. He knew he made for a
bad leader most of the time, too impatient to let others do their jobs. He was work-
ing on that. Now he had to put his recent self-restraint regime into practice.
He took a breath, let it out, and took a step back, relaxing his grip on his
sheathed klaive. He waited.
Moments later, the line moved again. Five, six, seven garou through. Then the
howling, hissing, and screams halted. The fight was over. For now.
The ahrouns waiting to enter stepped away to let the theurges through. One
garou stepped out, coming toward Albrecht. Mountain Breaker, one of Kula’s
ahrouns, from the first wave. She nodded at Albrecht while shaking her hands to
fling brown goo from her claws. “The stairwell is clear. Seven fomori, three sludge
Banes, all destroyed.” She turned to look at Kleon, standing next to Albrecht.
“You’re up, cockroach.” She spun and walked back through the door.
Albrecht knew her form of address wasn’t an insult, not exactly. Cockroach
was the totem spirit of the Glass Walkers tribe. Kula’s crew didn’t always respect
them or their totem, but Mountain Breaker wasn’t technically dissing Kleon with
that epithet.
Kleon followed behind her, with Albrecht right behind him. He motioned to
One-Song and looked over his shoulder to make sure she was sticking close. Her
brow was furrowed and she looked down at her two animal spirits, who walked
alongside her, but she kept pace with him.
It was crowded in the tight metal stairwell. Garou stood along the walls, ready
should an enemy appear. The theurges watched the walls carefully, expecting
waves of pattern spiders at any moment.
A way had been cleared for them to wend their way down to the elevator level.
Kula stood before the closed door, arms crossed. She was soaked in her own blood,
but it was quickly drying and, thanks to her theurge packmate, her wounds were
all sealed.
The grilled-metal floor dripped with pungent brown goo, which Albrecht took
to be the remains of the sludge banes. H’rugglings. It looked like Kula and the
ahrouns had torn them into indistinguishable streaks of sewage. Albrecht wondered
how such creatures had wound up here, of all places. They were corrupted earth
elementals, normally associated with toxic waste. Is the particle accelerator some-
how producing this shit, as some sort of Wyrmish byproduct, or did Pentex bring
them in to taint the atoms used in the experiments?
Chapter Twelve 87
Kleon dropped his backpack on the floor and bent down, carefully pulling
something from it. It moved and made clicking noises. Kleon cooed something to
it, like someone shushing a cat. He placed it on the floor and let it go.
The scorpion clacked forward, toward the elevator, it claws snapping, its
barbed tail poised to strike. When it reached the door, it walked right through it —
disappearing through the steel sheet like a ghost.
One-Song shook her head, an I’ve-seen-everything look on her face. “You sure
that thing knows what it’s doing? Doesn’t look too sophisticated to me.”
Kleon stood up, smiling. “Oh, it knows. That spirit will work its way right into
the programming of this place — the pattern that the pattern spiders have woven.
We lucked out — the spiders are still dealing with my Geneva tribemates’ incursion
at the main accelerator. They’ll certainly send some troops back this way now that a
pattern scorpion is in their server stacks, but we’ve had a big head start.” He pulled
out his PDA and watched as code scrolled across his screen, showing him his scor-
pion spirit’s progress.
Albrecht peered over his shoulder at the device, but couldn’t make sense of the
jumble of letters and numbers whizzing by. “How long?”
“Almost there… almost there. Yes! Sting!”
The elevator door disappeared. The shaft was exposed, open all the way down.
“Elevator car: deleted. Elevator doors on the bottom level: deleted. Elevator
doors on all other levels except this one: sealed.”
Kula grunted, a snort that passed, coming from her, as a compliment. She
whistled and jumped into the shaft, grabbing the rungs of a ladder on the far side,
which she immediately began to slide down. Her packmates were behind her in a
flash, leaping one-by-one into the shaft.
Kleon, Albrecht, and One-Song squeezed against the wall as the garou flowed
passed them and down the shaft. Some of them had shifted into glabro form, to
better deal with the ladders; not everyone wanted to risk tumbling five levels down
if they lost their grip due to clumsy, crinos-clawed hands.
When Albrecht’s place in the ranks opened up, he stepped in and grabbed a
ladder — there was one on each of the four sides of the shaft — and began climb-
ing down. He wanted to just slide like Kula had, but he didn’t want to out pace
One-Song. She crawled into the shaft above him, in her glabro form, and began her
slow, careful climb down. Kleon followed right behind her.
Before he was half-way down, a bark of pain broke the air above him. A garou
plummeted past him, howling. He looked up. A dark mass hung two levels up, right
above where he had stepped into the shaft. Shit. Nobody thought to make sure the
shaft was clear above us. The thing swayed on a rope and clutched a garou, who
struggled and snarled, trying to slash at it. No, not a rope. A web.
Albrecht hauled himself back up the ladder. One-Song had already moved to
the adjacent ladder, clearing the way, as she stared up at the thing, frowning.
Kleon hung above her, one arm wrapped through the ladder’s rungs, the other
drawing a pistol.
Albrecht, shifting into crinos form as he climbed, passed him. “You really
think a gun’s going to do shit to whatever this thing is?”
Kleon, taking aim, didn’t turn his gaze from the creature. “To this dratossi moth-
erfucker? Oh, hell yeah. This gun will.” He squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in
his hand and there was a high-pitched scream from above. The creature spun on its
line of webbing, surprised. It’s garou prey — Hathor, Albrecht thought, Silent Strid-
er from the Earth’s Voice pack in New York — reached out with one hand to grasp
a ladder and slashed a claw at the web. The line split and the creature plummeted.
Albrecht leaped into the air to tackle it as it flew past. It was nearly his size, a
multi-limbed spiderlike thing, pincers everywhere. He felt at least two pincers pierce
him, stomach and left leg, as they fell, wrapped around each other. He clamped his
jaws on its neck, the least carapaced part of it that he could reach, and gnawed away.
It screeched and struggled to get free — and then they both hit the ground.
The thing’s chitin cracked and leaked green goo and its struggling limbs grew weak
as Albrecht chewed into the ropey neck. He tried not to move his limbs. His legs, he knew,
had been crushed by the fall. In a few moments, they’d knit back together, but he needed
to make sure, in those few moments, that this thing wouldn’t also get back up.
It went limp beneath him. He let go and spat out the bitter mush of its flesh. He
struggled to rise, and slowly found his footing, as his legs strengthened under him.
By the time One-Song plopped down next to him, he stood at full height and
had caught his second wind.
She stepped over to the unconscious but still-breathing garou, the one whose fall
had alerted them to the danger above, and used her moon lore to heal her wounds.
Albrecht couldn’t remember the garou’s name. She was from Kinsky’s Ice Sword
pack. A Black Fury. I’m such an asshole. I should know every single one of us.
Another garou dropped down next to Albrecht. Greatheart Gulyas, his philo-
dox. “My lord, are you injured?”
Albrecht drew his klaive and gestured to the opening in the shaft were Kula and
the others had already exited. “I’m peachy. Let’s quit yapping and get a move on.”
Gulyas nodded gravely and waited to fall in behind Albrecht. One-Song just
stood aside, her palm open in an after-you gesture.
Albrecht stormed into the hallway. It was thick with spilled blood. He had
heard howls and snarls coming from down here, but couldn’t focus on it before
now. Three garou bodies lay on the floor, reverted to human form. Dead. Five First
Team bodies were sprawled throughout the hall, torn to shreds by garou claws.
Up ahead, at a T-intersection, Briga rounded the corner, stumbling, clutching
a bruised arm. Her eyes met Albrecht’s, pleading. He shot forward, slipping passed
her and around the corner.
Two ahrouns lay on the ground. Moving, thank Gaia. Albrecht leaped over
them to join the rest of the force. Five garou and Kula, standing in a tight V-forma-
tion, were staring down a wall of thick, muscled flesh.
The creature crouched, scrunched down to fit into the tunnel. Warts and ac-
id-etched burns mottled its flesh. Its hands bristled with massive claws, dripping
Chapter Twelve 89
with steaming clear jelly. Its hairless head grinned with haphazard rows of sharp
fangs, each larger than Albrecht’s fingers.
“Fuck,” he said, as he slipped through the ranks to stand beside Kula. “Halassh.
They brought out the heavy hitter.”
“Hitters,” Kula said, not turning away from the massive Bane. “There’s anoth-
er one behind it.” She teetered a moment, catching her balance, then dropped back
into fighting form.
“You’ve had all the fun so far,” he said. “Why don’t you let me take this one?”
She smiled at him, knowing full well what he was saying without saying. She
bared her fangs and took a step forward, then stopped. He could tell she was fight-
ing for balance again. He could now see the deep, pus-filled scars running down her
back. She nodded. He stepped forward, but she put out her hand.
“Let me make sure he has your full attention.” She met the Bane’s gaze and her
eyes blazed red, then gold, and then cooled down to a faint green before returning
to her natural blue. A Black Fury curse.
The Bane froze into place, still grinning. It was paralyzed.
“Shit. I was hoping to turn it to stone.” Kula shrugged then motioned for Al-
brecht to do his thing.
He ran forward and drove his klaive’s pointed tip into the Bane’s belly. The
thick, knotted mass of muscle resisted, almost bouncing the blade back, but the
force of Albrecht’s thrust won through. The flesh parted and the blade slid jerkily
in, like forcing a baseball bat into a cooked steak. The Bane didn’t flinch or react in
any way, still under Kula’s gorgon’s spell.
The klaive’s hilt met the belly. It couldn’t go in any farther and Albrecht could tell it still
hadn’t reached the spine. He twisted it and began to drive it downward, sawing away to part
the reluctant flesh. He went at it like a butcher with all the time in the world.
As the blade reached the thing’s pelvic bone, the body convulsed. Time’s up.
Albrecht yanked the klaive free, dragging intestines with it. The Bane roared in
pain and rage, his hands drawing back to slash into Albrecht with all its fury.
A black, prehistoric wolf leaped onto its head and wrapped its jaws around
its skull — the smallest part of the bane’s anatomy. Albrecht tried to remember
who this was. Hekate, one of Kula’s Own. The hispo-form wolf exerted all its jaw
strength, to a resounding crack as its teeth pierced bone.
The Bane’s eyes widened in shock. Albrecht reached up and poked the klaive
through its throat, which turned out to be its soft spot. He pressed through until it
severed the spine at the base of the skull. Instantly, the fight went out of the Bane
and its flesh began to dissolve, going the way of all spirit flesh.
A freight train broke through and slammed into Albrecht. Hekate was flung
into the air, somersaulting away. Albrecht couldn’t move, couldn’t breath, as he
was flung forward by the other halassh Bane that had been waiting behind the first.
Albrecht hit the ground, stunned. He saw a giant fist flying at him. Barely con-
scious, he mimicked a lion’s roar, but it exited his throat as a weak cough. It was

enough. Intent was everything. He called upon the lion’s Gift and sidestepped his
sure death. Instead of being on the floor where the fist smashed into concrete, he
was suddenly a few yards away, down the hall, removed from the fray. It was said
that when the first Silver Fang died, he was reborn with the secret of evading his
deathblow. Albrecht was thankful for his ancestor’s wisdom.
He crawled to his feet, his eyes blurry. He focused them and saw the rest of the
ahrouns swarming the halassh, slashing, biting, beating at it. It flung its claws out
and sliced a garou in half. Redmane, Albrecht thought. Another of the Earth’s Voice
pack. They’ve only got one left unwounded, an Uktena galliard.
He growled and forced himself to move, to get back into battle. Then Great-
heart Gulyas was at his side, holding him up.
“Wait, sire. Catch your wind. All here seek glory.”
Albrecht relaxed. Gulyas was right. Redmane and the others had known what
they were getting into. They deserved the right to fight and die for Gaia, without
the elders stepping in to do it all themselves.
He saw Kula likewise holding back, standing on all fours in hispo form, pant-
ing, healing. He stumbled over to stand beside her, clutching his side. His ribs were
broken, but slowly stitched themselves back into shape.
“We need to move the rest of the force up,” Kula said, still watching the battle.
“The full moons will be spent.”
Albrecht nodded and turned back to Gulyas. “Tell everybody to get up here.
They’re on.”
He turned back and winced as another garou fell. Skeevy, a Bone Gnawer
ahroun from the Rough Bunch pack around Central Park. Albrecht hoped he was
still alive.
The halassh groaned and stumbled, as Hekate hung, still in hispo form, from
its throat. Blood gushed in geysers, and the halassh resembled a balloon losing air,
its flesh falling in folds as its fell to the ground.
Albrecht moved forward, stepping lightly around the ahrouns, not one of
whom was unbloodied. He stepped over the dissolving remains of the Bane and set
himself against whatever came next. The corridor was empty.
Behind him, theurges and philodoxes moved up, tending to the wounded and
forming up behind Albrecht.
One-Song appeared at his side. “There’s something up ahead. My friends
smell it.”
Albrecht looked down at the fox and badger spirits clinging closely to One-
Song’s ankles. Their noses twitched and their eyes were wide with fear.
“Alea iacta est,” he said.
One-Song raised an eyebrow and set her staff before her, waiting like Albrecht
for what came next.
Chapter Twelve 91
Chapter
Thirteen
One-Song peered ahead into the darkness of the tunnel. Red safety lights
glowed dully along the walls, leaving large gaps of shadow between them. Shapes
moved in the dark.
She focused her spirit, a scant, paradoxical moment of letting go at the same
time that she exerted supreme attentiveness. Her senses sharpened with the en-
riched sight, hearing and smell of her wolf form.
The shapes took form: large, lumbering, insectoid dinosaurs — crinos-sized
T-rexes mixed with beetles. They hunched behind the cover of the particle accel-
erator tube that took up most of the tunnel to the left of the walkway strip. They
were clustered right before the spot where she had seen the egg. This must be the
final defense.
“Ooralath,” she said. “Three of them.”
“Makes sense,” Albrecht said. “I was wondering when we’d see some corrupt
Weaver spirits.”
One-Song swept her staff around her legs like a broom, forcing the fox and the
badger to slide back away from her. “Shoo. Get back down that hallway. You’re not
going to like what I’m about to do.”
Tumbler barked indignantly and Grumblepaw harrumphed, but they both
shuffled back away, although slower than One-Song would have preferred. She
didn’t wait. She raised her finger and hummed a tune, drawing an invisible shape
in the air before her. She couldn’t see the pictogram she’d traced, and neither could
her garou companions, but any spirit within ten paces of her would see it and recoil.
The spirit ward was an ancient sign that awoke an atavistic dread in any and all
spirits, slowly draining them of their life essence if they remained near.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw ran as if they’d been kicked. Should of skeedaddled
quicker, thought One-Song. The spirits ran back past the ankles of the garou army
and out of One-Song’s sight.
She turned back to peer at the Ooralath, who were shuddering and swaying,
fighting the urge to abandon their posts and get out of range of the dread sign.

“Okay,” she said, tapping Albrecht on the shoulder with her staff. “You’re up.”
He nodded and howled, raising and lowering his arm in a cutting motion.
Garou flowed around him and One-Song, leaping onto the accelerator tube and
dropping on all fours to charge the ooralath.
One-Song raised an eyebrow at Albrecht, who didn’t notice it. His eyes were
glued onto the garou and their prey. She was impressed. She’d expected him to lead
the charge, but he was beginning to better measure his energies, letting the army do
the grunt work. She could tell he was fighting his urge to charge into the fray, the
way his hand gripped and ungripped his klaive, his shoulders leaning forward and
then back again as he got control over his animal instinct.
A horrific howl broke out. One of the garou — she wasn’t sure who was who
— had lost it. His rage exploded and he spun around, clawing and biting anything
that moved. Luckily, the ooralath were closest to him, so they took the brunt of it,
but one garou leaped back, bleeding.
Thank Gaia it took this long, she thought. I’d been expecting that kettle to blow
since we first took a step out of the damn woods. Garou were always walking the
edge between self-control and primal anger, the bestial urge to fight anything that
moved. It was a testament to either Albrecht’s example or fear of Kula that, so far,
none of the garou had yet given in to their instincts. Until now.
She stepped forward to intervene, but Dawn Dancer beat her to it. She was a
fellow Child of Gaia from the Finger Lakes, part of the Blacklight Pack. She cried
out to the raging garou and he reacted as if slapped across the face — stunned, eyes
blinking, unsure where he was. One of his fellows yanked him away from the fray
before an ooralath claw could slice him open and another garou slid in to take his
place in the scrum.
The way of peace and calm was one of the many secrets that Unicorn and her
brood taught to her Children. It was the very same Gift that Pearl River had used on
One-Song in the council lodge, when she’d completely lost her shit after reliving
the horror of killing her own packmates.
The battle didn’t last long. Three garou were badly wounded, but the ooralath
were dispatched. One-Song didn’t wait for a congratulatory round of howling. She
marched forward, shoving garou aside with her staff.
She reached the spot along the tube where she had seen it, the egg — a place
etched in her mind, its every feature, from the rivets on the curving tube to the
broken bulb in the nearby emergency light fixture. She dropped to her knees and
reached out her senses, sniffing. The Wyrm scent was strong, but not strong enough.
Nothing like the last time she’d been here.
“Kleon!” she yelled, rubbing her hands up and down and along the tube,
searching for a hatch.
The Glass Walker pushed himself through the gathered crowd to stand next
to her.
“Is there a way to open this up? I know it looks like a metal tube, but it’s really
pattern webbing, right?”
Chapter Thirteen 93
Kleon nodded. “It’s the ephemeral shadow of the material-world tube, but it’s
heavily interwoven with the Pattern Web. We need raw muscle to get through, and
that’ll attract attention.”
“Got to risk it. It’s what we came for.” She looked back at the garou crowd,
searching for Albrecht’s face.
Kinsky stepped forward. He was the elder from the Alps sept, the leader of
the Ice Sword Pack, and a ragabash. He smirked and waved everyone away. When
One-Song didn’t move, he put his hand under her elbow and gently lifted. “It’s my
turn, dear. Be polite.”
She let him lift her to a standing position and frowned at him, but she stepped
away, joining Albrecht.
“As you can see,” he said, “every few feet is a set of rivets joining each section
of tube to the next.”
Kleon nodded, shrugging. “You have a giant wrench? Those rivets are ma-
chined into place.”
Kinsky smiled and placed his hand over one of the rivets. It popped out, clank-
ing onto the ground and rolling toward the wall. He ran his hand over an adjacent
rivet. It shot out and almost hit Albrecht in the chest. He moved aside at the last
moment, sending it over his shoulder. A third and then a fourth rivet popped out.
Kinsky slammed his crinos-form arms down on the tube section and it lurched
downward. He nodded at two of his packmates who had come to stand beside him
and, in a single coordinated blow, they knocked the tube section down, its rivet-free
side smashing into the floor, exposing the insides of its adjacent tube section.
One-Song stepped up and pressed Kinsky aside. She leaned forward and
peered into the opening, searching. She slumped over and groaned, anger and sor-
row bursting out of her.
The egg was gone.
Severed webbing, coated in organic slime, marked the spot where it had been
stuck to the inside of the tube, where it had soaked up the energies unleashed by
colliding particles. No more; the nest was empty.
One-Song stepped aside and leaned her back against the walkway wall, sliding
down into a sitting position, her head in her hands. “It’s gone. They moved it.”
Albrecht stuck his head into the open tube. “No goddamn way. How’d they
pull that off? Are you sure it hasn’t hatched?”
“Do you see any shards of eggshell? No, they moved it.”
“GODDAMN IT!” Albrecht said, punching the accelerator tube. The blow
didn’t even dent it.
“When?” Kula said, stepping forward from the crowd, her eyes slitted in anger.
“Can we still catch them?”
“Search for clues,” Albrecht cried. “There’s got to be some trace, some scent
— something to show which way they went.”

