Chapter Text
Julie Riley is not a mind-reader.
However, when the pinch-faced, middle-aged woman working the lingerie counter at Boscov's gives her that look down her nose and says "You'll only have seven days for a return, and there's no returns on worn merchandise," Julie is absolutely aware she's really saying "Who the fuck are you fooling? You're a toothpick in a t-shirt, you could eat nothing but Kandy Kakes for a year and you'll still never be a C-cup."
Julie withers under her gaze. Even as she can imagine her ancestors are screaming at her from across the umbra to change, flex her claws and lift this woman's head off her shoulders, she doesn't even let a bit of the wolf into her body, grow into her Glabro battleform to give this woman a scare she won't forget.
God, am I just the lousiest werewolf or what? she thinks to herself, feeling something like a tiny molten knot forming at the front of her skull. Swallowing her rage, Julie stammers out something lie-shaped about it being for her mother, who's sick. The clerk's expression softens a bit, and Julie hates her even more for it.
Beating a quick retreat into the mall's common space, Julie mutters to herself: "Ugh. I should have driven the extra fifteen minutes to Viewmont, why are they always complete pricks at Steamtown?"
Of course, the fact that she's even thinking about driving, adding another burst of carbon dioxide into the ozone layer, makes her frown again: World's worst werewolf. Someone buy me the coffee mug with that on it.
She coughs, shrugging her winter jacket higher up onto her shoulders. She gets about twenty steps down the lane towards the Suncoast before stopping, thinking for a moment, then turning a hundred and eighty degrees and booking it back to the parking deck.
Breath fogging in her path and yanking the beanie down over her ears, Julie Riley, Child of Gaia, finds she does not have the deal-with-it today to go underwear shopping for Tanya and also see if Suncoast has that movie she asked for. In fact, she's forgotten the name of it entirely, having failed to write it down.
So Julie starts the car and waits for it to warm up so she can take her gloves off; she's not upset by the winter weather, but nor is she giving it any quarter.
KRZ back on the radio, advertising the Hot 9 at 9. She frowns at it, too, suspecting that the next #1 and that for every night remaining until the Apocalypse descends that it'll still be that fucking Titanic song. She reaches up for the shift lever on the steering column and reverses.
As we follow Julie's beige 1987 Caprice out of the parking garage and onto Lackawanna Ave., the astute reader might generally ask at this juncture, "But, wouldn't it be more reasonable for Ms. Riley to just change and run on four legs?" And, while, yes, she would be well-furred and ready to deal with the weather, the nature of her errand---procuring a bra for her slug-a-bed vampire roommate-slash-BFF before the mall closes---requires a certain number of thumbs and, perhaps, a backseat to set the bag of goods down on.
And, yes, you read that right. Vampire roommate.
Julie finds that Tanya's up by the time she's unlocking the front door of the suburban two-bedroom, though still in pajamas. She doesn't much look the part of an undead spectre, more like a sorority girl that decided to never graduate and stay a senior forever. Her cheeks are cherubic, her black curls Byronic. She makes Julie wish she was gay sometimes.
Tanya's nursing a wineglass of her usual on the living room couch, the television intoning the drowsy prose poetry of Mike Stevens as the news wraps up. The women exchange exaggerated Euro air-kisses from across the room, and Julie tosses her the Boscov's bag before stepping out of her boots and flopping down next to her.
Tanya sighs, checking the contents of the bag, lifting the black satin lifter-separator out. Julie worries for a moment that she forgot her band size or something before Tanya clarifies:
"You're a lifesaver, Jules, I need this for tonight; we're out of milk."
For most people, being short a bra on a trip to the grocery store is more embarrassing than desperate, but being "out of milk" is this particular household's polite way of saying that Tanya needs to feed and will be out for the night taking the blood of the innocent or not-so-innocent.
Julie smiles a thin smile. "Guess we're not playing Scrabble tonight."
She chuckles and hauls herself off the couch to head for the shower while Julie contemplates her options. Pretty much everything in this part of the world ends up closing as early as possible. State stores aren't even open Sundays, let alone past dinnertime. Hell, even the Wawa down the street is like the only one that isn't twenty-four hours.
But at least getting out in the world on her own business for a few hours sounds like a better time than hooking up the Super Nintendo.
