Lycanthropy Files Box Set: Books 1-3 Plus Novella

by Cecilia Dominic

  “Are the English going to invade again? I thought we’d been pretty well defeated two hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “If not the English, then maybe someone nastier. We’ve gotten threats.”

  When he opened the door, the smell of shed blood hit me full-force the second time that day.

  6

  When we walked into the room where the CT scanner resided, we were met by a nasty surprise: the security guards tied up, their throats slit. However, there wasn’t much blood, at least not enough for two grown men.

  “Not again.” Max groaned and staggered back.

  “Again?” I asked and reached to steady him. I took in the details of the scene, which almost seemed ordinary compared to LeConte’s odd murder that morning.

  “LeConte and now this. I’ll call Garou.” He dashed out of the room, and his speed gave me pause because I’d not known Max ever to hurry. Yes, the matter was urgent, especially since these chaps were very dead, but there was something odd about his reaction.

  I’ll talk to him about it later.

  I shook my head and investigated the corpses. These two didn’t make my stomach turn like LeConte had, but they also didn’t resemble a certain picture a young boy shouldn’t have seen of his mutilated father. I pushed the memory away and closed my eyes to bring my wolf nose into play and focus on the scent trail, faint as it was. There was the same kerosene-pipe smoke smell and another one that smelled vaguely of dust and mold. I sneezed.

  Ah, so he had an accomplice. I opened my eyes and took off my jacket—doctor’s orders or not, I was going to change. I walked into the hallway and looked around for a room I could secure against someone walking in on me.

  A petite black wolf appeared in the hall, and I knew Max had called Lonna, who had sent her psychic double. It always threw me how the spirit-wolf didn’t have a scent.

  “It’s the same one as this morning,” I said.

  “I wonder if their intent is to intimidate or if they’re actually looking for something.”

  “I don’t know. Let me change and I’ll join you.”

  “Not so fast,” Max said and came through the door. “Wolf-Lonna has this. She can travel faster than any of us.”

  Indeed, she’d left, head low, following the trail.

  “Amazing how she does that. Does Abby have a double?”

  Max grinned ruefully. “Like any nine-month-old, she babbles when no one’s in the room with her but it’s impossible to tell who or what she’s talking to. It’s early to know what her talents will be.”

  After about twenty minutes, Garou shuffled into the hallway. He looked exhausted and irritated.

  “I take it you have already been in there,” he said.

  “That’s how we discovered the bodies, yes,” Max said.

  “What brought you to the Institute so late?” Garou asked and checked his watch.

  “Investigator McCord sustained a concussion today,” Max told him. “I was concerned and decided to check him out.”

  Garou looked at me with narrowed eyes. “How did this happen?”

  No way was I telling him about Selene and the scar-faced Englishman. Obviously she had a reason not to go to the police in spite of being involved in something dangerous, and I needed to speak to her before spilling her secrets. “I cannot say, as it impacts my own part of the investigation, Detective.”

  “Were you attacked? If so, you need to make a report, particularly if it concerns our investigation.”

  “Once I’m feeling coherent enough, I’ll be happy to talk to you about it. Meanwhile, you have two more corpses to check out.” I stepped aside and gestured for him to proceed into the CT lab.

  A quick tour of the building didn’t yield any more clues, at least not to my tired brain. I figured if Garou picked up anything, he would include it in a report, which I would get soon, anyway. Plus, I counted on Lonna to tell me what her double found.

  After convincing Max I was feeling better and enduring another round of him looking in my eyes and poking and prodding my skull, I left without getting scanned. He had me promise not to do any changing for the next twenty-four hours, and definitely not if I had any headache, dizziness or nausea, in which case I needed to come back and see him for that CT. It was after two o’clock in the morning by the time I fell into bed and dreamed in fragments of battles and death.

  Laura’s words “Don’t forget your ten o’clock!” rattled through my brain at about nine-fifteen. I jerked awake with the sense I had been running through fields all night from an enemy who pursued me with relentless determination through my dreams. In spite of my fatigue, I rushed to get ready in time. This was an important appointment, one I made every year, and the only one I’d delay investigating a triple homicide for.

  The community knew that the school for poorly behaved children was called the Council School, but they didn’t know why, exactly. It was another example of how lycanthropes had managed to live in human communities with only the barest of awareness. Like many of our institutions, including Lycan Castle, the name had long ago passed into the status of, “I never really thought about it much, saw no reason to.” Even when it touted its expertise in treating the symptoms of Chronic Lycanthropy Syndrome, no one made the connection. Perhaps a rare lycanthrope-wizard collaboration had instituted some sort of memory spell around it so people would acknowledge it and move on.

  My head throbbed when I walked into the sunlight, but briefly, and my driving was steady. I pulled up to the school, a large gray stone building with gargoyles perched on the corners of the crenellated roof. No one knew when it was built or the gargoyles added, likely sometime during the Victorian era when Queen Victoria fell in love with Scotland and decided to make the country pretty. I always liked to think of the architect adding the Gothic elements to make it more appropriate to the setting.