Garou spread out, some shifting into wolf form, their snouts sniffing up and
down every inch of the tunnel.
One-Song just sat against the wall, defeated. Tumbler and Grumblepaw crept
forward, cautiously avoiding the other garou. One-Song’s spirit ward had worn
away, making it safe for them to approach.
They nuzzled their heads against her shins. She weakly put her hands out to pet
them, but it was a half-hearted gesture.
“Guys,” Kleon said, staring into his PDA. “They’re coming. The spiders. They
didn’t like our vandalism. Better catch that scent — and fast.”
“Nothing!” Kula said. She kicked the tube. Like Albrecht’s blow, it had no
effect. “Not a fucking trace.”
Greatheart Gulyas, Albrecht’s philodox herald, shook his head. “I’ve tried to
catch the shadow of his presence — Czajka, that is. I assume he had to be the one
to remove the egg, yes? But there’s no trace. I’ve tried to find the trails of Pentex,
but they’re not showing up either. None of them were here. If they were, I would
sense their trail — the pulse of our prey. It’s as if the egg was teleported away.”
Kleon slapped his forehead. “Shit. I think you’re right. Remember what I said
about Czajka? He’s tuned into technomagic about spatial dimensions. Remember
the windows? He must have used some procedure to remove the egg without need-
ing to risk being here physically.”
One-Song threw up her hands. “All these Banes, these First Team soldiers —
they’ve been here to distract us, to keep us busy.”
“How soon until the pattern spiders arrive?” Albrecht said coolly, with a calm
that surprised One-Song.
“Five minutes. Maybe three,” Kleon said.
“Everybody out. Now! They want us to waste our time looking for something
we’ll never find, and then be overwhelmed by Weaver spirits. Hell no, we won’t!
Form ranks! We’re going back out the way we came in.”
Albrecht walked over to One-Song. He held out his hand. “Come on. Nothing
you can do down there.”
She took his hand and stood up. He nodded at her and took his place in the line
of garou. She fell in behind him. Tumbler and Grumblepaw slipped along beside
her.
“No!” a garou yelled, his voice gurgling with the pent-up anger every garou
recognized as raw rage fighting to explode. “We came all this way! So many dead!
We can’t run like cubs!”
One-Song didn’t recognize the garou. He stood at the end of the line, refusing
to join. His shoulders rose and fell, his breath like a bellows. He was going to snap
at any minute.
Albrecht shot past her and towered over the garou. He locked eyes and stared,
beginning the age-old contest of wills, well-known to most garou. “Into line. Now.”
The garou hesitated, his breath slowing.
Chapter Thirteen 95
“And if you ever call me a cub again, I’ll give you a battle scar you’ll wear in
shame for the rest of your life.”
The garou cracked, looking away, gulping in air and shrinking into human
form. He nodded, shoulders slumping, and shuffled forward into the line.
Albrecht stormed passed him back through the line. One-Song stepped aside
and let him pass her. He stopped and sighed, then nodded at Kula, who stood at the
front of the line, waiting for his signal. She huffed a wolf bark and then marched
forward.
One-Song knew she should have kept a keen watch out, in case the enemy
had left traps for their exit, or had sent in fresh troops, but her heart wasn’t in it.
She was distracted by fear, knowing the egg was out there somewhere, Gaia knew
where, waiting to hatch. Although Czajka wanted her there when that happened,
it wasn’t necessary. The thing would be monstrous enough on its own, even if it
didn’t complete its perinatal development by extracting the Song from her head.
The next thing she knew, they were back in the elevator shaft and she had to
climb up the ladder again. She heard clicking noises back from where they’d come,
a dozen metronomes beating together. Pattern spiders.
She glanced at Kleon, who was climbing directly below her.
He shrugged. “They’re flooding through the tunnel, trying to repair the dam-
age. My scorpion is keeping the shaft open for now. But keep moving.”
She nodded and sped her climb.
She crawled from the shaft onto the grilled catwalk of the stairwell. Albrecht
gave her a hand up. He didn’t meet her eyes, or anyone else’s. He was seeth-
ing, running through some fierce thoughts in his head that he wasn’t sharing. That
wasn’t like him; he usually just said whatever was on his mind and damn the tor-
pedoes. He stomped up the stairs and she followed.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw caught up to her before the next landing. They had
also climbed the shaft’s ladders, somewhat awkwardly, but Kleon had given them
both a final shove out of the shaft. One-Song suspected they could have found
their own way out if they’d wanted to. The badger was a prodigious burrower,
and she suspected that he could get through the pattern webs, assuming the spider
guardians were too busy to notice his tunneling. But they’d stayed close to her. The
loyalty of Unicorn’s brood.
She scoured her memory of her short captivity in Czajka’s techno-hut, search-
ing for any clue — an image seen on a screen, a command given to the First Teams,
anything — that would signal where he’d taken the egg. He’d already shown an
ability to step sideways, as well as to teleport himself from danger. But where did
he go, when he’d escaped Albrecht’s assault? Did he come here and immediately
start the egg evacuation procedure? Or was there a safe house he operated from?
She had nothing to go on. For all she knew, he could be deep into some an-
chorhead realm far into the Umbra, beyond the easy reach of Albrecht’s army. If
so, they’d never get to the egg in time. On the plus side, the egg wouldn’t affect

the material world and its Umbral environs so drastically as Czajka had planned.
It would be too far removed. Unless Czajka’s magic meant that distance wasn’t
a hindrance. Who could tell with a mage? They were strange creatures to garou,
working with powers beyond the understanding of the werewolves’ animistic cul-
ture and folklore.
Lost in her desperate musings, she’d blanked out on the climb up the stairs
until the cool air hit her as she exited the glowing pattern-web hoop. Somewhere
along the way, she’d shifted back into human form. It wasn’t even her native form.
She’d been born as a wolf. Get off of autopilot, damn it. We aren’t out of danger yet.
Kula and Albrecht were forming the exiting garou back into ranks, although a
wider unit this time, without the hindrance of the tight corridors. She took her place
and scanned her surroundings. The moon had set, leaving the meadow in complete
darkness. Each garou had their own light source, either a flashlight or a light stick
hanging from a necklace or wristband. Across the Gauntlet, in the material world,
One-Song guessed that the faint hint of dawn was brightening the distant sky, al-
though the Alps mountains would probably block direct sunlight for a couple of
hours yet.
The fomori bodies from their initial assault still littered the meadow. No back-
up had arrived. It had all been a ploy, a series of chess pieces placed to make it
seem like Czajka was defending the egg. He’d certainly delivered some heavy
assets for the job. The presence of the halassh Banes alone meant that he took this
seriously. He’d almost certainly have needed to make unsavory Wyrmish bargains
to have gained those thugs. Maybe that meant that he was still nearby, making a
slow getaway. If so, how in the world would they know? If their spirit gifts couldn’t
suss out a trace of him or his subordinates, what could? Maybe she could summon
a spirit, perhaps a bloodhound or an owl, someone who just might be able to pick
up a trail hidden from them.
“I need to get back to New York City,” Kleon said. He stood beside One-Song,
but addressed Albrecht. “I can’t access all of my networks from here.”
Albrecht gave him a side glance. “You mean the ones used by mages, right?
That technoweb or whatever they call it?”
“Digital Web. And yeah, that. It’s the only thing I can think to try at this point.
Some Virtual Adept might have a way to track Czajka, if he’s using Correspon-
dence tech like I suspect.”
“Uh, huh,” Albrecht said. “And what’s this philanthropist going to charge for
his services? We can’t have them knowing too much about our movements or who
we are.”
“I’ve been dealing with the denizens of the Digital Web for years now. I know
the protocols. You got a better idea?”
Albrecht sighed and turned away. “Knock yourself out. When we hit Brighton,
you can get a separate bridge back to Central Park. Take the Rough Bunch and the
Blacklight packs back with you. They deserve to go home. An army’s not going to
solve our problems now.”
Chapter Thirteen 97
One-Song looked around at her fellow garou and saw just how weary they all
were. They hadn’t rested since setting out from the Hand of Gaia caern. While the
ahrouns had taken the brunt of the battle wounds, the theurges were drained from
their spirit doctoring, and even the other auspices had entered the fray toward the
end. There wasn’t one among them who couldn’t use a few hours sleep.
But they couldn’t rest anywhere near here. They’d have to hoof it back to the
fleet of cars they’d left at the airport parking lot and then to the high Alps. Maybe
there they could rest for a while, in the lakeside cabins, before taking the moon
bridge back to England.
She looked down at the animal spirits crouched by her legs. They scanned
in all directions, wide-eyed, nostrils flared, waiting for any sign of trouble. She
wished Tumbler would say something funny. She needed a smile. But there was
nothing to laugh about. The gentle-hearted spirit animals shivered in fear.
She lowered herself to one knee and placed her free hand on Tumbler’s back,
caressing her fur. She cradled her staff in her left elbow and rubbed her left hand
over Grumblepaw’s bristly back. As her hands slid over the spirits, she hummed a
tune taught to her by the spirit of a blooming rose. A tingle flowed from her palms
into the spirits. They relaxed, closing their eyes, feeling the warmth restore their
essential substance, which had been diminished earlier by her spirit ward.
Tumbler’s tail flicked and her body curled around One-Song’s knees. She
licked her palm. Grumblepaw stretched out his back and shook his belly, like an
old man coming out of a nap.
One-Song stood up and leaned on her staff. She caught Kleon watching the
animal spirits. “I wish I could do that for everybody here,” she said. “But there’s
too damn many of us.”
Kleon nodded at Albrecht’s back. The Silver Fang stood in front of them in his
native human form, fidgeting while waiting for the garou to get into line. “Some-
body needs a hug.”
“Oh, and because I’m a Child of Gaia, everybody gets free hugs, right? I ain’t
a hippy, son. Well, not these days at least. Back in the ’60s, though? I guess I qual-
ified. Fine.” She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Albrecht. She only
reached as high as the bottom of his shoulder blades.
“Uh, what?” he said, moving his hands down to hers, beginning to unwrap
them from his chest.
She hummed the tune, the rose-growing tune as she thought of it. Her kind
called this Gift the Lover’s Touch. Not romantic love, not necessarily, but the love
of Gaia for all her own. Albrecht stopped trying to move her hands. She could feel
his tense muscles loosen. The warmth that spread within him wasn’t just healing
wounds, it restored his resolve, replenishing the well of will that even human sci-
entists now recognized as a finite resource for each individual.
“Okay, okay,” Albrecht said, gently grasping One-Song’s hands and moving
them apart, breaking her embrace. “Point taken. Maybe you are my bodyguard.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she could sense the smile he spoke through.

One-Song stepped back and winked at Kleon. Her tribe’s role in garou affairs
wasn’t to go around beating on everything. It was to heal the hurt done to Gaia,
to Her children, to Her world. Every wound she sealed, every heart she mended,
every mind she soothed, was a victory for Gaia. It’s easy to hit something. Putting
it back together was the real work.
A howl broke the air at the front of the line. Kula’s call, her signal to march.
The line began to move.
One-Song took a last look at the glowing web hoop that dominated the field.
She couldn’t wait to get away from the damn thing.
Chapter Thirteen 99
Chapter
Fourteen
“How many are dead?” Czajka said. He adjusted the dials on the readout of a large
metal box, the size of a Marshal stack amplifier, matching it to the frequency given off
by the four other boxes, each chained together by thick, rubber-coated wires.
“All of them,” McAllister said, looking up from his laptop.
Czajka turned to look at him, eyes wide. “All? Even Albrecht?”
McAllister looked away. “No. Our assets. They’re all gone.”
Czajka deflated. “All of them?”
“First Team Theta and all the Chernobyl Banes.”
“What are the casualties on their side?” Czajka’s face was white, more so than
usual, drained of any color his normally pale skin betrayed.
“Unclear. There are definitely some dead, but they took the bodies with them.
Our cameras went out early on. There’s no accurate count.”
“Well. At least they didn’t get what they were looking for.”
“Sir? There is an issue.”
“The Board? Delay them. I have to finish getting the occultation field calibrat-
ed. It’s especially vital now, following your news.” He turned back to examine the
dials on the humming box.
“It’s your former employers. The assault at CERN has come to their attention.”
Czjaka spun around, aghast. “How? I deliberately steered all leads away. If
they got lucky enough to witness the lycanthropes’ attack, they can’t possibly trace
it back to me.”
“Well, sir… there was a two-pronged assault. It appears that a handful of local
Glass Walkers performed an on-site hacking intrusion at a separate facility, one we
don’t have access to. They somehow managed to unearth video records from the
pattern spiders’ visual arrays. They posted them to a public board.”
“What?! Are you fucking telling me that those goddamn Weaver spirits were
recording us the whole time? And they kept a record? And it’s on the goddamn
Internet?”

“It’s been taken down. By your former employer. Who saw it all. Sir, they’re
sending a team in to investigate. As you know, CERN is theirs. They spent a lot of
time and materiel making sure no other party intervened in the accelerator. They
have big expansion plans.”
“Which is why the Board was so eager to enlist my involvement. I had the
backdoor. And now it’s all out in the open.” Czajka paced away from the bank of
connected machines, scratching his chin. “We knew it would come to this, eventu-
ally. It’s far sooner than I’d expected, though.”
“The Board is furious. They are demanding that you contact them and give
them your location. They wish to remind you that they are joint owners of the
entity.”
Czajka waved him off. “I’ll deal with them. For now remind them that the
fewer minds who know where the egg is, the more likely it will remain hidden. The
more sympathetic connections it forges — even through the mere knowledge of its
space-time coordinates — the more space-time distortion anomalies it might cre-
ate. These were what alerted Lord Albrecht. Note that. Maybe then they’ll shut up.”
“They want to send a representative. Someone to ensure that their interests are
being fully considered.”
“Delay, delay. I don’t need more distractions.”
“They wish to send the director of Project Iliad.”
Czajka sputtered. “Francesco? Are they insane? The last thing we need here is
a lycanthrope — especially one like him. The garou can fucking smell his type.”
He gestured toward the banks of machinery. “The Board spent a fortune on these,
all to disguise that redolent scent and to prevent further space-time anomalies gen-
erated by the gestating Unmaker. If Francesco comes anywhere near here, it risks
alerting garou. No! Absolutely not!”
McAllister closed his tablet and held it to his chest. “Is that all for now, sir?”
Czajka tapped his chin. “Any activity at the caern?”
“The Hand of Gaia? Nothing unusual. Their army is still traveling back.”
“You’re sure? They’re not diverting anywhere that could put us at risk?”
“Not that we can tell. You really need to take a look at it yourself. You’re the
only one who really knows how to use the correspondence camera you provided.
Try as they might, the Pentex scientists can’t seem to operate it properly.”
“It requires an enlightened mind. It’s useless anyway, though. I keep getting in-
terference. It’s those damn spirits following her around. They’re protecting her from
my being able to locate and extract her. I’ll say this about her tribe’s totem spirit:
she’s canny. She headed me off even before I knew such a thing was possible.”
“How are you going to proceed without her?”
“Plan B. That’s all you need to know.”
McAllister nodded and spun around, heading back to the home office. Czajka
looked over the machines and smiled. They were functioning just fine, despite a mi-
nor hiccup in transportation. He’d been too free with his displacement technology. It
Chapter Fourteen 101

was only a matter of time until a glitch arose. Luckily, this one had been minor, taking
out only one of the machines. An expensive mistake, but it was a backup anyway.
The occultation field they generated would hide the Unmaker’s so-called
“Wyrm scent” from the keen noses of any lycanthropes who came near. Now it
was just a waiting game. Waiting for the egg to hatch.
He frowned, rubbing a hand across his head. He had hoped to have One-Song
here by now, but that didn’t seem possible. He was going to have to rely on a far
less-certain method. It scared him.
He was prepared to die, but not like that. It would be painful, worse because
it would be his own creation — his beautiful Unmaker — eating its way into his
brain. If he succumbed to the pain, if he couldn’t keep his mind fortified against the
dissolution of his own body and the devouring pincers of the Unmaker, everything
he had achieved so far would be for nothing. The Wyrm would win.
He envisioned the Wyrm as the creature’s mother, providing the egg. But he
was its father, providing the spark of life.
He couldn’t let the mother win.
His own mother had already defeated him by dying. She took a piece of him
with her, a weakness he despised.
Not this time. The mother must lose. At all costs.

Chapter
Fifteen
Albrecht barely said a word the entire way back. Both he and Kula withdrew into
shells of sulking fury. He was angry, frustrated, ashamed — he’d led them all there, to
a fight that was lost before they’d arrived. Garou had died. Many wore battle scars, but
none would sing tales of glory about their attainment when their story had ended in de-
feat, no matter the valor displayed on the way there.
Who would listen to him now? He was king of the east coast Silver Fangs, the shin-
ing example of lordship to the other tribes. Not anymore. He was a loser, a fool who’d
rushed seven packs of garou halfway across the world with little to no intel and nothing
to show for it. The world-shattering threat still existed, hidden beyond their means to
find it.
Meister Sun-Runner greeted them like heroes anyway, pleased to see his packs
return, even though a member of the Gathering Cloud pack had been lost, a Shadow
Lord ahroun named Nyevsky. They were a three-member pack, now with only two left.
There were four dead total. The other three were all from Albrecht’s army: Hi-
ram Longshanks, a Bone Gnawer ahroun from the New York City Rough Bunch pack;
Stonebreaker, a Child of Gaia ahroun from the Hand of Gaia Blacklight pack; and Red-
mane, Fianna ahroun from the Earth’s Voice pack, in the Catskills. Other garou were
wounded, although their most grievous injuries had been tended to and mended.
The Sept of Sun’s Glory gave them the run of their cabins, giving them a much-need-
ed rest. Albrecht couldn’t sleep and so stood outside by the lake for the rest of the day,
waiting for the others to rise at sundown.
One-Song had come by and tried to console him, but he just politely thanked her
and made it clear he didn’t want to talk about it and he didn’t want company.
He’d made a big mistake not waiting for his packmates. They couldn’t have changed
the outcome, but they would have changed his mood. He had two of his septmates with
him, Silver Fangs from his protectorate, but it wasn’t the same as having packmates near.
He hoped they’d be waiting for him back in New York. That’s when it hit him that he
wasn’t in the Umbra anymore. He could call them.
He fished through his jeans pocket for his cell phone and drew it out. The screen
was cracked beyond repair. He pressed the power button but nothing happened. He
Chapter Fifteen 103
growled and tossed the phone onto the rocky ground, stomping on it and grinding it
down with his heel.
That must have been the fifth phone he’d lost. He really needed to get Kleon to
make him a battle-ready phone.
“My lord.” Thomas Cordain approached. He was Albrecht’s galliard chronicler. He
had come with Albrecht to the Hand of Gaia caern-cleansing ceremony in case they’d
needed to remind the Finger Lakes garou of Albrecht’s deeds.
Albrecht ran a hand through his hair, which hung freely since he’d undone his po-
nytail. “Hi, Tom. Sorry I’ve been ignoring everybody.”
“Everyone understands.” The garou, a slender man with movie-star good looks,
pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket and handed it to Albrecht. “I notice you ren-
dered another phone into its raw components.”
Albrecht smiled for the first time since they’d arrived at the lake. “Are you keeping
count of these things?”
“That,” Tom said, pointing at the shattered remains of the phone, “would be number
nine.”
“Jesus Christmas,” Albrecht said, turning on Cordain’s phone and dialing Evan’s
phone number. “Just don’t… don’t record that for posterity or anything. All right?”
“Understood,” Tom said, bowing slightly. He then turned and walked back toward
one of the cabins.
Albrecht heard it ring three times before a voice answered. “Hello?” Evan Heals-
the-Past.
He smiled, thankful to hear the young man’s familiar voice. He’d encountered him
during his First Change and, despite his initial self-absorption in his own problems,
wound up fostering him through a rollercoaster of a rite of passage. Evan and Mari
Cabrah, a hot-headed Black Fury, had become his packmates, his first true pack since he
had been exiled by his own father from the sept he now commanded.
Of course, Albrecht thought. He doesn’t have Tom’s number in his contact list. “Hey
kid,” he said, summoning as much swagger as he could. “Miss me?”
“Albrecht! Where are you?”
“Chilling in the French Alps. Figured it was time for a vacation.”
“So you’re okay? You got the egg?”
Albrecht sighed. “Uh… well, not yet. Complications. They moved the damn thing
on us. Killed a lot of Wyrm creatures, though. Sorry, no souvenirs. I’ll try to bring back
an ‘I love the Alps’ t-shirt or something.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end. “You’ll find it. Come back. Mari
and I are at the Green.” Albrecht knew he meant the Sept of the Green, in Central Park,
his home away from home when he wasn’t at the Silver Fang protectorate in Vermont.
“We’ll meet you at the Hand of Gaia.”
“Sure. On my way. Got to wrangle an army, though. We, ah… we lost some. Not
many, thank Gaia. You, uh… you’re going to need to tell Pearl that Stonebreaker isn’t
coming home. Better she knows it before we arrive.”

