preparations for a feast.

[Remy] The violence and rapidity with which his quarry dies is little consolation for all the epic fails that came before. After the fomor's dispatched, after his rotten head has bounced off into the dirt, the Godi sinks his jaws into the headless corpse, snarling, and whips it furiously back and forth like a dog with a rat for a good ten, twenty seconds before letting the lump of putrid flesh fall.

Then he goes and picks up the head, first in his teeth, then in his crinos-paws. Holding it in the crook of handpaw and wrist, the Godi slings it out over the lake, shotput-like, one mangled lump of bone and flesh and brain and hair sailing out yards and yards and yards and yards to splash! into the dark waters. The body he keeps, digging claws into trachea and esophagus and aorta, holding it by these three hot, stinking orifices the way a man holds a bowling ball. Step by step, the Godi drags the corpse across the thawing park grounds, hunting down his baseball bat.


Some minutes later, when Sofie has the unluck to come strolling down the midnight paths, she hears an odd sound. An intermittent, distant, wet snapping and popping. And the occasional low growl.

[Sofie Janssen] The sound has the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She casts a look upward, across the dark spaces of the trees and down through the slopes to the tall trunks. Her hands are taken from her pockets and she had slowed her brisk walk just enough to take in the details of her surrounds. She had stuck to the more main paths of the park, wanting her time in there, at night, to be brief. The city, as she's been told over and over, is not home. It has different rules.

Pale eyes dart from place to place, and her heart thunders harder, quicker in her chest. She has no weapons on her, nothing but some switch blade and a cellular phone. Neither of which will do good against the sounds that she can place as semi familiar by similar association. She's hoping it's a dog. A dog too engrossed in its meal to pay any attention, and if it's not a dog lapping up its kill, that it's not another sort of canine that might catch whiff of her ancestry.

She quiets her breathing, speeds up her step and takes a longer stride, all the while trying to be quieter and become aware of which way the wind is blowing by licking a thumb and holding it to the air as she goes.

[Remy] The thing about dogs -- or any canine, for that matter -- is that their hearing is so much sharper than a human's. And that's to say nothing of their sense of smell. By the time Sofie thinks to quieten her steps and check the wind, the popping and snapping has already come to a sudden, ominous stop.

Silence. And then -- very close by -- a sudden crack! of a twig snapping.

[Sofie Janssen] Fuck.

Too late. Her head snaps to the side, glancing sharply in the direction of the sound.

She's continuing to walk, not coming to some dead standstill like a deer. Her heart is pounding louder now, blood rushing through her ears through strained hearing. Pale hands are already in fists at her sides, not so much prepared to fight as it's clenched through rising anxiety strumming through her body.

Adrenalin floods.

[Remy] There's a certain sixth sense that warns of danger; an intuition that draws upon all five of the other senses in ways too subtle for the conscious mind to comprehend. The faintest stirring of a breeze. The slightest sights and sounds. The smell, however dim, of old, putrid blood. Most humans have forgotten how to use it, but not the kin to the Garou. And right now, Sofie's danger-sense is shrieking, crescendoing --

-- abruptly leveling off and fading. Whatever pursued her, watched her, hunted her is gone. She's safe, for the moment. Perhaps she slows. Perhaps she keeps going at that quick, smart clip. Perhaps --

it doesn't matter at all. Suddenly there's a sense of rending, not of the physical world but of timespace, of reality. Something large and savage boils through; a huge hot hand grabs her, the other clamping over her mouth, dragging her into the bushes like the boogeymen of childhood tales.

She's clamped back against a body that feels like a tower of muscle and rage. The hand over her mouth tastes like blood, stinks like rot. A fierce whisper slices past her ear: "Shh! It's me," - but the voice isn't quite recognizable, too low and rough.

[Sofie Janssen] Its sweat that comes across her lip, down the back of her neck, the cold sort that comes with a fear that everyone says they don't have, but they do. Its what they do with fear that matters, or so she's been told. Hers keeps her walking and looking out, not shying back from it. She has better sense then to go and investigate though. Those noises weren't anything human.

Fading off gives her this sense of, not relief, just wariness and a moment where a fist isn't closing tight around her heart and throat. It's followed, a second later, of this other sense that she could never put into words, but generally means run.

She goes to do just that, shifts weight to start off in a sprint, but she's almost caught by some coathanger move that jerks her in the other direction and has something larger than she, stronger by far, hold on. Sofie isn't just pulled into the bushes calmly. Muscles and hold are a little worked as the Kinfolk jerks and kicks, tossing weight towards the ground. Her nose is half squashed under the palm of the hand, which she digs her teeth into with a sharp bite, intending on ripping flesh right from the palm in a chunk.

It's not a pleasant taste that. That someone is coaxing her to quiet in an unfamiliar voice has her struggle anew. Sofie isn't a small woman, she's tall and she's had more than her fair shares of down and out brawls, but she's already in a hold, and is at the mercy of the Garou. But it's clear she's intending on going quietly.

[Remy] "Ow!" It's hard to snarl in a whisper. "Sofie. It's me. Rémy. Keep quiet. You hear me? Keep. Quiet."

And cautiously - slowly, one finger at a time - the Godi removes his hand from the kinswoman's face.

[Sofie Janssen] His hand moves finger after the other and she's jerking her shoulders, trying to get her body out of his grip, hating to be helpless. She spits off to the side. The taste in her mouth is more than awful and is threatening to kick in her gag reflex. Other than the sound of her trying to get spit from her tongue and off her lips, she says nothing. Her breath comes hard.

Fear is turning to fire.

