Bearclaw Valley your dark splendor

People like Taylor could smell the promise of violence from a mile away. People like Taylor were: taxi cab drivers, soldiers, both former and active, bartenders, airport managers.
A fistfight in a space barely fit for two men. It smells like nickel and sweat.
Evien's voice drifts into his ear. The other ear is stubborn and at times blazes white with pain like a TV with burst tubes, so he has to cock his head. The pups, he hears, a snatch of a sentence, and he knows that he has stumbled on something clandestine, a pandora's box, a mimic. Two heads put together over a field of nuclear buttons. He holds his breath.
There were only a few times where he had been compelled to do something so strongly, as if he was not a wolf, but a vector, an arrow that had been leading inexorably up to this moment. He emerges into the scene voicelessly.

In his eyes, a clear message: Don't hurt him.