“I’m sorry. This is never easy on anyone.”
“It’s what it is, though, right? The never-ending circle, where we throw ourselves
against the worst goddamn things from beyond all imagination of hell and wind up like
bugs on the windshield.”
“Don’t say that. It’s not fair to Stonebreaker. Not to any of us. You can’t carry this
on your shoulders.”
“I kind of have to, don’t I? I dragged everyone here. I’m the one who’s trying to
live up to destiny, the scion of the Silver Fangs, the wearer of the Silver Crown. If it ain’t
me, who?”
“All of us. Together. Luna gave us roles for a reason, so we wouldn’t do it all our-
selves.”
Albrecht closed his eyes. He’d had something like this same conversation many
times before with Evan and Evan knew it. Still, he played his role, just like he’d said,
advocating for Albrecht to quit being so damn self-absorbed. He knew Albrecht needed
to hear it again, even if it never fully sunk in. And Albrecht knew it, too. The ritual of
it was what he wanted, the rote argument. That’s what made him feel it was okay to
concede, just a little.
“Okay, kid,” he said, wondering when Evan would get tired of him calling him
that. “I’m racking up fierce roaming charges on Tom’s phone. I’ll see you at the Hand.”
“You better.”
“Say hi to Mari for me. Don’t let her practice whatever speech she’s planning to
give me about running off without her. I prefer it ex tempore.”
Evan laughed. “See you soon.”
Albrecht hung up. He looked out over the still waters of the alpine lake. Enough
castigating. He needed a plan, but he had no idea where to start. He had to admit that it
was somebody else’s turn to take it from here. Kleon needed to gather intel. Maybe he
could reach Antonine Teardrop, the Stargazer elder in the Catskills, and see if the stars
had any clues. The long and short of it was, there were things they could do, even if his
job in all this was to set everybody else in motion and wait.
He stretched his shoulders and shook his legs, then marched back to the cabins to
rouse everyone for the next leg of the journey.
•••
They arrived at the Hand of Gaia caern at dawn the next morning. The weary garou
filed into the forest clearing from the shining moon bridge. Pearl River and True Silver-
heels were there to greet them, along with many of the sept members, eager to console
their comrades.
Albrecht stepped from the silvery tunnel onto the compact dirt of the ceremonial
ground. He looked around, seeing the sept members gather around their returned war-
riors, but he didn’t see Evan or Mari.
A hand gripped his shoulder, pulling him around. Mari Cabrah. As soon as he was
facing her, she placed both hands on each of his shoulders and met his eyes.
Chapter Fifteen 105

“Don’t do that again,” she said.
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Albrecht said, trying to fight the smile
that was spreading across his face. “I’ve done a heck of a lot of things lately.”
“Don’t bother answering that,” Evan Heals-the-Past said, stepping up to Albrecht
and punching him lightly in the bicep. “He knows what he did.”
Albrecht feigned pain. “I’ll vet everything I do with you guys from now on. Walk,
talk, whatever. Permission to embarrass myself terribly by bear-hugging both of you?”
Mari grimaced and stepped away. “Ugh, no.”
Evan smiled and stepped in, wrapping an arm around Albrecht’s shoulder. Albrecht
reached out and drew Mari in with one arm while pinning Evan’s neck with the other.
Despite her display of reluctance, she let it happen.
“Got it out of your system?” she said. “Good.” She extracted herself from under his
arm. “We’ll catch up, but first I need to see Kula.”
“Sure. She’s right over there.” Albrecht gestured toward the Black Fury warrior,
who stood at the edge of the clearing, watching the garou as they separated into packs.
Her own pack, five strong, each of whom had fought at CERN with them, fanned out
behind her in a half-circle.
Mari walked over to her. Kula nodded and smiled. They each reached out and
gripped the others’ forearms and leaned their heads together, foreheads touching, eyes
closed. “Sister,” they both said simultaneously.
“So,” Albrecht said, releasing Evan, who rubbed his neck and gave Albrecht a
quick, playful kidney jab as he stepped away. Albrecht winced, but nodded, wagging his
finger. “Hear anything? Any clues?”
“No, not yet,” Evan said. He looked past Albrecht’s shoulder and waved at some-
one. Albrecht turned and saw One-Song, standing by herself at the center of the clearing,
her two animal spirits sitting by her legs. “One-Song! Do you remember me? It’s been
a long time.”
One-Song smiled and walked over. “Of course I remember you, boy. Your rite of
passage made quite a racket around these parts. Last time I saw you was, oh, when you
came through here with Loba.”
“That’s right. I was helping Loba find homes for orphaned children. They weren’t
even Kinfolk, just kids whose lives had been made a living hell by the Defiler Wyrm.”
“Thank Gaia all that business is behind us now.” She looked at Albrecht and raised
an eyebrow. “This one behaved pretty well without you, Evan. Better than I expected,
even.” She winked.
“Hardee-har-har,” Albrecht said. “Do I get a gold star? Look, all this comradery
aside, we’ve got to continue the search. I refuse to believe that Czajka can completely
disappear on us.”
“Why not? It’s amazing we even found out about him at all. If it hadn’t been for
Unicorn…” She looked down at the fox and badger. They looked up at her, expectantly.
“Well, we did our best, didn’t we?” Albrecht couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or
the spirits.

“It wasn’t good enough. I admit it — I’m out of my league here. Detective work
isn’t in my wheelhouse. I hate — and I mean hate — having to cool my heels, but it’s
time for others to step up.”
“I’ve talked to Antonine,” Evan said. “He’s on his way. He’ll have a trick or two up
his sleeve, although he’ll probably need to interpret it. The chimerlings speak in riddles
and symbols.” The enigma spirits, associated with the Stargazer tribe, knew things that
others couldn’t and could answer questions about deep truths of the universe.
“If Unicorn knew about the Nexus Crawler,” One-Song said, “then it’s possible that
Antonine’s Gifts could reveal where it’s hiding.”
“Kleon’s back in New York City by now,” Albrecht said. “He’ll call if he can dig
anything up. So, we wait.”
One-Song shrugged her shoulders. “I guess I’ll go find someplace to sit.”
“Not too far. You hear me? If Czajka thinks he still needs you, he could make a
move against us at any moment. I want someone near you at all times.”
One-Song nodded, eyes closed. “Don’t worry, I won’t let him surprise me this
time.”
Alani Astarte hobbled over, leaning heavily on her cane. The old black woman
hugged One-Song and cupped her face in her palms. “Your cabin’s still here. It’s time
you opened it up.”
One-Song squeezed her eyes shut tighter, tears escaping. Albrecht stepped up and
put a hand on her shoulder. Whatever was going on here, she clearly was having trouble
facing it. The ghosts of her packmates, again, he thought.
“I’ll go with you,” Alani said, taking One-Song’s hand in hers. She gently pulled
her along as she limped away, heading down a path leading into the woods. One-Song
turned and watched Albrecht as she let herself be led away. He couldn’t figure out what
she was saying with that hangdog expression, except perhaps a silent acknowledgement
that he couldn’t help her with this.
“Albrecht,” Evan said. “Pearl and True want a debriefing. And then we’ve got to
prep for the death rites tonight.”
Albrecht winced. Stonebreaker and Redmane. The fallen. Their packs were both
based out of this caern, so they would be honored here. The other dead from their ranks,
Hiram, had been taken by Kleon to New York City.
“It’s my fault and it’s not my fault. I know that. Time to own up to it.”
Albrecht took a deep breath, blew it out, then headed over to address the two sept
leaders. Evan followed closely behind. Mari left Kula’s side and joined them as they
walked.
“Whoever this Czajka is, Albrecht,” Mari said. “We’re going to kick his ass.”
Albrecht smiled, his cloud of doom dispersing as he walked. His pack was with
him. Everything else was just a footnote.
“Damn straight we will.”
Chapter Fifteen 107

Chapter
Sixteen
One-Song stood before a log cabin in the woods. It was one of five clustered
together, once used for tourist rentals in the national forest grounds, now used
exclusively by the garou of the Hand of Gaia sept. One of them was occupied by
the Earth’s Voice pack, who had been among the expedition force. The other three
were Kinfolk cabins, home to three of the human families who helped to tend the
caern and held the promise in their bloodlines of future Children of Gaia garou.
One of their children, a boy of about five years old, stared at One-Song from
the porch of his family home. He held a red crayon in one hand. She waved at him.
Timothy Tyler, she thought. He’s sprouted up since I was here last. She remembered
him well. She’d been the one to summon and assign a tribal Kin Fetch spirit to him.
The spirit slumbered for now, but should the boy ever undergo the First Change —
becoming garou — it would awaken and alert the closest Child of Gaia.
Alani stood next to her, patiently waiting. One-Song didn’t want to go into
the cabin. Her cabin. Her pack’s cabin. It had stood empty since her packmates
had died. When she’d come back to collect her things before disappearing into the
Umbra those many moons ago, she hadn’t had the courage to enter it. Everything
inside would remind her of those she’d lost.
“Got to do it sometime,” Alani said. “You need to reclaim their belongings,
and give back to the sept what can be used by others. If you don’t do it, Kula will.”
“I know it,” One-Song said testily. “Just give me another second.” She tapped
her thumb on her staff, a nervous tick she’d only recently become aware of. “All
right.” She walked up the steps to the front door.
She rattled the doorknob and found it unlocked, as usual. There were certainly
septs where garou needed to be wary of theft from other garou or Kinfolk, but the
Hand of Gaia was not one of those. These days, communal living septs were rare.
Garou tended to live just like most modern humans, driving in from modern homes
or apartments to visit their caerns as needed. The Hand of Gaia was an exception,
a commune whose roots stretched back into the 19th Century, with strong ties to
suffragettes, spiritualists, naturalists, and other progressive experimentalists into
back-to-nature living. The perfect camouflage for a garou sept. Many of its mem-

bers lived on-site. It was the only home she’d ever known since her First Change as
a three-year old wolf running wild in upstate New York, along the Canadian border.
She opened the door and stepped into the musty living room. While members of
the sept had visited the cabin since she was last here, looking for clues about where
she and her pack had gone, it was substantially unchanged since the day she had left
to hunt the masquer Bane. A jacket was spread across the back of the couch. Brown
leather, with a patch depicting crossed eagle feathers sewn into the arm. Bold Eyes’
coat. He had said he didn’t need it where we were going. Into the Umbra.
She sighed and walked to the side table, where an open bottle of Coke still sat,
empty, waiting for someone to clean it up. She tried to remember who had been
drinking it. Breaks-the-Spine? He had a weakness for soda pop.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw padded into the room, sniffing in all directions.
They broke apart and wandered around the edges of the room, investigating every
inch with their noses.
Alani walked in. “You were all in such a rush to track down that thing. I
couldn’t get over here to say goodbye.”
“The trail was already growing cold. It had taken us so damn long to get a lead,
we couldn’t risk losing it. We grabbed what we could and set out.”
Alani hobbled over to the dining room table and sat down, grunting. “These
old bones. Not many Furies get to my age.”
One-Song smiled. “Kula hasn’t let you forget it.”
Alani tapped her cane on the floor. “One of the things that keeps me ticking.
Pissing her off. Maybe she’ll learn some patience.”
One-Song cocked her head, listening. “Do that again.”
“What? Complain about Kula? I could do that all day.”
“No. Tap your cane.”
Alani shrugged and tapped her cane on the floor again.
“Of course,” One-Song said, smiling and walking over to Alani. “It’s hollow.
I’d forgotten about that hidey-hole.”
Alani frowned and looked down at the floor. “What? A loose board or something?”
“The Hidalgos liked to hide things. They were raised in a rough borough in
New York. They never really got used to the openness here at the Hand.” One-
Song bent down on one leg and ran her hand along the floorboard, searching for
a handhold. She pressed one end of the board. It see-sawed slightly, popping up
just enough for her to dig a finger in. She huffed and shifted her hands to the long-
nailed glabro form, giving her more strength and leverage. After a moment’s resis-
tance, she tugged the board out of its place, revealing a compartment.
There was a leather bag stuffed down inside it. She carefully reached down and
around the sack, getting her hands beneath it, and then lifted it up. She stood and put
the bag on the table with a sharp sound, something hard inside hitting the wood.
She looked at Alani, who looked at the bag and then back at One-Song, eye-
brows raised.
Chapter Sixteen 109

“What’s in it?” Alani said, sitting back, both hands on the handle of her cane.
“I don’t know. Robin and Roberta were pack rats. I wouldn’t be surprised to
find a bunch of their old childhood toys in here. But… it could also be a fetish.
They were always surprising me with what they’d found or had traded for with
other garou.”
“Well? You going to open it?” Alani nudged the bag with a finger.
“Might as well.” One-Song laid her staff against a nearby chair and reached
for the leather cord wrapped around the mouth of the bag. She slowly unraveled it.
It had been tied in an elaborate tangle. “Those twins. They’d didn’t want anybody
touching their stuff.”
When she got the cord loose, she tugged open the leather bag. A silvery sheen
with a hint of rainbow shone out at her. An abelone shell. It had a spiral painted
onto it in gold leaf, spinning out from the center to the edges. She carefully reached
in and picked it up, feeling the hard bumps on its outer surface.
“I think I know what this is. Good Gaia, I had no idea the twins had this.”
“Come on, spit it out.” Alani held out her hands, clearly wanting to hold the
shell. One-Song handed it over. The old Black Fury moved it about, looking at it
from every angle.
“That’s old Nathan Steepwater’s ceremonial smudge shell. He got it from the
Uktena, but they dedicated to it his tribe as a gift for his help to them.”
“Children of Gaia,” Alani said. “Everybody around here’s heard of him. Used
to be the leader here at this caern, am I right? Chosen by the Life of the Nation,
they said.”
“He was the one who reopened the caern after the Wyrm forces had closed it.
The Life of the Nation spirit had called to him, sent him visions, and gave him the
courage and knowledge to gather a pack to retake the caern.”
“So what does this shell do?”
“From what I heard, it’s used to burn sage and summon the ancestors of his
tribe and the sept, those dedicated to the Life of the Nation totem. The ancestor
spirits can’t materialize or fight, but they can speak their wisdom. Steepwater used
it to learn how to seal the pact with the Black Furies, giving both tribes co-leader-
ship of the sept.”
“So this shell did that? I guess then it’s what brought you and me together.
How did your galliards find it?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have let them hide it away under the floorboards.
Pearl would walk through hell to get this.” One-Song leaned close to Alani, whis-
pering. “That’s why we’re not going to tell her about it. Right?”
“What mischief are you getting into? Not sure it’s right that I keep something
like this from her.”
“Just for now, you old wolf. I have a mind to use it myself.”
“You’re the same age as me, girl. Just not as much mileage. But okay. I’ll keep
a lid on it for now.” Alani put the shell down on the table. “What else is in that bag?”

One-Song widened the opening. There was a tiny fur pelt folded up. Picto-
grams had been burned into it, but she couldn’t read them clearly. She pulled it out
and unfolded it, spreading it out so Alani could see.
“That’s a mole pelt,” Alani said, running her hands over it.
“I can read these pictograms. This lets the bearer of this pelt burrow deep into
the earth, traveling by tunnel. It’s a talen, not a fetish. Gaia knows where the Hidal-
gos found this one.” Talens were one-use objects, freeing their bound spirits once
their task had been completed, unlike fetishes, which held their spirits permanently.
“Anything else in the bag?”
One-Song looked and didn’t see anything. She picked up the bag and shook it.
A rock fell out. An ochre-painted, sharp-edged river rock, carved with pictograms.
“That’s the symbol for Falcon,” One-Song said, picking up the rock and exam-
ining all its sides, “and the sign of a claw.”
“Silver Fang?”
“I don’t think so. They’re not the types to turn rocks into fetishes. They’d use
precious metals or something. I don’t know what it does.”
A voice standing in the doorway startled both of them. “It’s a Raptor’s Talon.”
“Great Gaia, Kula,” Alani said, “don’t startle your elders like that. We’re liable
to rage out on you and nobody wants to fight off two old wolves who’ve lost their
minds.”
“I think I can handle it,” Kula said, sauntering into the room. She’d had a
fresh change of clothes and had combed her hair since One-Song had seen her last.
“That rock is a handy little thing. Throw it at a horde of Wyrm creatures and it will
bounce around hitting a bunch of them before returning to your hand.”
“How do you know about it?” One-Song said, slipping the stone into the pock-
et of her batik skirt.
“I gave it to Roberta. She helped one of my own out of a jam in New York City,
so I felt I owed her and I don’t like being in debt. That stone made things right.
What I don’t understand is why she didn’t have it with her when your pack fought
that Bane.”
One-Song snatched up her staff and headed toward the door. Kula stood in her
way. She stopped inches away from the Black Fury, eyes smoldering. “Out of my
way.”
“No.” Kula crossed her arms. “Albrecht sent me here to babysit you. I was
going to be cooling my heels anyway, so I figured it was a good idea. To keep you
from being kidnapped again.”
One-Song deflated. She shuffled over to the couch and dropped down onto it.
“Fine. I got no place else to go, anyway. Might as well spend it miserably with you.”
Alani stood up and pointed at Kula, her finger shaking. “You’re a mean bitch,
you know that? I’m getting right sick of it.”
Kula actually looked surprised. She opened her mouth and then shut it. She
gave Alani a quizzical look. She uncrossed her arms and walked over to the table,
Chapter Sixteen 111

pulling out a chair. She sat down on it and gestured to Alani’s chair. “Sit down, old
woman. Don’t get all worked up. I’m too tired to fight right now.”
Alani stood with saucer eyes. She’d clearly expected to get into an argument.
Instead, she sat down, staring at Kula.
“Don’t worry,” Kula said, waving her hand at the now-empty bag, “I won’t tell
anyone about your swag stash. But I still want to know why in the hell the Hidalgos
didn’t take it with them.”
One-Song closed her eyes and sighed. “Because they thought they were com-
ing back. They didn’t want to risk losing the Steepwater shell. I don’t think they
wanted to let Sees-the-Sun know they had it. She would have turned it over to
Pearl and True. They couldn’t get to the Raptor’s Talon and the mole pelt without
us seeing the shell, or their hidey-hole. So, I guess they just figured it’d be here for
them when they came back.”
“Huh,” Kula said. “That makes sense.” She was quiet for a moment. “Look.
I, uh, I wanted to… I wanted to say that I’m sorry for what happened to them. To
your pack. I really liked those kids. The twins. Didn’t care for Bold Eyes much, but
he was good garou anyway.”
One-Song opened her eyes, watching Kula, who didn’t meet her gaze. The
hardened Wyrm-fighter looked away, clearly not used to being so open.
Tumbler and Grumplepaw appeared, slinking around the edge of the sofa,
standing between One-Song and Kula. Kula frowned at the sight of them.
“You know,” One-Song said, leaning her staff against the side table and reach-
ing down to rub her hands on the necks of the animal spirits. “There was this
time when the Children of Gaia of Ithaca and the Black Furies of Seneca Falls
were coming close to blows. Nathan Steepwater stepped in. Brought them together.
They had a common enemy; he just had to make them all see that. That was how
they killed the Night Angel.”
Kula raised her head. “The what? I’ve never heard of that.”
“It’s not a story I’ve told much. It’s one I got from the previous lorekeeper.”
“Night Angel? What the hell was that?”
“It’s what happened when the Wyrm got a hold of religion. Human religion.
Turned it inside-out into something ugly.”
Kula frowned, watching One-Song. She’s too proud to ask, One-Song thought.
But she’s got to ask. That’s the rule.
Alani leaned forward, looking at Kula. “Kind of makes you curious, don’t it?”
Kula waved a hand. “It’s dead, right? What does it matter now?”
“Really?” Alani said. “A Wyrm creature you’ve never heard of? Ain’t that
something.”
Kula shot a look at Alani, but then turned toward One-Song. “Tell me.”
One-Song smiled. The magic words.

Chapter
Seventeen
Things was different back in those days. The brand new United States had won
its independence from the Crown, but it wasn’t exactly sure what it was just yet.
Right around here, born from this very caern from before it was a caern, a vision
took place, took root, and grew. Democracy. Hiawatha brought it to his people, and
they later showed it to Ben Franklin, who took it to his people and changed the life
of the nation.
The Life of the Nation. That’s what we call the spirit that comes from this
land, this enchanted place, this womb of the vision that united a people. She’s
mysterious. Nobody has ever looked upon her face, or heard her words, or felt her
touch. She is veiled but abundant, speaking to us through dreams, through visions,
through mighty desires. The Uktena first knew of her, learning to read her words
written in sky and stream, in the minds of her prophets. The Black Furies further
divined her wishes and saw that she sought freedom for all — man, woman, white,
black, red, all. Not just here, in this place, but the whole land. The nation. Every-
one and everything who gathers on the back of the Great Turtle that is this island
continent.
Humans call this region, this place where the Life of the Nation speaks through
sign and symbol, the “burnt-over district.” So many fiery passions were ignited
here, so many new religions born, new faiths enflamed. Joseph Smith saw his an-
gel here. The Shakers shook themselves to exhaustion here. The Fox Sisters spoke
to spirits, and the Millerites prepared for the Second Coming that’s always just
around the corner but never comes.
Suffragists, spiritualists, Fourierists, Oneida Society, and so many more. It
was a garden of religion, throwing up shoots, leaves, flowers, and creeping vines,
all of which eventually uprooted and spread their seed across the nation, becoming
tangled beyond all hope of pruning from the hearts of its people.
But that hadn’t happened yet. It was just beginning. To this land, so recently
opened to the newcomers and yielded unwillingly from Natives, came a group of
families looking for the fabled garden of their dreams. This religious community,
led by the Reverend Harold Courtright, called themselves the Gethsemanites. The

children of the garden of anguish. They taught that the wilderness was their place
of trial, where they would spend their lives in prayer as if they would each be cru-
cified upon the next morn, like their Savior.
Reverend Courtright had it in a vision that this land, between Seneca Lake and
Cayuga Lake, was the new garden. An angel had appeared to him and told him to
take his people here, where the angel would again come to him and teach the ways
to know God. And so he did.
The angel called itself Dosigel, the Night Angel. The Gethsemanites practiced
what they called “talkings,” a form of walking séance where they would go out into
the woods by night and invite in the spirits that accompanied Dosigel and become
their mouthpieces. Whatever was spoken through them was holy, and would be
adhered to by the Gethsemanites.
Now, this is what outsiders knew about them. What they didn’t know was that
inside they were rotten. Those “talkings”? They spoke of incest, child abuse, and
slitting the throats of strangers on the road at night. All in the name of God.
Well, somebody had to do something. Problem was, the Black Furies up the
north end of the lake and the Children of Gaia down at the south end, weren’t
getting along too well. They knew there was a place of power nearby, somewhere
between them, and each wanted to claim it for their own. The Uktena, whose peo-
ple were part of the Iroquois Confederacy, had lived in that place once, but were
forced out by the raw corruption of the Wyrm, through the tainted and ill-hearted
early English colonists. They lost knowledge of exactly where the caern had been,
and nobody could go looking for it without Wyrm creatures rising up to protect it.
The Gethsemanites lived right among all that nastiness, having been guided
there by their angel, a dark spirit that sought to corrupt the work of the Life of the
Nation. To poison it at its heart. Where the Life spirit gave freedom, the Night An-
gel brought chains. What the Life spirit united, the Night Angel divided.
Sound familiar? The Defiler Wyrm. That head of the serpent has dogged us all
to no end here in New York. Just yesterday it was with the Seventh Generation, its
vile gang of child molesters. Back then, at the birth of the nation, it was the Night
Angel and its Gethsemanites.
Enter Nathan Steepwater. He was a Child of Gaia, a half-moon, born to a
blacksmith in Ithaca. His mother was a Tuscarora Indian. When he came of age —
had his First Change, that is — he was guided by his Gaian tribe, but he always felt
kinship with the Uktena, for his great-grandmother on his mother’s side had been
of the Horned Serpent’s people. His mother had been Kinfolk to them, but it was
his father’s Kin blood that won out stronger, making him Unicorn’s child.
Nathan was what they called a strapping specimen of a man. He’d been raised
at the forge by his Pa, but his heart yearned to be out among the land, meeting its
people and walking its places. Once he had his Change, the smithy had no hold
over him. If ever there was a Child of Gaia so rightly made to play his part, it was
Nathan. Big, bearded, and deft of hand. Not perfect, of course. His blacksmithing
had roughened him, in both hand and shoulder. He had a few scars from splinters
of scalding metal, wounds that had set in when he was young, before the shifting

