A Hunt By Moonlight (Werewolves and Gaslight Book 1)

by Shawna Reppert

  The inspector lowered his gun and gave a shaky laugh. “All right. Just—all right. Sorry. You’re kind of scary, you know.”

  Richard sat, waiting it out.

  “All right,” Jones said. “Sorry. Stupid of me.”

  Richard flicked his ears forward and back.

  Jones took a deep breath. “So, all sorted?”

  Richard stood cautiously and went back to trying to make sense of the smells. Would he be better at this if he had consciously practiced using these skills? It had been almost literally a lifetime ago since, still a child, he’d wandered out to help the dog he’d heard whimpering in the night and had been bitten by a rogue werewolf. He’d hated the wolf within for all these years. But the wolf within him had saved Catherine’s life and now might help stop another killer.

  If he could only figure out why the scent trail seemed to end here, with no girl and no body.

  He had a human mind, even in the wolf’s body. He needed to start using it. He cast about, and this time instead of filtering out the scents that weren’t hers he took them in as well, analyzing. A half-dozen or so alley cats had passed this way over the last couple of days—irrelevant. More rats than he cared to think about. Cats and rats—could the inevitable clash be the source of the animal blood? His wolf instinct said something else, something more, but his human mind could not puzzle out why.

  A dog, sickly smelling, probably a stray. Scent strong enough to be only hours old. Nothing to do with the girl or her abductor. Carriage or cart horses— most likely cart horses making deliveries to back entrances of shops, as this was not a normal carriage thoroughfare.

  Cart horses. Some scents current, some quite old. One trail the approximate age of the missing girl’s scent.

  He started to follow its track.

  Seven

  The chase took him down alleys, across fields, further outside the heart of London. He hunted silently, the only sound in the night his breath, which came through gaping jaws in great pants. He panted from excitement, not exertion. This body was strong; he marveled how strong, how fast. It was all he could do not to break into a full-on run, but he would risk losing the scent.

  And risk losing his human partner, who was panting with exhaustion. Richard’s human brain had to keep reminding the wolf why this mattered, especially when his wolf instinct told him they were getting closer, closer. . .

  There. The girl’s scent again, outside what looked like an abandoned storage building among a row of warehouses. The scent pooled; she had been here for some time, and the man’s scent was here as well. He circled, sniffing. The wind shifted, and he raised his muzzle to sample it. Oh, dear God. The scent of fear. Pain. Death. Human blood. He cringed back, and an unholy sound came from his throat unchecked, a howl and a growl blending. Jones urged him forward toward the building, but he bellied down on the grass. He couldn’t. The scent was bad enough, the scent told him what had happened here, the important parts. Not the how but the what—the depth of that poor girl’s terror and agony. There was nothing more that could be done for her, and he could not go any nearer.

  “What?” Jones asked. “You have to tell me what you sense.”

  Even in his human form, Richard couldn’t have found the words. He regretted the overwhelming nature of scent to his wolf form, the totality of information. He howled again.

  “Oh,” Jones said. “The girl?”

  He nodded, his wolf-body finding the human expression foreign.

  “Is she. . . Is there any hope?”

  Death had a smell, even a fresh death such as this. He whined and lowered his head, ears flat to the sides.

  Jones paled visibly in the moonlight. “Oh.”

  Richard watched the man pull himself together, the consummate professional. Not uncaring. Just determined to function for the sake of those who needed his skills. Richard damned himself for being every bit the useless bit of blue-blood fluff Jones named him. All he could think of was pain-blood-death.

  “Is the killer still here?” Jones whispered.

  Richard lay down, burying his muzzle in his paws as if that could somehow hide the stench, fighting the urge to flee.

  “Pull yourself together, damn it!” Jones crouched and, trusting or daring, grabbed the thick ruff of fur on either side of Richard’s face. “I need to know before I go in, is the killer still there?”

  Jones was a better man than he would ever be. Even if he could not be his equal, at least he could try not to fail him. The man’s scent was here, yes. Impossible to tell how fresh, as it was obscured by… He couldn’t think about that now and remain useful.

  He focused his other senses. Eyesight was different in this form, good for catching distant movement but less able to make out details. His hearing, though, his hearing was meant to find a deer moving through the brush a mile away or a mole scurrying in its burrow under three feet of earth.

  Nothing moved in the old building in front of him save some rats scurrying at the edges, gathering their courage to— no, don’t think about it. No loud human breath except Jones' beside him. No other human heart beating.

  “I need to go in,” Jones said. “Is it safe?”

  Safe. Was it safe? Hard to think over the sensory overload that assaulted his nose. But the killer had gone. He was sure of that much. He nodded.

  “Will you watch my back anyway?” Jones asked. “You can stay at the doorway, no point in both of us seeing the girl in our nightmares. But just in case you're wrong about the killer, I’d feel better knowing you were there to jump in and lend a hand. Or fang.”

  Richard padded to the door, even though the scent was stronger there, and stronger still when Jones opened the door. Moonlight streamed through high windows, apparently giving Jones just enough light to pick his way around the scattered boxes of the mostly-empty warehouse to the table in the center where the scents of horror came from, the table with a form on it that Richard, mercifully, could not see from where he stood.