Julie heads for the bathroom herself once she hears Tanya's blowdryer cut off, gives the ol' chompers a scrub, gives herself a quick lookover. Her assessment is grim and, perhaps, unkind: About the same as always. A scrawny redhead with a dumb nose and a Cranberries-Zombie haircut, nothing doing in the sex appeal department, not going to walk a Paris runway.
They bump into each other again as Tanya's putting her shoes on, ready to do the nighttime thing in a Rachely vest-and-blouse outfit. Julie tells her she'll be out as well, causing Tanya's eyes light up and she looks giddy for a moment. "Oh, shit, gonna go run in the woods?" she asks.
Julie sighs a little bit, knowing what's coming next.
"Lemme pet you before you goooooo!" Tanya croons, almost whining.
Julie folds her arms across her middle, sighing again, perhaps not an Emmy-winning performance of put-uponness, but certainly an attempt.
"Come on, don't be a bitch, just a little bit. You know me, I can't have a dog anymore..."
Julie shakes her head ruefully, but in an eyeblink, four paws land on the linoleum of the kitchenette and the woman is a massive wolf, fur all silver and rust, eyes flaming and feral, teeth and claws to rival half the utensils in the kitchen drawer. Julie looks up at her roommate with an expression that she hopes reads as something like "Are you kidding me?" but Tanya doesn't care, landing on her knees on the floor, throwing her arms around Julie's neck, burying her face into the mass of fur.
Julie cringes internally. As a wolf, she can smell the death on Tanya. She tries to keep her stomach from doing backflips and gives her roomie an approving grunt, nudging her pale, cold cheek with a cold, wet nose.
I know I'm supposed to hate her and everything she stands for, that she's wyrmbait, a leech to suck us all dry, but...she didn't ask for this, just like I didn't. We were in first grade together, hanging upside-down from the jungle gym, Julie thinks. She squeezes her eyes shut, letting Tanya pet her and trying not to cry.
She doesn't bother with the car, so once she's out the back door and the spare key's back underneath the lawn gnome, Julie's in Lupus again, wearing only her fur beneath the stars. In two or three strides, she's accelerating, vaulting the fence at the edge of the backyard and running headfirst into the night. The winter air is like knives in her nose and down into her lungs, but it's maybe the first thing that's made her feel alive all day. There's not much in the way of streetlights here, so she doesn't have to worry about being seen as she runs beneath the light of the stars and the dark of the new moon. Already she's passing the woods at the edge of town, the country club slipping by as she turns power into speed and launches herself northwards. Sometimes, she doesn't really mind living in this weird semi-urban, semi-rural mess.
After a solid hour's run here to there, She feels like she's crossed about eight bajillion shitty roads, but she assuredly has arrived at her destination. She stays around the back of the building to change back into her usual Julie-shape, even though the parking lot is so poorly lit that no-one would notice if she did it right at the front door. It's generally a good idea to change back in private in case you were wearing something that wasn't properly dedicated when you went wolf and you wind up bare-ass naked on the wrong side of Dickson City. She rounds the corner of the building and heads in the door.
The illuminated sign above the gravel parking lot: Idle Hours Lanes.
Julie sniffs, nose twitching as her sneakers meet the red carpet entryway. Either she's still feeling some of her lupine senses as she makes the scene, or the smell of cigarettes, board oil, and shitty nachos is even more pungent tonight than usual. The room's mostly empty tonight, only a thin handful of lanes occupied. She hangs a right, walking right past the attendant and heading for the end of the room. The staff here know the sort of people who wind up on Lane 36. The radio on the overhead speakers bleats out some kind of naggingly repetitive dance number made mostly unintelligible by the public address system, the singer asking anyone within earshot to be her lover.
If you ask the average visitor to Idle Hours, Lane 36, up against the wall next to the emergency exit, is usually out of order---if they even notice it at all. Half the time, the fluorescent lights overhead are out, leaving it vaguely, disquietingly dark.
Despite what you've heard, Lane 36 isn't haunted. At least, not in the way you usually think. Lane 36 is frequented by...well, maybe you can guess what sort of weirdos hang out on 36.
There's two there tonight, looking like refugees from a fallout shelter as they recline in their seats in between games. The girl on the right is wearing a poodle skirt over her hoofed feet and furry legs. Horns jut out over her brow, cat's-eye glasses perched on her nose, hair tied back by a rubber band. The guy on the left has the Elvis sideburns and pompadour, as well as yellow cat's eyes and an incongruous pair of black-furred ears jutting out of the top of his head. They're wearing matching bowling shirts, light-blue team uniforms with white racing-stripe details.
