Aftermath

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

The moon had turned from full to half. Beneath it everything was shades of comforting, familiar grey, even to her human eyes, as she walked the city.

The fires had mostly burned out; the scents that she turned her head to catch were no longer smoke, but carrion and dirt and the rotting of naked timbers under the fine mist of rain that had been coming down for days.

The cold pavements were painful under her feet; the granite of the Highlands had given her calluses, but in winter she had run the hills as a wolf; with sensible fur between her toes cushioning her pads against the ice. She paused now to pick ice shards out of these great, flat, clumsy paws, and stared at them wonderingly as they did not melt in her fingers. Behind her the great empty shop windows gaped like so many mouths, a gap in the clouds causing moonlight to briefly glint from their broken teeth.

Further down the street a wide puddle of water lapped sluggishly at the tarmac, the furthest shore of a serene pool that stretched unbroken back to where the silent river flowed past the shattered embankment. She skirted the edge and moved on.

Some of the people had fled, and some had died, and some clustered together under tarpaulins in the rubble, and cowered back with wide eyes as she passed. At another time she might have taken the invitation to leap in among them in an orgy of killing - enough prey to feed her pack for seasons to come - but the breeze sighed softly against the bare skin of her face like the breath of a great beast, and she knew that the time of the greatest danger was when the prey lay quiet, but not yet dead.

She had seen enough. The London-beast lay dying. Soon it would be dead, and the long work of rebuilding could begin...