Copyright 1999, Lyka. This story may be copied for personal use so long as the author's credits are kept, but may not be posted, archived elsewhere, otherwise distributed or sold without the author's permission.

The intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway is in the city of Malibu, which is largely rural -- so it’s not nearly as busy as the streets of Los Angeles. Even so, Andrea Pagalos halted on the curb, stomach churning, running her fingers through her curly black hair, as the cars whizzed by. She guessed the others were feeling the same thing, not that that helped her.

It wasn’t that she’d been away from cities for so long -- only five months. Five months living in the Raccoon Sept of Topanga Canyon, with only scrub birds, deer, foxes and coyotes (and, of course, other werewolves) for neighbors. It had altered her perceptions. Now the constant roar of traffic and the reek of gas fumes grated on her, drowning out even the smell of sage scrub.

Worse, now she had to be a Pack Leader and try to be responsible.

It was another overcast June morning -- what southern Californians call "June gloom," with the sky a sheet of gray overhead, giving everything a bleak, washed- out look. Even the ocean’s color was drained to a lead-gray. The little surf shop across the road was still quiet, dark behind the window that displayed a few black and yellow surfboards. The rush hour was just beginning, and the traffic on Pacific Coast Highway was already heavy, filling the air with its reek and noise.

The other four girls shuffled their feet, except for Terry Smith, who stood without motion with her shoulders hunched, head down. The pack omega.

"I think I know where the bus stop is," she said.

They turned as one to look at her.

"Why didn’t you say so before?" Kali Red-Fang’s tone was petulant. She was one of the two Pack members who had already selected a deed-name. "You could have saved us all this walking."

"There’s none closer," Terry answered, seeming to huddle down farther. A passing eighteen-wheeler’s breeze stirred her long, mousy-brown hair.

Andrea felt a faint pang of mingled annoyance and pity.

"Kali, get off her case," she ordered, putting on her best dominance look without actually beginning a staredown as she looked at the skinny frizz-haired girl.

"I’m not on her case!" Kali started, her voice rising, "It’s just -- "

Andrea turned up her dominance glare full-blast. Thankfully, Kali shut up and lowered her eyes, looking sullen. Inwardly, Andrea sighed. Kali was way too much the stereotypical Ahroun -- more like a bully, she corrected herself. Even five months of Sept discipline hadn’t taught her complete control.

Andrea squelched both her queasiness and her feelings. "Come on, let’s walk," she ordered her Pack.

They all fell in behind her and started walking, though she heard Kali grumble something to herself. She decided to just ignore it.

They walked south down the narrow sidewalk on the east side of Pacific Coast Highway, toward the city. The cars roared by just feet away, their owners headed for workplaces in the interior, ignoring them. On the other side of the walk, nearly perpendicular hundred- foot cliffs covered with scraggly brush loomed, dull and unlovely in the gray morning; they were at the wrong angle to see what was on top, but she knew she’d see more expensive hillside homes. Little spills of red-beige sand lay on the sidewalk here and there, a reminder of the landslides that sometimes closed PCH as the unstable hillsides eroded, their substance trying to complete its journey from the Santa Monica mountains to the sea.

Owl’s-Flight would have looked at the thick hill scrub that flourished in that unpromising soil and fashioned some sort of lesson of how the Wyld could push right up against the Weaver like that. Andrea felt a smile tug briefly at her mouth before she brought her mind back to their mission.

It was one thing to hunt down an unarmed Pentex agent in the hills of Topanga Canyon and kill him -- which they had actually done two months ago, a thing that still sometimes bothered, amazed and made her feel guilty and shocked by turns -- another thing entirely to journey straight into the inner city to open negotiations with the Bone Gnawers. For one thing, Terry wasn’t even legal to drive. Andrea had to almost physically push herself to go on. She began to understand the reluctance of most older Sept members to leave the canyon.

They were too young to drink, but they had killed a man. Admittedly, a man who had come as part of a group meaning to kill them all and destroy the Caern, but still a human being. Andrea thought about that again, turned it over in her mind but still couldn’t achieve peace with her conflicting emotions. Or, rather, her lack of remorse over it. Surely she should feel more guilt about it . . . but the guy wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment to kill her. . . .

