This is another lovely chapter brought to you by VladimirsAngel!  Rat, the Necropolis and its indigenous inhabitants are the property of the Deville’s Dog.  Lupa , Vladimir, the merry band accompanying them and the Nexus are the property of VladimirsAngel.

Ahead of Rat and Lupa, the edge of the Lampeter City slums stretched like a pale glimmering line in the pre-dawn sky.

“A cardboard city lit with candles? ” Lupa queried, risking a look under burlaps and pieces of corrugated metal as she passed. Little tea-lights and lit scraps of rag dipped in oil flickered back at her. Rat hurried on without stopping, chewing nervously on a gingerbread man. “It’s almost pretty.”

She was right. From this far up the sloping road, one could look back on the Necropolis with a friendly eye. Tiny glimmers of candle-light amongst the slums gave way to the glaring neon of nightclubs and bars. The Necropolis was at its most alive at night. Vampire bars, strip revue, dubious clubs with far more dubious names – not the most salubrious place to be, but if you were of the right flavour of mind, you could never get bored or starved of junk food. It was completely different to the studied modern cleanliness of the Nexus Mall, for example, with its exclusive little coffee stands and twelve-screen cinemas. The only cinemas in Necropolis tended to have only one screen and the movies they showed really weren’t high on plot, unless your idea of a good plot was three men with dodgy moustaches turning up to mend a fridge.

“At least it’s not raining anymore,” said Rat, shaking out her thick hair mournfully. Damnit, this would take hours to dry. And then it would smell musty…she patted her pockets in a sudden panic. No. It was all right. The rain hadn’t soaked through to the packet of carefully-wrapped caramels.

Lupa looked forward, to where the last few shanties clung to the edges of the road like limpets, and then further to where the road lost its smooth concrete surface and became thinner, muddier. She wrinkled her nose.

“Are we going in there?” she asked, indicating the scattering of dark pine trees clustered on the immediate horizon. “If I’d know we were going to be rambling, I’d’ve brought my Prada hiking socks and a copy of I Love To Go A-Wandering Along The Mountain Track…”

Rat was looking behind her, to the city. It might have seemed awful and shabby to Lupa – but to her it had been…well…sort of home, for a long time.

The forest was suddenly looking very uninviting.

But I used to live there too, she told herself firmly. Just because it doesn’t have dustbins doesn’t make it any less home.

I wonder if this wolf has got a nice home? With dustbins of her own that she doesn’t live in? And people, people who will be worrying about her?

Lupa, getting bored, rested one long pale hand on her hip and huffed noisily.

“Come on, then,” said Rat. She started walking again, as purposefully as she could. She only hoped, that after all this time away, she could still find that odd place deep in the trees where the very fabric of reality had seemed to warp around her and made her fur stand on end.

Vladimir knocked politely on the ruined door of the coffee shop. It fell off, creakily and slowly, and Vladimir growled softly under his breath to hear the tall pale vampire laughing at him.

He stepped over the door and the broken glass as best he could. “Hello…?”

It was no longer raining. The vampire had gleefully abandoned his umbrella and was now as conspicuous as a panther in a rabbit farm, his long white hair seeming almost to shine in the dim light. The mage lingered on the street, watchful, his purple eyes suspicious.  Magic curled around him in golden waves as he tried to locate the source of his unease.

Something is watching me….

Vladimir nodded cheerfully at the man who appeared from the back kitchen. “Hello!” he said. “Seems you’ve been having a rough night…”

The man narrowed his eyes – the shotgun seemed to almost glide into his hand and up to his shoulder. He was aiming slightly to the left and behind Vladimir. “Stay very still,” he said. “There’s a vampire behind you. I’ll get him.”

Vladimir automatically reacted in horror before remembering.

“Oh, him. No, much as it would really make my day,” said Vladimir, moving carefully into the firing line, “I can’t let you shoot him. She’d kill me.”

“She?” queried the man, still not lowering his aim. The vampire, not helping the situation at all, opened a mouth full of fangs and hissed.

“I  know she’s been here,” said Vladimir, eyeing the destruction. “You’d remember her. Tall. Sort of…predatory-looking? Wearing a red halter-neck top and flared jeans that look like an accident in a tie-dye factory?”

“Oh, yeah,” said the man, finally lowering his gun. “The prostitute, right? And her little cake-loving friend. Nice girls. Good at killing fang-faces too.”

“Prostitute?” said the vampire in his low, arrogant drawl, and sniggered.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Vladimir pursued. He was overjoyed – she had been here, and although he could smell her blood, she wasn’t dead.

“Vladimir,” the mage interrupted. He stalked in off the street, staff raised, looking like a role-play reject from some ill-fated Dungeons and Dragons session, and the shop manager stared. “Something’s coming. I can feel it watching me as surely as if I could see its eyes. It does not like us…”

“What are you, elvish?” demanded Vladimir, rounding on him in a fury. “It’s always the same with you magical folk! “Something comes, Vladimir”. “It feels evil, Vladimir.” Never anything concrete or useful, like –“

“Dragon,” said the vampire.

“Yes, exactly,” Vladimir spat. “Next time, say something specific like that! Enough with the random forebodings of doom!”

“No, I really do mean dragon,” said the vampire, pointing out onto the street.

“Oh,” said Vladimir, trying desperately to fight the impulse to scream like a girl as huge red membranous wings suddenly filled the broken windows of the shop. “I see.”

The forest felt old to Lupa, a little like the ancient elvish woods where she had been born. The trees were hundreds of feet tall, seemed watchful as she glanced up at them. Lupa’s wolf shape pressed hard against the human in her, because woods to a wolf are a call to older times, simpler times, when there was only the warm pelt to touch and the rabbit to chase. She followed Rat slowly, as the sky grew brighter in the East, and the Necropolis lay almost a mile behind them.

“Is this where you were born?” she asked eventually. “Are there…others…like you? Family? Where I came from, there was only me and my sister – and now…there’s only me.”

Receieving no immediate answer, she continued: “I just sort of travel, now. All sorts of places. Though I guess the Nexus is as close to having a proper home as I’m going to get…”