of forms could mend them. One such scar was on his cheek, looking like a tear. It
gave his smile an earnesty, something won through hardship.
He spent his days traveling the protectorates, meeting every garou he could,
making friends. Sure, he made enemies, too, not because of anything he did, but
because some folks just got to hate on others. The Get up in the North Country
didn’t like him. Not because he couldn’t fight or wrestle or tear up an enemy like
they could, but because he could do these things. Jealous, was all.
Still, he kept to his labors and tried to bring peace between the White settlers
and the Native peoples. He fought when he had to, but more often proved his
mettle by easing the fears of the humans on both sides, bringing them together for
councils and feasts.
The tainted lands between the lakes kept getting in the way.
His good friend, the Uktena new moon called Little Pinecone, had heard of an
old fetish of his tribe’s, one that had been lost when they were forced to move west
from their old caern. It was a shell that came from the sea to the far west — sound
familiar? — and had the power to bring up the ancestors from their rest in the far
realms where they dwelled. Not just the Uktena, but any Garou who had ever lived
at the caern — the lost caern. This meant Wendigo, too, and Croatan, although even
before the caern had been lost, it was said that burning tobacco in the shell couldn’t
raise those ancestors no more.
If someone could just find that shell, that lost fetish, then the ancestors could
tell that person where the caern was hidden and how one might go about reopening
it and driving away the Wyrm. So how in the world could Nathan find that shell,
that one, single thing that sits in the palm of your hand, when it could be anywhere
between the two lakes?
Little Pinecone had an answer: ask the Life of the Nation. His tribe had been
forced west, but they still remembered the powerful spirit that sent them visions.
She hadn’t spoken to them — hadn’t sent signs and portents — since they had been
forced to leave the caern. Many feared she was gone, but Little Pinecone thought
she was waiting. Waiting for someone to come asking for a vision. He did not re-
member where the caern had been, but he knew where his great-uncle was buried.
Perhaps there, by the unmarked grave of the Uktena theurge, old Mudfoot, the Life
of the Nation could be called.
It would be dangerous. The Wyrm had taken the area. The Gethsemanites were
committing atrocities under the veil of night and blamed the Indians for them. The
settlers from around the area thought they were an innocent community of reli-
gious faithful. Some of the Gethsemanites gave themselves over to more than mere
“talkings.” These became possessed by the Night Angel’s Banes and stalked the
land as fomori, searching out any garou who they came upon.
Nathan knew he couldn’t do this alone. He had Little Pinecone with him, but
he’d need someone else, a warrior who could defend him if the Life of the Nation
saw fit to deliver him a vision. He could have called on his own people. He could
have called on Little Pinecone’s people. He chose to call on the people who were
at odds with his people. He went to the Black Furies.

They weren’t happy to see him, but they were polite. They knew how to treat
guests. Nathan stood before them in council and asked for their help. He was going
to reclaim the lost caern. If they were a part of that effort, they’d reap the spoils —
his tribe and theirs would share the new caern.
They scoffed at him, called him a fool. If their mighty amazons couldn’t track
down the caern, how could he? He’d wind up dead or worse — possessed by the
Wyrm and then they’d have to kill him.
Nathan hung his head and left the campfire. Outside the fire, Bathsheba Long-
fang waited for him. She was a well-regarded full-moon among her tribe, but she
had grown tired of the endless wars. Her people were having success among human
women by convincing them to speak up and demand their rights. Bathsheba sus-
pected that their true foe was hidden from them, corrupting the hearts of humans,
and if they didn’t battle it by winning hearts, all the muscle, sinew, and claws
would matter naught. She pledged herself to Nathan’s quest.
He had his warrior. He had his no-moon. He was ready.
The next night they crept from Seneca Falls into the tainted land between the
lakes. They walked as wolves, silent and sneaky. Little Pinecone used his gifts to
trick animals, humans, and spirits so they didn’t see, hear, or smell him. He went
ahead of the others unseen, so he could alert them to any danger before it found
them.
Now, despite the Wyrm having taken the land, it wasn’t a barren wilderness.
There were farms and small townships here and there. But the woods at night were
fearful, full of strange sounds and stranger lights. The Gauntlet was thinner then,
and the Banes that roamed the Umbra could find their way across it by night, given
the right conditions. The Gethsemanites performed black masses in hidden groves,
creating those exact conditions. Longfellow described the sense of it that humans
had: “This is the forest primeval.”
Thanks to Little Pinecone’s scouting, the trio was able to avoid a covey of
bandits, hiding out just off the road, waiting to pounce on travelers. Bathsheba
wanted to teach them a lesson, but Nathan talked her down from her outrage. Their
mission was more important. If they could find the caern, all the ills that plagued
the land would soon be flushed from it by the power of the awakened spirits alone.
They were searching for a place where two creeks met, west of Romulus. The
Indian village of Kendaia once stood nearby, full of Uktena Kinfolk. Sullivan’s
Expedition against the Iroquois tribes who had sided with the British had worked
its way through the area, burning villages. The Indians left, heading west, before
the colonial marauders arrived, but the expedition burned the village anyway.
The Uktena buried their dead along rivers and streams. Little Pinecone’s
great-uncle rested where the creeks met, south of the remains of his village. The
trio arrived by night, the moon waxing into its half phase, a good sign for Nathan.
It was his moon.
They stepped sideways and searched for enemies, finding none. The place was
too far from any human habitation to be of interest to the Gethsemanites and their
Bane allies.
Nathan settled down by the creeks, sitting still and closing his eyes. He began
to chant, crying to the Life of the Nation, begging her to hear him and show him
where the lost fetish could be found. Little Pinecone and Bathsheba guarded him,
roaming the creek bed and nearby woods, alert for any danger.
Nathan chanted for three nights, non-stop. That man had a fierce need and a
strong endurance. Still, by the end of the third night, he was spent. He had taken a
little water but no food, and his throat was sore and his voice barely a whisper. He
had refused to shift forms, for that would be a weakness. Finally, he collapsed, and
fell into a deep sleep.
From beyond all exhaustion, his mind’s eye saw an image. A mantle above a
roaring fire. There were candles, and a snuffbox, and between all the bric-a-brac, an
abalone shell. A man moved in front the fire, stirring it with a poker. He turned and
Nathan saw his sour face, wrinkled with self-loathing. The Reverend Coatright.
Nathan woke up, filled with vigor, all his fatigue washed away. They had to go
to Prospect, the hamlet of the Gethsemanites. Nobody remembers that name any-
more. The site later became the location of the Willard Asylum for the Chronically
Insane. Even with all the healing that came later, there was just something that had
gotten into the dirt that stank of madness.
Nathan knew they wouldn’t be able to win out by force alone. Three garou
were fierce, but the Gethsemanites had Banes and fomori protecting them. They
would never let three garou near their hamlet. But three converts? A family who
had traveled far to join the holy commune? Surely they would not be refused.
The next morning, Jacob Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, and their Indian guide
walked into the hamlet of Prospect. The Gethsemanites greeted them with smiles and
good cheer, thanking them for blessing their village with their visit. They were invit-
ed to break bread with the Reverend Coatright in his own home, and they accepted
his offer to pray with him. When Jacob asked if they might join the religious commu-
nity, they were welcomed. They would be given quarter in the common halls — one
for the men, and one for the women. Their Indian would sleep in the barn.
That night, when the moon rose, Jacob and Elizabeth slipped away from their
beds and met with the Indian, who pulled the abalone shell from his pocket. It had
been no hardship at all for Little Pinecone to steal it from the Reverend’s mantle —
he was, after all, a ragabash.
Nathan and Bathsheba were relieved to see the shell, but knew they had to
sneak out of there right quick. They suspected that the Night Angel’s Banes would
already be looking for them. They had been promised new human converts, and
they were almost certainly just on the other side of the Gauntlet, scouring the ham-
let for their prey, who had so unfairly left their beds early.
They shifted into wolf form and ran for the woods, barely making it into the
treeline before lanterns were lit and a hubbub broke out from the halls, as people
spilled out, righteous angry that the newcomers had slipped past them.
Little Pinecone covered their tracks as they zig-zagged through the woods,
across streams and through thickets, doing all they could to baffle any pursuers. After
a few hours they arrived back at the two creeks, back at old Mudfoot’s burial spot.
Wasting no time, Nathan held out the shell and sprinkled it with tobacco, then
lit it. Smoke wafted up and swirled around, far more smoke than mere tobacco
could produce. A shape formed, becoming more and more clear as the smoke rose.
An ancient Iroquois sachem. It was old Mudfoot himself.
He howled in greeting to the brave garou who had rescued his fetish from the
enemy. He then warned them that the Gethsemanites were near, scouring the woods
for the three garou. Nathan begged him to tell them where to find the old caern
grounds and how to awaken the Life of the Nation again.
Now, Mudfoot could have told him to piss off. Who was this Child of Gaia,
this newcomer garou, to ask these things of him? Mudfoot had been sleeping in
the Horned Serpent’s distant spirit lands, but he wasn’t ignorant of what had been
going on. He wasn’t happy about what the Wyrm was doing. Here was a garou with
some Indian blood, accompanied by his nephew, and allied with a strange garou, a
child of Pegasus, a tribe he hadn’t known about during his lifetime. But more than
anything else, Mudfoot had served the Life of the Nation spirit, the spirit that had
watered the roots of the tribal alliances among the Iroquois. The spirit that brought
folks together to make them stronger.
Of course he told Nathan what he needed to know. The caern grounds lay to
the south, in the deep woods well past Prospect hamlet. Once in that area, Nathan
was to burn tobacco in the shell once more, and the smoke would drift toward the
caern center. Follow the smoke to find the caern.
They were off, running for the south, trying to outrace the enemy that hunted
them. Twice they were ambushed. Bathsheba tore into the fomori, leaving their
bodies spread across the pine-straw littered ground. Nathan pounded them with his
forge hammer, a fetish holding a fire spirit, leaving them burnt black and crisp. Lit-
tle Pinecone tripped them up and confused them, so they struck out at one another
thinking they were attacking the garou.
The trio suffered wounds and one or two battle scars, but they made it to the
deep woods. Following the trail of smoke from the shell, they navigated their way
to a clearing — you know the one. Our ceremonial space, not far from this cabin.
Nathan cried out his chant, the one that had brought him a vision before. Would
the Life of the Nation answer?
A shape stepped from the woods, shining with beauty. For a moment, the ga-
rou stared in awe. The Life of the Nation had never before been seen.
Wings unfurled from her back and stretched forth to block the light of the
setting sun. Her shadow grew heavy, like an actual substance, and pressed down on
the three garou who had been caught within it. Her laugh cut them like sharp ice.
The Night Angel had come.
She opened her robes and revealed a host of faces, many heads growing from her
torso like tumors, wailing and moaning. The souls of the Gethsemanites she had claimed.
She threw off her robe and multiple arms reached out — six, seven, maybe
even eleven of them — each with claws dripping black blood. She had absorbed
the bodies of her flock and used them to… to…”

• • •
One-Song stopped talking. She sat frozen on the couch, staring sightlessly at
the far wall, memories welling up.
“Hey,” Kula said. “What’s wrong?” She stood up quickly, her chair sliding
across the floor from the force of her sudden move. She shifted into glabro form
and spread her claws, sniffing for Wyrm scent.
“I…” One-Song said. “I just realized… the Night Angel. It was a masquer. It
was the same type of Bane that killed my pack.”
“Oh, dear Gaia,” Alani said, standing up shakily. She tromped, cane in hand,
across the room to sit beside One-Song, and wrapped her arm around her shoulders.
“I hadn’t told this story since… since everything happened. I hadn’t made the
connection before. What does it all mean? The Bane that tried to destroy this caern
is the ancestor of the one that destroyed my pack.”
Kula relaxed. The enemy wasn’t here, in the flesh, but in One-Song’s mind.
“You killed the masquer. It’s gone. Don’t dwell on what you can’t change.”
One-Song looked up at Kula, fighting tears. “I ain’t hard like you. There’s got
to be a purpose, a reason for all this suffering. Some way to redeem all the—“ She
froze, staring past Kula, out the open door of the cabin. She tried to speak, but no
words would come out.
Kula frowned and then, realizing that One-Song was looking past her, she
turned and saw it.
Outside in the clearing, a giant white bison stood, staring at Kula. She felt
something loosen in her chest, a tightness that had been there since before memory,
a wound that now melted like ice on a summer day. All her losses, all her anger, her
pain and frustration at the endless fight, they simply faded like dawn mist under
the rising sun.
Kula dropped to her knees, feeling the full power and force of the totem spirit
whose eyes bored into hers. Some totems appeared with auras of fearsome majesty,
others with hints of unfathomable mystery. Unicorn radiated the peace beyond all
pain, the deep, aching beauty that harkened to forgotten memories of all begin-
nings, of perfect, untarnished hope at the very precipice of new life.
One-Song smiled at Alani, patting her hand as she stood up, taking her staff
in hand.
Tumbler and Grumblepaw padded out the door, silent, following a silent sum-
mons. One-Song stepped around Kula to follow them.
“Wait,” Kula said, her voice a whisper. “You can’t leave. Albrecht said—“
“I have to go with her,” One-Song said. “She’s been waiting for me. I realize
that now.”
“Where?” Kula’s voice rose in volume. Her awe in the face of the divinity was
slowly giving way to her duty, her need to keep One-Song safe from Czajka.
“Where it all went down. Where my pack died.” She walked to the door.

“Wait! How… how did the story end?”
One-Song turned around, laughing. “Oh, life’s so not fair. None of us likes an
unfinished story. Look around. We’re here. The Life of the Nation feeds this place.
Nathan woke her up. He called, she came. The Night Angel couldn’t stand before
her. Nathan stood true to his promise. Because of Bathsheba’s help, the Black Fu-
ries joined the new sept, along with the Children of Gaia, and the Uktena. It was
the beginning of the time of all-tribes-as-one-tribe. The time that’s still coming.”
She walked out the door. Tumbler and Grumblepaw stood at the bison’s feet,
looking back at One-Song, impatient for her to join them. “I’m coming. I’m com-
ing, my friends.”
She bowed her head and placed her hand on the white bison’s horn. It let out
a cloud of breath, its mist a cleansing waterfall spray, enveloping One-Song and
the animal spirits.
Then they were gone.
Kula stepped from the cabin and stared at the spot where the totem had taken
One-Song across the Gauntlet and across the Umbra, to the distant Wyrm realm
where her packmates had died. To a place where none of them could follow.
She growled and stalked toward the council hall.

Chapter
Eighteen
“Hold on, Albrecht!”
Albrecht stopped and spun around, still fuming. Mari Cabrah caught up to
him, pointing a finger right in his face. He cocked his head and failed to suppress a
growing grin. Ah, Mari, how I’ve missed you.
“You’ve got no right to go bursting in there and lay down the law. This is an
internal sept matter.”
“She’s right,” Evan said, strolling up behind Mari. He hadn’t even tried to keep
up. “This is between Kula and the sept leadership.”
“Yeah?” Albrecht said, crossing his arms. “And when they start tearing into
each other with claws, who do you think’s going to come out on top?”
Mari frowned and also crossed her arms. “She’s been humiliated — by Pearl
and True’s tribal totem, of all things. Black Furies don’t take shit from anyone. You
know that from me by now. And I’m just a theurge. She’s an ahroun — one who
had a duty to keep One-Song here in camp.”
“Not her fault. Not Pearl’s or True’s either. You don’t stand in the way of a
totem.”
“Doesn’t make it easier,” Evan said. “If it’d been Fenris or Stormcrow, they
would have respected her if she’d at least tried to stand ground. But Unicorn doesn’t
fight fair — she saps all will to fight.”
“I thought you respected that kind of thing,” Albrecht said.
“In the proper context. And I’m certainly not double-guessing what Unicorn
thinks she needs One-Song for. But come on, Kula needs a victory just like you
do.”
Albrecht nodded and looked out past the clearing, toward the open door to the
council lodge, from where he could hear the half-howling yells of the argument
going full storm. “You’re right. She needs someone to fight that’s not her own sept.
I need someone to fight. And I know just who it is…” He uncrossed his arms and
marched across the clearing and into the lodge. Mari and Evan followed behind,
exchanging quizzical looks.

Kula stood in the center of the room, in crinos form, pointing a claw at Pearl
River, who sat on her bench before the far wall. True Silverheels stood in front of
her, as if to ward off the snarling garou, stoically listening to Kula’s ranting.
“Goddamn it!” Kula cried. “She’s your fucking totem — call her back. I don’t
care what cosmic fucking mission she thinks she’s up to, she’s putting everybody
at risk!”
Pearl sighed. “You can’t even hear yourself. Make demands of a tribal totem?
When is the last time you attempted that with Pegasus?”
“My totem didn’t snatch away the enemy’s secret weapon!”
“We don’t need her,” Albrecht said, sauntering up to stand next to Kula, al-
though he addressed Pearl. His stance was easy, relaxed, the opposite of what it
should be standing next to a hardened ahroun close to snapping.
“Explain,” Pearl said, her eyes narrowing.
“For one, we just have to trust that Unicorn has a plan. She is after all, the spirit
who alerted One-Song about the egg.” Kula growled low, clearly not happy about
his topic. “Two,” he turned to address Kula, “we have an enemy much closer we
need to deal with.”
Kula stepped back, lowering herself into a defensive position, but her head
cocked inquisitively.
“The First Team soldiers who came with Czajka. They were positioned across
the lake at the natural gas storage depot, inside the closed-down salt mines.”
“We haven’t forgotten, Albrecht,” True said. “While you were gone, I sent a
scouting party to find out more about them.”
“And?”
True crossed his arms and leaned back. “They haven’t returned yet. They ar-
en’t expected back until tonight at the earliest.”
“And if they’ve run into trouble, how would you know?”
“They have a messenger talen. It will send a spirit bird to alert me.”
“That’s assuming they can activate it in time and that the spirit isn’t intercept-
ed. Look, we have a bunch of garou here, right now, who are ready to fight.” He
gestured at Kula. “Especially this one. I propose we get off our asses and get over
to that facility. It’s the only clue we have that might lead us to Czajka.”
Kula shifted into glabro form, frowning. She looked at Pearl and True, waiting
for their response.
True shook his head. “It endangers the scouts. There’s no way you’ll be able
to get over there without the enemy seeing you coming. If they raise their security
while the scouts are still inside…”
“Then they’ll have to fight with the rest of us. That’s what we do, True. Fight.
I know you Children of Gaia see it as a last resort, but I also know that when it’s
time for claw and fang, you know how to hold your own.”

“Yes,” Pearl said, surprising True, who turned to look at her. Pearl matched
eyes with Kula, who shifted into human form, her trademark smirk across her face.
She nodded slightly at Pearl.
“I lead the vanguard,” Kula said. Her tone left no room for further consulta-
tion.
Pearl looked at Albrecht, but her hand stretched out to find True’s, wrapping
around it. True’s shoulders relaxed. “Kula in the front ranks. True in charge.”
Albrecht grimaced. This wasn’t what he expected. “All respect and every-
thing, but True should guard the caern, in case they slip past us and try to draw us
back by attacking here.”
“That is a risk, but we’re able to hold ground just fine with those who stay
behind.” Pearl’s eyes bored into his. She had put up with too many challenges to
her leadership in the last few days. She did not need one from an outsider, which
is what Albrecht was, at the end of the day, no matter his high rank among his own
tribe.
Albrecht cracked his knuckles. “I’m not so sure…” Evan put his hand on Al-
brecht’s shoulder. He turned to look at the young man and saw the slight shake of
Evan’s head. Really, kid? You don’t have my back on this? He held up his palms.
“Okay. We do it True’s way. On one condition: Once we find out where Czajka is
holed up… he’s mine.”
Pearl nodded. True walked between Albrecht and Kula, slapping Albrecht on
the back as he went, and headed out the door to organize the assault force.
Kula caught Albrecht’s eye. “Smart man. Just the right distraction at the right
time.” She stepped closer and whispered. “You can’t put it off forever. My time is
coming.” She smiled and marched out of the lodge.
Albrecht sat down on the bench. Mari sat next to him, shaking her head.
“Normally, I’d be really enjoying this case of schadenfreude, but I don’t want
to hit a man when he’s down.”
“Oh, yes you do. Don’t put on airs. I should have seen that one coming.”
Evan sat down on the other side of him. “Compromise is the art of kings.”
Pearl stood up and walked passed them, pretending not to hear. As she got
to the door, she paused and turned to look back at Albrecht. “Thank you, Lord
Albrecht. Your wisdom shall one day be as renowned as your glory.” She smiled
and left the room.
“I know she meant that honestly,” Albrecht said. “But it still stings. One day,
leading an army. Next day, part of the rank and file.”
“Quit moping, you fool.” Mari stood up. She wrapped her arm under Al-
brecht’s and yanked him up. “The key difference is that we’ll be fighting alongside
you this time.”
Evan smiled. “No more slipping out before we arrive. You’re stuck with us.”
“Hey,” Albrecht said. “Don’t you hold that against me — we were under time
pressure.”

