I rested the old besom against a crumbling wall. “I’m absolutely paws-itive.”
“Whoa!” Shade shook his furry head. “Eau de Stinky Cheese is not a favorite scent with the ladies.” Shade said as the pungent stench of Gaunt Manor swamp engulfed us.
“Oh, but smelly onion is?” I pointed out.
Shade took a casual whiff of his fur and almost keeled over. “Man, oh, man! That’s rank! And,I have a date tonight!”
He popped a fuzzy paw on his brother’s head. “What were you thinking letting us sneak into the onion bin?”
Jet shook his head in confusion at how this escapade had somehow become his fault.
“Look on the bright side, Shade. If you get eaten by a werewolf tonight, you won’t have to worry about the date,” I suggested helpfully.
“That’s true,” Shade started to smile in agreement. Then, the gravity of my comment smacked the smirk right off his furry face. “Wait! What?!?”
“I’m too young to become puppy chow!” Jet moaned.
“Can we just go home, now, boss lady?” Shade sobbed melodramatically.
“Oh, wow! Now, you two are both starting to sound like Fraidy.”
That straightened them both up in the blink of the Three Fate’s Eye.
“No way!” they chimed collectively.
“I’ll take on a whole pack of wolfies!” Shade puffed out his chest, strutting proudly up Portia’s sidewalk.
“Just let one of those hellhounds try to catch me!” Jet launched into a rocketing black flash of fur and claws. “I dare ‘em! I’ll slice ‘em and dice ‘em into a bunch of wiener schnitzels!”
Shade shook his head. “Wait. Jet. Wiener Schnitzel is veal. Not hot dogs.”
Jet screeched to a halt. He cocked his head. “Oh.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t share the cats’ misgivings about coming out to Portia’s manor to search for Rad Silverback. The potion I had created for Rad was only good for twenty-four hours. Any effectiveness the tonic may have had had long since worn off.
Something that hadn’t worn off was the longevity of werewolf lore. Stories had existed about The Children of the Moon as far back as 440 B.C. when the Greek historian Herodotus scribed the tale of Scythian lycanthropes who could transform with ease between human and wolf form. Other scribes, like the Roman poet Ovid, portrayed the wolf as more of a curse. In 1 A.D. when he penned his Metamorphoses, he recorded the story of an ancient and evil king, Lycaeon, who perpetrated acts of unspeakable horror which so offended the Gods they doomed him and his descendants to wear the mantle of a wolf for the remainder of eternity.
But, the lore didn’t stop there. The legend of the wolf was called upon to explain many dark and mysterious events throughout the ages. For instance, as the winter snow blanketed the ground between the 16th-century village of Bedburg, Germany and the dense, foreboding forest that surrounded it, the villagers toiled honestly during the days, going peaceably about their daily tasks. But, at night? At night, they huddled together inside their homes; doors bolted against an invisible evil as young women and children began to disappear, later to be found horribly ravaged. Farmers woke to mutilated cattle in their pastures, throats torn out as if by some savage beast. Surely, the villagers thought, it was the work of some demonic monster, some crazed creature, half man, and half-wolf.
But, the legend of the wolf was not limited to Germany. Indeed, France purported to be home to several werewolf legends, including that of Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun and the Beast of Gévaudan. The repercussions of the latter’s particularly brutal reign of savagery, including nearly two hundred separate attacks with over one hundred deaths, were felt as far away as Scotland by such luminaries as Robert Louis Stevenson, who chronicled the tale of the beast in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.
And while David Naughton’s transformation to The Beast was more Hollywood hype than true hairy hex, believe you me, when a real werewolf transformed, there was more than a valid reason to “stay off the moors.” That much was fact.
At that very moment, a long, piercing howl echoed eerily in the distance.
“For the record, I am not a-MEW-sed,” Shade gulped, and he melted, cowardly, into the nearby shadows.
“Traitor,” I whispered tersely.
My mental history lesson had me on a definitive edge. I wondered, briefly, if wolf howls were like lighting. After you heard the first howl, could you count the time before the next howl to estimate just how close a bad attitude with teeth might be?
A second cry sounded. Maybe just a little bit closer than the first. Where was Chief Trew?
“Hattie!” the Chief’s voice suddenly called from above. I smiled in relief and waved eagerly. The Chief touched down neatly on his own broom. “Sorry, I’m late. Amber needed a ride home.”
I might have winced if I wasn’t so worried.
“Hattie, what’s wrong? You’re as white as a ghost!”
“Let’s just say I’d rather be in Disneyland.”
