If anyone were to find out about their meeting, it would mean both their deaths. The Disciple knew this and didn't care. She knew the stories as well as anyone: a collaborator, a blonde beauty who had once been a vision in blue and silver, found by the police with her long body stretched across a creek, drowned by the overflowing waters; an old man, harried and trapped again and again in a three-hour chase until he spoiled their fun by dying of a heart attack; a car abandoned in the middle of I-95 that led to the discovery of its driver in the nearby woods, a wife and mother stripped of everything but the government ID dropped haphazardly next to her charred and half-eaten body; a Disicple missing for weeks until she stumbled into a safe house on the north border, her tongue cut from her mouth, her hands hammered into useless lumps of flesh studded with projecting bits of bone, the words 'Speak no evil' branded on her forehead.

Even after all those tales, the Disciple standing next to the park bench couldn't make herself believe that she shouldn't be doing this. Nevertheless, she combed her fingers through her boy-length sandy hair and bit her lip. Her brown eyes searched the landscape for her contact.

"Surprise."

The Disciple jumped several inches, hand over her frantically beating heart. "You scared the shit out of me!"

"Would you believe me if I said I was sorry?" The Lone Wolf's smile was all teeth, and it had a nasty edge to it that the Disciple didn't remember.

"No." The Disciple laughed bitterly at the thought. "I brought you stuff." She pushed a series of plastic bags towards the Lone Wolf.

"Toothbrushes? Oh, you shouldn't have. Dairy products... yeah, strong bones come in handy for a lot of things, if you know what I mean... soap- hey, ya trying to tell us something?"

The Disciple shook her head. "I just tried to think of what you can't really forage for effectively."

"The thought's appreciated. Monique don't come often enough, and really, how many trucks can ya hijack before people freak out?" She laughed, but her eyes were as empty and cold as starless desert night.

"Please tell me you're kidding."

"I'm kidding." After a long moment to let the sarcasm sink in, the Lone Wolf leaned in towards the Disciple and asked, "Have you found the Balliard kids yet? Their mom wants to get them the hell out of this fucked up world already."

"She ought to know how complicated Britney is, and thusly how hard the system is to crack. We've figured out that they're not under their own names, which I heard made Christine literally tear her hair out. We'll keep the search going, of course. If we can pull a kid out of that world, we'll be very happy."

"What about Phoebe and Bryan?" There was a naked yearning in her voice as she spoke of her lover's children.

"We're tracking their father, but that hasn't been as useful as it should be. He's caught between two of Britney's stereotypes, so his behavior is very unpredictable." The Disciple sighed and unwrapped a peanut butter sandwich. Passing it to the Lone Wolf, she opened a second one for herself. "Remind me again why you didn't leave?" she asked. "The Aussie put your name on the safe-conduct visa before she had to cross it out and put Dora in."

"Love. Then greed. Then love again." The Lone Wolf stroked the ring on her finger. The Disciple tried to get a good look at it, but the Lone Wolf had her hand folded over the hand with the ring. It had looked like gold, but she couldn't place the stone in the middle. "What about you? I know that one Aussie wanted to get me out, but her backup was more than willing to take you home with her."

"I wanted to stay and fight. This is my home- not just the city, but this country. I wasn't going to run away. I'm glad I stayed. I wouldn't have learned what I needed to know, and I wouldn't have settled debts with my old flame." The Disciple's eyes clouded over, thinking back to a steamy summer night in Los Angeles when a few too many secrets had been revealed and a gunshot had finally put the older woman out of her inverted confusion.

"Settling debts... yeah, I understand that. If they do you wrong, you got to do them wrong right back. That's the way these things work, isn't it? Someone speaks ill of the old man, we make sure they don't make the same mistake twice. Someone dishonors the colors, we make sure they'll never do that again. Someone costs us a ring, we make her provide us with rings." The Lone Wolf thrust her hand in the Disciple's face. "Isn't it pretty?"

It took every ounce of iron self-control that the Disciple possessed not to retch at the sight. What she had taken for gold was actually a loop of hair so blonde that it had to be artificial, and the mysterious stone in its center was a delicate piece of bone. "I made it myself," the Lone Wolf continued proudly. "My lovely has one that matches. I always told her I'd give her a ring someday, and so I did. She was a very pretty lady, you know."

"I remember your girl," the Disciple said carefully, making sure that nothing she said could be misread as making a move on her old colleague's lover.

"Oh, I wasn't talking about her for once. I meant the one who cost us that ring. We should have had another one, you know. But the pretty lady stood in our way and took the rings that we should have had. We waited years for her, and finally we took what was ours. We made her our pretty lady, so pretty and so delicious. Who knew blondes had such good taste?" The Lone Wolf's voice dropped to a hushed tone that froze the Disciple's blood further. "She had it coming, you know. You don't cross us and get away with it. Pretty lady was a fool to come back here. She took her life in her hands, and we took it from her. They always have it coming if they run into us. False, lying bitches! They don't even deserve *that* name!"

The Disciple edged away unobtrusively, reminded abruptly of all the stories she had remembered before, reminded that this woman she thought she had known was no longer the easygoing jokester of the past, but instead a savage, psychotic killer functioning on a hair-trigger that any number of items could set off. "I have to go. If I stay too long, someone will get suspicious. I can't do this again. It's too risky, and this isn't worth my life. I won't turn you in, but that's all I can do."

"Whatever. It's been real. Have a good one." The Lone Wolf waved cheerfully as the Disciple left to catch the train back into Manhattan. She tilted her head back to feel the sun on her face, then gathered her goods and took off north at an easy lope. Her pack awaited her back at their lair. The thought of returning home to her chestnut-maned mate, to her lover's sure touch, lit the fire in her eyes and her blood again, and she ran silently through the woods, letting her instincts guide her.