Mari tugged him out toward the door. “It’s time to get outside and ready to
travel to these salt mines. I intend to stomp some First Teams to the curb.”
• • •
Albrecht counted the gathered garou. Two packs, if he included his own, and
a handful of individuals, including True Silverheels. Kula and her all-Furies pack
made six; Albrecht, Evan, and Mari made three; Albrecht’s Silver Fang cadre,
Greatheart Gulyas and Thomas Cordain, made two. 12 garou in all. Not bad, unless
this place turns out to be way more Wyrmish than anybody suspects.
True had spread a map out across a large wooden table. The garou were var-
iously standing or seated in his cabin’s main room, which he used as a war room
whenever the sept needed to plot strategy and tactics. That wasn’t often. More
common were the smaller, more individual efforts to steer the local human commu-
nity toward the sept’s desired outcomes — Pearl’s territory. Still, every sept needed
to have a method for dealing with large deployments and True was no stranger to
that.
True traced a line with his finger around a spot on the map, on a section of land
right beside the lake. “The salt mines are here. The facility for transporting and
managing the storage of natural gas is mostly here, above ground. Endron Oil only
has a test lease. We’ve been able to use legal muscle to delay their full implementa-
tion, using our local community and environmental groups. So, they’ve only got a
portion of the underground mines filled with gas. They’re supposed to be allowing
the government to monitor the stability of the mines, to ensure that no tunnels or
ceilings collapse and risk contaminating the lake. Unfortunately, a previous col-
lapse many years ago was covered up and isn’t being taken into consideration.”
Albrecht put down his half-empty beer can on the edge of the map. “What in
the world was your plan if they kept pumping that place full?”
“If it came to that, we’d take it out and cause an intentional collapse, but only
after we could empty it first. The more plausible — although less satisfying — ac-
tion is to let our legal assets bog it down until even Pentex writes it off as a loss.”
“Considering this place is right across the lake from the caern, you’re playing
it down to the wire.”
“Remember, Albrecht, we scout and vet this place constantly. Until those First
Team soldiers showed up with Czajka, there had been zero sign of any Pentex
or Wyrm involvement. It seemed like run-of-the-mill human greed and stupidity.
Easily countered.”
“Uh-huh. Until it isn’t.”
“For all we know, those First Teams only came to accompany Czajka. They
might already be gone. They know that the entire team that went out with Czajka
didn’t come back and they haven’t sent anybody out to retrieve them.”
“You sure about that? Remember those devices they used.”
True straightened and placed both hands on the table, looking Albrecht in the
eye. “We’ve figured out how to counter them. Spirits can see right through their

camouflage. We’ve position allies on the borders and within the bawn. All our
guards are on heightened alert to note any footprints or strange movements.”
Albrecht shrugged and picked up his beer. “So long as you got all the bases
covered.”
“Thank you for your input.” True turned to address Kula. “I expect that if
they’re still there, this is where they’ll be, the former salt processing facility. It’s
big but defensible. It has windows all around, so they can see anybody approach-
ing. If they need to, they can retreat deeper into the building, where internal choke-
points will allow a few of them to fend off a larger attacking force.”
“Physically, sure,” Kula said, dismissing the facility on the map with a wave
of her hand. “We go in sideways and step back in behind them.”
“If conditions allow, yes. We don’t know the strength of the Gauntlet there.
Our last visit showed some signs that it was thickening.”
“No matter. If we have to force our way in, we will.”
“Don’t forget that the last group was carrying silver bullets,” Albrecht said,
leaning back against the wall.
Kula grimaced. “Then we trick them into wasting them against false targets.”
She gestured with a thumb toward Briga, her pack’s resident ragabash. “We have
experience with that.”
“What if they’re down below ground, in the mines, protecting whatever the
hell they’ve got down there?” Albrecht took another sip and then crumpled his
empty can. “They say it’s natural gas they’re storing, but they could be breeding
hoglings for all we know.”
True pointed to a place on the map. “This is the elevator shaft. The lift is huge,
large enough to carry heavy equipment. We’d all be able to go down at once. Now,
one thing we do know from a previous scouting trip: in the Umbra, the shaft exists,
but no elevator lift. It’s 900 feet down. No way we’re climbing down on ropes. It’s
the material world option or nothing.”
“Which makes us sitting ducks while we’re going down,” Kula said. She
looked over at Albrecht. “Any way we could call Kleon back here from New York?
He might at least be able to keep them from screwing with the tech while we’re
vulnerable.”
“I can do that,” Mari said. “He taught me a few things about dealing with
Weaver spirits. I don’t have his arsenal of fetishes, but I can make do.”
“Besides,” Albrecht said, “we don’t want to wait until he can hop a moon
bridge back out here. And I still need him to track down leads on Czajka. As you
said yourself, True, these guys might not even be here anymore, which means my
clues to Czajka might be gone.”
“Since the elevator is the only way in and out for them as well as us,” True
said. “I have to believe they won’t sabotage it.”
“I agree. I doubt Czajka left them any way to teleport like he did. That has got
to be expensive tech. Still, it’s going to be a vulnerable ride down.”

Evan stood up from his seat at the edge of the room and walked over to look at
the map. “What about the workers? They’re sending them up and down for shifts,
right?” He looked around the room, at the assortment of homid-form garou. “It
can’t be too hard to masquerade as a work shift. We just have to steal some uni-
forms and make sure 12 workers are otherwise occupied.”
“You mean tied and unconscious somewhere?” Albrecht said.
“No reason to kill them, unless they’re knowingly serving the Wyrm.”
“Evan’s right,” True said. “We don’t kill unless we have to. The Life of the
Nation prefers that everyone gets a second chance. No way to do that when you’re
dead.”
“Life of the Nation or the Children of Gaia?” Albrecht said.
“Both,” Kula said, surprising Albrecht. He didn’t expect her to defend True
from his needling. “There’s a reason the Life of the Nation’s caern is led by a joint
Gaian and Fury pact. They temper us, we embolden them. But True’s right. We
preserve innocent life where we can. But if it stinks of the Wyrm? It dies.”
Albrecht nodded. “I’m not disagreeing, just testing the limits.”
“It’s a good idea, but I think masquerading as miners is a risk,” True said.
“I’ve a better option, one we’ve used before at this site: a surprise EPA inspection.
We sent in two ‘inspectors’ the last time, so a group of 12 is a bit of a stretch, but
I think we can pad out the fiction by having half of us represent one of our local
environmental groups. We’ll mock up a court order allowing them to accompany
the EPA inspectors.”
Albrecht chuckled. “I don’t think a single one of us looks like government.”
True smiled at Albrecht. “A thorough hair-cut can fix that.”
Albrecht shook his head. “Me? Uh,uh. I like my hair long. Besides, I don’t
have a suit.”
“One of my suits will fit you.” He looked at Mari. “What about you? You’d
make convincing agents together, yes? And I know you can speak the right envi-
ronmental science jargon.”
Mari grinned. “Are you kidding? I know more about natural gas than the god-
damn EPA does. I’m in.”
“You can pick the rest of your ‘inspection team’ from among Kula’s pack and
Albrecht’s entourage. We have a plan.” True banged his fist onto the map, meta-
phorically crushing the salt mining facility. “We leave at moonrise. It’s still full,
soon to be gibbous. For now, we have the full gaze of Luna upon our deeds. May
we prove worthy.”
Albrecht nodded but crossed his arms and stepped back, brooding while the
rest of them broke apart and headed out to retrieve whatever gear they intended to
bring.
He knew he was being difficult, but he also knew the others couldn’t know
the struggle he constantly fought with himself. He wore on his brow the fabled
Silver Crown, an ancient relic that held power over all the garou. Used properly,

it inspired rather than controlled. But he could, if he’d wanted to, exert its power
for control. He had resisted doing that at all times. His tribe’s history held many
examples of power turned bad — his grandfather among them. It was the example
of his grandfather that helped him avoid using the Crown in moments of weakness
and rage. He would never — never — become like King Morningkill.
And so he let himself play second banana to True, because to give in to his
real desire to boss everybody around was to betray everything he’d done to earn
the Crown. His consolation was that the Crown still exerted subtle influence. Garou
listened to him. It helped them to know their better angels, even if it didn’t force
them to follow them. It also sat invisible on his brow much of the time, showing
itself only in times when it, not Albrecht, deemed necessary.
He shook his head. It all seemed so odd, this mission. How in the world did it
work out that they’d be assaulting another underground base through an elevator
shaft, less than two days after the last mission? Trouble comes in pairs. He had a
growing suspicion that this salt mine was more than it appeared, more than just a
way station for Czajka’s troops when they tried to kidnap One-Song.
Yet there was no evidence for it being more than that. You simply couldn’t
pack a place too full of the Wyrm so close to one of the eastern seaboard’s most
powerful caerns without someone noticing. They’d been caught off guard by Cza-
jka, but he was a goddamn mage, after all. They knew what to look for — what to
smell for — when it came to Pentex and its First Teams.
Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something, some intel
he needed to put the pieces together, so they’d know exactly what they were getting
into.
“Albrecht,” Mari said, standing in the doorway. Everybody else had left.
“Time to go.”

Chapter
Nineteen
The wet mists evaporated under the hot, anvil heat of the parched, barren,
cracked ground.
One-Song stood once again in the place of her sorrow, where she had left be-
hind the better part of herself, stumbling away broken and numb from the killing
ground of the masquer’s private hell. The place where she had slain her packmates.
The unmarked grave of her shattered heart.
She started as the white bison at her side snorted. It turned its megalithic head
and pointed its single horn toward something in the distance. One-Song peered at
it. A shape, familiar, but strange. The bison nodded toward it.
She sighed and began walking to it. She heard the scuttling sound of Grum-
blepaw’s claws on the hard ground behind her as the badger waddled after. Tumbler
was surely there, too, but moving silently.
As she drew closer, she recognized the thing. A broken merry-go-round, cant-
ed at an angle, half-fallen into a hole in the ground. It was the last remaining piece
of playground equipment that had once littered this realm when she had first ar-
rived here, a grim trophy of the masquer Bane’s child victims.
It was rusted completely through. She tapped one of its hand rails with the butt
of her staff. Chunks of brittle, red metal fell off.
She turned to look at Unicorn, who still stood in the distance, unmoving. She
noticed a mark on its hoof, a red welt, looking like a fresh rash. This place is poison
to her. She can’t step any farther in. That’s why she needs me.
She realized that, if this was the merry-go-round she’d seen before, then the
killing ground was just a few paces to her left. She turned that way and saw a slight
mound. Atop it was a single, tiny blade of grass, the only growing thing in the
entire realm.
“Why is this place so bad?” Tumbler said, suddenly appearing from behind
her, sliding closely along her shin.
One-Song looked down at the fox spirit. She looked thin, her fur stiff, as if it
hadn’t been washed in days. Not her normal, glossy coat. She looked around and

saw Grumblepaw to the other side of her, crouched low, his eyes wide with fear, his
nose catching every stray scent that managed to drift through the stale air.
“It’s a splinter of a greater realm, a place we call Atrocity. A hell-realm at the
very door to the worst hell of them all: Malfeas.”
“We can’t stay here,” the fox said, her voice almost a whine.
“I have something I need to do. Something I have to finish.”
Tumbler looked up at her, her eyes pleading. “This place… isn’t good for us.”
One-Song bent down and rubbed her hand down the fox’s back. She means her
and Grumblepaw. This place must be draining their essence. Time to light a fire.
She walked over to the mound. It was here that her packmates had fallen be-
neath her rage-maddened claws and teeth. There was no sign of their bodies, just
dirt, and the single lonely stalk of grass.
She reached into her skirt pocket and withdrew the abalone shell. She bent
down and placed it next to the grass. She then fished into her satchel and pulled out
a lighter and a leather tobacco pouch. She opened the pouch and pulled out a pinch
of fragrant tobacco, which she placed in the center of the shell.
She bowed her head for a moment, gathering her courage, and then lit the
tobacco and said a silent prayer.
The smoke drifted hazily upward, and then began to spiral, as if caught in a
whirlwind. The smoke grew thicker and thicker, far greater in volume than the
small tobacco could possibly produce on its own. A great cloud spread across the
mound. One-Song stood up and stepped back, leaning on her staff.
The cloud suddenly whipped away, flying across the ground, dispersing in
all directions. In its place stood a woman. She stood taller than One-Song, with
olive-complected skin, dark hair tied into a pony-tail, and brilliant green eyes. She
wore a brown leather vest, fringed with multicolored beads, a pair of jeans, and
brown sandals. Around her neck was a leather cord with a massive turquoise stone.
One-Song’s lower lip trembled and she gripped her staff tightly, afraid to
move, afraid to speak.
The woman stepped forward and opened her arms. “Come,” she said.
One-Song dropped her staff and fell into her arms, wrapping her own arms
around the woman, hugging her tight.
Sees-the-Sun hugged her packmate, her theurge, and whispered into her ear.
“Do not cry. Our waiting is over at last.”
They stood there in embrace for a long time. One-Song had no strength to let
go or step away. Her pack leader simply held her, for as long as she needed.
Finally, Sees-the-Sun gently placed her arms on One-Song’s shoulders and
pushed her away. “It is time.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” One-Song said to the ghost that stood
before her, the spirit of her dead pack leader. She wiped a tear from her eye. “I
thought you were… I thought you were… beyond all contact.”

“The masquer’s last trick was to make you think it had abolished everything
you loved. But Unicorn is stronger than a single Bane. She held our spirits here,
contained within the grass seed, until you could come for us.”
“Where are the others? I want to see them!”
Sees-the-Sun lowered her eyes. “They sleep. Steepwater’s Shell is powerful
magic, but it cannot awaken us all.”
“It’s not fair!” One-Song said, turning to look at the white bison, so very far
now in the distance. “I came all this way! I’ve waited all this time, not knowing.”
Sees-the-Sun put her hand in One-Song’s. “Gaia’s patience is infinite. We must all learn
from her. Alas, time is not our ally in this. I cannot speak for long. Know that your nemesis sent
a spirit here, to find us. Its coming awoke us, briefly. Long enough for Robin to steal a secret
from it, unnoticed.” She leaned in and placed her lips beside One-Song’s ear and whispered.
One-Song’s eyes widened as she saw in her mind’s eye, in a single heartbeat,
a story unfold. When it was over, she cast her eyes down.
“That’s how it always starts, doesn’t it? With loss. Unbearable loss.”
“Nothing is ever lost. Not so long as it remains within Gaia’s reach. Listen
now: you have two tasks remaining. You must dig up the grass stalk and take it
to Unicorn. Only then can we join our brothers and sisters in the ancestral lands.”
One-Song nodded. “Of course. I understand it all now.” She released Sees-the-
Sun’s hand and bent down on her knees in front of the blade of grass. She stopped
and looked up at Sees-the-Sun. “What’s the other task?”
Sees-the-Suns placed her hand on One-Song’s head. “You must confront the
Unmaker. Only you can counter its song. Only you remember the One Song.”
“But I don’t! I don’t remember the Song. I just get snatches of it now and then.
I can’t do this.”
“It’s in you. You simply must remember. When the time is right, you will.”
“Why can’t Unicorn do it? She’s a totem. I’m just an old wolf.”
“Even she does not know the Song. It was given to you.”
One-Song closed her eyes and rocked back and forth. She hated this. Hated all
the responsibility laid on her shoulders. She just wanted to follow her pack into the
undying lands, where she could rest forever.
“No!” Sees-the-Sun said. “You don’t get to refuse this. You don’t get to lie
down. You are the only one of us still standing. Until you can no longer stand —
until you have fought with all your strength and can fight no more — only then can
you fall. Until that time, you go onward. You go on for every one of us. That is the
price you must pay for living. We can no longer pay it.”
One-Song squeezed her eyes tight, but nodded her head. She felt the slight pres-
sure of Sees-the-Sun’s hand lift away and slowly opened her eyes. She was alone.
She looked down at the blade of grass, the sole spark of life left in the land
of the dead. Slowly, carefully, she dug her hands into the dirt around it, wrapping
them together beneath it. She raised up the small handful of soil from the dry earth,
cupped between her palms.

Standing up, her staff crooked beneath her arm, she walked slowly toward her
totem spirit, careful to keep any dirt from escaping. As she approached closer, the
bison stamped her front hoof and lowered her head, snorting. As One-Song came
up next to her, she opened her mouth, waiting. One-Song placed the mound of dirt
with its precious bloom onto the bison’s tongue, carefully unweaving her hands
and letting the precious green shoot settle onto the grayish-pink organ.
Unicorn closed her mouth and looked at One-Song with her impossibly an-
cient eyes. The ageless totem slowly blinked, nodding.
Tumbler rubbed against One-Song’s right leg. “You did it.”
“I guess I did,” One-Song said, stepping back from the bison, taking her staff
in hand. “It’s not fair. But I did it.”
Grumblepaw raised himself on his hind legs and placed his front paws on her
left leg. “I will miss you, One-Song. I will miss you very much.”
“What do you mean?” One-Song lowered herself, petting the badger’s head.
“You’re not coming with me?”
Tumbler swept around her knees. “When we came to you, those many moons
ago, we did not come for you.”
“I don’t understand. It took me a while, but I finally realized you’d been sent
to me. By Unicorn.”
“To you,” said Grumblepaw. “Not for you.”
“We came for them.” Tumbler stopped weaving around One-Song’s legs and
sat still, looking into One-Song’s eyes.
One-Song gently rubbed her cheek. “My packmates. You came to keep me on
the path, so I’d eventually find my way back here. To them.”
“We did not…” Grumblepaw buried his head against her thigh. “We did not
think we would love you so much.”
One-Song blinked at the tears in her eyes. “I didn’t think I’d love you two so
much, either. I thought you were silly. I needed silly.”
“Goodbye, One-Song,” Tumbler said. “Now we must go, to keep your pack-
mates on the path, to show them the way home.”
“I hope we shall meet again,” Grumblepaw said, dropping on all fours and
nodding his head gentlemanly.
“Oh, goddamn it,” One-Song said, rubbing away the tears that escaped down
her cheeks. “It really ain’t fair now. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.
The world might be unmade and me with it. But if you’re in the ancestor lands,
you’ll be safe. I got to believe that.”
The two spirits smiled at One-Song. Tumbler leaped into the air, somersault-
ing, and landed on all fours. She pranced around behind the white bison’s rear legs
and was gone. Grumblepaw waddled behind her, turning for one last glance back
at One-Song, sorrow in his eyes, before he too disappeared.
One-Song looked up at Unicorn, who stood stock still, like a rock carving from
antediluvian times. She stood up and tapped the butt of her staff on the ground.

“No use waiting. Take me to this goddamn Unmaker.”
The bison lowered its head, presenting its sole horn. One-Song reached out and
grasped it. Instantly, the world changed around her. The barren ground gave way to
a dark cave, its walls striated with straight vertical marks, like they’d been clawed
by a creature with massive, regularly spaced talons. Large klieg lights mounted on
poles cast shadows in all directions, revealing rows of equipment, metal boxes with
wires snaking from them, stretching across the cave floor.
Unicorn was gone. One-Song stood alone.
“How is this possible?” a heavily accented voice said.
One-Song gripped her staff. Goddamnit. She turned to her left, to stare into the
eyes of Dr. Basil Czajka.
“I believe you were looking for me?” she said.
Czajka stood with mouth agape, surrounded by a cadre of First Team soldiers,
armed to the hilt. He stepped forward, looking One-Song up and down. He didn’t
turn away from her as he gave orders to his men. “Search this place, up and down
— the Penumbra included. She can’t be alone.”
“Oh, I’m alone, all right,” she said. “More alone than I’ve ever been.”

