The Wolf Must Hunt.
Every one of those Accursed Beasts knew that if they abandoned the collection of essential human characteristics - family and lovers, social rank and artifice - and embraced the overriding singularity of that central instinct, they'd never go back. Steeped in Savagery, such Werewolves were said to coast through existence in the depths of an endless dream, their higher thought subsumed beneath the need to harry, kill, and devour, and they could never be awakened.
Why would they ever want to? To embrace that side of their nature was an escape from the sorrow, the contradiction, and the chaos. Entire packs had gone feral together, like a suicide pact of the mind.
Yusuf imagined it as something reaching far beyond happiness, since that was a mortal emotion; even now, with the background static of his pre-Change identity anchoring his higher thoughts, he felt as if he was walking on the edge of some expanded state of consciousness.
Here he was, gliding there along the periphery of his mortality's slippery slope, to go forth into the night with a loved one and pursue a problem to its den, to undo it - with fang or wit.
The dismal, flat gray world of Pomdufond Parish outside its metropolitan center was a flat sea of ill-kept, tangle-yard homes, garish strip malls and grease-cloyed fast food restaurants. On the Hunt, however, it became a warren of intrigue, a place where the coastal-plains offered scant shelter but for these rain-soaked, ramshackle little structures...perfect for Prey to hide among, making them a challenge to peel forth.
Down there, off the main highway in Delacroix, nestled in a vast parking lot filled with colorful vehicles; a Paulie's Pizza Warren squatted like a bloated, oblong rat-lord, carnival lights and music droning from its internals. Skitterlings dragged unwary kids down to the twisting, claustrophobic tunnels beneath to feed; but the Rats were good for an easy kill.
A few blocks southward, crawling closer to the salty, hurricane-ravaged shoreline where home values had plummeted, the palsied arm of federal assistance had never arrived after Katrina. Sobek maintained little wyrm's nests of abandoned treasures in Saint Martha's; hard, scaled meat, but invigorating and woven with secrets that armored one's hide for the next Hunt.
By contrast, and juxtaposed near the squalor in a way that reminded him of New Delhi or Hyderabad, a curling country road led to a series of gated communities in Hillshire Valley; a fief of two or three bathrooms per capita. Dahaka slithered amidst the church gatherings and country clubs, politicking and scheming...long, blood-and-venom rich meat.
...but he wasn't after lesser Afflicted; it was the pursuit of the most dangerous prey that made him giddy as a teenager, and taking Monroe along with him was like sneaking out to a concert with his girlfriend. One where he was the main man of the performance, howling his glory through brass strings and towering speakers to impress
her
. Music may have defined his human heart, but Hunting his own kind was the symphony of his soul, a strange outcome of his strange life. Other Werewolves understandably feared and despised him, though he'd never cared.
Someone had to do this.
The sensation of being On the Hunt was comparable to a perception-enhancing drug, one that cooled the uncomfortable inferno in his blood to a pleasant, tingling rush. Then again...as of late, that overabundance of warmth had found an outlet in the woman next to him. As he drove West along the interstate, he took the time to admire her.
"God
damn
you are classy Monroe Carter." He pulled one hand away from the wheel to map the sinews leading to her knee. Clad in camouflage shorts that came down to the middle of her svelte thigh, he slowly ran his palm and fingers up her teak-dark, smooth leg.
This sultry, formidable woman pulled a hand away from the careful reassembly of her rifle to close her fingers over the back of his palm, dragging it ever closer to her hip and looking at him with amber eyes, mischievous as a raven. "You're imaginative. Nobody's ever called me classy before, Mizrah."
"You like it?" his purr was confident, even as part of his heart quailed that she
might not
.
"I do cuz you're the one saying it, even if it's just a cute hallucination on your part." There, she beamed that
new
smile his way. Normally she hid her teeth, giving him the very real sense that she'd been holding something back, but now the dam of her caution had been breached and the light of her adoration beamed forth. "Or maybe it's just you don't know what that means," she challenged him.
"I do baby, wouldn't say it if I didn't." Not necessarily true, Yusuf made plenty of utterances whose four-fold meaning he didn't fully comprehend, but they sounded nice and worked in the moment. "Classy girls carry AKs, right?"