A mile down, they found the metal sign indicating the bus stop and halted to wait, huddled into a group as if to protect themselves against their own unease. There was no bench, and the air reeked of the tangy stink of gasoline fumes.

Andrea’s head jerked up sharply at a vehement male-voiced scream, jabbing into her attention. She spotted its source: a head sticking out of a red Trans-Am speeding by. She caught a glimpse of an ugly sneer and belatedly realized he’d shouted an obscenity at them, though she hadn’t understood it. She actually snarled -- she felt her upper lip curling wolf-fashion. She was startled to hear one of the others actually growl like a wolf.

She remembered when she would have told herself it didn’t bother her, because it was too scary to admit she was afraid of him, of being raped. Now she wanted to punish him. She was afraid now not of being raped but of breaking the Veil when she savaged him.

The Trans-Am vanished into the traffic to the south. "Prick," Kali snarled.

A few minutes later a bag lady wrapped in layers of dull brown clothes pushed a shopping cart along the walk, then stopped at the nearby trash can to rummage, muttering unintelligibly to herself. It was impossible to guess her true weight or shape, or the real color of her sparse, stringy hair under several handkerchiefs, but Andrea could smell that her clothes hadn’t been washed in a long time. The cart contained several overstuffed plastic trash bags. She couldn’t see what was in them.

Ariadne Moonsinger walked up to her, meaning to offer her her empty soda-pop can, but the woman looked up, glazed eyes widening, and backed away. She scuttled off, cart in tow, looking anxiously backward as if she expected them to come after her or try to steal her cart. Ariadne shrugged and rejoined them. Anath, who as yet had no deed-name, put an arm around her, and the two stood together like that, ignoring the passing cars.

A warm current of comfort flowed as the five Garou stood together, remembering that they were a Pack, that they were protected from ending their lives that way.

"Ariadne, Anath, Andrea . . ." murmured Ariadne, her dark eyes half-closed. "We have too many names beginning with A in this Pack." A quiet little smile spread on her round face. Anath smiled as well.

"I know," Anath purred. "But what can we do about it, until Andrea picks a tribe-name?"

Andrea felt a smile form on her own face. They made a lovely pair, Anath slender with close-cropped hair as dark and curly as her own, Ariadne stout and blonde and pale.

"I will, soon," she said. "Don’t worry."

Suddenly she realized the Trans Am was pulling up beside them -- the driver must have circled around to return here. He ignored the honk of another driver behind it. Andrea tensed. Sure enough, a leering male face appeared at the window. He had greasy brown hair, sharp, vicious features and a bad case of five’ o’clock shadow.

"Hey, girls. Ya wanna party?"

Kali began walking slowly, deliberately toward the car. There was no mistaking her intent: she meant to do *something* to him.

Andrea moved toward her to stop her, but it was over before she needed to act. As Kali reached the window, the sneer slid off the creep’s face like spit off glass. Andrea heard a parting obscenity as the car suddenly jerked into motion. Whatever the bag lady had sensed, he had, too.

The bus arrived ten minutes later by Andrea’s cheap digital watch, clanking to a smelly halt in front of them. It stank of diesel fumes, human sweat of varying degrees of ripeness, fast food and perfume and less identifiable odors. Andrea got on first, shoving her dollar bill into the pay slot. The driver, an old man with a big, rounded nose and a crown of thinning short gray hair, looked at her only to be sure she paid; he didn’t sense anything.

The streets rolled by outside the window as the fashionable stores and the mohawks and black leather petered out, to be replaced by check-cashing joints, fast-food places, pawn shops. The first sign in Spanish instead of English appeared, and then more and more of them.

The decline was halted abruptly by the appearance of the great skyscrapers of downtown, where they had to change buses, with the tall buildings seeming to lean over them, making the street into a great canyon. The business-suited men and immaculately-dressed women peered curiously at them, and one asked them if they were lost. Anath smiled and shook her head. "No," she said.

They boarded the next bus, and as soon as the towering office buildings vanished, the decay resumed. They at last got off in East L.A.

