It is true that werewolves change on the full moon. But a newly-turned werewolf will change just about every night, and sometimes even during the day. It takes years of training and practice to quiet those urges to the point where turning is a voluntary process and where they have full control of their mind and their actions in their wolf form.
But once a lunar cycle, they have no choice. No matter how disciplined they are, whatever primal magic fuels their curse can’t be denied under the light of a full moon, and nothing short of dawn, silver, or cold iron will reverse a transformation. But the elders can retain their minds and sense of self even during this time, and their control keeps the rest of the Pack in line.
Family Life
Wednesday, March 16th, 9:21 AM
The Gardaà had finally located the Pack for me and so Cormac and I drove out to Blessington the day before Saint Patrick’s day to pay them a visit. They had chosen a halting site surrounded by tall pines and accessed by a short dirt road, which they had closed by stringing a chain over.
Cormac parked outside the chain and I stepped over it cautiously. I expected sentries; someone keeping watch who would challenge me, but it was eerily quiet. I continued down the path, but the only sounds were our feet on the clay. Even the echoes were absorbed by the trees to either side.
“This isn’t nerve-wracking at all,” said Cormac. “I’ve definitely not seen six different horror movies that began like this.”
“Don’t worry,” I called back. “Those movies never kill off the whiny annoying one.” I could see the circle of caravans and campervans ahead of me so called out, “Hello! Victor Grey visiting!”
I finally saw movement, as four dogs emerged from under one of the caravans and loped towards us. One of them barked in friendly greeting before they ran a few circles around us and trotted back the way they had come, occasionally glancing back at us.
We followed them to the heart of the campsite. Everything was quiet, but a door to one of the larger caravans flew open as we approached and James, aka, Jamesy, aka JP, Powers stepped out. He was a huge man with a wild mane of curly black hair that was lately peppered with grey. He wore only boxer shorts with a light blue dressing gown pulled over them and a faded pair of bedroom slippers. He squinted in the bright light, before reaching into the pocket of his dressing gown for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, coughed once, and then nodded a greeting towards us.
Truth be told, I had a lot of time for Jamesy, despite the animosity between his Pack and the Magistrate. From what I had gathered, he saw trolls as fellow outcasts, but his Pack naturally clashed with our Clan structure. But Clanless Grey trolls had none of that baggage so he was always welcoming to me.
“JP, you remember Cormac?” I asked by way of introduction.
Jamesy nodded and put his cigarette into his mouth to free up a hand for shaking. “Spellcaster, right?”
Cormac nodded and shook his hand. “That’s right.”
“You able to change the weather? We’re hoping for a nice day tomorrow.”
“That’s a bit outside my area of expertise, I’m afraid,” Cormac said with a grin.
“Ah, no harm,” said Jamesy back before turning to me. “So you here for the wedding?”
I blinked. “Wedding? No. Who’s getting married?”
He took out his cigarette again. “You didn’t hear? Ah, jayse, I thought we’d gotten the word around. JJ is getting married tomorrow.”
“Oh shit, no, I hadn’t heard.” JJ was Jamesy’s oldest son and not someone I had ever imagined settling down to married life. “Is he about?”
“Probably sleeping it off,” Jamesy said with a laugh that sounded like a bark. “We’ve got the new in-laws up and have been celebrating the last week or so.” He gestured to where four caravans were clustered together, slightly apart from the main site.
“Did any of the celebrations head into the city?” I asked.
“JJ and his brothers took Peter in at the weekend. Why?” he asked and then saw the look on my face. “Ah, fecks sake. Did they… fuckin’ eejits. I fuckin’ told them to fuckin’ behave.” He threw down his cigarette then stormed to the door of the caravan next to his and hammered on its door.
JJ emerged a few minutes later, a virtual copy of his dad but without the grey in his hair. He was barefoot and wore tracksuit bottoms and an old t-shirt. He seemed very hung over and blinked in confusion as he turned his head from his father to us and back.
“What did yiz do?” demanded Jamesy. “You getting in fights in town? I knew something was up when you came back limping.”
JJ opened his mouth to speak then regained some composure and closed it again. He turned to me and asked, “What exactly are you accusing us of?”
“Saturday night or Sunday morning, you killed and ate a deer in the Phoenix Park,” I said. “You left it in sight of the Magistrate's house. Then on Tuesday morning, you attacked a jogger, just before dawn. Scratched her leg up pretty good.”
“The deer was Peter. He’s my wife’s brother,” JJ explained with a grin. “He wants to join the pack, he needs an initiation.”