Their laughter was like sweet brandy and acidic coffee, taking off the edge with its lustrous bite. With her hunting at his side, the night didn't seem nearly as foreboding and hopeless. He wasn't just some pathetic lone quantity that couldn't catch his own prey, someone for Wolves like Ariadne to move like a pawn in their twisted, frenetic game of dominance and conspiracy. It was that fear that had driven him to ask this from Monroe, in defiance of all the traditions of the Night that governed their kind - Vampires and Werewolves didn't Hunt together...except for when they did, like now.
For a moment they sat in silence, just enjoying the other's presence. He considered the woman next to him in this new context; well, perhaps not entirely new. That first night they'd met at Radcliffe's, she'd chosen him as Prey - flattering, in retrospect - so in that way, she too had experience hunting the most dangerous prey.
What had left him very pleasantly surprised was that Monroe had never asked what they were going after, she'd simply come as prepared as she could.
What was that? It couldn't have been stupidity or impulsive behavior on her part, she (mostly) had that under control when he wasn't being a negative influence. The reasonable, monotonously human part of his mind that could reckon the emotions of others explained casually that she may have simply loved him that much...but in the grand hypostasis of his curse-bent mind, his father's and Lena's voice assured him, in unison, that such was not the case.
What does it matter? Do you need her to love you in this instance, or do you simply need her strength, her eyes on your back, and hot lead when you require?
"A'right. Lemme lay it out for you... the plan, the prey." Like they were going to clean out his aunt's apartment, or go chill with one of his eclectic friends. Monroe regarded him in the rearview mirror with a jackal's saffron stare, naturally intrigued - ah...she'd been waiting for him to kick it off, her whole stance was reminiscent of a dragonfly about to snatch a mosquito from the air.
"I'm all ears, handsome...not gonna lie, you got me all curious - what could big bad Yusuf Mizrah possibly need help tanglin' with, 'specially with sweet, harmless lil' ol' me?" She coyly pinched the tip of her tongue between her perfectly white teeth, and even though it probably was meant to look endearing her whole demeanor was unsubtly murderous. "Don't look at me like that, I'm not kiddin', you got a reputation even with Kindred, so...must be somethin' juicy."
What an incredible woman
, he thought. Her smile was a bonfire, repelling the coyote-shadows of his doubts about the nature of her affection; no woman smiled at him like that, not like Monroe Carter. "Her name is Shamrys Sharukhan. She's a...heh. Lupine."
-WHACK- slapped her palm against the ridges of his abs. "Color me intrigued, jerk."
"Haha...a'right, a'right do you want the too-long-didn't-read, or the whole spiel? I admit, it'd be more of a look into our world than most get." For all his casual charm and ease, the prospect of talking about The Jungle with anything that didn't run beneath its bloodsoaked canopy was akin to when he dropped into a dry pool for the first time on a skateboard.
Predators didn't reveal the Secrets of the Hunt to Prey...but Monroe wasn't Prey; she could be something so much more.
Partner.
Packmate
.
"Hmm hmm like an exclusive backstage pass to where all the freaky magic happens...like I'd pass that up. Spill the details." No hesitation on Monroe's part. Would she be able to stomach the horror of it all? Could he even adequately start to explain it?
"Okay, well..." Mizrah shifted in his seat uneasily as he took exit 29B. "So we're at the top of our foodchain, right?"
"I can't imagine Humans put up all that much of a fight when you go all...y'know, boogaloo at 'em." Monroe was surveying the way urban faded into suburban. The whims of capital unleashed across the globe had ground once vibrant industrial towns like West Cardiff down to bare concrete roads needle-tracked with potholes, arteries clogged with shuttered businesses and abandoned homes.
"If we had to eat nothing but Humans we'd have been caught long before...our usual prey is actually other Accursed Beings." Even in his car he felt the reflex to keep his voice down when they fell beneath the shadowed eaves of ragged apartment blocks or passed the gaping parking lots of big-box stores. "It's not just wolves, there's lions, rats and gators. Like a fucked up menagerie, but for me they're
all