"We don't know what Nemsemet's strategy is, but we do know that everyone on his side are the ones against the court. I mean, let's take a quick look at us. Two court investigators, one lycan that wanted nothing to do with that shit prior to the whole thing, one...uh, whatever the fuck he is that stays out of things, and bosslady here who definitely doesn't like the exposure. But you know, Nemsemet's ancient, bad news sure, but he's also way behind the times. Does he have any idea what modern artillery is like? What a nuclear weapon even looks like? I mean, look at what happened to werefolk when they started chambering silver rounds, like what Hunter here has."

Sore point with lycanthropes -- their day had set already and they'd been set behind the curve by modern technology and human society, ill suited to either. Sure, they could do more, but their weakness was out there, easily identified and simple to exploit. They were taken down quickly.

"I'm no fan of the Court. It was archaic and based on who owed a few obligation; in this case, the Nicholson and de Lacy clans and all the other damn nobles, but the rationale was solid. One of him," he jerked at thumb at Gray, "is bad. An entire military supported by research and development...do the math vampire. How long you think you last when they start putting a silver bullet every second round on the belt and an incendiary on every third? Maybe some cold iron for the faeries. How long do you think our kind lasts? Yeah, one hunter you can kill in a lot of ways, but what happens when humanity comes in numbers?" 

Tony's luck was that he'd seen a real war; so had Flint, but Flint didn't seem to process it the same way, the adaptability of humanity, the way the tech was evolving so damn fast and the secrecy...well, Nemsemet was ancient. In a day and age when metal forging was barely being discovered, when mud brick was the dominant building material, when most humans lived and died in short, brutish lives, illiterate and often dead in their thirties of some disease, if they survived childhood. Now technology unlocked the birthrate and the killing capabilities of humanity. Most supernaturals didn't grasp it; hell, lycanthropes wouldn't except the had time, particularly since the genesis of the firearm, to really brood about it.

Lycanthropes were, in a sense, creatures of an animal nature ill at ease with the humanity of it, and that was the underlying tension that fueled their abilities, but they were also the first supernaturals to really be left behind by modernity. The hunters usually went after vampires, but had a much harder time spotting them. Lycanthropes were not subtle and once identified, easily if they exposed themselves, they were relatively simple to cut down with modern munitions. Gray's shotgun was a mute testament to it. They optimal load wasn't even what you'd kill a deer with.

--

[i]The March thorugh Georgia was a bloody path of plunder and devastation -- Seccessionists took a shot at the 1st Tennessee Volunteers, they'd burn the house the shot came from, and what they couldn't plunder and carry, they destroyed. It would ensure a cruel season of famine for the South, but it was the necessary methods to bring the war to a swifter end, or so was the opinion of one William Tecumseh Sherman.

War was cruelty, and it was time to slake the Confederate thirst for more war. Sherman saw the heart of it-- the Southern industrial capacity was exposed; they were already cut off by a naval blockade with little in the way of recourse and much of their industrial capability was concentrated into the cities; Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta. It wasn't like the North; the South had fertile soil and lots of cheap labor, as opposed to the mineral resources of the North and less than ideal soil conditions that made them such early and fervent adopters of industrial production, much as the English had. The South were much like the French the old families sprung from, preferring pastoral systems and a fertile properties that produced farm goods. 

Other Union officers had their moral qualms about it; he considered it the whirlwind the Confederacy reaped when they killed his brother, Douglas Augustus Gordon, good old Gus, in Cumberland, around the time of the secession, because he'd refused to turn over his property to the Confederates. They'd burned the horse farm as an object lesson to others in the area with union sympathies -- to acclaim.

Now Charles Niall Gordon was a lieutenant in the cavalry, a West Point trained warrior with the battles of Cumberland and Shiloh under his belt and he relished the chance to visit on the Confederates the vengeance they so richly deserved. The Confederates had started this fight, but Gordon, like Sherman, who'd he'd been aide to when the campaign was planned, intended to finish it. The Confederates were tenacious, lions in battle, but they were hanging on by a thread. Their lands, untouched, continued to supply them with the meager essentials of fighting a war. They'd fought the battles in mostly Union and border territory -- Maryland, Pennsylvania, the massacres in Kansas, the bloody battles of Shiloh and Chattanooga in his own home state -- and forced the depredations of the war on the Union's civilians, for the most part.

The Deep South, the wellspring of Confederate sentiment, had not particularly suffered, except that the ladies made do without their imported pins and silk. Uncle Billy Sherman changed that. He brought the torch to the cotton fields, to these soft plantation wives and the men who'd sent their sons to bleed and die in other mens' back yards, while blathering away in their slurred voices about states rights, going on about their Huguenot French ancestry and aping the ways of the aristocrats that had died in the guillotines of the last century. These were the most fervent supporters of the Confederacy, these plantations, and the source of their leadership. This was a blow to their fortunes, which was really, to the mind of Gordon, what the Confederacy was about. Burn the cotton, destroy the manors, send the slaves packing to wherever they might go -- he cared not a whit.

He rode, and in his wake was flame, smoke and the lamentation of some plantation owner's wife, bemoaning her fate and cursing the men that did it. He turned back and affixed her with a steely blue eye, a sort of fierce moustachio'd visage that the Scots and the Scots-Irish, with their blonde-red hair and freckled, fair-skinned looks seemed to be able to gather up, that held little pity. He was of a mountain people, who held grudges and settled accounts in blood. The Confederacy killed his kith and kin, and this was merely due compensation. But he wasn't entirely bereft of the rudiments of civilization, though it burned all around him, "Madam," he told her, imperiously astride his bay gelding, one hand gloved and holding the reins, the other resting on the handle of his pistol, a Colt Dragoon. He surveyed the devastation with a deep feeling of personal serenity, his voice distant even as he tilted the brim of his hat to her, "A good day to you." He wanted to tell her to curse Jefferson Davis and curse the war, but not to curse the bearer of the tidings. She wouldn't understand. Few  did. To advance civilization, you had to teach people, by direct experience, the alternative.[/i]

--

There were flashes of the other memories; the taste of blood in the mouth, a particularly savored meal, the thrill of the sort of work he did over the years for the Courts, forcing tribes of indigenous supernatural beings to accept the Courts dictates. He applied the strategies of Uncle Billy and George Custer and Philip Sheridan with an unflinching determination, happily leveraging the technology and adapting it to the enemy.

Then the connection abruptly severed as Gordon took his finger off the sword.

"There is a connection," he told Anastasia, "and I saw what you saw. I think he saw things as well. Is there something you might do with it?"

"Yes," the haughtily beautiful woman told him, even as she adjusted her scarf, removing it from around her throat and picking the blade up with it, so as to prevent skin contact, "there is much we can do with this, though we should not touch it again, lest he pick up upon our realization. There are rituals..."