“So you challenged him to violate the Magistrate’s territory?”
JJ laughed. “Well, we didn’t tell him that bit til later. He almost fuckin’ pissed himself.”
“And the attack yesterday morning?” Cormac asked.
“Dunno anything about that,” JJ said with a shrug. “Da’ll tell you. We were back here by then. Got back on Monday afternoon. Giz a smoke,” he added to his father, who passed him the pack.
“It’s true,” said Jamesy. “The lot o’ them came back Monday. They didn’t go out again.”
“With a limp?” I asked JJ. “How’d that happen?”
“Ah, you know yerself. Bit o’ the aul roughhousing between brothers. It’s basically better now.” He raised his right knee and flexed his leg to demonstrate.
“Do you know of any werewolves in the city?” said Cormac, and added, “Maybe not from your pack?”
Father and son exchanged glances. “The closest pack to us now is about sixty miles away, on the Curragh,” Jamesy said.
“And any loners? Any running packless?”
Jamesy scoffed. “In the city? Hardly. JJ?”
JJ shrugged. “I wouldn’t go in there without at least four brothers. You’d be insane to hunt the city solo.” He spat on the ground then said, “Can I go back to bed now? I only got the head down at seven.”
His dad waved him away, then led Cormac and I back to his own caravan. “Lookit, I know there’s probably a fine for the deer. But we got the wedding tomorrow so I hope we can come to some sort of arrangement.”
“I’ll run it by the Magistrate,” I said. “But you know how he feels about these things. And if you know anything about the attack yesterday that you haven’t told us…” I left the rest of the threat unspoken.
On the drive back to the city I pulled out my phone to check the lunar calendar. “The next full moon is due on Friday, March 18th, at 7am,” I said.
“So Thursday night?” said Cormac. “Saint Patrick’s night?”
“This week keeps getting better and better.”
The Haunting of Garden View
Wednesday, March 16th, 2:43 PM
Margaret Taylor was a low-level practitioner of magic who had some run-ins with the department in the past. She had a unique style, including some flashy wizard-type spells that she mixed with low-level curses and hexes that were more common with witchcraft. But whenever she encountered a gap in her knowledge, she tended to fill it in by making stuff up. Which is where she had run into problems, and the OSI, before. So it was somewhat surprising to get a call from her, asking for help with a case.
She had been hired to cleanse an apartment building in Marino that its owner had become convinced was haunted. After a week of burning sage bunches in the lobby and putting sprigs of holly on each door and window, she realised she was in over her head and put in a call to the department.
Cormac and I arrived at the apartment building in the mid-afternoon. It was one of three identical buildings surrounding a small triangular green. They were new buildings, in white-and-cream, about six storeys each. Every apartment in the building had a small balcony, alternating with the one below it in a zig-zag pattern up the facade, and a safety railing around the roof of each indicated a terrace.
Margaret waited inside the lobby of the northernmost building with an older man in work trousers and a branded polo-shirt. “Thank you for coming,” she said to us as we entered. “Victor Grey and Cormac Francis, this is Trevor Whittaker, he’s the property manager here.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Cormac. “What seems to be the problem?”
“We have a hallway we think may be…” Whittaker hesitated, embarrassed. “It may be haunted.”
“I can guarantee you that it’s not a ghost,” I said. “But if you take us there, we can check things out for you.”
The pair led us past the bank of three elevators to where the lobby took a sharp right turn. There was a short corridor that terminated in another lift and the door to what looked like a supply closet. I walked down the corridor before realising that none of the three had followed me.
“What’s up?” I asked, turning.
“You can’t feel that?” Cormac asked me.
“This is the problem,” said Whittaker. “For the last week or two, anyone trying to walk down this hall has been turned back.”
“By what?” I asked, confused.
“That feeling,” said Margaret. “It’s like… dread.”
“Foreboding,” added Cormac.
I turned on the spot a few times. I saw nothing but the supply closet and the elevator door. “What do you keep in here?”
“Cleaning supplies,” said Whittaker, still from the end of the hallway.
I pulled open the door to see he was correct. Mops and cardboard boxes and one of those big machines with a circular sponge they use for cleaning floors. I closed the door again. “Where does the lift go?”
Whittaker hesitated, as if he had never considered the question before. “To the roof?” he said eventually.
“What about the penthouse?” I asked.
“Garden View doesn’t have one. Sea View and City View do.”
“Those are the other two apartment buildings?”
“That’s right.”