Dead tree leaves rattled across the empty courtyard like dry bones. The Chief looked around and nodded. “Okay. I get that. But, we’re out her for a reason. What makes you think Rad Silverback is here?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tell-tale swatch of fur. “I found this yesterday when we were out here questioning Portia. It was stuck in a splinter of a door jamb.”
The Chief shrugged. “Okay. It’s a piece of fuzz. Did you see the cobwebs in that place?” He jabbed a thumb in the general direction of Portia’s home. “It would take Indiana Jones years to excavate the furniture in that parlor.”
I shook my head. “No, no, no. It’s not fuzz. It’s fur. The salt and pepper is the same black and silver color as Rad’s hair.”
One of Chief Trew’s perfect eyebrows raised high. He folded his arms. “Okay. I’m listening.”
“Remember the massive door in the corner of Portia’s kitchen? The claw marks that were gouged on the inside?”
The Chief nodded.
“Remember at the station. Rad said something about his ‘safe sanctuary’? Well, what if Portia’s basement is Rad’s safe sanctuary? That door was certainly thick enough to hold him if he were to try and break loose. Think about it. Spithilda’s gone. He’s suspected of her murder. And now he has no potion to contain the wolf, where else would Rad be likely to go, but to the house of his former fiancée who is arguably, one of the most powerful witches on Glessie Isle?”
The Chief was paying such close attention to me at this point; I had almost forgotten about Amber’s little Über stunt. The Chief walked up to Portia’s door and knocked.
“What are you doing?!?” I protested. “You’re just going to knock?”
“I have to Hattie. I don’t have a warrant. Your hunches might be good enough for me, but I don’t know that they carry enough legal weight to convince a judge. So, our safest and most legal bet is to knock and hope that Miss Fearwyn is gracious enough to allow us to enter her home a second time. If she invites us in and we find something that leads us to Rad, we’re in the clear.”
I tried not to pout. The legal mumbo jumbo of this whole detective thing was sometimes more confusing than some of the archaic spells in Grammy Chimera’s grimoire. “Fine.”
“Otherwise, unless we have a valid reason to go in…”
A sudden loud and splintering crash of glass echoed at the same time a blood-curdling shriek echoed from the interior of the house.
Jet tilted his black head. “Breaking glass a valid reason?”
“Oh, yeah.” The Chief drew his service revolver. He motioned for Jet and me to get behind him and to the side. He rapped sharply on the door. Shade was undoubtedly the cause of that shattering glass, and as he wasn’t in line behind me now, I’d guess that he was on the inside.
“Miss Fearwyn? This is Chief Trew of the GIPPD.” Silence. The Chief tried the handle and found the door unlocked. The door swung wide, yawing open like the mouth of some dark monster. The Chief, Jet an
d I formed a quirky little totem pole as our three heads peered around the corner and dared a look inside. No movement stirred.
“Stay behind me,” the Chief warned. We were only too happy to oblige. We padded on the balls of our feet down the carpet runner of the narrow, crooked hallway of Fearwyn's past. I glanced behind at Jet, who was low, low, low to the ground, his haunches moving methodically, slowly, and his ears flat, and back. I’d never seen my wayward puss so composed, so poised. My eyes drifted to Atropa Belladonna’s portrait which had given me such shivers on our previous visit. I didn’t think it was possible for the austere matriarch’s likeness to stir any more dread in my soul, but then the sight of the five jagged tears shredding through the canvas turned me colder than ice. Atropa’s stern features hung, limp and impotent, in thin wafting shreds from the gilt frame.
“I think we’ve come to the right place,” I whispered, putting a cautious hand on Chief Trew’s shoulder. He nodded and we continued forward.
I pointed to the splinter in the door jamb where I had found the swatch of fur. “That’s where I found Rad’s fur.”
We stepped cautiously into the darkened kitchen. The deep, bass tick-tock of the grandfather clock echoed from the hallway, the heartbeat of the spooky house.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
My own heart threatened to thrum right on out of my chest. Long shadows stretched like groping fingers across the kitchen floor, waving, clutching toward us. The curtains over the kitchen sink waved in the breeze from the open window.
“There’s the glass.” The Chief pointed to a shattered pot and some limp stalks of chive.
“It must have fallen from the window.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.” The bodiless voice apologized in an ethereal whisper. Only Chief Trew’s quick hand over my mouth saved me from shrieking out loud.
“It’s just Shade,” he grumbled quietly, pointing to my sneaky shadow surfer. Two yellow eyes materialized in the dark as Shade peeled himself away from the surrounding blackness.
