Regulus Anatolii Adravendi

It had taken him the best of a day and a half to reach home, and as he trotted in that choppy, rump bouncing gait of the crippled, he looked up to see the walls of home ahead, and a grin passed his features, parting his jaws as he spotted the shimmering white form of his fast-growing daughter, sitting lookout at the northern passage. He could only spare a few minutes of loving attention for her before he nudged her off toward the den, mind turning to more serious matters as he made his way to a point he figured his prickly packmate would hear him and come quickly, but leave them to speak in private. He tipped his head back, sending an urgent howl out for Justice. He didn’t doubt Paladin would catch onto that urgency and come, but first, he wanted to discuss the matter with Creed’s only daughter. Out of all of Creed’s children that remained and knew, she had been taking it the worse. He sat patiently, resting himself. He’d need all his energy, particularly if they moved quickly. He had little doubt the two in the north would scarper as soon as they sensed the impending danger for them both. Bullies usually turned coward as soon as anyone stood as a real threat to them.

It had been a year since her brother had been kidnapped, and Justice had not been able to rouse herself from her apathetic state. She'd been able to do nothing to help her mother, nothing to save her father, nothing to keep Exodus there, and now she was helpless to free Valor from his captivity. The knowledge of her continuous line of failures ate at her. From afar, the sorry state of affairs might not have been obvious. She was eating, she kept herself well groomed, she did her patrols, she kept herself in good physical condition, and when she happened to cross paths with another pack member she spoke to them as though nothing had changed, as though everything was all right.

But it wasn't all right. Nothing was.

She'd moved out of the communal dens that she'd stayed in since she'd returned to the pack, but hadn't bothered to dig one of her own. Why should she stay in the caves when there was no Kavdaya there for her to care for? No Valor to watch over as he healed? If she stayed, Paladin might start to notice something was wrong and confront her about it. So she'd left, and slept curled in an old buffalo wallow instead.

She was there now, sleeping off a late-night patrol among the new-growth grasses of spring, when her ears twitched up of their own accord and woke her. It took a long moment for it to register as a howl calling for her. For her? For a second a spark of interest flared in her, but it was smothered beneath the weight of gloom. She had to go through the motions though, so the young Ancora hauled herself to her paws and loped mechanically along the path to where Regulus' call had originated.

She stopped in front of him and eyed him with a narrow-eyed neutrality. He had lost his last fight in the raid to one of Talis' warriors, leaving him with a permanent limp. She wondered distantly how he felt about that. He seemed to be coping with it anyway. It wasn't exactly a death-knell for his alphaship. On the other hand, she wondered what effect Dragon being completely blinded was having, and managed to scrape up a dark satisfaction that she'd taken away his ability to betray them so easily again. Caught up in these thoughts, Justice didn't say anything aloud.

Regulus Anatolii Adravendi

As he spotted Justice approaching, the Archangel appraised her with frank silence, locking eyes briefly. Despite the outward appearance, those eyes looked deeper. He knew what it meant to lose one’s parents, and to have siblings go missing. He couldn’t say he knew how it felt to lose a parent to murder, but he knew the feeling of losing one you loved to it. Cinder’s grave lay along his usual patrol, and he never failed to stop at the family burial ground. It was one more mound – Kavdaya – that had joined Erani, Surreal, Falk, and the sunken herb patch that had been Cairo’s resting place in the grove. Perhaps if he hadn’t been the Archangel of a pack that needed him, he might have sunk into the same kind of lost pit Kavdaya had when his parents had finally both left him and his siblings alone. Even with the pack, he’d flagged considerably in his duties, and that still rankled with him. Finally, after the silence drew on, he turned his head away, stating, “They’ve returned to the northlands of Boreas. I was exploring and ran across their scents. There’s no mistake.” He turned back to the young Ancora and studied her quietly. “Of anyone in Celestial, you and your brother have the greatest right to kill that bitch. And I have a debt to settle with the male she walks with. What do you wish to do?”

It was actually startling when Regulus broke the silence, and it took Justice a long moment to register what he meant. At first she eyed him with a scowl of confusion. Who was back? Her missing brothers? No, he said something about a bitch. Was he being deliberately cryptic or had the alpha suffered a stroke or something? Sure she was a bit absent lately but she was fairly certain that she would have heard if he had a stroke, so he must have been doing it deliberately, playing sage-on-the-mountain. Well if he was going to act like a sage he could at least say something... well... sage instead of just randomly calling her to spout off weirdness.