Chapter
Twenty
Czajka reached out and wrapped his hand around One-Song’s staff and gently
tugged it from her hands. She didn’t resist.
“Can’t have a repeat of last time, can we?” he said, marveling at her. “I’ll hold
on to it this time.”
How was it possible that she was standing right in front of him? None of his
calculations had admitted the slightest probability of her just appearing before him.
He knew his understanding of chaos theory wasn’t so advanced as certain of his
former colleagues, but this? This was beyond a statistical anomaly. It spoke of fate.
“I don’t suppose that old stick would do me much good now, anyway,” One-
Song said, looking around the cavern, at the scientists moving to and fro, and the
First Team soldiers cemented to their posts, watching her warily, guns half-raised.
“Where the hell am I?”
Czajka frowned. “You don’t know? Just how exactly did you get here?”
“Hitched a ride.” She crossed her arms and cocked her head at him.
“I find it hard to believe that you really came by yourself. If you tell me where
you’re companions are, I promise not to kill them outright.”
One-Song raised an eyebrow. “Go ahead, search all you want. If it makes you
waste more time, it’s good with me.”
Czajka leaned on the staff, looking her up and down. “Maybe you are telling
the truth. Still, I’m not taking any chances and my team will shoot on sight.”
One-Song just stood there, staring at him.
“Most perplexing,” he said. “I had feared… well, you have come to allay my
fears. My original plan can proceed.”
“So you got the egg here somewhere. Let’s get this over with. Where is it?”
“Ah,” Czajka laughed. “This is some sort of trick? I show you the egg and you’re
companions come bursting through the Gauntlet to attack it, yes?” He fished a PDA
from his pocket, tapped a button to waken it, and brought up a full-screen camera view,
which he then held up as moved the device around, its camera taking in the cavern.
Chapter Twenty 133

It did not display his immediate environs, however. Instead, it saw across the
Gauntlet into the Penumbral reflection the material room cast into the spirit realm.
In that cavern, there was no machinery and no lights. His camera’s small flash
provided the only illumination. He saw no movement, no bodies in wait. The walls
showed hints of slumbering spirits curled up within them, revealed only through
patterns on the walls that suggested animal shapes. But they were deep asleep, as
was normal.
He frowned. She did appear to be telling the truth. “Sergeant!” he said. The
First Team leader, standing nearby, snapped to attention. “Take a number of your
men to scout the Penumbra. Stay in contact with us here at all times.”
“Yes, sir!” the soldier said. “Smith, Sykes, Muldoon! You’re with me!” Three
men broke away from their posts and followed the sergeant to a ring of cables set
in the floor, wide enough to accommodate them all. The sergeant pressed a button
on a control panel just outside the ring and the men disappeared, transported across
the Gauntlet into the spirit world.
“Well ain’t that fancy,” One-Song said.
“I don’t know what you think you can do here,” Czajka said. “I’m sure you
have a plan in your head about how you’re going to prevent the egg from hatch-
ing, or if it does, how you’re going to somehow turn the Wyrm, as it were, open
its heart, sing Kumbaya, and restore the universe to the loving arms of your bitch
goddess.”
One-Song’s stare shot daggers at him. “You watch your tongue, you stunted
little man, or you’re going to find out just what it means to have a theurge elder in
your midst.”
Czajka put up his palms in apology. “Where are my manners? You are, after
all, a guest of your own will. I am remiss not to celebrate that.”
“Are going to take me to the damn egg or not?”
Czajka shrugged. “All right. Come…” He put his left hand out, waiting for
her to take it. She warily put her hand in his. He thumbed the gold ring on his right
index finger and initiated the displacement procedure. The illusion of fixed points
in geometrical space melted before the gravity of the correspondence singularity
and then reformed, with Czajka and One-Song now standing somewhere else.
He released her hand. “There,” he said, pointing across the dark space to a
pedestal made of stacked rocks, resembling a neolithic altar. A string of lights on
the floor surrounded it, each positioned to shine up at the object placed on top of it.
The Dolorous Egg. The gestating Unmaker. It squatted on the rock, the size of
an exercise ball, its leathery surface pitted with cracks and folds. It dripped clear
mucus from the oily sheen that encased it. Wisps of steam curled from its hot,
pulsing surface.
One-Song stood watching it, her lip curled in disgust. She moved toward it,
slowly, as if afraid it might burst at any moment.
“Don’t worry,” Czajka said. “It’s not ready yet. Not quite. Very soon, though.
You can touch it, if you want.”

One-Song started to put her hand out but then pulled it back, grimacing. “I
think not. Just being next to it is awful enough. How can you stand it?”
Czajka frowned. “Stand what? The heat? Please, it’s not that hot. It won’t scald
you.”
“No, I mean the… the stench. The Wyrm scent. Can’t you feel it? Coming off
in waves, each of them like a bug crawling up your spine.”
Czajka scratched his chin. That was interesting. The egg was giving off an
effect he had failed to detect. His science had proven quite effective in dealing
with Wyrm spawn, but still there were levels he had failed to see. He needed to
recalibrate his devices.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t affect me at all. It’s probably a product of your garou
anatomy.”
“Oh, it’s just me, is it? You’re wrong. This thing is poisoning the environment
here. I think you’d call them trace elements. Typical blindness.”
“Any effect on the environment isn’t important. The world will be remade
soon. It’s already past its date.”
One-Song shook her head, chuckling. “You’re a piece of work. I know about
you. You got your head so far up the Wyrm’s ass, you think that smell is perfume.”
Czajka couldn’t help laughing. Why not? She was in his possession now. Let
her mock him. “You know nothing about me, garou. Your kind cannot fathom who
I am and what I know.”
“That right? That what you told your mother, when she was calling for you
while she was dying? ‘Sorry, mama, my britches are too big to sit by your bedside.
I got science to make.’”
Czajka frowned. This was too close to the bone. “What do you know about my
mother? How do you know this?”
One-Song turned to face him. “You really want to hear? You going to be pa-
tient and let me talk?”
“Yes, yes. Say whatever you want.” She had intel about him that there’s no
way the garou should have known. Did he have a leak? One of the Pentex opera-
tives?
“You asked. There are rules to these things. Now, you listen up…”
Chapter Twenty 135

Chapter
Twenty-One
There once was a brilliant boy whose name was Basil. His mother was so
proud of him. She knew he would grow up to be recognized by all the world as a
genius, even a Nobel laureate. She scrimped and saved so that he would one day be
able to afford the education that his great mind deserved.
Freud wrote: “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother
keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.” This boy was destined for conquering.
Trouble was, the family was poor. Basil’s father was dead. He’d been a drunk
and an anti-communist agitator — not a healthy thing in Poland at that time. He
was killed by police during a demonstration. He left his wife penniless and with no
sure means of support. She moved in with her in-laws, who had never approved of
her and who did not like the boy at all. He grew up in that unhappy house, assured
only of two things: his mother’s absolute devotion and his own genius.
His school projects captured the eye of a Soviet official, who, upon interview-
ing the young man, admitted him to a private academy for the gifted. Such things
were kept quiet; it would not do to admit of an elite class in a so-called worker’s
paradise.
There was another reason they kept this school a secret. All the students were
extremely special, with an aptitude for enhanced science unknown to most people
in the population.
It was a school for the training and indoctrination of nascent members of the
Technocratic Union. Basil very early on proved his potential and achieved the
epiphany that would vault him into league with his teachers. He had Awakened.
The next years were spent mastering the special school of physics that dealt
with the hidden forces of the universe. He expanded his studies into the far corners
of quantum indeterminacy and entanglement. He was welcomed into the fold of
Iteration X, the technocratic convention most concerned with the evolution of the
Machine.
Then, unusual among his fellows, he became curious about the alternate di-
mensions around us. He began to study dimensional science, curious how it could
be combined with his previous studies of forces and correspondence. Since these
other dimensions were rife with strange entities — and even places and things that
seemed to be imbued with consciousness — his fellows looked down on these
studies. They had little imagination for how they could advance the Machine.
What they did not know, what he had never told anyone, even his beloved
mother, was that his genius was not wholly his. Oh, don’t think for a moment that
he wasn’t fully the enlightened scientist he had made himself. It’s just that, when
he was younger, he had a… friend. An imaginary friend, some would call it. But he
knew better. Olenka was real.
She was a little bird, a nightjar. He loved to hear her sing to him with her
trilling song. They played many games, from hide and seek, scavenger hunts, cha-
rades, to one she taught him herself: thrash and stab. This involved capturing a live
animal, usually in a trap she had taught him to make, and then dissecting it alive, to
discover the amazing secrets of its pulsing organs. To Basil’s credit, he did not en-
joy this game. He resisted playing it, but every time he did so, Olenka would leave
and not come back for many days. She was his only friend, his only confidant.
What was he to do? He did as he was told.
These games left him with a lifelong disgust for biology. It was his worst sub-
ject at school. But that was later. Olenka was now.
She told him many folktales and showed him where some of them had hap-
pened. When he snuck out of the house at night and followed her into the woods, it
was always creepy and eerie. The place came alive in a way it never had when he
was alone. It was almost as if he had stepped from one world, the world of waking
solidity, into this one, the world of fairy tales, where trees could talk and animals
were nobles in disguise.
Olenka had always talked about her other friends and promised Basil that, if
he remained true to her, as loyal friends do, she would introduce them someday.
That night had come. She led him deep into the woods and into an abandoned farm
house, one said to be haunted. There, sitting at a table playing cards underneath the
light of a foul-smelling candle, were two dogs. When they saw Basil, they smiled
and began drooling. They stood up on two legs and dragged him closer to the table,
where they examined him from head to toe.
“Oh, he’ll do! Yes, he’ll do just fine,” one of them said. His breath smelled like
a dead pig Basil had once found behind the butcher’s.
“Too scrawny,” said the other. “He won’t survive the first circle.”
Basil didn’t like being talked about that way. Olenka landed on his shoulder
and scolded the dogs. “He is not for you!” she said. “He has a greater destiny. Your
task is to mark him, so our kind will always know him, and he may pass unmolest-
ed among us.”
The first dog spat onto the floor. “Get the brand.”
The other dog reached into a bag and drew out a cattle brand shaped into a
strange spiral. He held it over the candle and began muttering.
Basil ran. He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew that brand was
intended for him. Olenka had betrayed him.

The dogs gave chase. They caught him in seconds, bringing him down with
nips to his heels. He cowered on the ground as the second dog pressed the hot brand
into the small of his back. It sizzled and burned, an agony he had never imagined.
The smell of his frying flesh caused him to vomit.
The dogs let him go, laughing at him. Olenka landed by his head. “One day,
Basil, you will return to me.” She flew away and he fainted.
When he awoke, he was lying in the field outside the barn. He felt his back,
but could not find the burn mark. There was no pain, no blistered skin. Was it all a
nightmare? He stumbled home, stoic, but he cried when his mother wrapped him
in her arms.
If his instructors and classmates had known this little tale, they would have
taken measures to find and remove that mark. They would have recognized the bird
for the vile spirit it was. Basil would have undergone extensive conditioning to rid
him of any lingering subliminal programming from the Bane and its allies.
But they did not know. Neither did Basil. He had convinced himself that Olen-
ka was imaginary and that his nightmare was just a case of sleepwalking. He put
it behind him and moved on, rising in the ranks, becoming a most impressive and
prominent scientist.
I suppose tragedy comes to us all, but when you are raised to believe you are
a god among humans, it hits harder when it does arrive.
Basil’s mother developed cancer.
This should have been no problem for someone with his connections. His fel-
low scientists in the Progenitor convention surely had remitted many such cases.
They certainly tried here, too. None of their treatments worked.
How could enlightened life sciences fail against mere cancer cells?
They were not ‘mere’. They were from the toxic touch of the Wyrm.
Olenka had returned to Basil many times, but he could no longer see her. He
was protected in his labs against her arrival and he was blind to the omens she sent
him.
In spite, or final desperation, she got his attention. The dark nature of the can-
cer finally became obvious to him. Furious, he stole technology that would allow
him to confront Olenka and demand that she reverse what she had caused.
“I cannot, Basil my love,” Olenka said. “But there is one who can. You must
go to him and pledge your fealty. The way will open for you. The mark protects
you.”
Basil’s mother was in her final stages. He had no time to research a way to
force the cure from her. If he sought aid from his colleagues, it would involve
revealing his hidden mark, which would mean career suicide. He would have been
willing to suffer such a fate, if he knew that they could wrest the cure from the
spirit. But they had not even detected his hidden mark. In all his studies, he had
come across nothing explaining Olenka and her dog allies. If the Union knew, they
kept it classified from him.

Basil, defeated, agreed. Olenka took him across the Gauntlet, as she had before,
but this time she led him far from the paths they had walked together. She took him
through blasted lands, scoured of life, home only to wailing spirits, and through battle
grounds, where brutal creatures clashed against one another in a fury of blood. In
every place, the spirits parted and let them pass, awed by the sight of Basil’s mark.
They arrived at the edge of a cliff in a place of stale, dead air. The ground and
the sky were gray, with only subtle differences of shade to allow Basil to distin-
guish between them. Olenka led him down a rocky path, from where he could see
uncountable cave entrances, stretching down the cliff face, into the mists below.
Some had strange markings, neolithic symbols, but Olenka took no heed of them.
She stopped at a cave and motioned for Basil to enter. “Here you walk alone.
When you sense his presence, bow to him. Present your neck or be prepared to lose it.”
Basil walked cautiously into the pitch darkness, feeling for any obstructions
ahead of him. He finally felt a slight breeze, hot air wafting his way. As he approached,
he could hear a sound, a faint bellows. When he moved yet closer, he could smell
the earthy scent of a dog. He knew, now that he was an adult and had had much time
to think about his encounter in the barn as a child, that it was no dog. It was a wolf.
He dropped to his knees, his head facing down, as Olenka had warned him. He
felt a wave of hot air on his neck as the wolf’s snout hovered over him, snorting.
Then a voice.
“Rise.”
He stood up, his knees shaking. He had brought his technology with him, his
means of tapping the hidden laws of the universe as only an enlightened mind
could, but all thought of using it left him shivering and cold. This wolf could kill
him before he brought any science to bear.
“I promise you a wonder beyond all imagining,” the wolf said in a gruff voice.
“You have only to accept it.”
“What… what is this wonder?” Basil chewed his lip, expecting to feel teeth
sink into his throat.
A faint light appeared. He saw a small pebble, held in a hairy hand, glowing.
No, not a pebble. An embryo. A tiny creature, curled up into a ball. An insect with
no exoskeleton, naked, vulnerable.
“Take it. With it you will undo the great wrong that is existence.”
He reached out, hand shaking, and cupped the embryo in his fist. It merged into
his palm, becoming a faint mark, a tiny spiral, barely noticeable. The light went out.
“Go. Do your work.”
“Who are you?” Basil said. He was gaining an ounce of his courage.
“The one whose face you stare into when you look at your soul, Basil Czajka.
Go!” This last word became a wolfen snarl and Basil bolted back the way he had come.
He broke back into the gray light outside the cave and barely stopped himself
just in time from plummeting off the cliff face. Olenka caught at his shirt and
pulled him back.

“The Nightmaster likes you,” Olenka said. “With his gift, the world will trem-
ble before you.”
“What about my mother? Where is her cure?”
Olenka blinked at him. “Follow me. It is a long journey back.”
By the time she brought him home, to the bedside of his mother, he was ex-
hausted, too long without food or water. He collapsed by his mother’s side and
stroked her forehead. Her eyes fluttered but did not fully open.
Olenka sat on the bed post. “Her disease is gone. She is cured.”
Basil wept, smiling. He shook his mother, trying to wake her. She opened her
mouth and released a slow, grating rattle that pierced Basil’s heart like a knife. Her
body relaxed as she died in front of him.
“You lied!” Basil screamed, reaching for the bird, energy crackling from his
hands.
Olenka flew to the window across the room. “You will find no cancer in her
body. It’s a pity she was too weak to keep living after her ordeal.”
A bolt of energy shot from Basil’s fist at the bird, but she had already disap-
peared across the Gauntlet, beyond his power. He collapsed, crying in rage and
anguish.
He spent the next week nearly catatonic. His colleagues, oblivious to his jour-
ney and pact, prepared a funeral and made sure he ate and took fluids. They pre-
pared to intervene with certain measures, but he awoke from his trance, ready to
resume his work.
He knew what it was he carried, this embryo. He knew it was a living weapon
the forces of the Wyrm wanted him to make for them, to destroy their enemies. He
would make that weapon.
But it wouldn’t be the Wyrm’s weapon. It would be his. Basil’s. With this seed,
he would destroy the Wyrm.
The Unmaker, the embryo of the Abyss, the ultimate avatar of nihilism, would
do far more than rend Gaia’s garment, as its master had intended. Under Basil’s
careful tending, its reach would exceed all of its master’s imaginings. It would
make an Abyss of all reality. The entropy of all entropy. The end of the end.
And just before the last spark of existence went out, Basil’s own vision would
conquer and grow, creating from the void a utopia where death had no sway.
He would have much work to do and new studies. As of yet, he knew little of
the power that formed the Abyss, that dark realm to which Olenka had taken him.
He would have to learn the secrets of entropy and adapt them to his own special
understanding, a knowledge gained through direct experience, from the hand of the
Abyss lord, the Nightmaster.
He would show Nightmaster who was the true master.
He was, after all, a conqueror.

Chapter
Twenty-Two
Czajka leaned against the altar, his knees weak. He could feel sweat beading
on his brow, and suspected he was as pale as a sheet. “How can you possibly know
these things?”
“A little bird told me,” One-Song said. “Rather, the spirit of one of my dead
packmates took all that from your bird. Olenka.”
He felt like she’d just shot a bullet into his gut. Olenka. Had the nightjar be-
trayed him yet again? “How? You’re not making sense.”
“You told me yourself you’d sent a spirit to the masquer’s realm, to prove that
my packmates’ souls were still there. That spirit was Olenka. She woke my pack-
mates and gloated over them, but what she didn’t know was that Robin Hidalgo,
our galliard, knows how to steal stories from folks. Like a pickpocket, except from
your mind rather than your pocket.”
Czajka stared wide-eyed at One-Song. “Why didn’t Olenka tell me?” That
goddamn bird. That murderous bitch.
“She didn’t know. Like I said, pickpocket.”
Czajka stepped forward and grabbed the collar of One-Song’s blouse, pulling
the garou closer to him. Her face was inches from his, his eyes staring into hers,
looking for any sign of deception. “Then she knows? Olenka knows about my
plan?”
One-Song gently unwrapped Czajka’s fingers from her blouse and pushed him
away. “No. I added that bit at the end myself. I put it all together, once that story
was passed to me. The original plan — Nightmaster’s plan — was for the Unmaker
to imprint on you once it hatches. Using your sick, diseased self-loathing, it would
remake the material world into something like the Abyss.”
One-Song stepped away from Czajka and the altar. “But your plan, the one that
involves me, has the Unmaker imprint on me instead. It uses the Song of Creation
hidden deep in my memory to unmake all of creation — including the Abyss. Or
so you believe.”
“My plan is sound. No belief required.”

“Maybe. We’ll have to wait and see. But if Olenka or Nightmaster were to ac-
tually figure it all out, you’d be in a world of trouble. It’s one thing to have us after
your ass, along with the Technocracy, not to mention Pentex, who surely wants to
betray you the first chance it gets. But to have the lord of the Abyss put you at the
top of his shit list? I would not want to be you.”
“But they don’t know. They can’t know. My occultation field blocks Olenka
from seeing where I’ve taken the egg.” He had tested that field over and over. He
knew it worked.
“Hmm hmm. And that alone is telling her everything she needs to know. Why
would you hide from her if you didn’t have something to hide from her?”
Czajka sighed. Theories. Just theories.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The egg will hatch soon. She will be powerless
after that.” Czajka circled the altar, looking at the egg and then at One-Song, and
then back at the egg. “If you know all this, then why are you here? Why did you
come here just to die?”
One-Song closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. “I guess it’s faith. I’m
trusting my friends know what they’re doing.”
“Albrecht? Your sept? They don’t know anything!”
“My packmates. My totem.”
“Ah, your tribal spirit, the Incarna class entity that looks over your tribe. The
one who is powerless to act and must rely on garou to do its bidding.”
Her eyes shot daggers at him. “You don’t know jack shit about spirits. You
think you do, but you don’t. Take Olenka. What is she?”
“A Bane. A spirit servitor of Nightmaster.”
“Nope. She’s a broodling of Whippoorwill. The totem. The patron spirit of the
Black Spiral Dancers.”
He must have gone pale again, judging from the triumphant look in her eyes.
Was it true? There was still so much he didn’t know about the garou and their ways.
Was he a puppet of a totem? Did free will even exist in a world where such spirits
manipulated people into doing their will?
“You’re just like me,” One-Song said. “We both serve higher spirits. Only
yours hates you and is using you to further the interests of the Black Spiral Dancers
and, Nightmaster, he’s a garou, in case you didn’t put that together. Or was, until
the Abyss hollowed him out.”
Czajka wiped his brow, his other hand balled into a fist. “Why me? Why did
she choose me all those years ago?”
“I guess it’s because you had a hole in you, an opening in your soul. The Abyss
calls to abysses. Most folks go through something like that when they suffer, but they
get over it. They heal. Oh, they might have scars, but they move on. Not you. She
knew what you’d become — a mage — and exploited your dark night of the soul.
She never let that wound heal. Maybe it was your father’s death, maybe it was some
presentiment about what you’d become. Your saving grace was your mother.”

“They let her die. Those bastards let her die.” Czajka felt energy involuntarily
build at the tips of his fingers. He shook it off, willing it to dissipate. He had mas-
tered the laws of energetic forces enough that, at times, he no longer needed to use
a device to unleash them. Doing so, however, risked setting off a butterfly-effect
cataclysm, what the Technocratic Union called a Paradox effect.
One-Song had stepped away from him, clearly noticing the nimbus of energy
that had come and gone from the tips of his hands. “They did. They killed her. And
you refused to let her die, to let her go. Death is part of the cycle. Ain’t nobody likes
it. Fighting it only leads to bruised fists and spirits. I know. I spent way too much
time grieving over death.”
Czajka turned away from her, facing the egg. “This changes nothing. Don’t
you see? That’s the heart of the problem. Nothing changes nothing. Everything just
keeps on going, over and over. I can put a stop to it. The Unmaker will stop it. You
will help him.”
“It won’t turn out the way you think. I have to believe that.”
Czajka sneered. Her voice betrayed the slump in her shoulders, her sense of de-
feat. “Your faith in Gaia is as ridiculous as was my former blindness to the Wyrm’s
motives. It won’t be long—” His PDA’s emergency klaxon began to chime. He
pulled it from his pocket and activated the screen. It showed him video from one
of his soldier’s chest cameras.
He smiled at One-Song. “Your attempt at distracting me is worthless. For your
troubles, I’ll let you watch along with me as I destroy your friends.”
One-Song frowned. Czajka chuckled, tapping his device’s keyboard to prepare
a series of procedures, what fools such as One-Song’s kind quaintly called ‘spells.’
She’s not so damn omniscient after all.