“They all looked identical to me driving up. Why does this building not have one?”
Whittaker didn’t say anything but his eyes lost focus for a second in a way I was very familiar with.
“Cormac and Margaret, come with me,” I said, walking to the elevator and pressing the call button.
The two hesitated at the entrance to the hallway for a moment, before I made one of those ‘get a damn move on’ gestures. They broke through whatever enchantment was keeping them out and they joined me at the lift. Inside, I was pleased to see there were only two buttons. One marked with an “L” and one with a “P”. I hit the Penthouse button and smiled at the others as the doors closed.
“Still scared?” I asked.
“No,” said Cormac in a surprised tone of voice.
“Me neither,” said Margaret. “A ward to keep people out of the corridor?”
“Almost certainly,” said Cormac. “But I’ve never felt one that strong before.”
The elevator dinged and the door opened to a small carpeted lobby. Opposite the elevator door were a set of beech double doors with frosted glass panels. One of the doors was slightly ajar. As I pull it open further, I felt some resistance. I swung it open and closed a few times. Something had warped the entire door frame.
Inside, the entrance hallway to the apartment was a disaster. The wall on the right-hand side was broken and bowed outwards, which explained why the doorframe was askew. Dust covered the carpet, and pieces of timber showed through the broken plaster. A bureau which had been against that wall had been knocked over and lay face-down covered by chunks of plaster and a fine layer of dust. I stepped around it and proceeded into the apartment while Cormac knelt to pull some documents from where they were pinned by the fallen desk.
“Post,” he said. “Letters addressed to Oliver Hong. I know that name…”
I also knew the name. “We arrested him about two years ago, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” said Cormac. “He glamoured his car and made it invisible. Moron almost got himself killed on the M50 when a truck merged on top of him. How did he afford a place like this?”
“I don’t think he did,” I said. “Find a new build, a glamour here, a memory charm there, and a ward to stop anyone poking about your private elevator and you’ve got yourself a rent-free private penthouse in the sky.”
“Wow,” said Margaret. “You can arrest him for this, right?”
I had reached the door to the room on the right and looked inside. “I think he’s a bit beyond being arrested at this point.”
Hong’s corpse was crumpled in the corner of the room like a pair of jeans after a long day. He’d been dead a week or more, judging by the state of decomposition and the fluids splashed about the place. I checked the body to be sure, and it felt like every bone in his body had been broken.
In the center of the hardwood floor was drawn a circle with runes scribed inside and arrows on the outside pointing in the eight compass directions.
“Travelling circle?” I asked Cormac.
“Looks like it,” he said, then went to the body and checked the pockets. In addition to a passport and some U.S. dollars, he pulled a small book. It was soaked with blood that had dried into a solid mass but he was able to scrape the spine until the title was visible. “A guide to Miami nightlife,” he read aloud.
I stood in the centre of the travelling circle and held an arm straight out towards the centre of the bloodstained crater in the wall above the corpse. “Would you say this is west-south-west?”
Cormac sighted along my arm and nodded. “I’d say so. Circle shot him on a straight line to Miami. He probably hit the wall at a thousand miles an hour.”
Margaret’s jaw dropped. “That’s not how travelling circles are supposed to work. They’re supposed to just teleport you.”
Cormac gave her a sympathetic shrug. “I try not to use words like ‘supposed to’ when it comes to the behaviour of powerful spells.”
“So what happens now?” she asked.
“Now we call the Scene team to secure the site and make sure no magical paraphernalia gets mislaid,” I explained.
“And they will lift the ward downstairs?”
“What you have downstairs is a Dead Wizard’s Curse,” said Cormac. “We have neither the time nor the resources to break that.”
“Besides,” I said, “Whittaker already hired you for that job.”
Cormac grinned. “I hope you’re billing him by the hour.”
The New Head of Archives
Wednesday, March 16th, 5:25 PM
Technically, Sir Arthur’s Drum Library was part of Archives, but he was the only one who ever used it. The rest of the Archives Department worked in one of three smaller divisions: Records, Research and Materials. Records catalogued our own case files, Research did, well, research using external sources and liaised with other departments around the world, and Materials stored and analysed any magical objects that Containment or the Scene Team or one of the Investigators brought back. There was a lot of overlap between the three sub-departments and, as the new girl, Kim floated between them whenever the need arose.
They sent her to fetch me late on Wednesday evening. Kim had been pretty cold to me over the last month, so carried out the task with some resentment and didn’t say a word to me as we took the stairs down to Materials and passed through the heavy doors and protective runes inscribed on the floor.