Before Julie is even close enough to read the patches stitched over their hearts, she knows they read "Ponytail" and "Hepcat." The bowlers perk up and wave, seeing her on her way over. She grins a little, despite her nagging moodiness and settles in at the scorer's table.
Hepcat grins. "I knew you were comin' in, mama." He points at a nearby ceiling-mounted television showing a UFO falling apart on The Simpsons. "News at ten on WOLF-TV tells it right every time."
Ponytail rolls her eyes dramatically. "Ignore him, he hasn't gotten any lately and the semen's backed up and drowned his brain."
Julie chuckles. "Not going to put him out of his misery?" she asks the saytr.
She snorts, smiling wryly back at the werewolf. "He couldn't keep up. Hell, you might not be able to keep up, wolfgirl, but I'm more than willing to try."
Julie lets the come-on pass and glances around as if just noticing something. "Ace Face and Crawler not coming tonight?" The other half of their bowling team was notably absent.
Hepcat shrugs. "Crawler's not really feelin' up to making the scene tonight, staying home to catch up on his stamp collecting, I hear. Ace's out, too. Gettin' inta local politics, likelier'n'not, gonna pass legislation on the Unseelie Court."
A cutting voice from behind Julie rejects Hepcat's latest flight of fancy in the Spice Girlsiest of British accents. "The Ace Face is never 'out,' darlings, only occasionally detained."
Wearing her uniform shirt rather incongruously under the jacket of an Italian suit, a tall woman with ink-black hair and flashing eyes steps up behind Julie and lays an imperious hand on her shoulder, like the redhead is the broadsword stuck in the ground she's swearing an oath of vengeance on. The Ace Face had arrived.
They exchange greetings and like always, Julie still has a bit of a flush to her cheeks, perhaps a little star-struck by the Ace Face. The tableau, however, shatters as the Face tries to take another step forward and crashes to the ground, the laces of her bowling shoes firmly knotted together in some kind of nightmarish hellwad. Hepcat just whistles a little tune as he gets up to retrieve his ball from the return and Ponytail and Julie help Ace back up.
Ace tries to run damage control, presumably for her own sake, since lane 36 remains firmly unobserved. "No harm done but to my pride. Just showing off for my fans, dearies," she says as she stands up, brushing a few bits of lint off her outfit before bending over to work on whatever geometric violence the Cat had done to her laces.
A few frames in, after Julie'd turned down all the bargains and bets offered on the result of the game---there are some things you just don't do with the Fae, if you've got even half a brain---Ponytail asks if the group is up for snacks. Julie figures a thoroughly-mundane basket of nachos or cheese fries or some other man-made cheese delivery system would be safe enough, and chucks a couple dollars into the pile.
Julie's never been sure if the bowling alley is magic, or if the Fae had magicked her, or if it's something that she can see because she Changes, but she feels there's something different here. Almost like stepping sideways, but without actually seeing the Umbra. Even apart from being able to see her friends here for what they are, there's a feeling, a quality of the light. She's distracted enough musing on the topic that her next roll sees her stumble in a bit too close and trip the foul sensor, the toe of her shoe over the line.
It's not the most competitive group on the parquet tonight, so there is more a collective air of dismay than anything else. Julie blows a dejected raspberry, deflating a little as her bottom lands back in her seat. Hepcat pulls a bit of a wan smile. "Still got them ol' blues, mama?" he asks, almost unnecessarily. Julie's a known quantity with these three.
"Sorry, guys," she says, sidestepping the issue. "I missed dinner. Gimme da nachooo." They share a laugh and get back to it, safely evading Julie's inner angst for the moment.
After the game, the group decamps for the bar over by the pool tables. Ace smirks when Julie asks for a cup of coffee, but Julie doesn't think anything of it at first. However, it's Ponytail who ends up pressing the issue as the first round arrives.
"Dollface, you're gonna burn yourself out if you keep being a giant bummer."
Julie looks up from the napkin she's fretting with, twisted between two fists, not entirely aware that she's being addressed. Ponytail's nudged her glasses down her nose and is eyeballing Julie over the rims, making her target explicit.
"Er?" Julie says as she jerks slightly out of a reverie.
