"I am asking for the bear clan to aid us in our fight against the vampires. To avenge the loss of our home, and justice for those killed."

Yrsa was quiet for long moments. The only sound in the lodge was the roaring bonfire at Keva's back. Yrsa placed her chin softly on her fist as she propped her arm up on the arm of her throne. Looking out over the Shape shifters and the two wolves that stood with them.

"No."

"What? What do you mean, no?" Keva blurted out.

"I mean, no. I won't risk my people for you, or send them out into the world with only the word of werewolves about what they will find. I won't risk my people like that, you understand."

"No, I don't understand," Javier interrupted. "You locked me in your root cellar for days. We have spent a lot of time together and in all that time, you still see me as a monster that isn't worthy of trust?"

Yrsa turned her head and looked directly at Javier, "Yes, wolf. I still see you as a monster, but no more a monster than I am. In that sense, your Alpha is correct, we have come to an understanding."

"But not so much of an understanding that you would be willing to lend us your aid in our time of need?" Huan Li asked quietly.

"I'm sorry, no. We have never been granted the aid of others in our times of need, we can scarcely afford to lend aid to others," Yrsa countered.

"Never asking, and being denied are two very different things," Huan said.

"I have made my judgement," Yrsa said with quiet finality. "You will be welcome in our village for as long as you require. You have proven yourselves to be reliable, and hard workers. Our village shall always be open to you, provided like service to our village is rendered. If you have no further business with us, then I must ask that you bid your farewells and leave us to our business and our lives." Yrsa said, gazing at them waiting for them to leave.

With more self-control than he realized he possessed, Javier turned on his heel and walked out of the lodge, his head held high and his steps even. Even with rejection he would not let these people see him lose his temper or behave in any other way except that of a dignified warrior. He felt the rest of his pack follow him out through the large doors of the lodge. If he wasn't fuming from rage, he might have smiled to himself.

Keva watched her pack and Huan leave, but she stayed rooted in place. She wasn't sure what to do. The complete failure that had just been handed to her didn't sit well with her, at all. She looked up at the throne of the Bear clan, the striking blonde woman sitting atop it, in all her self-assured dignity, after dismissing them so absolutely. There was one more gambit left to play and Keva didn't want to leave anything on the field.

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"I don't know what troubles or crisis your people have endured in the past. For those, I am sorry that I wasn't around to help. We are cousins, you and I. Distant relations, and different sides of the same magic that created both our peoples. Nature gave our peoples different gifts. Seeing you and yours here in your home, we could learn so much from each other," Keva saw no reaction from Yrsa, but the chieftainess wasn't yelling for her to be removed from the lodge either… progress?

"You have a way with words, Keva," Yrsa said. "But what is the point of this new speech? I will not change my mind."

"I don't expect you too," Keva answered quickly. "I will however, offer you a second chance. If sometime in the coming days you feel you may have made a mistake, that you may have turned us away too quickly, I will come to you here, and offer you a chance to take back what you did here today, something that you may come to regard as a huge mistake." Keva didn't wait for a response, instead she whipped around on her heel and strode out of the lodge.

* * * * *

The office in the Home Land security building was spacious and comfortable looking, complete with a water cooler and couch. The large man sitting behind the heavy desk looked anything but comfortable. He was squinting at his computer screen in fatigue as he blinked and shook his head trying to make the numbers on his screen make sense to his tired mind.

He had this project dumped on his desk a few weeks back. A random gunfight with just about the entire crew murdered on a Chinese cargo ship. The whole mess came complete with human trafficking to the sum of seventy six people, men, women, and children. The icing on the cake was that found throughout the ship was little cashes of drugs stashed in all sorts of little hidey holes that the actual Captain of the ship probably hadn't had any idea they were there.

And a random group of Americans of different ethnicities, and a strange custom bred dog apparently, who just so happened to disappear from custody, not six hours after the ship had been piloted into San Francisco harbor.

Oh sure, at the time he thought it had been a joke. He had to read the file three times before the reality of the case and situation settled in on him. The Coast Guard Commander, Simmons, had been brought to this very building twice to answer follow up questions about the incident and his involvement in it. The CIA spook who had overseen the initial interrogations and scene processing had disappeared; there was no surprise there. The CIA loved their intrigue and cloak and dagger shit, leaving shlubs like him to clean up the mess.

There had been a recent development in the case though. The trail went nowhere and he had been about to rubber stamp the whole mess and file it in the basement. Then, there had been a name that he had overlooked on his first read, a name that had connections to Little Tokyo. From there, the trail led to some apparently unrelated fires and property damage of warehouses and some stock items that belonged to several different people, but where all connected to Karte Industries.

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