  I waved to my favorite, a dog-like creature I’d long ago named Harry. He didn’t wave back, but to me, he represented my ancestors back in the murky time of legend before everything had to be documented in minute detail for the world to see. The others represented other magical species, most of which had died out long ago or perhaps had never existed. The wizard gargoyle clung to the roofline with clawed hands and peered down with iris-less eyes set in a gaunt face with fangs. I always felt it leered at me.

  Headmistress Corinne Reid met me at the door. We embraced and sniffed, and I got the image of a warm breeze sweeping across green fields dotted with purple and white heather. She stepped back and studied me with bright green eyes. As usual, her blonde hair was pulled back in a bun, but it didn’t make her high-cheeked face severe or unfriendly.

  “Welcome, Investigator,” she said. “We always look forward to your Solstice visit. But there’s something different about you.”

  “It must be my current investigation,” I said and gestured for her to lead the way.

  “No, there’s something else. Oh, well.” She stepped into the gloom that was the front hall of the Council School.

  I maintained some skepticism regarding the pagan feasts and their effects on us, but I respected the tradition of seeking for truth in the waxing light of the year, with the presumption being that most would be found at the time when light was most abundant. This included interviewing the children who attended the school to see who might develop into a full werewolf and who merely had the behavioral symptoms. Those who would bloom into true lycanthropes were then invited to attend special classes and training. It was in the interest of keeping our kind out of the light of human awareness, or at least on the very periphery of it, so this “chore” fell under my jurisdiction. Although I would end up spending several hours with sullen preteens, the children often surprised me in a good way.

  Today was no exception. Corinne led me to an office overlooking the wide lawn in front of the school and left to fetch the first interviewee. Thankfully, we’d left the shadows behind. Sunlight poured through the windows, and specks of dust floated through the beams. I coul
dn’t help but note the difference in smell between the synthetic new building odor of the Institute and the must and paper scent of the older structure.

  “This one insisted on talking to you,” she said when she returned, a piece of paper in her hand and a small white-blond boy in tow. “He’s not one of our CLS kids, but he has some interesting abilities that have been getting him in trouble.”

  “And what does this have to do with me?” I asked.

  “He saw you come in and said he has something to tell you about a soldier. Alexander, come tell Mister McCord what you need to say.” She ushered the child into the room and left us to speak privately.

  The child sat across from me and studied me with serious brown eyes that flicked from me to a space over my left shoulder. The office chair with its red leather cushions dwarfed him.

  “Good morning, Alexander,” I said and resisted the urge to look behind me.

  “Good morning, sirs,” the child said.

  I looked up, startled, and felt a draught. “There’s only one of me here.”

  He shook his head. “No, there’s the chap standing beside you too. Bit see-through, but he’s there.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I glanced down at the summary sheet Corinne had handed to me. The boy’s diagnosis space had a question mark in it followed by the words, “suspected clairvoyant or psychotic.”

  “What is he wearing?” I asked.

  “He’s got on brown pants and a big jacket.”

  “Describe him to me.”

  “He looks like you, but with more wrinkles and shorter hair.” Alexander leaned forward, and light flashed through his eyes. “And he’s trying to tell you something, but you don’t want to listen.”

  “I see.” I didn’t speak further, just listened, and heard a sound like the wind blowing through dry autumn leaves. “Do you know what he’s trying to say?”

  “He says he tried to talk to you last night, but you were hurt on your head.” He sat back and rubbed his temples, a surprisingly adult gesture for such a small boy. “Why does talking to him make my head hurt?”

  “Sometimes that happens when you’re doing things too much before you get used to them,” I said. “It’s like building a muscle. If you use it too much before it gets strong, it hurts so you’ll stop.”

  “Do you know why I’m here?” he asked and waved his hands around, “at this school?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “I know things I shouldn’t. Like I know that you have a lot of secrets that you keep from others.”

  “Most grown-ups do.”

  He shook his head and winced. “Not all of them. The soldier is worried you’re going to get hurt because of some of them.”

  The soldier’s uniform sounded like my father’s in the pictures I’d seen of him just before he shipped off to the continent to get killed in the Second Great War. I knew that no matter how desperately he felt the need to communicate with me, he wouldn’t want to hurt the boy.

  “Take it easy there, Alexander,” I said and stood. “I’d like to come back and talk to you more in the future, but only if you promise you’ll be careful and try not to talk to the see-through people too much.”

  His eyes widened as he scrambled out of the chair to stand. “I will, sir.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t want to talk to most of them, anyhow.” He left the room without making much sound, and I suspected that was how he did most things—as unobtrusively as possible. It made me wonder how many secrets he’d spilled in childish innocence before he learned less attention was better than more.

  I unclenched my left hand and forced my jaw to relax. When to demand attention and when to shy away from it was a lesson learned harder by some. And some of us were better at avoiding the limelight than others.