Ponytail gives her a total no-bullshit look. "Julie, it's for your own good, you can't just live in the past. Go get laid, get fucked up, get something for yourself. We're all gonna go quicker than we want to, you gotta act like you're still alive. Is it because of..."
Julie nods as Ponytail trails off.
Hepcat wriggles his nose, rotating his beer in place on its coaster. "Y'can't jive us, mama, we know it's hard goin' it alone. Cats're social creatures, too. Says so in the Declaration'vIndependence."
Ace stirs a creamer into her tea. "Would it help to talk---"
"No," Julie replies instinctively, before reconsidering and letting her thoughts spill out, her mug of coffee untouched and steaming. "Well, maybe. I just...even having to tell the rest of the sept what happened was bad enough, I'm tired of thinking about it. I'm not doing great with either being a person or being a wolf. I try to help people and it all seems to go to shit. I still haven't even had the stupid spiritual vision I'm supposed to get where I find out my true name is Julie Fucks-Dogs-In-The-Woods or whatever."
Hepcat, eternally thirteen years old, chuckles at that.
Ponytail nudges her glasses back into place and muses, "Damn, if you're that hard-up for it..."
But it's not until the sidhe uncrosses then recrosses her legs in the opposite direction so she can more comfortably lean over the werewolf's shoulder that the advice snaps into focus. "Julie, darling," she murmurs conspiratorially, "you must remember there are two kinds of people in this world. There are coffee realists and tea dreamers." She pulls away, and winks as she sits upright again. "You just need to dream a little more."
Julie's still thinking about what Ace said when she leaves at last call a few hours later.
Out on the four-lane roadway beyond the parking lot, it's nearly pitch-black. Store parking lots keep their lights on for security, but those are nowhere to be seen this far past the edge of town. Even with the moon in shadow and stormclouds beginning to edge over the horizon, Julie looks up and tracks the moon's invisible pull in its arc. Even with the possibility of snow---or worse, sleet or freezing rain---in the forecast, she's extremely tempted to get perpendicular to the highway, climb the ridge above the city to the northwest, and spend the night in the woods.
She starts down the road itself while trying to figure out her plans. Story of my life, I guess, she thinks, If only I could still talk to Stag the way I could with the pack behind me. Lost in thought, she practically stumbles over a dead deer at the side of the road. Freshly dead, laying in an Exxon Valdez-size pool of blood, probably hit by one of the sporadically-appearing trucks on this stretch of road no more than an hour or two ago.
"Now there's some grade-school symbolism for you," she says to no-one in particular, but the gallows humor isn't enough to keep her mood from tipping over the edge; not with one of her patron's flock, another life pointlessly wasted in front of her. She's in wolf-shape again before she even thinks about it, and she sings. She sings to Luna, to Stag, to her pack that is no more.
You probably would call it howling, but the Garou prefer to think of it as song.
She more or less runs out of things to say and falls silent in time for the sound of a rattling old pickup truck to emerge from the dark. Digging her paws into the gravel to duck under the guardrail and huddle in the drainage ditch, she hears the truck slow and eventually stop, and she catches a whiff of something familiar. The voice that emerges from the truck also has a certain familiarity to it.
"Don't worry 'bout me, sister, it's just yer ol' Uncle Chuck," says the truck's driver out the window as he parks it on the side of the road and exits. It's barely a vehicle, really. Possibly more rust than paint to the finish, almost certainly only still running by the grace of some sweet-talked spirits of machinery.
She climbs out of the ditch and changes back as Chuck slams the door, dislodging more disintegrating rust powder from the pickup. He gets behind the truck and opens the tailgate with a further squeal of metal on metal. He himself isn't in much better shape, looking somewhere between sixty and six hundred years old, and it'd be impossible to tell where the ratty grey beard ends and his ratty grey coat starts were it not for the blaze orange hunting vest he's wearing over it.
Julie considers what she knows of Uncle Chuck. She'd only ever seen him once before, but she knows he's a well-regarded Bone Gnawer elder in the area. A full-moon beloved of Rat and one mean motherfucker in a scrap. He smiles like Santa Claus, though, as she brushes the crud off her jeans. "How-do, young Julie. Heard yer howlin'," he says. "Shame, to be sure. You mind helpin' me put th' doe in the back?"
Julie raises a questioning eyebrow.
