The city opens to your senses like a great polluted book, a blossoming thing of concrete and language, steel and the thoughts of all the myriad millions within its ill-defined borders. A vast, pristine hunting ground of moral decay, the fervor of your Hunt had driven the most dangerous Prey into hiding. It is a town in a state of blessed balance by your careful talons, pruning the tree of monstrosity where it grew to tangling bramble and leaving just enough to chase when the moon is high. The bloodsoaked branches have been carefully manicured after years of struggle and terrible violence.
You recall in gory detail the inhuman Wretched that stalked the shadows with feral hunger, twisted and broken reflections of mankind infected with the Mark of the Wolf - in their hundreds you'd harried them into places where they could be torn asunder and devoured; now their power beat and thrummed through your veins.
Your back is a patchwork of ambush-scars, a hundred stories told in slender slice-lines left by the stalking feline things that had competed with the packs for control of those hunting grounds. They'd either scattered into the woods in the county, or had submitted themselves to Thralldom in exchange for limited territory and servitude...you even had a Felid Thrall of your own to call upon.
The greatest of victories, however, had been in driving out the Church of the Saturnine Revelation - a surprisingly dense fringe group of the South that had nucleated around a trio of Fire Touched packs. They'd been driven forth into the wilderness as well, their flocks of believers either slaughtered or scared straight, and the 'angels' at their service had been bound at the bottom of Lake Opaumwangum.
Admittedly, that triumph had come at the cost of your own pack's shaman.
Ever since Carson's departure from this mortal coil, it was as if the mortar that held together you and your mate had crumbled, so that the brickwork of your over-passionate souls ground and teetered against one another. It's a shame...back when there had been actual threat in the air, when the Prey did more than simply mewl and flee, the pressure of survival had brought you together and banished the obvious flaws in your relationship. Now you'd become over-attentive to one another's Hunting patterns, constructive support warping to sniping critique that had riven you both apart to crash back together again every night, as you couldn't stay away from Santiago for long. Even when you wanted to.
You're a few blocks from Arjuna's place, and summon an Uber as easily as Carson had commanded the spirits to do his bidding. The driver is understandably petrified, operating on autopilot and under duress from the subconscious pressure of being stuck in a closed space with a predator such as yourself. He has no conscious suspicion of your true nature - the Sheepskin you wear is just too effective to be pierced by mortal, even supernatural perceptions - but you always made sure to tip your drivers generously for tolerating your presence.
The Mazda deposits you just at the boundary of your turf, where the bridge crosses over the Doura River and into Westfold. Compared to what was untamed urban wilderness beyond, your territory feels distinctly different; even the humans notice it, and for creatures as attuned as Uratha it is almost a sensory shock. Like jumping in a cold pool on a hot day. Ringed in by skyscrapers reaching toward the heavens like the disjointed fingers of a steel giant, Westfold's three, four story brick apartments, ample tree cover, and narrow roads are like coming inside after a storm. The shadows stretch longer, halos from streetlights coruscate in the humid night air, and the roads are mercifully clear of pedestrians who knew to stay inside after moonrise.
You are of course, an exception, and you take pleasure in the halcyon darkness. You have a few blocks yet before you reach the Coleman Center where Santiago is shredding his muscles.
He'd been religious about the gym lately...you know what he is really doing. It was his own response to the restlessness of little challenge, for the Full Moon's thirst for confrontation was emblazoned in his heart. It stoked his Rage and readiness for battle...the problem was that there was little to be found. Then, of course, there was your own influence upon his behavior. His overcompensation.
Your fingers ball into fists in the pockets of your dark-green army surplus jacket...a gift from him, in fact, one that you loved well. At once there is a selachian feeling of satisfaction in the knowledge that you are getting a rise out of him, after he'd pushed you away and ignored you for three painful months. Your thoughts drift inevitably back to that time; you know he was having some sort of emotional collapse linked to his father's deepening dementia...political developments in his home country that you'd expected him to be over but that had consumed his attention. Still you'd done what you could, you'd offered yourself night and day to support him. Santiago had insisted he was fine because of course he would. His radiant warmth was counterbalanced by the frigid dark of his overbearing stoicism.
You could have lived with that too, if he hadn't started fucking that tawdry bitch in the next territory over, Eleanor Vanderfeldt. Really, you didn't even mind him having his little harem of mortals - that was expected, you had your own - but another one of your kind, and a rival...it tore a hole in your self-esteem as surely as if he'd clapped his jaws around your midsection and ripped you out.