  Richard kept his ears focused for any sounds of danger, watched the deep shadows in the corners of the building carefully. Jones gasped, retched with dry heaves, straightened himself, and continued forward to examine the body.

  The inspector had lived this nightmare over and over again. No wonder he’d been so desperate for any advantage that he’d wanted to recruit a reluctant werewolf as a tracking dog. If Richard had aided him when he'd first asked, would they still be here tonight? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not. With his nose telling tales of a death beyond lupine or human imagination, that uncertainty loomed large and terrible.

  A thin strip of horizon had begun to grey toward dawn before Jones returned to the doorway. The pallor of his face was more than the illusion of moonlight. Jones looked as if he had been the one to bleed out. “I knew her,” Jones whispered. “Dear Lord, I knew her.”

  The man swayed a little on his feet. In this form, Richard would not be able to catch him if he fell. He stepped closer anyway, pressing against the inspector’s legs in a lupine gesture of support.

  “I didn’t recognize her name on the missing person’s report. Mary-Lea must have been her full name. Mary-Lea MacArthur. I don’t think I ever knew her surname. She was just Molly at the fish and chips stand, the lovely Molly-o.” Royston choked on the last words. “She gave me extra chips if I flirted.”

  One advantage of not being able to speak— he didn’t have to find words when there were none.

  Jones took a few deep breaths. Pulling himself together. Richard waited, trying to close out the scents of death and blood that told too clearly what had happened to this girl Jones used to flirt with.

  “She died like the others. But she was killed here, not dumped. The coroner thought that some of the others might have been dead up to a day before they were dumped, so maybe he heard us coming and ran, or maybe he wasn’t planning to move the body until tomorrow. Either way, finding her at the place she was killed may give us more clues. You did a good thing, finding this place.”
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br />   Richard was a large wolf and Jones not a tall man, and so without bending down Jones laid a hand on Richard’s shoulders. The touch was not that of a man praising an animal but that of a police inspector acknowledging a colleague.

  He stood under the hand for a moment before glancing at the paling horizon, then back to Jones.

  “Yes, you had best get out of here,” Jones acknowledged. "Will you meet me here again at moonrise? I’d like to see if we can find out more from the scene.”

  Richard nodded, then turned and fled. Daylight was fast approaching, and even in this form, it was a long run home.

  ***

  Richard joined Catherine for a late tea, as was their custom. It was more a breakfast for him this time. He’d barely made it home before dawn and had slept the whole day away. It had been a good day to sleep, anyway—gray and dismal with a chill rain falling. He’d be thankful for the thickness of his wolf-pelt tonight.

  “So,” he said conversationally as soon as the maid finished laying the plates and left the room. “Jones was rather surprised to see me last night.”

  She slathered honey on a scone without looking at him. “I imagine he was,” she answered.

  “He said something about threats. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  She put down her scone and looked away, telling him all that he needed to know.

  “Catherine, what did you do?”

  She didn’t look at him the whole time she told him the story.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” he said when she had finished.

  “I know,” she said miserably. I can’t believe I did, either. I regretted it almost the instant I had done it. It seemed like a good idea, at first. I mean, I wouldn’t have carried through the threat, you know I wouldn’t have. So there was no actual harm done.”

  “No actual harm?” he repeated.

  “I didn’t think. . .”

  “The problem is, you spend too much time thinking, and not enough time feeling.”

  She winced. “I know. I wouldn’t have done it for myself. But to protect you. . .”

  Richard drew a slow breath. She was not malicious by nature. He knew that, or he wouldn’t love her like he did. But sometimes she didn’t think deeply enough about how her actions affected others. Not until it was too late to change anything.

  He took her hand in his. “I know.”

  She twined their fingers. “Do you forgive me?”

  “Always,” he said. “But I am not the one you need to apologize to.”

  She nodded acknowledgement. “Do you think I should send him a letter?”

  At the moment, he suspected that Jones was still angry enough to tear her letter up and burn the pieces. Perhaps without reading it first.

  “I can’t help thinking. . .” she broke off, uncharacteristically hesitant. “Do you think, if we'd helped the Inspector when he first asked, that that girl would still be alive?”

  He heard her unspoken question. Is her death our fault? My fault?

  He shook he head. “I don’t know. Even with my tracking, we might not have caught him in time. We didn’t get him last night, though we were close.” How close, he would never know. Would another half-hour have made a difference? Another hour? “But it was my decision, too, not to help. Whatever guilt there it is ours, not yours.

  ***

  The next night, Royston shivered in the damp, overcast night, waiting for the werewolf. The coroner’s men had taken Molly’s body away at dawn. Royston and his team had been over the warehouse and the surrounding area, but the search had yielded surprisingly few clues. It was almost as if the killer had studied their methods and knew how to thwart them.

  The only evidence of the moon in the overcast sky was a silvering of the dark clouds where the moon should be. A light, misting rain started. Royston was glad for his caped great coat as he cursed the changeable spring weather. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. He had gotten maybe four hours sleep in the last two days, and the cold he was fighting seemed to be winning. If that toff werewolf left him standing in the rain waiting because he had a more promising engagement. . .

