6:01am.

Santiago

Sat 05:55AM EST
5:58am. Her alarm's going off in 2 minutes.
DING-DONG.
It's preceded by the doorbell.


Éva Jozsefa Illésházy

Sat 06:02AM EST
Though Éva never flails for the alarm, she does this morning. "The hell?" Several groggy seconds, twisted by confusion, follow as she twists herself from the lush white sheets and stumbles to her feet, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

The alarm: clicked off. Or rather, clicked through the alarm mood to the radio mode. Santiago may hear the brief blare of white noise as she turns down the volume and switches it to the soothing sounds of Bob Edwards, the NPR announcer.

Struggling into a silk robe, the kinfolk pads quietly through her dark, still apartment. Peers through the peephole. Opens the door, and stares, wordlessly, for a long, stretched moment.


Santiago

Sat 06:07AM EST
6:01am. This is when he usually sleeps. Not today. Not this morning.

Her wordless stare meets the shape he cuts in the doorway. He's in his killing clothes again. Pants and no shirt. A pair of black tattoos, complex and interwoven and flowing and not quite identical, twist over his shoulders and down his sides. Lean and sinewy rather than large and bulky, the shape of his ribs are faintly visible beneath a sheath of muscle as hard as wood, beneath the black shapes.

A beat. Then he walks forward through the door, and she'll either step aside or be pushed back. The minute he passes through the door what were once tattoos are now the guns, familiar perhaps. There is no moment of transition. It was tattoo. It is gun. Simple as that.

"Shut the door. Lock it."
What?
"Do as I say!"


Éva Jozsefa Illésházy

Sat 06:17AM EST
He is in his killing clothes, and she is in her sleepthings. What different pictures they present. He is hard and dark, half-bare. Feral. She is disordered from sleep, dressed in a pair of white satiny pajamas strewn with pale pink roses, dark hair a disordered mess around her shoulders. He walks forward; she stumbles back, the wordless stare bleeds into a twist of puzzlement and something close to alarm.

"You - " (Shut the door. Lock it.) Her reflexes are slowed and thick with sleep, but it is an oddly recalcitrant look she sends him. " - can't - " (Do as I say!)

Only then does she snap into obedience, shutting the door firmly and clicking the locks home with unaccountably trembling hands.

"What the hell - " She does not look at him, but at least her voice, low and urgent, does not tremble. Her hand remains curved over the junction between frame and door. He is behind her, her back is turned, and though she does not like it, she comforts herself with the delusion of flight. Through the now-locked door, out, away. " - is going on?


Santiago

Sat 06:40AM EST
(What the hell)
" - sh! - " Hand held up, index and middle fingers upright and tense, rest curled in a simulacrum of relaxation.
(is going on?)

One dark eye shuts gently as the other peers through the peephole. Silence reigns. Gradually she can hear banging outside. Crash goes the neighbor's aluminum trashcan. Cracklecrackle, the shrubs trampled. Stomp, stomp, stomp up the stairs and WHAM on the door.

"Motherfucking little shit!" WHAM. The doorknob rattles furiously. The door shakes and so does the wall. A picture falls off its nail. The deadbolt holds. WHAM. "Come out and--"

Watching, Eva will never know - no matter how many times she closes her eyes and reconstructs the scene for herself in her mind - how he moved so fast, so smooth, and so silent. The locks are turned back in a blur of lean sunbrowned fingers, the knob turned; the door begins to fly open under the assault and Santiago is strafing sideways, sliding, as the door whisks and misses his nose by an inch. An enormous man comes in swinging. Santiago dodges left, takes the motion and swings it into a three-sixty turn, clockwise around the charging man like a matador of his native country, and slams his elbow into the back of the skull.

The man hits the floor and the door shuts again, locks and bolts, and Santiago slides back into the ready position, cautious, until he is certain the man is out.

Then he leans down, grabs him beneath the ears, and twists.

crakk.
A foot chicken-kicks. Goes still. Santiago holds his fingers over the carotid until he's certain the heart has stopped.

Then he straightens, mouth a grim line, guns swinging unused at his sides. "I'm sorry for bringing violence into your home. He was home with his wife and children. I couldn't do it there, and there were bystanders in the streets." He looks about him, nods to himself. "I'll leave his body in the Umbra."


Éva Jozsefa Illésházy

Sat 06:58AM EST
"You ca - " Breath, caught suddenly, the cusp of something close to a sob, hisses out from between her clenched teeth before the weak sound can form. Her hands clench into fists at her side and her arms swing rigidly. "What if someone saw him - " Abruptly bitten off. It makes no difference, in the end. There is no reasoning with the unreasonable. The man is already dead before she has begun to move again, stalking three paces away from the door, into the house - the body, her floor. Her floor, the body, and the murdered standing upright beside her. "You can't do this."

The sky outside is dark, gray with rainclouds, but paling in the east. In the yard, a the dogwood blooms, pale petals brushed pink at the tips, pastel counterpart to the hot rush of color in her cheek, still imprinted with the crease of a sheet that became tangled beenath her as she slept.

Anger then: suddenly, blinding, virulent and visceral. It begins in the pit of her stomach and lances through her in a wild rush of blind sensation that leaves her shaking.