  The rest of the morning passed in a stream of twenty-minute interviews. None of the other children had anything interesting to offer or say, and I noted which ones I suspected would manifest the full CLS spectrum of symptoms. I wished I could tell Corinne exactly what I saw or how I did what I did, but my determinations were based on instinct rather than logic. I only knew my father had had the same ability, one of the few tidbits I’d learned about him in his official capacity. Of course I felt like I was being watched or that he was there, but he didn’t communicate with me, and I wondered whether he was, indeed, there, or if he had left when Alexander did and my mind was playing tricks on me.

  “Tell me about Alexander,” I said when I sat down for lunch with Corinne in her office. “How did he end up here?”

  “Right now, most of our boys are here because of being born with CLS into human families, but he’s the exception. His father is a lycanthrope, but he’s puzzled with him—Alexander has these strange abilities and no CLS symptoms.”

  “So has he had behavior problems? He seems inclined to stay under the radar.”

  She shook her head. “His father wanted him to come here to be exposed to children with CLS to see if it would ‘toughen him up’. As you can probably guess, he doesn’t really fit in with the bad boys.”

  “Poor lad. What about his mum?”

  “Died when Alexander was a baby. What did he have to tell you that was so important?” She paused with a forkful of salad in her hand.

  “I’m still trying to make sense of it,” I told her. “You know how it is with clairvoyants.”

  “Right, sometimes they’re clear and sometimes not, and when you want them to be one way, they’re usually the opposite.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What did you want him to be?”

  I thought about being told there was a ghost following me and then how it resembled my long-dead father. “I’m not sure.”

  The afternoon passed quickly with two more possible lycanthropes emerging from the group of preadolescent CLS sufferers. That brought me up to four, a typical number for the full phenotypic expression. I gave their names to Corinne before I left.

  “Watch these especially closely,” I told her.

  “When will you be checking on them again?” she asked and opened up her calendar to August. “They’ll be going back to their homes this weekend but will be back end of the summer.”

  “It will likely not be until September. I have a major investigation going on right now.”

  Wrinkles creased her otherwise flawless brow. “Is that the one about the Institute? The murders there?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that. It’s an ongoing case.”

  “Right. Just let me know. I’ll continue to watch over young Alexander as well. He’s a local.”

  “Thank you.”

  As I walked out of the front door, I felt the weight of someone’s gaze on me and turned to see Alexander standing in one of the second floor windows. He held a hand up to me as if to wave farewell, and rather than sweet, the gesture struck me as creepy. The hair on the back of my neck didn’t stand down until I got well away from the Council School.

  7

  My interviews had ended at the termination of the school day, and although I typically used that as an excuse to knock off early, the investigation beckoned. I wanted to peek at Garou’s preliminary report as to what he’d gathered, although I knew nothing would be back from analysis yet. I also wanted to get a sense of the atmosphere around Lycan Castle to prepare myself for the inevitable backlash from the previous day’s events.

  The first scent that came to me when I walked into the castle was that of candle smoke, which wasn’t too unusual, but the green bite of sage caught my attention. Typically the only time we burned sage along with the candles was to smudge the Council Chamber before a meeting, a tradition dating back to the days when the Council met in secret and needed to clear magical energies from spying wizards. But we weren’t supposed to meet until the following week.

  The look on Laura’s face confirmed my suspicions that I was not expected to be at Lycan Castle that afternoon.

  “Got any live ones this term?” she asked and hand
ed me a stack of messages. “None of these are urgent, by the way.”

  I gave her the file with my notes on my visit to the Council School. “Please type these up. And yes, a few. Nothing unusual except a little clairvoyant chap who’s ended up in the wrong place.”

  “I can only imagine the secrets that child knows. Ghosts do love to talk.” She took my jacket, and for the first time in decades, I reached for my hat, which I hadn’t worn since they went out of fashion.

  The appearance of my father’s ghost must be dragging me into the past.

  “Ah, yes,” I said and pretended to scratch a spot above my left ear. Her lips quirked.

  “It is a pity gentlemen don’t wear hats anymore,” she said. “I’ll make you some tea. Will you be here long?”

  “Right, thank you. I imagine I’ll be here long enough.”

  As soon as the door closed behind me in my office, I sat at the desk and turned on my super listening skills.

  “Yes, he just arrived,” Laura said, presumably into the telephone. “No, I don’t know exactly when he came into the building… He said ‘long enough.’”

  Who is spying on me through my secretary?

  She hung up, so I brought my attention back into my office. Her duplicity didn’t surprise me considering I wasn’t the one who signed her paychecks—Morena was—but it did disappoint me. I thought she was more loyal to me.

  When I opened my eyes, I found that she’d stacked the Institute personnel files on the corner of the desk so I’d have them within easy reach. There was also a file with Garou’s initial report, which I pulled out once I’d sat and made myself comfortable with my cup of tea in front of me. What had started out as a relatively warm day had turned chilly and cloudy toward the end, and even with the thick castle walls and deep-set windows, I could feel it. I hated it when my body reminded me I was older than I looked.