Chapter
Twenty-Three
That was easy, Albrecht thought. Too damn easy.
They were rattling down the shaft on the wide elevator platform. The mining
facility supervisor operated the controls, still frowning and flustered at their sud-
den government intrusion. He’d wanted to call the home office and wait for their
instructions, but Mari and Thomas Cordain had been very convincing and made
it clear that any delay would be considered a black mark and would lead to fines.
To Albrecht’s surprise — and, honestly, his disappointment — the place
showed no sign of overt Pentex involvement. They had stormed in out of nowhere
to perform a surprise inspection, giving the supervisor no time to cover up any
misdeeds. A quick tour of the upper buildings showed only a company functioning
at minimal capacity, unable to fully press their natural gas storage agenda until the
court cases wound their slow way through the system.
There were no First Teams and the only scent of the Wyrm was old, from a
few days ago. It seems that True was right, that Czajka’s force had only been here
temporarily.
Except that there was no sign of the Hand of Gaia’s scouting team. True wasn’t
concerned — yet. He had whispered to Albrecht that they might be down in the
mines, which was were they then promptly went, piling onto the elevator and de-
scending down.
“How long does it take to get to the bottom?” Albrecht asked the supervisor,
his hands crossed, his posture stern. He was wearing one of True’s suits, a boring
gray office uniform. He’d had to leave his armor behind, but it was looking likely
that he might not need to use it anyway.
“Fifteen minutes,” the man said, taking off his plastic helmet and wiping sweat
from his bald head. “I don’t know why you can’t just wait for the report from the
Interior Department. This stinks of political harassment. Our lawyers should have
been told about them.” He nodded at Kula and the group of ‘environmental activ-
ists’ that had accompanied Mari’s EPA inspection team.
“What report are you talking about?” Mari said. “What does Interior have to
do with this?”
“They’re down there now. Stopped all the work while they did a structural
analysis. Won’t let my guys in. You’d think we live in communist Russia, with all
this government interference.”
“Hey,” Kula said, “poisoning a lake isn’t a right, asshole.”
The man flinched. Albrecht recognized that, despite Kula’s attempts to play
the role of angry activist, she couldn’t fully hide the wolf within.
“Take it easy,” Albrecht said. “If things are on the up and up, we’ll be out of
here soon and you’ll be back in business. I don’t relish any more paperwork than I
already have, so let’s just hope there’s nothing to write about.”
The supervisor — Frank? Was that his name? Albrecht thought — nodded and
put his helmet back on. “I’m sure you’ll find everything in proper order. We don’t
do anything without filing it in the open record.”
Mari gave Albrecht a look, the one that said, something’s not right here. He
nodded. The news of a government team working down below made him feel bet-
ter already. It shouldn’t have, he knew that, but he couldn’t help himself. There’s no
way this team wasn’t a fake-out for Pentex. They’d come in, taken over the mines,
and sent the clueless humans up aboveground, leaving them free to do whatever
they wanted down there.
He wondered if they knew who was coming down on the elevator. They’d
tried to keep anyone from getting to a phone or walkie-talkie, under the excuse that
nobody was allowed to warn others of the surprise inspection. He’d thought they
did pretty well, but if word had gone down, or if Pentex had some means of spying
unseen and warning those down below, then they needed to be ready for a fight at
any second.
He resisted the urge to pace about as the elevator ground its way down. After
about 10 minutes, Frank said, “Helmets on, everybody. We’re not liable for anyone
who chooses not to wear one.”
The team members each put on the plastic helmet they’d been given before en-
tering the elevator. Albrecht grimaced as he was reminded of the haircut that make
him look more governmental. It was a petty sacrifice, he knew, but goddamn it, he
liked his long, white hair. He felt it gave him a regal bearing he didn’t naturally
possess. The things I do for Gaia.
The platform rattled and shook as it eased to a stop and hit the ground. Frank
slid the grate aside and then pulled a lever. The metal doors opened, splitting apart
horizontally, the top sliding upward and the bottom part sliding down.
Five armed men stood on the other side. They looked like a SWAT unit, except
that their insignia read ENDRON OIL. Their guns were in the ready position, not
pointed at the group in the elevator, but ready to fire upon command.
“What is this?” Frank yelled. “Why are you armed?”
One of the men stepped forward and looked over everybody in the elevator.
He spoke to Frank. “I’m Ramon Sanchez, head of security here. Identify your
passengers.”
“Identify them? Who are you? I’ve never met you.”
“We were brought in by corporate. My team is trained to deal with militant
activists who try to sabotage extraction sites or sea vessels.”
“I wasn’t told. We haven’t had any activists — except for these here. Some
protestors a few weeks ago outside the fence, but that’s it.”
“And who are these?” Sanchez said, eyeing Kula and her group.
True spoke up. “Seneca Lake Community Preservation League. We have a
court order.” He thrust forward a folded piece of paper.
Sanchez ignored it. He looked at Mari, Albrecht, and Cordain. “And you? You
don’t look like concerned citizens.”
Mari held out a government wallet with an ID card. “EPA. Surprise plant in-
spection. My office was not told about your armed private security. It’s supposed
to be on record.”
Sanchez turned and walked back to his men and then formed into a line with them.
“Due to security concerns, I’m afraid you will have to return to the surface. I cannot
allow undocumented people in the mines while our company performs its analysis.”
“I don’t understand,” Frank said. “I was told it was the Interior Department,
not Endron.”
Sanchez stared at Frank, his jaw twitching slightly. “As far as this site is con-
cerned, Endron is the Interior Department. There’s no air between our board of
directors and the Interior Secretary.”
Mari stepped off the elevator. “My inspection is going through, Mr. Sanchez.
You do not have the authority to turn us away. And don’t even think about threat-
ening us with guns. My office knows I’m here; if I don’t check back in by the end
of the day, there will be a full-scale investigation of this place.”
Sanchez exchanged glances with his team members, some of whom looked
nervous. He took his hands off his assault rifle, letting it hang from his chest by its
strap. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”
Mari motioned for the others to follow her. Playing their roles, they shuffled
off the elevator, doing their best to look like people who had just blundered into
something they hadn’t been prepared for.
Albrecht shot a questioning glance at Kula, who shook her head. Guess there’s
no Wyrm scent, he thought. Normal, everyday corporate stooges with guns. Might
as well keep up the charade for now.
He looked around. The cavern was enormous, stretching out to either side and
into the far distance. It had clearly been carved out piece-by-piece with machin-
ery, judging from the striations in the walls. The ground was rutted with giant tire
tracks, evidence of large trucks, probably both digging equipment and transport
for the salt that had once been extracted from the mine. Lights had been installed
regularly along all the tunnels.
Based on the map True had shown them, there was a large central tunnel, from
which numerous side tunnels branched off to the left and right. The natural gas
storage project would be straight ahead, at the very end of the long, wide corridor.

Three electric cars were lined up along the wall, plugged into charging sta-
tions. Frank gestured toward them. “We’ll need to take these. It’s a long walk.”
Albrecht figured that they’d need all three of them — more, for the lead car,
with Frank driving. He jumped into the driver’s seat of the second car, before any
one else could call dibs. Mari sat down next to him, with Evan and Cordain behind.
True and Kula climbed into the lead car with Frank and the rest of their team
split up between the rear seats of the lead car and the whole of the third car.
Once everybody was in, Frank pulled ahead and led them down the main cor-
ridor.
Albrecht settled back in the driver’s seat for what was surely going to be a
long, boring ride. They passed three rows of side tunnels. He glanced down the
ones to his left; they looked similar to the main tunnel: sienna walls, the majority
of their salt deposits carved away.
“Albrecht!” Mari cried.
He shot his eyes back ahead in time to see their car drive into a shimmering
wall of light. They came out immediately on the other side to a radically altered
corridor. There were banks of heavy equipment — large blocks of machinery —
lined up along the walls, with thick cables snaking between them. Klieg lights lit
the tunnel twice as bright as the fixtures they’d passed through before.
Two other things hit Albrecht’s attention as he slammed on the brakes. The
front car was gone, and the room was full of First Team soldiers, their weapons
trained on him and his packmates.
He shot a glance behind him in time to see the shimmering light fade away,
with no sign of the third car, just the main corridor stretching out behind them. “A
goddamn portal,” he said, low so only his packmates could hear him. “We drove
through a portal. Where the fuck are we?”
Mari didn’t bother answering. She was already in crinos form, leaping out of
the halted vehicle. Evan was also shifting, as was Cordain.
Albrecht snarled and snapped into the battle-form instantly, fueled by his eas-
ily tapped animal anger. Just in time. A storm of bullets tore through the garou.
Blood sprayed in all directions as they each took hits — luckily, none of the bullets
were silver. They still carried a punch, but nothing the garou couldn’t withstand.
Albrecht summoned up his lunar armor, which deflected some of the blows.
Already, his wounds began to knit together, sealing the flesh.
A ragged, piercing scream came from behind Albrecht. Evan’s voice. It echoed
throughout the cavern with an unholy force. If Albrecht had not recognized it and
been on the side of the righteous, it would have sent shockwaves through him. Four
First Team soldiers were slammed to the ground by the sheer, emotive force of the
scream, akin to a tornado, erupting from deep within, the garou’s pain at the horrors
delivered onto Gaia.
Albrecht did a quick scan and counted 15 soldiers. Four were on the ground,
but three were already struggling to rise again.

He reached for his klaive and realized he didn’t have it on him. It wouldn’t fit
with the disguise. He cursed and dropped to all fours, rushing at the closest soldier.
The wind picked up, shimmering his fur, and ahead of him, behind the sol-
diers, the air shattered like glass and five elemental spirits thrust through the Gaunt-
let into the room, snatching up one soldier each. Like dust motes before a vacuum
cleaner, they were sucked back across the barrier between worlds, dragging their
prey with them, screaming. Mari cackled with mad fury as her summoning stole
away a third of the enemy force.
Albrecht barreled into a First Team soldier with such force that he could hear
multiple bones fracture. He casually snapped his jaws down on the man’s shoulder,
chewed hard, then spat him out as he leaped onward to the next target, leaving a
broken and bleeding body behind.
A howl echoed from behind Albrecht, a brittle, beautiful, heartbreaking melo-
dy. It was the siren song of the galliard. Thomas Cordain, Albrecht’s herald. Three
of the soldiers stumbled back, dropping their guns, entranced and confused at the
sound, which touched a cord deep in their minds, stirring longings they didn’t
know they had. They would be unable to attack until they mustered enough will to
overcome those ineffable longings.
Albrecht stood up, running forward on two legs, his claws held out wide as he
whistled a sound like a rushing wind. His claws gleamed and sharpened; he could
feel them cutting through the air with almost no resistance.
He ran straight at a soldier, who opened fire on him. The bullets bounced off
his moon armor, with only a few causing bruising impact on his shoulder. His claws
swept through the air and slid through the soldier’s armor like it was linen, opening
up his stomach cleanly. His guts spilled out like water from a burst balloon.
Eight down, three disabled, four left fully functional. He turned to charge one
of the functional ones, but pulled back just in time to avoid a hurtling swarm of
detached claws as they sliced into the soldier, spraying blood in five spurting jets
from five separate wounds. Mari’s wasp talons, shot from her hands like bullets. I
know what those feel like.
He spun around to address a different target, only to see it crumple as an arrow
appeared in its chest. He looked back to see Evan knocking another arrow. Where
the hell did he hide that bow?
Getting impatient with losing targets to his packmates, he dropped on all fours
and rushed one of the two remaining soldiers. As his jaws reared back, ready to
clamp down on the closest limb the soldier presented for Albrecht’s dining plea-
sure, the world turned upside down.
Vertigo overtook him as he tumbled to the ground at the same time the sounds
of combat were silenced. The room suddenly grew darker, lit only by a circle of
electric lights ahead of him. Struggling to shake off the disorientation, he realized
he was no longer in the same cavern as his packmates.
“Don’t you fucking move, you goddamn animal,” the voice of Basil Czajka
said. “Or I’ll end you here and now.”

Albrecht steadied himself and looked toward where he thought the voice was
coming from. Czajka stood 20 yards from him, pointing some sort of gun at him.
He held a staff in his other hand, a very familiar staff with a hawk’s feather. One-
Song’s staff. Fuck.
He held up his hands, empty palms, his eyes darting around the room. Three
skrags paced about behind Czajka, clearly eager to eat this new garou arrival, wait-
ing for the order. Behind them was a raised platform, a makeshift stone altar. Upon
it sat a gray, leathery, moist, and steaming egg.
He shut his eyes. “Is that what I think it is?”
“The Dolorous Egg,” Czajka said. “Yes. It’s no longer your concern, Lord
Albrecht. Tell him, One-Song.”
“Don’t listen to that fucker,” One-Song’s voice said, from behind Albrecht. He
turned to see her, sitting with her back against the wall, her hands tied with some sort
of metallic wire wrapped in complex braids about her wrists. “Tear his face off!”
Albrecht instantly shifted into hispo form and vaulted across the room at Cza-
jka with a speed that clearly surprised the mage. His eyes widened and he began
to curse — a curse that was cut off when he disappeared, with a popping sound as
displaced air rushed to fill the space where he had been standing.
Albrecht careened passed the now-empty space and was instantly set upon
by the three skrags. Their snapping pincers crushed down on his arms and legs,
fracturing bone.
Suddenly, a sharp cracking sound rang out, followed by two more, and the
three skrags fell over. Albrecht sensed something whizz passed his ear. He turned
to see One-Song catching something in her hands, grunting with pain as it pressed
against her palms. Judging from the look on her face, her hands were wounded.
She weakly raised her arms, still bound together, struggling for balance, and
threw the object toward Albrecht. He saw a rock coming at his face, but it veered
and shot passed him, smacking again into a skrag, and then quickly bouncing from
it to another and then the third, before zipping back into One-Song’s hands.
The skrags roared in anger and rushed at One-Song.
Shit, Albrecht thought. They’ll tear her to pieces. Focus on me, boys. He
grunted and let loose a howl, shifting into crinos form, rising up to his full stature,
pumping out his chest and stretching his arms wide. He called upon the secret
once taught to him by a blindingly bright spirit shaped like a spear of sunlight, an
emissary of Gaia herself.
The skrags winced and looked away from him, blinking and raising their claws
to shield themselves from his uncloaked glory. Albrecht emanated the rumbling,
pent-up, overwhelming anger of the injured earth, the wrath of the earth goddess,
the hammer of her fury. They scuttled away from him as he took a step toward them,
cowering as they tried to find the will to fight this strangely transformed warrior.
Albrecht charged with no mercy. His claws, still sharpened by the power of
the unrelenting wind, tore through their carapaces like scissors through paper. They
screamed and tried to fight back, their wailing blows weak and off target. One of

them unraveled, his ephemeral form dissolving under the onslaught. The next tried
to limp away, its limb leaking thick fluids, as Albrecht shoved his hand through
its armor and into its soft organs within. It evaporated into nothingness. The third
gave up the ghost of its own will, whatever command Czajka had over it broken. It
dematerialized before Albrecht could strike it, its body disappearing.
Albrecht stood panting, catching his breath and letting his wounds knit together.
“You don’t have much time, Albrecht,” One-Song said. She struggled to her
feet, her hands still bound. “He’s going to be attacking whoever you brought with
you.”
Albrecht looked around the room. It was a salt cavern, similar to the one he’d
just left, but much smaller. There were no tunnels branching from the room.
“I’m not going anywhere until I smash that thing.” He started heading toward
the egg, wishing again that he’d brought his klaive with him.”
“You can’t. Czajka’s booby trapped it. I know. I tried it already.” She opened
her hands, revealing ugly, pus-oozing burns. “And that was just me touching it.”
“Okay, so it’s going to cost me. I still got to get rid of it. This is what it’s all
about.” He wanted more than anything to get back to the main cavern and make
sure Mari and Evan were alive. If Czajka had teleported to them, it would turn the
tide badly against them. But the egg was what this whole misadventure had been
about all along. He stopped a few paces from the altar and prepared to call upon
his avenging armor, the Luna gift that turned his body entirely into living silver.
“No!” One-Song said. “You’ll just die and then everybody will die. Believe
me, Czajka explained it all. He really likes bragging about it. Remember the win-
dowpanes, those portals that were showing up everywhere? There’s a field around
that egg that acts like one of them. If you stick your hand through it, Gaia knows
where you’d end up — or when. It fucks with time and space.”
“Then how the hell am I supposed to destroy it?”
“You can’t. Only I can.”
“And how the fuck are you going to get past its force field when I can’t?”
Albrecht paced around the egg in a circle, searching for any sign of the force field
and a weakness he could exploit.
“I’m not going to. I have to let it hatch.”
“What?! Are you fucking insane?” Albrecht stormed over to One-Song, tower-
ing over her. “I don’t know how the hell you wound up here — how you can walk
off with Unicorn and still wind up captive in this goddamn cave — but you are off
your goddamn rocker if you think I’m going to let that thing hatch.”
“It’s fully grown, Albrecht.” One-Song looked up at him, ignoring his shiv-
ering anger. Albrecht realized that, as a Child of Gaia elder, she could extinguish
his rage like a candle in the rain with a simple gaze. “Even if you break the shell,
it’s still coming out. Only one thing can undo it: the Song. The Song of Creation.”
“But that’s what Czajka wanted! He wanted you near so it could steal the Song
from your head. That ain’t happening!”

“That was when I didn’t think I could sing back. I thought I was just a victim.
No more. I don’t remember the Song, but someone… someone very important to
me told me that I would, when the time was right. I have to trust that.”
“No. I am not banking on this mystic mumbo-jumbo.” Albrecht grunted and
shut his eyes. His fur shimmered and transformed into sharp, metallic silver.
“Goddamn it, Albrecht — don’t do it!”
Albrecht ignored her and marched back to the egg. He drew back a claw, care-
fully aiming to bring it down on the top of the egg, at what he hoped was its softest
spot. He let his hand fly — and his whole body shot backward with the force of a
hurricane, hitting the wall, his ribs shattering.
He slid to the floor, his every breath a knife stab as his lungs expanded against
splintered ribs.
One-Song struggled to her feet and rushed over, laying her burned, still-bound
hands on him. She closed her eyes and hummed and Albrecht’s breathing relaxed
as his bones returned to their proper shape.
“Thanks,” he said, leaning against the wall, staring past One-Song at the egg.
“I guess you’re right. Heh. I should listen to my elders.”
One-Song held her hands out toward him. “Any chance, now that you’re made
of metal, that you can break these? They’re some sort of supertech alloy I’ve never
seen before.”
Albrecht slipped his two front claws into the space between her wrists and ex-
erted all his strength. His wind-sharpened, silver claws slowly began to pierce the
strange metal, weakening it enough for One-Song to slip her hands free.
“That was uncomfortable. Now, you listen to me…”
“Yes, ma’am.” Albrecht tried a smile, but it was only half-hearted.
“You’re going to get back upstairs and save everybody — and, just as import-
ant, you’re going to distract Czajka so he doesn’t come back down here.”
“Down here? Where the hell is here?”
“We’re in a cave under the salt mines. He had the tunnel entrances closed off,
since he can use magic to get down here. He calls it ‘enlightened science,’ by the
way. Nothing enlightened about it, if you ask me.”
“So how do I get back up there?”
One-Song reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a small patch of
furred leather. “This mole hide. It’s a talen. It’ll let you burrow you’re way back up,
like you’re a mole. Except faster.”
“Okay,” Albrecht said, drawing out the vowels. “But what are you going to
do?”
“I’m going to sing to the egg and hope I can get the right tune.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Well, then I guess I’m going to be eaten by a baby nexus crawler. Now shut
your damn mouth and start digging!”