All the faces now were black or brown, and most of the signs were in Spanish. There were no overpriced gorgeous facades with windows displaying trendy clothing or CD’s or keepsakes, only tiny places offering Mexican food, overpriced groceries, immigration services, and those truly ubiquitous evidences of a depressed neighborhood -- storefront churches and liquor and pawn shops.

The reek of gasoline was the same, but now it was joined by spicy, greasy fast foods and less identifiable odors.

Andrea had a feeling a group of teenage white girls were going to attract too much attention, but shifting was out of the question -- too many humans to see it.

Humans. She was no longer a human. She had never really been human.

How to contact the Gnawers? Finding them in this overcrowded cesspool would be like finding needles in a haystack.

Andrea turned it over in her head, but it was Ariadne who spoke first.

"What we ought to do is find a cheap hotel room. Then we could rent a room, change and start sniffing around."

Renting a room for an hour proved easy. The hotel was filthy and had cockroaches. The proprietor, a wrinkled but smoothly smiling old man with a face the color of coffee, looked up from his half-empty bottle as they entered and raised his eyebrows, but he was willing enough to accept their twenty dollars.

They changed in the room -- they wore only their dedicated clothing and what money they had in a pouch around Ariadne’s neck. One by one, they leaped through the open window into a tiny back yard piled high with junk, then leaped the low fence.

By now, it was late afternoon, and the shadows were lengthening.

The stench of humans, gas fumes and rotting garbage threatened to clog her nostrils. Andrea even hated the smell of Mexican food, with its biting peppers. Now and then they’d cross the trail of a cat or a dog, which usually smelled of fear, hunger and blood from flea bites. The human footsteps reeked of cheap perfume, chemicals or alcohol, sweat, processed foods and -- mostly -- despair.

Gradually, as she became acclimatized to this olfactory riot, Andrea began to sort out underlying odors.

As they passed one alley, a scraggly tuft of weeds at the mouth gave off the pungent stink of urine. Someone had pissed there, right out in public. The other smells it held were a fusty, mousy odor that she thought must be a rat, and a thin, nasty chemical stink from two used syringes left in the moldering rubbish.

More than once as they padded through the streets and alleys, they passed trails that, underneath the ever-present human smells, held the blood-and-carrion taint of Leeches. Kali bared her teeth and growled at them. Andrea wanted to do the same. Didn’t the Gnawers police their territory? Apparently not.

And then there were smells she could not identify at all -- smells she was sure were "supernatural" or at least not just human effluvia. She wondered what they were, then decided it was just as well she didn’t know.

They padded along the sidewalks and through the alleys, sniffing for any hint of Garou -- territorial marks, scent trails, anything -- even graffiti. They didn’t dare howl for fear of attracting something that wasn’t Garou. At least no one screamed sexual insults and invitations at a pack of big black stray dogs. The shadows lengthened as the afternoon waned.

A woman in a dirty red dress walked down the street muttering to herself, her eyes glazed; they gave her a wide berth, but her eyes widened in fear and she froze in a doorway as they passed.

On one corner, gang members were hanging out, smoking, drinking, talking in Spanish and laughing in coarse, unrestrained voices. Andrea’s wolf ears could pick up the undertones of adolescent aggression and violence in their speech, and they hurried by them at a rapid trot.

Elsewhere, people sat on steps or against the walls of buildings, watching the world go by, or carrying bags of groceries.

At still another street corner, a man hurled a chunk of concrete at them. Kali lifted her head and growled, echoed by Andrea, but then he drew a handgun, and they fled.

The sun died bloodily toward the distant ocean, the shadows lengthening.

Her tail wanted to tuck down between her legs as she loped, and her ears flattened against her head. Thank Gaia they were relatively safe in lupus form -- far safer than they would have been as homids. But she could smell her Pack’s fear and unhappiness.

Strange, she thought suddenly. All of them except Terry grew up in southern California. Was it like this even in the suburbs, and they just never saw it because they were still "human" and used to it? Or was this slum really so much worse?

Even Kali had shut up and was staying close to the Pack, her eyes nervous, her tail hanging low against her hind legs.