The Testing Room was built like a bank vault, with reinforced concrete walls and a door that would stop a cruise missile. Unlike a bank vault, however, the door swung inwards, as if the designers were more concerned with something trying to break out than something trying to break in. They were.
All of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling were carved with protective runes and a single stainless-steel table stood in the centre of the room. Mei Yang from Research and Eamonn Kelly from Materials were waiting for me.
“What’s this about?” I asked as I entered.
Doctor Yang pointed to the centre of the table, where a single metal bottle stood. It was about eight inches tall and sealed with wax at the top. “Containment found this on Monday’s raid,” she said. “We don’t know what’s inside, and would like to have you here when we open it.”
“Just in case?” I grinned.
“If you don’t mind?” asked Kelly. He was relatively young and new, and I think he was a bit afraid of me.
“No worries. Just let me do one thing,” I said. I walked outside the Testing Room and removed my glamour. I stored it on a shelf then re-entered. “Just in case. That thing is a pain to replace.” The trio stared back at me wide-eyed. This might have been the first time any of them had seen me in my natural form. “Shall I close the door?”
Kelly nodded so I gripped the heavy vault door and swung it closed. Once it was closed, the markings on its inside met the markings on the floor and ceiling above to provide a single continuous rune that encased the whole room. I spun the handle and turned back to the room.
“Do we have any idea what’s inside? Animal, vegetable, mineral, other?”
Yang shook her head. “The markings on it indicate it’s to ‘prevent escape’, so something living, in all likelihood. The runes in here should keep us safe, no matter what it is.”
“Whenever you are ready, then,” I said. I felt a presence close to my side and looked to see Kim standing half-behind me. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “These things are almost always a let-down.”
Kelly carefully broke off the wax with a scalpel then twisted out the cork. It came loose and he seemed ready to flinch, but aside from a soft popping noise, nothing happened.
“Nothing,” said Yang.
“See?” I said to Kim. “Disappointment every time.”
Kelly examined the bottle. “I was so sure it held something. The markings are so clear.”
“Don’t feel bad about it,” said Doctor Anderson, looking at us over his half-moon glasses with his usual sad smile. “Better to be disappointed and safe, than the reverse.”
“True,” said Kelly. “We’ll analyse the bottle anyway. See if it turns up anything.”
“If you would get the door please, Mister Grey,” said Anderson.
I turned to the door, then stopped. Something was definitely Not Right. I looked back at the four behind me to re-asses. I had distinct memories of meeting Yang when she was first hired four years ago, of Kelly when he started two years after that, and Kim, six months ago. I also remembered Anderson welcoming me on my first day at the OSI eleven years’ previously. But I also had an equally vivid memory of never having seen him before today.
“Oh you’re good,” I said to him.
“What do you mean?” asked Kelly, perplexed.
“Changeling, right?”
Kelly, Kim and Yang’s heads swivelled in confusion, but Anderson stared straight at me without blinking. Then he reluctantly nodded.
“I didn’t know your mojo worked on Trolls.”
“The weak-willed ones, yes,” he was grinning now. “And you have to open the door sometime.”
“What are you two talking about?” said Yang.
“None of us have ever met Anderson before,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” said Yang. “He’s head of Archives.”
I quickly considered my options.
“Vic?” said Kim, almost pleading.
“Yeah, Vic?” said Anderson with a slightly more sinister grin than before.
“OK,” I said to him. “I will open this door and let you go, on three conditions.”
Anderson made one of those ‘please, continue’ gestures.
“One: You lift the spell you cast on everyone here,” I said, and waited for his nod. “Two:” I continued, “You go immediately from this place and harm no living creature ever again.” I stopped again to see how he would react.
Anderson coughed. “Steep, but I agree. And the third price?”
“A favour to be named later,” I said.
He laughed loudly at that, his voice echoing around the small room. “Done!” he said and clapped his hands in delight. Suddenly, my memories of meeting him faded. They were still there, but they no longer felt real. It was more like remembering a dream than remembering an experience. The other three took a step backwards in unison as the enchantment was lifted from them at the same time. “Now, the door, please.”
I unlocked the door and swung it open for him and we were suddenly alone again.
“That was terrifying,” muttered Kim, under her breath.
“You’re not wrong,” I said. “Kelly, I want that bottle turned upside-down and inside-out. Translating that text is your top priority.”
“Absolutely. What the fuck did we just release on the world?”
“That is what I need you to tell me.”
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