(She wants to throttle him. The desire is complete and immediate, unmediated by sense or sensability, a raw rush of id so electric she could almost believe the mussed strands of her dark hair are standing on end.)

Her anger is no more than a thimbleful compared to the tsunami of rage that even the lowliest Garou carries with him, each and every day. And so she does not turn back, and so she dare not turn back, though every instinct screams to find something, tear something, break something.

"Get out." Her eyes are still squeezed closed. The pretty white robe flares out around her ankles, dances still in the reverberations from her precipitous rush away. "Get out."


Santiago

Sat 07:06AM EST
His lips part within the frame of his goatee. He draws breath like he might say something. Instead, he leans down, grabs the recently deceased by the collar, and straightens again. Lean, supple, carven muscles stand out along the line of arm and shoulder and neck. He would not be able to do this as little as half a minute ago. You cannot drag the living but unawakened into the Umbra without special permission. A Gift.

But this man is only meat now.

Santiago disappears. The air seems to pop in his wake, and then there's stillness. All signs of violence are gone as suddenly as it had burst upon her, but she knows that if someone cared enough to send the police here, they would find traces of the dead man. DNA from skin flakes on the door. From saliva where his mouth hit the floor. From urine where the sympathetic and parasympathetic feeds to his bladder cut out in one fell stroke and let loose the sphincters. Evidence of his passing - a bewildering dead end that will never solve a mystery taken to the mystic level, but could easily ruin her career.

The air pops again. Santiago, alone this time. He looks at her for a minute. Then, "Don't just stand there. We need to clean the mess up. I need paper towels. Carpet cleaner if you have it. 409 or anything like it if you don't. Move, hurry!"


Éva Jozsefa Illésházy

Sat 07:22AM EST
The blind, instinctual grip of her visceral rage has passed when he returns. It leaves her spent, faintly nauseous, and still shaking with anger. He commands her again, and for a moment she stands there lock-stock still, forcing each and every last scenario of death and doom and disaster firmly out of her mind. The assaults abates, and she sets her jaw against the bitter images, the certain shame, the disaster of police and and scandal and professional death, if, in the end, no other.

No other death, but for the man somehow still here, but not, on the other side of the wall she cannot even begin to sense, let alone breach, for all that she is too keenly aware of its presence.

Motion then: fine, furious motion. The chafing music of her pajamas as she erupts into motion and stalks through her apartment to the kitchen. From the kitchen, the clatter of cabinets slamming open and closed, and then she is returning with am armful of cleaning products cradles close to her body, released to fall clattering to the threadbare faux-Persian rug.

She looks at him then, for the first time since he came in, or perhaps for the first time since he opened the door for the dead man walking who followed him, careening through the streets. She looks at him - the flat planes of his face, but never quite his eyes - and her own face is blank of all but a cold rage drawn from some deep, dark, embittered well.

"I said, get out. And I mean get out." Suddenly, she closes her eyes tightly and drops to one knee, sorting through the products for carpet cleaner and ammonia to destroy all traces of him: DNA and fingerprints, blood and bile, urine, traceries of the spittle that foamed at the corner of his mouth. "I will clean this up." Each word is sharp and precise and sure, but clipped to its most meager length. " - and I want you to go."


Santiago

Sat 07:30AM EST
"No - " and he catches her by the wrist before she can press towel to soiled hardwood. The towel is forcibly wrested from her and then he stands, pulling her with him. "I will clean this up. You will get out. Go somewhere where you will have an alibi if worst should come to worst and someone should have seen him come into your apartment and not leave."

He releases her wrist, finally. An edict of a Half-Moon is hard to resist, particularly when backed by such hard eyes under such heavy, straight eyebrows. A beat passes. Santiago drops to a crouch rather than kneeling, and begins to deal with the mess. A moment later, noting her still there, he speaks again. Quieter this time. "It's unlikely anyone saw and cared. Put it out of your mind now and leave."


Éva Jozsefa Illésházy

Sat 07:43AM EST
The quiet is broken only by the low murmur of Noah Adams in the background. His voice, soothing, drones the news of the day as if he were reading a particularly enchanting recipe. Tariq Aziz was captured in Iraq, today, after... The news delivered with the proper mixture of lightness and somber undertone, and she hears none of it.

Unconsciously, her hand rises to her sleep-toussled hair. And where the hell am I supposed to go? The question rises, bitter as bile in her throat, but she swallows it hard and quickly. Though the words are more of a barb than a plea, she rememders her lessons well, always: Shadow Lords do not plead. Perhaps he could read it in the crease between her brows, in the flat line of her mouth, the thinned lips pressed firmly together.

Abrutply, she turns on her (bare) heel a moment later. The robe flares wild around her legs, swishes as she stalks away through the cheery hallway and disappears. She has the presence of mind, even, to keep herself from slamming the door shut.

Five minutes later, she emerges from the hallway, dressed in joggings shorts of leggings, a t-shirt and a hooded pullover. Her sleep-tangled hair is pulled back into a thick pony tail and her eyes are shadowed by the brim of a baseball cap. The Shadow Lord brushes by the Fenrir without another glance, looping around the heart of the crime scene. The locks click and tumble. The door swings open, and she is gone.