Then it finally settled in to her apathy fogged brain who the only bitch she and her brother would have the right to kill would be, and her expression of confusion cleared instantly into a crystalline fury. "The bitch that killed Dad and hurt Valor?" she growled, though it was far more statement than question. "I want to find her and end it. Make sure she can't ever, ever hurt someone again the way she hurt my brother. Make sure she can't do to..." She choked a moment, the images of what had remained still startlingly clear in her mind, "...make sure she can't do what she did to my father to anyone else. Not her and not that creature she ran off with. Cowards," she spat out at the last.

Regulus Anatolii Adravendi

He waited patiently for Justice to figure it out and think it through. When the penny dropped and she got it, he nodded darkly. “Yes. Her.” He let her vent her answer, listening calmly. Finally, he rose and faced his muzzle toward the north, squinting at the wall as she fell silent. His gaze turned back to Justice and he gave her an almost savage grin, teeth bared. “I take the harm done to this pack seriously. I regret having to let them go when they ran south, but at the end I had a pack here I had to govern. So I had to turn back.” He gazed hard at her features and said, firmly, “I give you and your siblings leave to do what you will with this wolf. Make that bitch dearly regret the day she messed with Celestial, and make it clear that running away can only save you for so long.” His tail gave a sharp lash behind him before he glanced Northward again. “They’ve returned to the place Marina was maimed and raped at. And by what Aello tells me, there are more than the two. Tread carefully. I’ve no doubt you can take that beast on and win, but even the biggest and best can be overcome by numbers.” He didn’t doubt that she’d probably drown the wisdom out. It was one of her worst habits and one she’d need to learn to quit if she wanted to rise in rank.

Regulus' warning didn't smooth the prickle of her hackles, the dark hairs with their phantom markings fluffing out to make the sturdy fighter look even more like a little bear than she usually did, but she did give a single sharp snort. "I don't mean to let them outnumber me," she stated on a low, grim growl. She swiped her tongue across her lips, clearly torn by her thoughts, which were running in a direction she didn't care for.

Valor was still stuck in Talis. Exodus was (as far as she knew at this point) still missing after the raid. Fable was still out there somewhere, doing whatever it was he thought he was doing. That only really left her and Paladin, and frankly she wasn't sure if her more healing-oriented brother would be up to the cold-blooded nature of what she wanted. She could see him fighting in the heat of the moment - the nomads wouldn't have let him do without fight training from what she remembered of her mother's stories about them - but to actually track the bitch down and to strike first and decisively? She didn't know about that. But if there were others that the murderer had gathered around her... would even she and Paladin be enough anyway? It was worth the risk.

Justice scowled furiously. "If we plan it so you go after the bastard who hurt Marina at the same time that will keep him out of it." She licked her lips again. "But the longer we wait the more likely they'll get nervy and run off again. If we don't wait we have surprise on our side." A fierce show of fangs. "Like hunting rabbits."

Regulus Anatolii Adravendi

Regulus allowed Justice to ruminate over her thoughts, nodding his agreement as she spoke up, a grim smile twitching across his features as he said, “That had been my thoughts. By rights, Marina should be the one to kill him, but I don’t see the harm in removing a few pieces of him. The less he has to hurt more women with, the better.” Her comparison to hunting rabbits brought a mirthless snort. “Unlike them, however, we won’t be eating the kill.” He paused then gave a brief huff of laughter as he suggested aloud, “I had considered, on the way home, getting the pack together for a hunt. Even if I don’t do that for this, I may make it a part of training for both hunters and fighters, in the case of something like this happening again, though I don’t mean to let something like this happen again... It would also be good practice for tracking and ambush practice. What do you think?” He posed the question to the young woman, brow points lifted in a crooked grin that held no true humor to it. “Wolf hunting practice?”

His joke about not eating their kill made Justice flinch, her jaw clenching down hard on the faint taste of bile. Perhaps not the best turn of phrase on his part, considering what had happened to her father, and nearly to her brother. She pulled herself together resolutely, turning sickly mental visions to fury, and instead raised her head higher. Better to think about Regulus' idea of wolf-tracking. Better yet to think of ripping out Creed's murderer's throat. "I think that would be a good idea. Even the warriors who don't have a good nose or eye for tracking should be part of it so they don't mess the tracker up when they need to go out with them for backup. They'd need to know what to do so they don't accidentally destroy a trace or something." Her eyes gleamed at the thought of it - growing up wanting to be a healer she had developed a pretty good nose, necessary for identifying certain herbs, and a good eye for details, necessary for spotting them among all the other plants they'd be with, so surely she'd be tapped to be a tracker if necessary? She certainly planned to put her nose to good work tracking down this cannibal and her clan, regardless.