Just another block until you see him, and already this bitter jealousy has colored your mood. If things were as simple as they were for the mortals you could simply dip out on him, ignore him for another night but the Hunt, the Pack, and of course love chain you together. Like a steel spring, the more you pull apart, the harder you are tugged back toward him. You stink of Arjuna...his orgasm is still warm inside of you, making your underwear sticky. To further confound Santiago is the fact that he is mixed together with the other man, and you have to wonder just how he will take it. The thought causes your loins to quiver...insatiable lust has been gripping you, ever since you started punishing him like this.
You, Carmen Greenwood, are badly unbalanced, as if reflecting the state of your city. This unwelcome peace is an ill thing, as Werewolves thrive on conflict and confrontation with dangerous Prey. You have to do something about this...and of course, Arjuna is the key.
The plain, almost basic facade of the Coleman Center announces its existence with stark honesty, red block letters on a white field. A combination gym and youth center, your man uses it after-hours like a nightly ritual now, and through the frosted glass windows you can see blaring bright lights. Your sensitive hearing easily picks up on that thudding trance he listens to when he's working out, far outside his normal fare; strange taste in music is the least of his issues right now. Your fingers dance along the keypad, unlocking the front door as you drift inside and out of the misty night.
Not for the first time, you stop to admire him...it's impossible for you not to, and it's just as difficult for you to not compare your lovers.
Santiago is standing at one of the barbell stations, pressing the bar loaded with weight above his head. Your eyes track the motion of his trapezius, his deltoids, shifting like steel cabling beneath his olive toned skin...he has the physique of a Mexica warrior, and it isn't difficult for you to imagine him clubbing in the skull of a conquistador (you'd seen him club in multiple skulls, after all). Shirtless and shining with sweat, you note the bristly-fresh stubble on the back of his neck...he got a haircut today which is good, he'd been letting it grow out too much. Styled in that fade you'd shown him, the one you liked no less.
His broad, powerful shoulders remind you of an armored knight in some ways...distinctly different from Arjuna, or your usual taste in men, you'd preferred a whip-thin, otter physique until you discovered the pleasure of running your nails over the carven shape of his pectoral muscles, of feeling diminutive in his potent embrace. Your Rajput prince, on the other hand, was a good thirty pounds lighter but defined with musculature, like liquid metal beneath your touch compared to Santiago's statuesque presence.
The barbell -clanks- back into place as he looks at you impassively in the mirrors...that look breaks your heart, the wall already slamming down, a million miles of space between you. Santiago takes after his Nahuatl-speaking grandmother with those almond-sharp eyes, narrow like scimitars as he regards you...a contrast to Arjuna's doe-dark gaze.
"Didn't know if I'd see you tonight." He's trying to sound neutral, like he could care less but you're so specially attuned to his underlying tones, the subtle shift in body language to know that he's relieved. Upset to see you, but relieved nonetheless.
"Didn't know if I'd come back tonight," and your tone is icier than you wish. You toss off your jacket onto a waiting room chair, kick off your shoes and cross onto the mat-covered workout space. Your long legs swing casual as a crane, and you drag a workout bench to recline a few meters away.
"Cold as stone," he points out. Once that might have hurt you, to know that he perceived you that way but now...you simply give him a disinterested stare, even as the echo of your love implores you to take his head in your arms and hold him close to you, to reassure him that you weren't frigid and you still cared. In fact...maybe you should. Your fingernails dig into the upholstery of the workout bench, and through a divine font of effort you start to rise, to go to him and stop this -
"Saw your little fuckboy again, did you." He spits the words like quills lashing you face; the jealousy is green venom dribbling from the corners of his obsidian eyes. You sag internally with each word that lashes you. "I can smell him in you...the fuck has he got that I don't?" He's rising dangerously from the bench, and it makes your heart start to race; you remain where you are, casual as a raven. He won't hurt you physically. Never has or will.
"It's not that he's got something you don't, it's that...oh I dunno...he's not putting his dick in Elle. That's a pretty good start for me." He begins to circle you like a restless tiger, his eyes never leaving you - normally you wouldn't submit to this kind of predator's behavior but you hold the slender links of pathos around his throat.
"I still put my dick in her cuz you're still coming back here reeking of him and you know how that makes me feel." He stops before you, fists tightening. His forearms are crisscrossed with veins and tendons that stand out enticingly; a single bead of sweat drips down the center of his abs, making its way to apex of his groin. You can see his bulge beneath his gym shorts, a virile shape that beckons your touch...but not yet. "We could just stop this - "
"There's no going back." Your words are final as an extinction event, a meteor wiping out his attempts to reconcile. "Fucking her was the breaking point for me, you understand that? After you shoving me away for months you dealt the killing blow - no, don't try again Santiago." You cut him off with a chopping motion before he can start, and a vindictive thrill fills you to see his shoulders sag...even as you feel terrible for doing this to him. You're riven in twain, badly out of balance but it's his fault.
