Update May 19, 2006:

Chapter 2: The Blue Eyed Demon added.

And onto chapter three! (by the way, there's one reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet, another reference to the rhyme Wee Willy Winky, and one or two nods towards Mother Goose. They're all fairly obvious...if not, look it up...you're missing out if you don't know about a weird peeping tom who runs upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown. Hope you enjoy.)

Chapter 3: The Moonlit Breeze

Miles away from Budapest, another creature had slipped into the night. Changing with the moonlight, she tore across the hills, a pack clutched in her claws…fearful of nothing.

Old blood had crossed the walls of a small home, away from the city…

…its warmth had been extinguished and the doors lay wide open and swinging softly on the creaking hinges. Shredded furniture gutted in the dining room…a table had been overturned, its dishes broken and scattered about the rusty hatchet buried in the floorboards. Several books thrown haphazardly at the doorway, their pages turning themselves before hours later…

…a breeze flowed lazily through the open door.

Dropping the empty carcass of a meal upon the carpet, the moonlit breeze began to move swiftly through the lower floor…

She danced through the dining room…capered lightly into the kitchen…and twirled herself nimbly round the corridor where, stopping with an arm draped sensuously about the stair, she sniffed the heavens, resting a gun beneath her coat, a finger poised at the trigger. Yes…

…there is definitely something rotten in the state of Denmark... she grinned wolfishly, her hand beginning to play a light tune upon the sticky banister. Removing her fingertips, she rubbed them together, taking a quick sniff before wiping them on the wall.

Still here…

…waiting above.

Silently, she picked her way up the staircase, her feet bare, stepping easily between the glass and over the youngling whose skull had been split…tawny eyes staring sightless at the ceiling. Golden tresses…a black dress…cut into strips with the rest of her body.

Not a day over fifty. She observed uncaringly, not even stopping to close the youngling's eyes.

Similar to the furnishings down below, the upstairs half of the small cottage had been outfitted with limited resources. Two bedrooms and the single bathroom to her right…no pictures on the walls. The entire place lay in darkness, the electricity shot into oblivion…a feature she herself had seen to earlier, preferring to use the moonlight and her nose for guidance. A quiet hum as she stepped light-footed upon the landing, her fingers still waving the tune whimsically through the air.

Knocking on the windows…crying at the lock…

Are all the children safe in bed?

She ended the rhyme abruptly, cocking her ear instead to listen, eyes narrowed…

The frenzied struggles of a creature thrashing within…whimpering and whining, too hoarse to howl at the moon.

The sounds were coming from the door at the end of the hallway, but she turned momentarily…ducking her head instead to the child's make-shift bedroom. A few toys…clothes scattered in a small duffel bag. Storybooks even. She smiled coldly, dropping to her haunches to pick through the pile, curious if the parents had added any wolf-tales to their pup's library. Finding a dead hamster underneath, she chucked it aside smoothly and stood up.

Alas…no red riding hood.

She resumed her path, leaving the room again as she followed the stains that had led her to the child's room. Evidence of the something which had been dragged kicking and screaming from the dining room, through the kitchen, up the stairs, into the bedroom…and out again, leaving a trail of black blood in its wake. Naturally, the stains led to the room at the end of the hallway…a fairly obvious trail…but, much like a game, she preferred to follow it precisely.

Unhurriedly, she moved closer to the door and placed her palm upon the wood, feeling through to the veins of one inside.

A lycan male…secondary alpha…someone she had known once.

As was the way of the seekers, her fingers found purchase through the door, soaring into his blood, her mind sailing upon his memories as she swiftly relived the length of his life in seconds…a journey bound only by the strength of her prey. But this one…cannot bar himself from his mistress…teeth glinting in the moonlit darkness. Scents…loves…anger…

…life. Her head jerked back violently, the eyes turning white as she plunged burning into the past, her mind swept forth upon the smoking reels of history.

His name was…

Bran.

Born of Cáel and Sinéad in the fourteenth century. Seasoned warrior in his prime. Hunter. A darting mistress. Fiona. A widower now…centuries pass. Smells of barley and rosewater. Makes shadows in the light when no one watches. The lightening locks of a youngling. He frightens her. Many years pass. She finds him and he laughs. He loves her name. Magdalene.

Inhaling in a daze, she cut herself abruptly from his memories as the smell of plague invaded her senses. Early in the second stage and dining upon festering mind and limbs.

The sound of claws scrabbling across the ground, trying to gain purchase. A changed creature…she could quiet its agony. Silence its cries and let it drop softly into sleep by soothing its blood. An extra minute of time spent breathing a child into sweet relief.

But that had never been her way.

She opened the door and stepped forward, the struggling creature within wrenching its decaying body from the ground. Eyes rolling and jaws slavering, it screamed, hungry for blood, and hurled itself at the woman standing in the doorway.

Her right hand shot out, snatching it mid-air as her claws gripped its throat and she stared coldly into its eyes. This youngling...locked away.

She moved her gun beneath its chest and fired.

The pup yelped in a high-pitched whimper of pain, surprise and confusion, a sound that made her cringe…old enough to attempt murder, but young enough to misunderstand pain. Unused to children, she still held a strange kind of fascination for "little lycans"…much the way she would view a dog…or a strange breed of elk. She continued to watch it struggle in her claws, noting the length of the teeth before callously dropping it to the floor in a grubby heap.

Removing the tranquilizer dart, the moonlit breeze finally turned to the dull-faced man in the corner, his face skeletal...the bottom half of his body wrapped in a filthy, moth-eaten blanket. He was shivering, covered in blood…a gun clutched in his right hand.