Albrecht stood up, fingering the tiny animal pelt. “I don’t like this. I’ll go up —
but I’m going to drag Czajka back down here so he can destroy what he created.”
One-Song threw up her hands. “You do that. You just do that, then. I don’t
care — just get moving.”
Albrecht looked into her eyes, trying to judge if she was just being suicidal or
if she really had a plan. They looked back at him, full of weariness and pain, but
underneath, a steely determination. He nodded.
He stepped up to the wall and squeezed the pelt, exerting the mysterious spir-
itual force all garou knew, the touchstone of their immaterial nature, reaching out
and awakening the spirit slumbering within the animal pelt. He felt his limbs flood
with a muscle memory he’d never experienced before and he suddenly knew —
instinctively, not intellectually — how to use his paws to dig tunnels through the
dirt with a speed and efficiency unknown to earthly beings.
He shifted into lupus form and began digging. The dirt parted from his hands
like liquid, sliding around to his sides, opening a passageway as quickly as he could
run. He threw himself into the task, changing directions to dig upwards at an angle,
heading toward what he hoped was the cavern where his packmates were still alive
and fighting.
He gave One-Song one last glance before his change of direction blocked her
from view. She had already turned away from him and was moving toward the egg.
He turned back and focused completely on digging, putting all thought of the
egg from his mind. It was useless now to spend time second-guessing his course
of action. The matter had proven beyond his ability to tackle. He had to hope that
One-Song was right, that whomever had convinced her that she could sing the
Song knew what he or she was talking about.
He dug and dug for what seemed like far too long — enough, he thought, to
break through to the surface far above — but he knew it had only been maybe
10 minutes. Finally, his paw burst through the dirt into open air and he struggled
through the shifting earth to leap into the cavern.
Still on all fours, he shook himself to knock free the dirt, his shining silver coat
catching the lights strung along the ceiling. He was in a side tunnel, narrower than
the main corridor. Down the passage, beyond the turn of the corner, he could hear
howling and gunshots. He charged forward as fast as he could, mentally preparing
for what he needed to do the instant he saw Czajka.
He burst from the side tunnel to see Mari and Evan crouched behind the
third electric car, now turned over on its side. Kula’s pack was gathered around
them, taking cover. Kula herself passed overhead, gliding through the air on wings
sprouting from her hispo-form sides, drawing the gunfire of a new set of First Team
soldiers, who took cover behind the banks of machinery.
Albrecht searched through their numbers and there, behind the last man,
watching the standoff warily, stood Czajka. He held a PDA in his hand, which he
punched at frantically with his fingers. The air between the two sides shimmered,
forming a barrier against Evan’s arrows and the wasp talons that Mari shot from

her clawed hands. The First Team’s bullets fired freely through the barrier, giving
Albrecht the distinct impression that Czajka was manipulating the force field.
He fully faced the mage and caught his eye, grunting a ragged bark that trans-
formed into a sharp falcon’s cry as it echoed through the cavern. Czajka’s eyes wid-
ened and then slanted in anger. His fingers went to work on his device, but instead
of producing a new spell, the force field fell, the solidified air plummeting to the
ground like a curtain dropping from its rod. Czajka’s eyes widened and he yanked
a gun out from a shoulder holster.
Albrecht shifted into crinos and rushed toward Czajka. The mage leveled his
gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. A look of horror crossed his face as
he realized that his magic had been neutralized. The garou had a term for this gift,
among the mightiest of the Silver Fang’s powers: the Paws of the Newborn Cub.
Czajka had been declawed.
Czajka stumbled backward frantically, trying to position the soldiers between
himself and the oncoming garou.
Albrecht howled and barreled toward the mage, all thoughts of defense cast
aside as he focused on the sweet murder he was going to deliver unto his nemesis.
Kula soared past him and into the First Team soldier on point, knocking him
backwards, which sent him into the second man in line. They fell into a tangle, with
Kula on top, gnashing her hispo fangs into them.
Albrecht leaped over them, ignoring the bullets flying at him, and punched the
next soldier in the face with his full force. The man’s nose crumpled and he fell
back, unconscious.
The remaining soldiers, seven in all, scattered. Abandoning their posts, they
hoped that the garou would be so focused on Czajka, they’d let them slip away.
Albrecht didn’t care. He ran at Czajka, letting the rest of his forces decide how to
handle the retreating soldiers.
Czajka had dropped to his knees, his hands locked together, raised toward
Albrecht, pleading. “I surrender! Don’t kill me!”
Albrecht slid to a halt, surprised, and forcefully separated Czajka’s hands with
a single swipe downward, which he stepped into and turned into a wrestler’s hold,
wrapping his arm around Czajka, moving behind him and tightening his arm into a
vice around the mage’s neck.
“You’re going to take me back down there and destroy that egg,” he whispered
into Czajka’s ears, afraid that if he spoke any louder, it would become a growl,
which would set him off something fierce. He might break the man’s neck.
“I can’t...” Czajka stammered. “My procedures... you’ve blocked them.”
“Use your fancy devices. Get us down there!”
“I — no — you... don’t... understand. My devices... they’re me. I channel en-
lightened will through them. They’re useless without my will.”
Albrecht frowned, confused. He shook Czajka. “Then how do we stop that
thing!”

“You can’t. I mean, I don’t know. I never intended to stop it. I don’t think there
is a way.”
Mari stepped up in front of Czajka, her clawless fingers still bleeding from
shooting forth her talons like rockets. “Albrecht — did you feel that?”
Albrecht looked around, still holding Czajka tight. “What? Feel what?”
Evan stumbled up, leaning on one of Czajka’s machines. He was bleeding
from bullet wounds, but nothing fatal. “Something shook the whole room, like an
ocean wave passed over us.”
Czajka relaxed in Albrecht’s iron grip. “It’s breaking forth. Nothing can stop it
now. Please... I can’t hurt you now. Just... just please let me free.”
Albrecht released Czajka, but kept a claw hovering just over his neck. The
mage, still on his knees on the floor, turned to face Albrecht.
“For what it’s worth, I’ve been a fool. A pawn of greater forces. I thought I
could master them. Maybe I still can. But it’s out of my hands. It’s all up to One-
Song now. If I’m right, I win. If I’m wrong and she’s right, then I’m still glad.
Either way, my enemy loses.”
He suddenly screamed as a shape tore past him, gouging chunks from his face.
He clutched his bloody flesh and dropped to the ground.
Albrecht leaped up and snatched the thing from the air. A bird struggled in his
grip, hollow bones cracking as it thrust itself against his unyielding fingers.
“A nightjar spirit!” Mari said. “It materialized out of nowhere!”
The bird opened its mouth and a croaking voice came out. “You are mine,
Czajka. Always.”
Albrecht tightened his grip, just enough to cause pain, not enough to kill the
spirit. “Who. The. Fuck. Are. You?”
Czajka whispered, his hands covering his mangled face. “Olenka.”
The bird watched Albrecht, its head turned sideways, its avian eye blinking.
“Nightmaster sends his regards, Silver Fang. He will see you soon.”
The room shook. Albrecht felt a force pass through him from below, making
him dizzy, weak, and then it moved upwards, past the mines, outward toward the
surface. He looked at Evan and Mari.
“If this goes south, guys, know that... well, you know.”
Evan nodded. Mari looked away, but also nodded.
Albrecht squeezed his hand into a fist, crushing the bird, which evaporated, its
materialized body unable to maintain coherence. “Fuck you, bird. And fuck you,
Nightmaster. Should of known you were involved. And last, but not least, fuck you,
Czajka.”
Czajka looked up at him, his eyes peeking out between his fingers, his face still
leaking blood. He said nothing.
Albrecht braced himself, ready for any other waves of force that might come.
“Ball’s in your court, One-Song.”

Chapter
Twenty-Four
“It’s just you and me now,” One-Song said, walking slowly around the altar upon
which the egg sat, dripping some sort of lubricant. She didn’t know whether it was
something it was producing organically or if it was some sort of protective gel Czajka
had used when transporting it here.
She listened. From within the egg, she could hear a distinct, faint but persistent bass
rhythm. A heartbeat. Occasionally, there was a scritching sound, like a claw scraping
against leather. It’s going to hatch soon. It’s testing the shell. I guess I got to get to it.
She cursed as she realized that Czajka had taken her staff with him. She still had
some helpful spirits bound within it, useless to her now.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember. Long ago, when she was a wild wolf
roaming the forests of upstate New York, separated from her Canadian pack, she’d heard
a strange sound, a beautiful melody like nothing she’d ever heard before. She followed
it, but it seemed to be moving, always just around the next grove from her.
She broke from the trees and entered a meadow, where the crescent moon’s sliver
of light brightened the swaying grass. The music was louder now. She didn’t even know
what music was, having before heard only natural sounds, except for the cacophony that
came from humans, whom she always avoided.
She crept closer and closer, searching with all her senses for the source of the won-
derful sound. When she reached the center of the meadow, she had an epiphany. The
music was coming from everywhere. Every blade of grass, every breeze, every pine tree
in the distance. It came from her fur, from her muscles, from within her heart.
She howled with joy, her snout raised up. When she opened her eyes, the moon stared
back at her, its crescent shape an eye half-lidded. Behind that eye was a presence, a being
that felt like her mother and her pack’s leader and her delicious prey all at the same time.
And then she changed. Her howl grew into a scream as her limbs popped and
cracked, her skin stretching and tearing, her every ligament snapping and rejoining and
snapping again. All thought of the music vanished as she panicked, driven mad by the
sheer pain and confusion of her new body. She stumbled on two legs, holding out two
arms, staring down at herself with horror.

She ran and ran, fleeing the meadow, trying to flee from the sight of the moon, run-
ning until she was beyond exhaustion, collapsing into a hole in a dead, fallen tree, and
dropping into the oblivion of sleep.
In the morning, the Children of Gaia found her. Unknown to her, she — who had
been a simple wolf — had been fixed at birth with a Kin fetch, a spirit protector who, when
she had experienced her First Change, had flown out to alert the nearest members of her
tribe. They had come to collect her and teach her to understand this new thing she had,
this consciousness that was strange and scary and, curiously, thrilling and empowering.
No matter how strongly she tried, she could not remember the music that had called
to her. Occasionally, when she was doing other things, a snippet of it would come, and
she would cry, aching to hear the whole thing again. The Kin Fetch had heard a shadow
of it, and conveyed this mystery to her new tribe members, and they named her for it.
One-Song, she who heard the Song of Creation.
She tried again, standing before the egg, to remember that song, that primal music.
And failed.
The egg shivered. A tiny crack appeared in its side. A tapping noise began to drum
from within, as the creature’s beak beat at the shell.
Oh, Gaia. Don’t let this happen. Let me remember. You let me hear it before. Let
me hear it again. One-Song shut her eyes, trying to cast her memory back to that day,
those last few moments of her wolf life, before she became garou. Before she became
conscious and lost the spell of primal unity with the tapestry of nature.
It wouldn’t come.
A piece of shell broke off and fell onto the altar. A sharp beak poked out of the hole
then withdrew. One-Song shifted into crinos form and popped a claw. If I can just dig
this in there, maybe I can get it while it’s weak…
An eye appeared in the hole, a blinking lizard eye. Its vertical slash of a pupil wid-
ened as it saw One-Song. A squawk erupted inside the egg and the whole shell began to
shake, bowing outward.
One-Song stumbled back away from the altar. She had only one trick left that she
could attempt, a powerful theurge gift taught by the mercurial chimmerlings. She had no
idea if it would work on something so fundamentally corrupt.
A pincered arm thrust out of the shell and flailed about. The other arm struggled
within to break the other side of the shell.
One-Song concentrated, shaping her hands as if she was forming clay. She reached
out and tried to massage the ephemeral form of the spirit, to reshape it, to change its very
nature. It was hatching in a materialized form, which made her task more difficult.
The nexus crawler, a patchwork hybrid of insect, reptile, and crustacean, thrust its
head from the shell, splintering the rest of its cage, sending pieces crumbling to the floor.
It stretched out, the size of an adult wolf, its pincers clacking, its beak opening and clos-
ing, its legs scuttling across the altar and leaping to the floor.
It completely ignored One-Song’s attempts to reshape it. She might as well have
been a human trying to bend the fender of a car with her mind.

It locked its eye on her, like a bird, staring sideways. It began to chitter, a grating
vibration, and as she watched, it grew, adding mass and size as if it were a child’s balloon
being inflated.
A giant pincer reached out and, almost casually, like an insect collector pinning a
butterfly, it drove its pincer through One-Song’s thigh, pinning her to the ground.
She screamed, struggling to rip herself free, but she couldn’t budge the pincer or her leg.
Its other pincer hovered over her, tapping gently upon her head. She growled and
snapped at it, but she might as well have been trying to bite stone.
Then it drove the pincer into her skull.
She couldn’t feel her body. She opened her eyes and realized that she could see
herself as if she were floating above her body, now reverted to its native lupus form. Her
eyes were rolled back into her head as blood oozed down her snout.
The nexus crawler began to sing. She knew, as ice gripped her chest, the song it was
singing. Her song. The One Song.
But it was backwards, like a Satanic backmasking, revealing terrible messages just
beyond her ability to fully comprehend but which filled her heart with dread. The pho-
netic reversals of Gaia’s pristine melody were discordant, jarring, wounding. Where the
Song in her memory revealed itself in everything, this sick parody detached each thing
from each other, a disassembling, atom by atom.
She felt pieces of her life falling away from her, erased and thrown into the void.
First was all memory of her coming here, then came memory of her encounter with
Sees-the-Sun, gone now, with all its healing reconciliation. Then Unicorn, stripped away
and shredded, its pieces utterly annihilated from reality itself.
•••
The nexus crawler dug through One-Song’s mind, slicing away everything that did
not give it the lyrics it needed, the musical notations it used to twist and warp and remake
the world. Its brutal editing reached wider and wider, outward and upward. It sensed some-
one it knew, its father, who had sung it into creation with his alchemy and the Abyssal seed.
It moved its feet, in one step traversing the distance from the enclosed cave to the
wide cavern above. It stood before Basil Czajka, its creator. One-Song’s body hung from
one pincer, dangling like a broken doll, gasping, trying to speak. The other pincer thrust
out and into Czajka’s heart.
The Unmaker unraveled and destroyed all Czajka’s memories of itself as it picked
through his mind, seeking fragments of the Song, only to find mere despair and de-
lusions of grandeur. It found the thread that signified Czajka’s enlightened mind, his
Awakened power over creation, and snipped it, a child heedlessly tossing aside the toys
it had no use for.
The nexus crawler shook Czajka from its pincer. His body crumpled to the ground,
still alive but empty of its animating presence. A vegetable.
Something slammed into the nexus crawler’s leg, causing it to buckle. Carapace
burst, spilling ichor.

The crawler looked down to see a gleaming, silver metallic werewolf slashing its
claws at its leg. It swiped its pincer, flinging Lord Albrecht across the cavern like a wind-
shield wiper smearing a bug.
Albrecht shifted forms into hispo and rolled with the blow as he skidded across
the floor, sliding into the cavern wall. He stood up shakily on his four legs, catching his
breath, his body numb all over.
The crawler sensed other garou howling and gathering, and ignored them. They did
not have the Song.
It looked down at the garou dangling from its pincer and poked her again. A fresh
melody came forth, unlocked from the atoms that made up her memory, the traces of her
life. It dug deeper, slicing its way past years and years of garou life, her struggles against
the forces of the Wyrm, her training as a theurge, her hundreds of stories collected and
memorized as the lorekeeper.
None of these were the core memory, the moment she had heard the Song.
Finally, as it tossed aside the vestiges of the days following her First Change, it hit
the vein it had been searching for. It stopped and carefully pried away at the layers of
experience. The melody eluded it. It was moving, retreating. The Unmaker could not
pinpoint it. There were echoes, fragments, a few bars here and there, but not the whole.
Angrily, robbed of the very thing it had been hatched to seek out, it tore into One-
Song’s essence, stripping away more years of her life, following the faint strains of
sound that retreated deeper and deeper.
There — the moment of birth. The tiny cub just crawled from her mother’s womb,
her snout opening, her first howl building from within.
The Unmaker prepared to undo this final seed moment.
A snippet drifted into view, a fragment of story from One-Song’s lorekeeper memo-
ry. It had been snipped away with the rest, but this one refused to dissolve. The Unmaker
peered at it…
•••
Gaia had set the world to dancing, everybody moving to the beat of the Song of
Creation.
That old worm, though, he just didn’t know how to be happy. Everybody else was
always humming and skipping to that damn music. Remember what happened when
Gaia made her Song? Snake had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t part of that world. That
music was just noise to him.
Eventually, folks stopped humming along and they stopped skipping to the beat.
They went back to just doing what they do.
Well, old snake slithered out of his dark hole and crawled along until he saw Gaia,
sitting by the river, cooling her feet.
“You think you’re so hot,” he said, slithering close. “All that dancing and every-
thing you had people doing. Well they ain’t dancing now. Listen? You hear it? That’s the
sound of silence. There ain’t no music no more.”

Gaia shook her head. “You are so dumb, worm. Of course you can’t hear it — I turned
it down. It’s still there, but it’s quiet. So quiet that you can only hear it every now and then,
when the world’s at peace, the moon is shining, and your heart is beating in time with it.”
“You’re just putting icing on a rock. There ain’t no cake there. If that music is still
playing, turn it up so I can hear it.”
Gaia frowned. “You don’t want that. You ain’t no part of that music. That was your
choice. You just go back into your hole and forget about the music.”
“That’s what I thought,” snake said, his tongue slipping in and out all excited.
“You’re lying. The music’s run out and you don’t want to admit it.”
Gaia turned and looked at him and he swayed back away from her, so mean was her
gaze. “Don’t test me, snake. I told you: you weren’t part of the music. You don’t want
to hear it. Now go.”
He slithered away, looking back at Gaia, and then spat on the ground. He turned
and slid right back up to her. “I ain’t leaving until you prove you still got the power of
that music.”
Gaia looked at him again, but this time she had pity in her eyes. She nodded at him,
and then opened her mouth…
•••
One-Song’s tiny cub howl burst forth, knocking the Unmaker to its knees. It reeled,
confused. The memory, the shadow of One-Song’s very first cry, the tiny wolf’s barely
audible howl, drove into the nexus crawler like a typhoon.
The Song of Creation rang out, sung for the very first time, spreading forth, gathering
power as it rolled in all directions, echoing and rebounding from all corners of the universe.
One-Song’s encounter in the meadow with the Song had itself been a memory, a
reliving of that first moment when she had taken in breath and expelled it. That was the
Song of Creation, sung by every single being anew when it first comes into life: wolf,
human, bird, lizard, even the trees.
The Unmaker had plucked out that memory and, in replaying it, had tapped into the
ever-flowing stream of the Song, never sung but always singing. It was not a mere idea,
a record of something that had gone before. It was a living thing, a force present at all
times in all things. It was the Song of Making and one could not hear it without being
made by it. To hear the music was to become the music, caught up in its tune, a note in
its symphony.
The nexus crawler was edited out of existence. Like the Wyrm, it was not part of
the Song. It was a passing note, nothing more, left behind in the forward march of the
eternal composition. A piece of driftwood caught in a raging river and smashed to pieces
on a passing rock. The river did not notice its arrival and took no heed of its absence.
Where it had stood, a small wolf cub wiggled onto its feet, blinking her eyes. Her
fur was black, her eyes radiant green. She looked out at the many garou who stared at
her. One of them, a large wolf with a pure white pelt, limped up to her, sniffing.
She threw back her head and howled.

Chapter
Twenty-Five
Albrecht watched the young wolf cub roll in the grass with three other young
cubs, recent newborns to the Kinfolk wolf pack that was watched over by the Sept
of the Hand of Gaia. The other cubs’ mother lay nearby, relaxing in the sunlight.
True Silverheels, in lupus form, sat on his haunches near her, watching the cubs at
play.
“Do we still call her One-Song?” Albrecht said.
Pearl River, standing next to him in the shade at the edge of the meadow,
shrugged her shoulders. “For now. She might earn a new name, when she under-
goes her First Change.”
“First? Try second. We’re all assuming she’s still garou. Whatever the hell
happened to change her into a wolf cub might have taken the garou out of her.”
“If so, then she will still live a happy life among our kind. I suspect, however,
she will join us again soon. I have had dreams of her.”
“The cub or the One-Song we knew?”
“The elder we knew and loved. The Life of the Nation speaks to us in dreams.
I think she’s telling us to be ready for One-Song’s return.”
“Will she remember anything of her former life?”
Again, Pearl shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe… maybe this is her reward. To
start anew.”
“I’m still trying to figure out what happened.”
“If One-Song knew the answer, she can’t tell us now.”
“Look, I’m sorry about your sept mates. The scouting team.”
“They were dead before you ever got to the mines. We vastly underestimated
Czajka. If you hadn’t pressed the issue....”
“Don’t second guess things. We were all operating in the dark.”
“Some of us with the right instincts, though,” Pearl said, looking into Al-
brecht’s eyes.

Albrecht looked away. “So… me and my crew are going to be heading out
later today. Finally going home.”
“Thank you for everything.”
“Ah, you would have been fine without me. This was really One-Song’s story.
That’s how the galliards should tell it. I was just a walk-on part.”
“I would normally file that under false modesty, but I think you mean it. But
you’re wrong. You were integral. Our songs will recognize that.”
Albrecht watched One-Song, who was now meandering through the meadow,
following the scent track of something that had absorbed her complete attention.
Pearl turned to leave but stopped, turning back. “Alani has decided to step
down. She’s letting Kula take the leadership of the Black Furies without a strug-
gle.”
“Yeah? Kula is damn formidable. I wouldn’t want to face a challenge from
her.”
“Kula says Alani has spent too much time among the Children of Gaia and
should fight for her position. I think she’s glad, though, even if she can’t admit it.
She once adored Alani. That’s why she never went through with a challenge; she
didn’t want to kill her.”
“Been too much killing.” Albrecht turned away from the meadow. Two figures
were winding their way through the woods toward him. He smiled. Evan and Mari.
Thank Gaia they survived all this.
“Goodbye, Lord Albrecht,” Pearl said. “Until we meet again.”
Albrecht waved as Pearl walked into the woods, away from him. A warbling
howl broke forth from the meadow. He turned to see One-Song, her head raised to
the sky, crying out.
That little wolf has some lungs on her.
Chapter Twenty-Five 161

Something Stirs…
The fabric of reality is cracking. Fissures appear in thin
air, glowing with balefire. Something is scratching on the
other side, pressing, beginning to break through….
The Wyrm’s corruption finds its way into the hearts of
humans and Garou alike. Even an ultra-rational techno-
cratic scientist can fall sway to its lies. Channeling his hate
and resentment through the most sophisticated machine
ever created, Basil Czajka has turned a tool designed to
peer deep into the heart of the quantum universe into a
nursery for the hatching of a horror — a creature whose
birth cry is destined to unmake Gaia’s Song of Creation.
The only ones standing in his way are One-Song, a bro-
ken-down old Theurge, and Lord Albrecht, whose heed-
less anger might be the very weapon the enemy needs to
crack the egg and free the Unmaker.

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Bill Bridges

Author: Bill Bridges

Copy-Editor: Jessa Michalek

Managing-Editor: Matt M. McElroy

Cover Artist: Ron Spencer

Art Direction and Design: Mike Chaney

Creative Director: Richard Thomas

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