The scream's still ringing in her skull (even muted, it must still be witnessed) when she sends the first one flying back into their own pack. They've tried to make themselves more Pack with ornaments, studs and fangs and manes, but they aren't Pack. Look at how they get in each other's way as the Silver Divers take the plunge.

Ember likes swords. They're heroic. Romantic. A length of shining metal made only for battle. But she doesn't have a sword right now. All she has is the dervish-whirl, the momentum, the resonance that sends these half-wolves flying back when she strikes them with the Shield, and if they were not half-wolves, the trailing macehead of the Lantern would kill them. But they are half-wolves, and Ember flings herself into their midst.

Beside her, Goldie has trident-knives. She catches hafts between their prongs and twists; axeheads fall like leaves in the harvest. Beside her, Gemini has a needle of a blade which hisses as it splits the air; no one can pass by it without being stung. Beside her, Velvet Heart's caestus are spattered with Portuguese blood, and she howls defiance. Make it hurt, the [i]lar[/i] said. Well, we can do that, can't we, girls?

Even so...

"Get out of our way!" The words spill out of her for those who cannot hear the command roiling off her. "Drop your weapons and run! None of this has to happen to [i]you![/i]"

Because they're pathetic, don't you think? Trying so hard to be wolves, to be Pack, aping the forms and the functions. Maybe that's her own weakness as a new member of the pack, relatively; to see herself when she drops the one standing and the one riding, and their obsolete electric-powered technology shatters on the pavement.

"[i]RUN,[/i] idiots!"

But they're not running. They're closing in, bloody-eared and furious, and when the Alpha's pulling her punches, Gemini's the one who picks up on that, and now everyone's flinching away from risking the worst: an explosion of songbirds, a melting of serpents, a haggard cry coming up from the throats of these children.

So when the next one comes, Ember sends him straight through the glass doors of the tower, with a howl and a charge after.