She nodded to him. "Bran."

"Urith." He nodded back in the direction of her voice, his eyes hollow, but still clinging precariously to an indistinct image of sanity. Already a day or two into the disease, the dark locks of his hair were surprisingly clean, only the beard having been tangled into a dark forest spattered with blood…no lice. She could smell the sores on him though, and his feet, poking miserably from underneath a blanket, were discoloured.

Urith, the moonlit breeze, settled on her haunches again, waiting for him to speak as she counted the bullets laid neatly on the ground beside him.

Liquid silver nitrate. No doubt from her own stores. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and it was no longer strange for lycans to carry liquid silver in their chambers nor for vampires to cling desperately to ultraviolet rounds. The ammunitions market had soared…

…and, of course, she had profited.

Hand to hand combat was a thing of the past now with a disease that spread through bites and blood. As the saying went, if a creature could spit in your eye, you were standing too close to it. Best to simply shoot it in the back and run. Elders had to invest in twice the rounds, making sure their troops were stocked enough to kill their own kind if an outbreak occurred…hardly a blink in the eye considering mortals had been doing it for years.

She darted her fingers into her coat, flipping open the time-piece…yawned a little impatiently. Typically she could hold a silence for years…but the Cleaners would be here in ten minutes.

Dropping the time-piece from whence it came, Urith shrugged, breaking the silence as she nonchalantly ripped a piece of beef-jerky from her coat and began to chew it.

"You'll be wasting a bullet."

The words were spoken matter-of-factly, her voice coming out cold and aloof. The type of creature that, if judged by her voice, understood much and cared for very little… "Your eyes are gone and your nerves are shot…see how your hand shakes? Perhaps if you aim at the wall…you may get lucky and hit your own head."

Her white teeth widened appreciatively at the black humour.

Except for his fingers scratching listlessly against the floor, the tattered source of her smiles remained silent, his body occasionally racked by shivers… blank face occasionally dripping sordid blood down his cheeks…a delicate feast of trails running through his beard before it all came together into the mess that had once served as his torso.

She continued to chew casually, noting how he moved. Judging by the claw-marks, his injuries were recent and self-inflicted…the eyes had been clawed out and most of the flesh on his chest, raked like a garden patch, the skin decomposing into a perfect breeding ground for bacteria. He had started scratching no doubt…a bit early considering his mate had been dead less than a day. The onset of stage two, but still early…

Suddenly a horrible sound…gurgling and shaking…the rotting lycan had begun to chuckle, fresh blood streaming as it broke upon the hurried words he strained to get out, body still racked by shivers. "I w-was always a rusty shot…you t-told me to practice on a dead horse…and I laughed and s-said I knew better than to…than t-to shoot your sorry hide…"

His laughter was tortured, gasping and wretched…but Urith smiled to herself, pleased that he remembered their first meeting.

Five centuries ago. Fool boy that he was, he hadn't been phased by cruel words nor the wounds she inflicted upon his shivering form…where others might have screamed in the face of death, he had laughed cheerfully before poking fun at her.

Always laughing, this one.

Suddenly, his empty eyes widened. Mouth gasping in horror…scrounging for words, his lips starting to tremble as he brought his hands up to his face. "I…s-should have…"

"It insults her memory to think you could have stopped what you did, youngling." Her seemingly indifferent tone brooked no argument.

"No…I…" he lowered the gun for a moment, beginning to scratch at his throat with the other hand. "I am…t-tired, Urith..." He let out a shuddering whimper suddenly, squinting red tears that fell between his finger, and wiped his cheeks with a palm. "Just w-waiting for you to take the boy..." Bran raised the gun again, this time pointing it directly at his right temple. "He's been s-shadowed, but…his name is Cáel...named for his grandfather."

"A fine choice…" She spoke politely, already growing bored of this exchange…but then she had never been one for chatter. At least with others. Heaving a monotonous sigh, she made the effort to convince him one more time. Hardly worth mentioning by the standards of others, but from Urith, it spoke volumes. "…but I am not the mothering kind, Bran…no doubt, if he wakes, he'd prefer his father."

He shook his head, smiling wistfully once more. "B-bah, woman…he's only six…barely a boy. He'll p-probably find your threats amusing and worship the ground you walk upon. Put him in foster care then…just d-don't let him remember." His arm was starting to shake, but he forced it still, his hollow eyes longing to see more than the darkness…

…but her presence was enough…that wintry voice.

He whispered softly…knowing she would take the words to heart. "I'm glad it was you that came, Urith. Always said I would die with your voice laughing in my head."

She let out an extraordinarily loud yawn. "Whatever you say, youngling. Just don't spatter on my coat this time." Leaving him chuckling on the floor, Urith hoisted the child by its ruff and smoothly stalked from the room.

A moment later, she heard the gunshot.

Stepping once more into the room, she confirmed the kill…her hand moving to the cell-phone strapped to her right leg. Flipping it open, she dialed a number swiftly and waited on the line. Someone picked up.

"Two bodies, both infected. Make room for a six-year-pup, Aeduin. Stage two…not too heavy." Without another word, she shut the cell, dropping it to the floor for the cleaning crew to find when they came to huff and puff and burn the house down.

Speaking of which…she had a visitor coming to tea on the morrow.

Still waltzing to her own tune, the moonlit breeze danced elegantly down the staircase one more time, leaped across the banister (accidentally knocking the child's head on the wall in the process) and drifted lazily out the door.

Changing with the moonlight, she tore across the hills, a pack and a child clutched in her claws…

…fearful of nothing.