Dusk thickened, warded off by streetlights. All they found were the scent trails and piss marks of stray mutts, and now and then the occasional shit pile. Some of the latter were human. None of them were Garou.

Then, when they came to a trash-strewn vacant lot filled with weeds, a shaggy-furred figure stepped out from behind a discarded cardboard box to confront them, tail raised. There was no mistaking the sentience in its movements -- it didn’t hesitate between fear and aggression, didn’t bark or whine. It padded toward them, head lowered, then stopped a body’s-length away.

"Who’re you?" it growled in the language of the Garou that could be spoken even in lupus form.

The Pack halted as one. Andrea looked at the other Garou.

The lupine heritage was obvious in its large size, its bushy tail, its wolfish head. She couldn’t see much in the dark night, but its pale coat was short, splotchy and reeking of grease and oil. One ear flopped over, whether by nature or injury she couldn’t tell. It smelled male.

She braced herself, stepped forward and began as Hippolyta had instructed.

"We are Garou of the Black Fury Sept of the Raccoon, sent by Sept Leader Hippolyta Getsbane -- " she began.

The ragged Garou cut her off in mid-sentence. "I *know* you’re Furies. What I want to know is, what are you doing here?"

His voice was gravelly, sharp with skepticism.

Andrea blinked. In the silence, a decrepit car chugged past the lot without pausing.

Behind her, Kali growled. Ariadne stepped up beside her, shoulder pressing against hers in support. Anath flanked her on the other side, with Terry as always bringing up the rear.

"We’re here to talk," Andrea said.

"Talk?" The Bone Gnawer’s voice retained its skepticism.

"To talk to your Sept," she confirmed. "Hippolyta Getsbane wants to start us talking again."

The Gnawer snorted, an astonishingly human gesture in a wolf -- or canid, anyway. "Well." He studied them for several moments, as she waited and listened to the others shift restlessly, pads and claws scraping the sandy soil. Their smell was as nervous as she felt.

"Okay," he finally said. "I’ll take you to our Ma. I’m Shelf-Life."

Shelf-Life gave her no chance to ask questions; he turned away and trotted out of the lot onto a side street, past the small, dilapidated single-family homes, most of them darkened. Andrea squelched her irritation and followed, and the rest of the Pack swung into motion after her.

The Gnawer led them down several blocks and back into a commercial area, lined with block buildings filled with tawdry stores (many of them vacant, abandoned), through a maze-like route of back allies, freeway underpasses, railroad tracks, vacant lots, the occasional yard of an abandoned house, areas whose purpose Andrea wasn’t sure of and, at one point, a small section of track for the Metrorail system, but always vaguely northwestward. Andrea suspected Shelf-Life was trying to confuse them. If so, he was successful. No one but a Gnawer could have remembered this route.

As they loped through another underpass, she glimpsed other loping shapes in the darkness, behind them; they had an escort. They’d probably been spotted before Shelf- Life confronted them, she thought.

She glanced up. Nearly masked by the sodium streetlights’ yellowish-brown glare, the gibbous moon was rising, the clouds reduced to scattered fleeing patches by an evening breeze.

Even at this hour, there were humans on the streets that ran between the rows of stores, but none took notice of them -- except for one old man in an overcoat, leaning against a wall so heavily graffiti’d it was almost impossible to see the bricks underneath. The man glanced over at them, exclaimed "Big fuckin’ dogs!" and took another swig out of the bottle in his paper sack. Shelf Life paid him no attention as he led them down the street.

He led them through an industrial area, where the streetlights nearly vanished, past a fenced-in refinery, across broad but empty roads. Here, only electrical lines marred the purity of the Moon’s face -- that and the ever-present smog that turned Her light faintly brown.

At last they reached a chain-link-and-wooden-slat palisade fence, the sort that surrounds junkyards and scrap yards. Improbably, it was covered with graffiti despite the irregular surface. She could smell urine; humans obviously sometimes pissed against it, into the styrofoam and crumpled paper that had fetched up against it on the untended grass. Shelf- Life ducked into a gap where some of the chain link had apparently been removed or rusted away and wriggled through, his scraggly tail vanishing last like an unkempt rabbit diving for cover.

