The liar calls out to me the garbled noise of impatience and command. It rolls easily off my frame, no allegiance owed to her or her tongue. I am too busy being lost within my own mind, fighting against the tides of sanity that ebb and flow upon the beach of my consciousness.

The liar begins to fade from my attention.

In the moment when I grin victorious into the night, the new plan fresh at feet like a recent kill split open, she steps back into my awareness. I haven't had the pleasure of dipping my maw in the red soup of my kill, my plan, this scavenger has come to lie and take. My ears slick back in defiance, but my wolf teeth bare themselves in greeting. Come my smile insists, yet my stomach roils, hunger guiding me to gorge on two feasts tonight.

I recognize in that moment when my gaze settles back upon her what had brought me to call her in falsehood to begin with. The similarity she shares with him is real, in as much as anything is real, which in some cases I have learned they are not. Is her face a shrine of false hope on this moonlight night eternal, or is it a sign from him, a lighthouse lit by a ghost to guide the wayward fleet he set sail so long ago?

Maybe neither

Another idea snarls into a voice, my wolf's grin sputtering into a pale line on my face. What if her bone-white color is just a suggestion of what she should look like? I could certainly help alleviate her of some of that skin.

My ears slip up, a feign at indifference to lure her closer and give meaning to the colors her head boast's of. I'll tear her face clean off; tear and tear and tear until all the hide has sunken to the earth, until all the muscle has withered to the ground, until all the ligaments and the nerves have snapped and all the blood has run down, leaving only one thing left, the blank canvas of her mortal composure.

She speaks in that moment when my hearing is forward, and I catch a phrase that sets the ideas in my brain all in a spin. Father her mouth speaks. I see the image of her lips placing that word into the air over and over as the realization floods me like a cold dread that overtakes a doomed hare beneath the pursuit of a hungry wolf. Only this time I'm the hare, and Oblivion, well, he's always the wolf.

I almost committed the worst crime against him. I almost took his blood, my blood. In all things good or evil or even nothing at all, the pack stands as one.

I trembled away from her, shying at the pain her frame suggested on my psyche. She does not relent though and her words hound upon me like fists on a barred door. With every syllable the wood yields bit by bit and the splinters come flying at me. The wriggle under my skin and dig in deeper, deeper, deeper until I'm no longer made of anything but wood and then CRACK the door splits and there she stands, unavoidable.

I blink. Black and orange wash and mix and in the haze there is the bone white of Confutatis staring me down. "Come, sister."
I proffer the word like a hand in the dark and if she grips it we will run.

We will run and in the night so drunk with stars and hope I'll whisper my name and that of my father's, our father's. Our fate is sealed with blood, and so it will continue to bind us in an unbreakable pact.
An unbreakable pack.

Howl.

Worn out places, worn out faces
No expression, no expression
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
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