  Bandon had helped last night, yes. Had helped of his own free will, since he and his lady had made it clear that there would be no coercing him. But gentry were fickle. Things, people, didn’t matter to them the way they did to working folk. Certainly people like he and Molly didn’t matter. He leaned against the building and closed his eyes. Just for a moment. Just while he waited. . .

  He jumped awake to the touch of a wet nose on his hand. The wolf gave a little whine of concern. How long had Bandon been standing there?

  “All right,” Jones said. “I’m assuming it was the cart you were following last night to find this place. In the daylight, we saw tracks where the ground was soft.”

  Richard nodded.

  “I want to know where the cart went when it left here.”

  ***

  Richard cast about. No new trails of horse-scent. The cart must have followed its own back-trail for a distance. The trick would be to catch it if and when it deviated.

  The rain came down more heavily, pelting him, soaking past his naturally oiled guard-hairs and down to the depths of his undercoat. It diluted scent, and he missed where the scent trail turned off toward the market square. Backtracking, he nearly ran into Jones. He’d forgotten that he had a partner in this hunt.

  The inspector shook hard with cold, and he staggered a little as he shifted his path to avoid the collision. Are you all right? Richard wanted to ask. He pushed his muzzle against Jones’ hand and whined.

  Jones straightened, seeming to pull himself back to focus. “Have you lost the scent?”

  Putting his nose to the new trail, Richard followed more slowly. Tracking was trickier here. The streets were better-traveled, and the trails of many horse teams crossed and overlapped until they reached the marketplace, and Richard could no longer be certain he followed the right cart. He was more mindful, too, of his human partner, who now and then snuffled surreptitiously into a handkerchief.

  He yelped at a sharp pain in his left forepaw. Jones was by him in an instant, taking up the paw.

  “Damn. You’ve glass in it. Someone must have broken a bottle here.”

  The scent of his own blood filled the air. Richard instinctively tried to draw his paw back, but Jones held firm.

  “This is one place where fingers are better than fangs, I think.”

  The inspector’s hands were gentle as he drew out the embedded glass. Most people would not go near a bleeding werewolf, even though science had proven that it took the saliva of a werewolf in an open human wound to cause the change.

  “That’s a nasty deep cut, and these streets are filthy. I think we’d best get you back to your lady alchemist.”

  But Richard had not forgotten the scent-memory of the horrors at the warehouse, just as he knew Jones had not forgotten the sight of the dead girl. Resolutely, he put his head down to the trail and limped forward. Jones, coughing, followed.

  By the time Big Ben chimed midnight, he had to admit it was futile. For the last quarter hour he had been crossing back and forth across the same street, trying to pick out the days-old scent of one horse team among dozens older and newer, all overlaid by spilled beer and dropped fish-and-chips and the fading exhaust of horseless carriages, all washed into a muddle by the downpour. Jones had long since surrendered to his misery and huddled in the meager shelter of an overhang, watching him sniff.

  Richard limped over and pressed against his legs in a mute plea and an apology.

  Jones dropped a hand to his shoulder. “We tried. No one can say we didn’t. I know you gave it your best.”

  Richard started to limp off.

  “Come back to my flat and dry off,” Jones called to him. “Do you drink in that form? Spirits, that is? I think we could both use a stiff one, and I hate to drink alone. It isn’t a fit night for man nor beast.”

  Jo
nes started off, and Richard followed.

  “None of that window nonsense, mind you,” Jones said over his shoulder. “You’ll come in by the front door like a proper guest.”

  ***

  Royston paused at the cubbies by the door to gather his mail. There was a yellow telegraph slip, but he’d need better light to read it. The neighbors would complain if they saw the werewolf padding upstairs after him, but he didn’t care. Bandon was far more respectable than his usual parade of informants.

  He let Bandon into his rooms and lit the fire before excusing himself to change into dry clothes. His throat felt raw, and his head felt twice its size. The night’s adventures hadn’t done him any good. He brought a towel out with him. The werewolf stood on three legs, dripping on the hearth rug. Oh, this was awkward. Bandon could scarcely towel himself dry, and one did not leave guests cold, wet, and uncomfortable. Rubbing him dry like he was some stray he’d brought home from the streets seemed a bit too familiar.

  He held the towel out. “Do you want—?”

  Bandon limped forward and, head high with dignity, submitted to a toweling.

  “Better, I hope?” Royston tried to ignore the wet-dog odor. Canis lupus or canis familiaris, even a clean wet canine inevitably smelled doggy.

  Bandon gave a slow wag of his tail.

  Royston took the whiskey out of the liquor cabinet and set out two glasses. Then he contemplated the width of the ’wolf’s muzzle relative to the width of the mouth of the glass. Perhaps a bowl would be better. Only setting down a bowl on the floor for a guest to drink out of seemed impolite.

  Finally he hit on a solution.

  Bandon gave him a gaping wolf grin before lapping whiskey from the delicate but wide-mouthed china teacup that was part of the set Royston had inherited from his mother.

  “Let me see to that paw before you go,” Royston said.