In there? After a moment’s hesitation, Andrea followed him, feeling sharp metal wire ends brush against her fur. The opening reeked of other Garou who’d used it, none of them very clean.

Inside, great dark heaps of crushed cars reached up toward the Moon, blotting out much of the dark sky. The scrap yard smelled of rusty metal, rubber rotting in the smog, spilled oils and the occasional rat -- and of Garou. She could hear the scuffling sounds as the rest of her pack wiggled through to join her.

Ariadne was beside her then, and they exchanged nuzzles before going on.

"Don’t worry," she breathed into Andrea’s ear. "You’ll do okay."

Andrea smiled slightly, her lips drawing back. "Thanks."

Ahead of them, outlined by a stray patch of moonlight passing through the broken-out window of a car perched atop one heap, Shelf-Life waited silently until he had their attention. He moved forward again, tail high and wagging slightly.

A narrow winding channel between the rusting metal shapes provided a route to a clearing in the center, thirty feet across. They reached it -- and more shapes both four- legged and two-legged emerged from the scrap heaps, all around them.

She had a moment of fear, then forced herself to relax, lest her fear spread to the rest of her Pack. This, Andrea realized, was where the Gnawer pack met visitors.

She wanted to wrinkle her nose at their smells. All of them were shabby, the human figures wearing tattered, reekingly unwashed clothes, the lupus ones as much dog as wolf, with soiled, smelly fur. There were ten of them besides Shelf-Life, and they didn’t smell friendly.

Her Pack found places beside her, and they settled down on their haunches to form a semicircle, their own scents sharp with tension. Ariadne was beside her again, on her left, with Kali on her right.

There was movement in the Gnawer group: Andrea saw they were making way for someone. Two someones, in homid form. One was a bulky, short form swaddled in clothing who moved slowly, awkwardly, but with confidence, the other taller, leaner.

As the squat figure reached the space in front of them, it raised a hand to peer at them, and the moonlight on her wrinkled face revealed her as an old woman. Scraggly hair peeked out from the hood of the jacket that formed the top layer of her clothing. There was less of the stench of homelessness on her, as if she got to wash more often -- or maybe had more access to clean clothing.

And intelligence definitely gleamed in those eyes -- or at least alertness -- as she stared at Andrea, glancing at the other Pack members. This was no schizophrenic or drug addict.

The other figure was wearing fewer clothes, or he was a lot thinner. His hair was a greasy black, hanging in thick strands. The top layer of his clothing was a dirty overcoat. His gaunt face was unshaven. He was a lot younger than the woman.

The scents of both of them were unmistakably Garou.

They studied her.

Andrea wondered what approach would work on them. She could guess what she looked like through their eyes -- a pampered, well-groomed bitch who’d always had it better than they, who frolicked in the wilds of Malibu and had no idea what their lives were like.

The male spoke first. "Let’s see your homid forms."

Andrea willed herself into homid form, her shape flowing as she reared on her hind legs and her tail and fur vanished, her dedicated clothes appearing with her. Her clean clothes would probably make an even worse impression on these Garou, but she had no choice. Well, she *could* just walk away, but that wasn’t really an option.

She heard rustlings as the others followed her lead. She hoped to hell Kali’s fashionable Calvin Klein jeans didn’t rub them the wrong way.

The Gnawers stared at them, a scruffy jury, but remained silent. They stank of their own body odors, of grime -- and the barbed, metallic smell of suppressed hostility. The thin man broke the silence again.

"So your Sept sent a bunch of pups to talk to us, did they?" His voice was raspy, but only slightly insulting.

There was more silence, and Andrea realized it would continue until she broke it. She devised a reply.

"That’s right," she said. "Sept Leader Hippolyta sent us, and no one else."

The man grunted, his unshaven face expressionless. Then, "Doubtless your Sept Leader does us great honor." There was no particular inflection, he just let the irony hang in the air.

Just as she was opening her mouth to speak again, he asked, "But why now?"

Andrea stilled her irritation. She decided to try honesty.

