Blood.<br/><br/>The stink of crimson filled his sharp, angular nose, tickling his brain and trying to draw out the animal he kept chained and caged deep within his heart.  Arcs of brilliant maroon soared through the air and stained the graffiti-caked ground, forming a gruesome trail between the hunter and the prey.  The smell intoxicated and disgusted him.  Blood, so beautiful, and so necessary, and so reviling; the smell made him sick, but it tempted him.  Eyes of gunmetal grey narrowed to slits as they found the mark, feet wearing shoes normally unfit for running sprinting forward in pursuit of the fleeing target.  Legs bred for chasing flexed and stretched, propelling him forward with unnatural speed.  Arms bred for fighting tensed and shot forward, silver-capped knuckles piercing flesh and bruising bone as he chased his target to the end of their world.  Whatever they thought was real, their "truth", ended with that impact as his fist bored into the base of their neck, driving them to their knees before he followed up with a single, sharp blow to the skull.  Their corpse crumpled under the impact as the Hunter straightened from his kill, turning back to search for his companion, his Tracker.  Sure enough, she had sunk her teeth into the other mark, glorious, vile blood spattered everywhere about her and trailing down her mouth and hands.  Her clothes were still intact; she hadn't needed to shift to handle this rabble, though doubtless she wanted to.  He forbade it, though; as it stood this would be mistaken for a murder if someone was somehow watching them in the deserted slum's subway station.  If she changed form here, though, they would be no better than the strays they had just finished off.  His partner was many things he detested, but stupid, thankfully, was not among them.<br/><br/>"He" was Alexin Creed.  "She" was Feralupina, as she refused any other moniker.  His partner in hunting down wolves who strayed from the pack and tried to disrupt the order that the Clans had so carefully built up over so many centuries.  She was his Tracker.  His Submissive, his mate.  The last part always made Alex sigh when he thought of it, wondering why he couldn't have gotten one of the demure, civilized Trackers when the Alpha had paired them off.  Of course, he knew the reason; they both were among the best.  Assigning them to anyone else but each other would have been a waste of talent.  But still, it meant that Alex's first and currently only mate was a wild, nearly-rabid loose cannon whom even he, as talented a Dominant as he might or might not be, could not fully control.  The best he could do was contain and direct her, but subjugation seemed all but impossible.  Polygamy wasn't unheard of amongst werewolves such as they, especially with Hunters because their Trackers served as poor homemakers owing to an emphasis on combat that a normal Submissive would never be exposed to.  That was the world they belonged to, the world just beneath the surface of humanity's; fangs and claws and pelts.  And blood.  Bountiful, acrid blood.  Their kind were divided along a clearer and more logical line than humans were, though; those who were more man than wolf, the Dominants, the creatures of reason and control; and those who were more wolf than man, the Submissives, creatures of instinct and passion.  A pecking order had sprung up around this fact, that Dominants would protect and provide for Submissives, who were dangerous and unstable in their shifting.  In exchange, Submissives served and cared for their Dominants.  Equal parts partner and livestock.  Except for the Trackers, those few Submissives in enough control of themselves to be trained as bloodhounds and attack dogs, accompanied always by a Hunter trained to subdue them if the Tracker's tenuous control broke.  Equal parts partner and executioner.<br/><br/>It hadn't always been like this.  Hounding and killing their own kind, people they by all rights should celebrate knowing for the rarity of their kind and the danger they faced when compared to the sheer numbers and passion of humanity.  But all things good are ephemeral, and some upstart jackass had the genius idea of tearing down the masquerade so carefully maintained for so long by so many.  Now here they were, Hunter and Tracker trained and ordered to hunt and kill the rogue elements before they could cause too much damage, before their crimes and actions could no longer be written off as madmen and hallucinations.  For years yet had this invisible little war been occuring, but somehow no matter how many rogues they killed more simply appeared.  The thought of them turning humans to sustain their numbers made Alex want to vomit; turning people was a long and involved process that was unpredictable in its results and could easily kill the human outright if mishandled.  Rebels in squalor had little hope of procuring the materials and knowledge needed to turn someone safely, and so the thought of how many people they would have to churn through, the astronomical amount of lives squandered across the world, made him somewhat qeasy.<br/><br/>"That's enough, Fera."  He said, pulling off the knuckles and wiping the blood off of them on his victim before sliding them into the pocket of his slacks.  "We've done what we came for.  Time to burn the corpses and go home."  He pulled a specialized, fluorescent blue matchbox from the same pocket in the same motion as he used to stash his weapons, striking one and leaving his kill to crisp in the fluorine-fueled pyre that would leave nothing but slag and a scorch mark in less than half an hour.  He strode slowly towards his partner, looking her over briefly and wrinkling his nose at the overpowering pungency of blood and viscera strewn hither and thither around her violence.  "Fera?"