He cackles briefly, then explains, tipping his Red Barons cap back on his balding dome: "Well, what I've been up to lately is gettin' one over on PENNDOT. See, they get the call to clean up roadkill on state roads, but most counties, they farm it out to some contractor, the same assholes who end up doin' half the construction anyway. I take poor creatures like this away, make sure their sacrifice feeds a hungry mouth or two, an' the tribe gets th' dollars for it that would have ended up in some bastard corporate subsidiary's pocket. Now is that some shit or what?"
She's clearly still feeling the edges of her nerves, frayed and exposed in the night air, but Chuck's plan seems pretty alright as these things go, and his good humor is infectious. "Yeah," she says, biting a half-smile. "That sounds like a good one."
They're able to get the carcass up and into the bed of the truck, each at one end, and it makes Julie realize exactly why the Oregon Trail only ever let you take a hundred pounds of meat back to the wagon. Dead weight is heavy. She doesn't think she gets much blood on her in the process, but it's hard to tell in the dark.
Chuck's brows furrow a bit and he gives her a look before nodding to the side, gesturing that she should join him in the front of the truck. "C'mon," he says. "You look like you could use a hand."
Julie's about to protest, then, with just a bit deeper incline of his head, she realizes he's not just saying this as a friendly local who helps out at the Scartown Valley Caern every so often, but as a wolf who Knows Better Than She Does.
In minutes, they're southbound on 81, windows cracked to counter the stench of the heater, which smells as if it has given up on providing heat and has decided to consume the rest of the truck in spite. A few wet flurries get brushed off the windshield with the delay wipers as they head into the dark and the storm.
He breaks the silence, but doesn't take his eyes off the road. "I know what'cher thinkin', Ooh, here's the big, bad Ahroun to gimme some kind of pep talk about how it's a war out there, an' blah-de-fuckin'-blah, gotta get out there, we need willing bodies to give their lives stoppin' the Wyrm an' just like yer pack bought the farm defendin' the caern, you're gonna go out like that, too." He snorts, underlining his sarcasm.
She smiles a tiny, rueful smile, ashamed to be so transparent. "I mean, yeah. You got me."
He nods, flicking the wiper stem from one position to the other but not seeming to like either result. "Now, back in the seventies, eighties? Maybe. I mighta. But it's the nineties. Won't be too long 'til we're out of the whole gahdam century. You get old, you get thumped one too many times, you start thinking that as nice as it is to be renowned and usin' yer gifts in service, maybe there's a better way to do this."
"So where we headin'?" Julie asks, not super-into the idea of discussing Apocalypse philosophy at this late hour.
"For'rd," he bites out around the toothpick that's taken up residence between his molars. "Just keep yer eyes on the road, 'n I'll do likewise."
She refocuses her attention on the road ahead. White flecks of snow, the few pale natural stars visible beyond the onrushing clouds, and the brighter stars of the occasional highway streetlamp forming their own constellation through the cracked windscreen. She stares harder, feeling deja vu, but not for a particular memory, but for the feeling of deja vu itself.
"Been fightin' the Wyrm, the Weaver, hell, even the Wyld gets up to some shit sometimes, what's it get us? We kick their asses, they kick ours, wake up tomorrow, do it again. Kids like you, Julie, you got the new idea, the right idea. We ain't doin' shit killin' their asses, we gotta take care of people. Sure, that still means gettin' hopped up an' bein' someone's nightmare, stompin' a mudhole in some prick, but it also means not leavin' people t' rot when we got the two spare hands to make it better."
There's a tiny moment of panic when he mentions taking care of people---Wait, does he know about Tanya?---but then she rubs her eyes, somewhat distracted in the process of determining the difference between the phosphenes and the dots and lines and patterns beyond the glass. "Shit, did we already pass Hazleton...?" She blinks and looks again. "Wait, Chuck, are we sideways?"
Outside the glass, 81 had ceased to be a four-lane interstate and become an endless ribbon, a road paved with intentions and options, moving at the speed of thought. Mountains and trees bend past as they stand still, or maybe vice-versa.
He grins. "L'il bit."
Lines on the road stretch to infinities in the sky and she barely remembers dropping the deer on the loading dock where the guy in the Orioles cap and the bloody apron takes it away again.
She can smell the stars and the stars beneath the stars on the wind, even through the drizzling half-snow, and she leaves Chuck behind, turning her muzzle north again in the impossible dark before sunrise, paws trampling the snow in a forgotten forest.