"I don’t know all the details, Gnawer-rhya," she said, ignoring the scattered snickers at the honorific. "I do know that Hippolyta wants to open up communication between us and you again. You know everything that goes on in the city, you can see where others can’t. Some Furies don’t agree with her, so that’s why she sent us, cubs, instead of someone else."

"And you need us," the man said. "That’s the only time you country Garou come up here." The others Gnawers nodded or growled low sounds of agreement.

Her stomach tightened as she searched for more words, the right words. She felt her Rage beginning to stir.

Ma beat her to it.

"It will take more than words to convince us, young Fury," the woman said, and her voice was gentle, surprisingly deep for a woman, yet a touch gravelly as old women’s voices sometimes become.

"There’s a lot they don’t tell cubs like you. But the first Raccoon Sept Leader, Eris Telemachos was her name, was the one who once dealt with us. It was a very long time ago, before the Vampire Wars. She helped us out a lot in exchange for all the information we gave her then. But she died in 1966, and your Sept hasn’t spoken to us since."

Andrea blinked.

Another Gnawer, a skinny woman, butted in, taking a step forward, glaring at Andrea. "You Furies say you’re about helping women," she snapped, her voice edged with bitterness. "Why ain’t you here for our Kin then? You’re not at the welfare offices or the soup kitchens! You don’t stop the gang-bangers or the cops! You don’t even come down here! You’re off running around in the woods --" A scatter of snarls and sounds of agreement joined in, and someone else started to speak. Ma made a sharp chopping motion with one hand, and silence again fell.

"I apologize for Charlotte’s interruption," she said. "But what she says *is* how most of us feel."

Andrea, thoughts churning, didn’t protest as Ma continued to speak. The only tactic likely to have a chance of success was to listen.

"You live in Malibu, where you don’t have these problems. You think that makes you closer to the Goddess. You’ve forgotten that Gaia’s here in the city, too, and so do women. And so do Garou."

Andrea forced her Rage down (*who are these city mongrels to criticize my Sept?*) and drew a deep breath, looking Ma carefully in the eye. The old Gnawer’s wrinkled face was emotionless, giving nothing away, no hint of what she could say or do to change her mind.

"What do you want from us, then?" she asked.

Ma’s stony expression changed. It was too dark even by moonlight to be sure, but she could have sworn there was a flicker of surprise there, maybe even respect.

"Well, that’s a good start," the old Garou observed. Then she smiled briefly.

"First, tell your Sept leader we can use some help here. If your Sept members won’t work in a soup kitchen or shelter, at least you can help us with the homes for battered women."

Andrea blinked again; she hadn’t thought these people would care about women being beaten.

"For the rest, just get your asses down here and see what’s happening, try talking to us. You have no idea what goes on here, do you?" Ma peered sharply at her.

Andrea stared back, refusing to be cowed or guilt-tripped.

"The Wyrm," she answered. "That’s what I was told."

Ma snorted, her face hardening again. Other Gnawers shifted restlessly, their own faces hard and angry, glaring back at her Pack, whose swelling Rage billowed around her in waves. Andrea prayed Kali would have the sense and discipline to keep silent, but she didn’t dare look around to see. She choked back her own anger, eyes locked to Ma’s face.

"And you believe that?" Ma demanded.

"From what I’ve seen before we got here, yes."

"You’ve been here for only a few hours, haven’t you?"

"That’s true," she admitted. "Tell me: if I do bring back this message, and the Sept decides to act on it, will we even be welcome in your territory? Or will you treat us like trespassers?"

Ma glared back at her another few moments, and then some of the anger left her weathered face. She nodded. "Yes, you will be. I’ll send the word out to my people that Furies who come to help are welcome here -- until and unless you make yourselves unwelcome." She heard a mutter or two from someone among the other Gnawers, but it fell silent almost at once.

"And what does ‘unwelcome’ mean?" Anath demanded behind Andrea. Andrea gritted her teeth, but it was the same question she’d been about to ask.

"Meaning you threaten one of us or our Kin," Ma answered.

Andrea lowered her head, pretending to consider this. In reality, she’d already made up her mind. When she looked up, she looked Ma in the eye again, and took a deep breath.

"We will take back your message," she told her. "We’ll give it to Hippolyta. What happens after that, I can’t promise."