Bearclaw Valley distant stars come in black or red.

the world blurred rapidly around merrick as his lover's teeth broke six places the skin upon his hapless, hateful countenance. her jaws closed around the socket where his last eye rolled; it watered from the spray of her hot breath and merrick, oh foolish, indolent, malicious prince; the boy cried out in an agony, a spray of scarlet droplets splattering as if it were a terrible rain upon her cheek and his chest, the ground, 
the small body that huddled upon the nightbound earth;
merrick stepped back, mercifully missing the boy by a step
the bile of hatred comingled in his own mouth with the rot of birth. he ripped away from astara, carving deep lines in the flesh. crimson blinded his vision, and the roar in his ears could surely belong only to him.
so dripping, merrick felt the suffusion of his wrath's greatest peak. he had forgotten about aventus; he burned now for the gasp of his nightbird —
and then a muzzle was seeking to lift the unwanted infant: doggish, wiry, unwolf, unwolf, unwolf. in the madman snapped the synaptic response of his kith; logical mind bore enmity but instinct choked off all consciousness; merrick rounded upon fraser with a spray of frothing sputum that demanded in one moment that the child be relinquished. the doctor was near.
merrick's shoulders bristled with a thousand autumnal spikes, muted ivory glinting in the moonlight. 
"evien," he hissed snakelike into the reek of new blood, the sickly sweet edge of raw life; garbled; "take the fucking kid."
the brunt of his insidious hate cast like a great eye toward the poor loyal dog, merrick obeyed the edict of his kind and lunged forward to mete out a killing.