You carefully shape the words of the Primal Tongue—the ancient language of the Garou, which you learned almost instinctively after your First Change—as you cannot speak human language in your wolf forms.
"Is that what you think?" Clay says, his maw dripping with horseflesh as he pauses his feast. "That we…owe you something, pup? You owed us a dead Bane, and you failed. Scarper did what you could not."
To emphasize his packmate's words, Scarper gestures with his knife across his hairy throat.
You sputter. Where to begin? The "Bane" was the horse, not the man. The man was already dead—you're sure you killed him. You finished them both without help, even though the others were supposed to back you up, were supposed to…
What would be the point of arguing? You look from Clay's blood-smeared face to Scarper's gleeful smirk to Black Tarn's hard, mad glare, and know that you will find neither mercy nor fairness here. You could almost choke on your Rage as this pack mocks the Litany right in front of you, turning it from sacred law into a crude bludgeon, used only to torment you. You will win no arguments here, nor find any Glory among these sad old wolves.
"Get back to the van," Scarper tells you. "Get yourself cleaned up. You look like shit. We're going to have to clean up your mess." He flings the keys at you, and they fly away in the darkness. Biting back a curse, you turn and spot the hole they left in the snow. You dig them out of the snow and fish them out with your teeth as Scarper and Black Tarn laugh at your misfortune and Clay returns to feeding on the horse-thing.
Next
Keys held securely in your mouth, you pad through the snow, under the dead winter trees, for maybe ten minutes. In the silence and darkness, you forget about Clay, the Bane, and the old pipeline as you pass through a twilight world of shifting shadows and gusting snow—the world as it was ten thousand years ago. Then you suddenly spill back out into the regular world, as if stepping onto a rectangular map laid out on a table. Trucks rumble down a county road; human silhouettes pass under fluorescent lights. The smell of diesel and fast food. One step takes you from the desolate wilderness into what passes for northern New York's civilization: a loading bay behind an Amazon fulfillment center.
It's past midnight and traffic on the nearby road is infrequent, so you lope easily across the street, careful to avoid cameras, until you spot Clay's rusted-out Chevy Astro. You stop in front of the Speedway's big glass windows, because you don't see yourself like this often: a titanic wolf, your bulk prehistorical and monstrous, with enormous canines and bright, clear eyes—intelligent eyes. In the relative darkness of the parking lot, you can't even see any blood on your fur, which is—
Inky black.
Gray.
Dappled gray-brown.
Silver.
White.
Brown.
Red.
Golden.
Blue-gray.
Next