[Remy] He's letting her go as soon as it's clear she's not about to scream her bloody head off. When she spins around to face him, it's Remy and it's not: it's some hulking, neanderthalic version of the pretty, pretty Godi, his clear brow sloping and low, his chiseled jaw a square-off chunk of bone. Sharp teeth clip against his lips. A dense fringe, more fur than beard, frames his face. The backs of his hands are dark with hair.

His eyes are wolf-yellow, even in the dark. They glint as he looks about sharply, then back to her. He palms a little gourd out of nowhere, hesitating only a moment before crushing the top in his dull claws. He holds it out to her -- there's clear water within.

"Rinse your mouth." It's scarcely over a whisper. He keeps looking around, sharp and alert. "Spit it out. Do it two, three times. What the fuck are you doing in the park at this hour?"

[Sofie Janssen] "The fuck are you doing?" it's a harsh whisper, keeping her voice low as she's trying to spit and not hack. The back of her own hand is used to wipe against her mouth and her outstretched tongue as if she could scrape the taste off. She can't see as well as him in the dark, only make out features that are him and yet not. Its the marvels of the shape changers form to twist their features at will.

Taking the gourd from him she looked at it, up at him - her expression is far from friendly, as is expected from an angry, startled Kinfolk, but she (mistakenly?) trusts him and does exactly as he asks. The water swishes in her puffed cheeks and spat in a quick stream on the ground, his question not answered until it's done three times.

"I missed the bus heading home."

[Remy] "Hunting," comes the singleworded answer. A moment -- a wary swing of his head about, and back -- later, another few. "Making preparations for a feast, you could say."

The feral-shaped Godi shifts ever so slightly to the side. A few inches at most. Enough that she can look past him, across the carefully manicured, perfectly aligned arboretum that forms this part of Grant Park. Moonlight gives this place -- so orderly, so civilized by day -- an eerie cast. On the ground, far away, almost too far to make out the details, is a dark lump of flesh. Headless. Carved and flayed open. Butterflied like poultry, bones gleaming white.

The Godi shifts back. His thickshouldered frame mercifully blocks the view. She can see the blood on his hands still, thick and black; the blood on his mouth, as though he'd used his teeth to kill the thing.

"Fillet of fomor served with a side of bone-meal might not sound too appetizing to you and me," he says, teeth showing in a savage laugh, "but the Dogs of War sure like it."

He reaches out again then, grabbing her by the arm, steering her deeper into the woods -- cutting toward the broad avenue on the other side of the arboretum. "Come on. Where there's one there may be more. I'll take you as far as the road. This summoning works only on a fresh kill, a full moon night. So get a cab, because I can't follow you home."

[Sofie Janssen] She still wants to hit him, to lash out. But she won't. Not while his eyes are born of yellow like that and he's brow is deep and cutting, like the sound of his voice. The pent up frustration will snap through later, for now it boils, swallowed under the surface. It still leaves her eyes bright.

They stare past him, take in the shape of the kill and the details offered by the moonlight, until his broad self blocks her view of it again and forces her attention up to his squared, brute face. She can see the blood there when he offers his barking laugh.

He barely gives her a chance to speak, not that it's stopped her before, and his man handling her again. By the arm she's pulled along, feet working to keep the pace and her lean, long muscle under his grip tightened with the way she fights not to jerk against him. "You're getting shit on my clothes," she hisses at him. "I gotta walk in public yanno."

"How's my face? Cos yours is covered in shit."

[Remy] The form makes Remy's smirk look like a snarl. "You might want to wipe it off a little," he says, but he does let go her arm, striding ahead of her. His path is angled -- they never really get any closer to that horrid corpse in the trees.

"And you might not want to come through Grant Park alone in the dark," he adds over his shoulder. "I've seen and heard about more shit going down here than you can imagine."

[Sofie Janssen] "Good to know," she mutters, using her other sleeve to wipe at her face and then her hand, checking her fingers after to look for signs of darkness against the pale digits. Without a mirror she can take it only on faith that she's not wandering with a red stained mouth or cheeks from his clamping hand. "Would love to hear about 'em sometime."

Following dutifully, she's glancing around - not so much at the corpse as the surrounds.

[Remy] Remy's laugh is a silent, hard exhale. He doesn't answer. A second later he's not even remotely human anymore, dropping forward on four legs, shifting through the hulking warforms to a barely-lither wolf-form. Large, rugged, ghost-silent nonetheless, the wolf ranges ahead, is lost amidst the trees.

That's how he leads her out of Grant Park. Glimpsed in flashes and moments, coming back suddenly. Never quite out of sight; never quite alongside her. Eventually they come too close to the edge of the park, to Lake Shore Drive, for him to wear the lupus form even at this hour of the night.

He pauses in the shadow of some athletic field, some stadium that looks ancient as the Colosseum in the moonlight. "You can get a cab out on Michigan," he says, returning to the near-man shape, nodding at the wide boulevard. "It's only two blocks that way. Try not to get yourself killed en route."

[Sofie Janssen] Walking along in the darkness, lead by a Garou through the spaces and shadows, the Kinfolk watches. A glance over her shoulder here and there, over to the side, and catches the tail of his colour in the night as he weaves back again.

By the edges, she stands with him, not dwarfed so much in height as she is by everything else about the wolf-man. "If I had money for a cab, I'd not be in the park," she points out with a barely there smirk. But she nods to him, lifting her chin to do so and begins walking ahead. "I'll call someone." To get a ride, to get off the street in an area, he says, that is trouble right now - maybe always has been.

And, her voice, already growing distant: "Thanks."

[Remy] An irritated sort of growl escapes him, but for what it's worth, he doesn't chase after her to manhandle her into a cab. As she walks away, so does he. If she looks back -- seconds later, he's gone, vanished into the shadows or across the barrier between worlds.