Some rational part of her brain suggests she's in an umbral memory of the land in some time past, but there's nothing but now in how she feels from nosetip to tailtip and every point in between. Trees are white and grey birch and oak lines in the black, reaching up in a joyous chorus, snow electric-white laying paths and possibilities before her. Every stone and stream is more charming than the next, like the world was painted by that guy on channel 13.
As she runs, for no better reason than to run, to take this moment for herself and share herself with the world, time and distance began to fail to keep meaning. She's in the woods. A night in the forest in winter. There's nothing else. The voice on a track from a CD Tanya likes echoes in her ears: "Let's go out. Let's keep going."
A moment's lifetime of leaping dales and dodging deadfalls and even sitting for a moment at a lonely hilltop later, she's still at top speed, somewhere in the State Game Lands when a dark shape comes up beside her, also on the run, but seeming even more relaxed about the business than she is. She hears their voice, both in her ears and in her mind, and it's clearly a spirit of some sort, and their voice is buttered velvet.
"May I cut in?" it asks in a low throb, the vaguest smile at the edges of the question.
Eyes to the wind, She doesn't look back, but smirks toothily and tosses a playful "As long as you can keep up!" over her shoulder at her new companion, digging in and leaping forward like the snap of a coiled spring.
As they run, they share the night in silence for a moment, but then the presence startles her enough with a single word that her back paws almost skid out from underneath.
"Julie," it says.
She slows up after nearly faceplanting, looking again at the dark wolf-shape alongside. Its eyes twinkle and she could swear it winks at her. "Don't look so surprised, it's not a good look for a Garou. But I've been hoping to talk with you."
She tilts her head to one side, as good a shrug as she can do without human shoulders, then hops up on a nearby boulder. "Who are you?" she asks.
"I'm you, to some extent. I'm the earth. I'm the moon. I'm your ancestors, your sense of right and wrong, a guidepost on your road. I'm a moment's reassurance that not everything is completely fucked."
"You've been wondering," the wolf continues, voice both masculine and feminine and wine-dark and moon-bright, "if you're doing the right thing at all. It's written all over your face, even if I haven't been hearing your conversations."
"What," is her reply, internally cursing being off-balance in multiple dimensions.
"It's a spirit thing, don't try to make sense of it, it's just going to waste your time."
"I...I mean, yeah?" she confirms, feeling more and more like a refugee from the Barbie aisle.
"Well, I hate to tell you this, but just because you're doing the right thing, it doesn't mean it's going to be okay. If anything, this is the easy part. I don't personally believe in Apocalypse, 'cos nothing ever ends, really, but...it's gonna get a lot tougher than it is now, in ways you can't even imagine, real quick."
"Some pep talk," she says before she can even consider what it is she's saying, which at least tells her her sarcasm glands are still working.
The ancestor-spirit chuckles. "Inorite? But listen. This isn't just a big creepy warning happening because you're a bit high on catching an umbral wave or whatever, I'm here because you need something from me."
"Tomorrow's Cash 5 numbers?"
There's a tiny edge of exasperation in its voice as it peruses the future. "4, 8, 23, 29, and 37, lottery drawings are audited by Boyer & Ritter, certified public accountants, but that's not important right now, Julie."
She laughs, admitting to herself that apparently the Umbra does make her a bit loopy.
"But my point is, when you and your kaffeeklatsch went in against that horde of fomori and just barely kept the caern safe, a lot of eyes in a lot of places started focusing on this part of the world that weren't looking previously. And when Kelly died, and Jason died, and Heather died, and you ended up being the only one to survive after all the bodies were swept up, that means a lot of those eyes are going to be looking in your direction."
It frowns, as much as a wolf-shaped spirit can frown. "You're going to get a lot of shit flung at you. But here's the thing about you: The winds are gonna blow, and you'll bend, but you'll never break. You take care of people, and it's good, and it's worth it, but it is never going to be easy."
She hears it and it all clicks. She is going to build something. She is going to shelter those who aren't. This is why she's a wolf with claws and a human with hands. She locks eyes with her ancestor and says the name back to it almost before they're saying it to her.
"...name is Julie Storm-Willow."
And she sings that name, and the umbra rings and the forest rings with the voices of the stars and the snow and the winds and a thousand thousand wolves. And she guesses she's not too bad at this shit after all---just as long as she keeps dreaming something better.