Chief motioned to the broken pot. “So, you’re responsible for that?”
“Mmmmmmaybe,” Shade toed the floor. “It was an accident, I swear! But, seriously, what took you cats so long? What were you waiting for?”
Chief fixed him with a stern, law-abiding look. “Just cause.”
Shade shrugged. “Well, in that case, I broke in on purpose…just cause I wanted you guys to get your keisters in here!”
Before the Chief could give Shade a blistering lecture of proper police protocol a low, guttural growl rumbled through the darkness.
My eyes shot to the heavy oaken door across the room. It was closed and barred by a no-nonsense, solid beam.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
“Nevermind. Now I want your keisters out there!” Shade jabbed a paw in the immediate direction of the outside night and hightailed it down the hallway.
“Hide!” he caterwauled.
“Shade!” I hissed, but he was gone.
Another low growl emanated from behind the door. Chief Trew took a step closer, hand reaching for the beam.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” came the acidic, warning voice of Portia Fearwyn as she stood behind us; an Angel Apothecary bag in one hand and Shade, by the scruff of his immortal neck, in the other.
This time, Chief’s hand didn’t stop my shriek.
“Are you certain he can’t break through that door?” Shade asked, looking nervously at the door behind which Rad Silverback most certainly pawed. We were all sitting around Portia’s kitchen table once more, sipping a sweet, gentle Chamomile Tea Portia had procured from Millie at the apothecary when she had gone into town to pick up some of the items necessary to create Rad’s draught.
A loud thud sounded on the heavy wood. Shade jumped.
“No,” Portia stated straightforwardly.
“Oh, good,” Shade replied, prematurely assured and lapped some of the milk Portia had set out for the cats. He then did a milky spit-take, spewing a fine white mist all over his brother, Jet. “What?!?”
“Oh, don’t worry, Master Shade. It shouldn’t be long now before the draught starts to take effect and Rad will be quite harmless,” Portia assured him. Shade smiled dopily. Any apprehension he may have been feeling had been completely erased when Portia addressed him as “Master.”
“Ooh! ‘Master’ Shade. That’s MEOW-velous! I think that’s how you all should address me from now on,” he suggested.
“How’s about I lick a stamp and slap it on your forehead and address you to Timbuktu?” Jet offered, still licking the milk from his fur.
“Hmmph,” Shade snorted in reply and slinked off into the shadows to find a mouse. Or at least a more appreciative audience.
Portia turned her attentions back to Chief Trew. “So, Chief. Am I to understand that you entered my home in my absence because you believed Mr. Silverback to be lodged here and you somehow believed him to be responsible in some way for Spithilda Roach’s untimely demise?”
The Chief flushed a little red around the tips of his ears. He pulled nervously at his collar. I wondered if he thought Portia capable of slipping a Truth Serum into his tea. Or worse.
I guess he decided honesty was the best policy. “Yes, ma’am. We did knock. But, there was no answer.”
“I was procuring the necessary ingredients to develop Mr. Silverback’s much-needed monthly elixir. I had run out of a few key ingredients myself. Luckily, Ms. Joyvive’s establishment is a well stocked and well run apothecary. But, back to Lady Roach’s death. You say Spithilda expired three nights past, correct?”
“That is correct,” Chief Trew agreed.
Portia stood, with her typical stiff grace, and glided to a wall belabored with pigeon-hole racks. Scores of rolled documents, ancient maps, charts, spells, and graphs, were stuffed into the open spaces. Portia ticked a long, gnarled finger in the air, searching for just the right scroll.
“Aha! This is the one.” She pulled a long, ethereally white scroll from her collection and brought it to the table. Once there, she rolled it out to reveal a brilliantly illuminated lunar chart. A flowing, looping script delineated the cycle of the moon in pearlescent blue ink. Portia laid a long, thickly yellow nail upon the full, silvery orb in the center of the chart.
“This, of course, is the full moon. It is the full moon that commands our greatest attention each month. We witches can use the power of this moon to work some of our strongest magic.”
“If you’re into the sort of thing,” Chief Trew jibed. The thin hard line of Portia’s dry lips indicated her level of amusement. The Chief cleared his throat.
Portia continued. “But, even the Unawakened have reason to give the full moon pause. The werewolf legend has root in their history as well as our own.”
I remembered my little self-guided tour down lycan memory lane. A sudden shudder rippled down my spine.
“But,” Portia gave the silvery orb several rhythmic taps. “A lycan, be he born or cursed, will not only feel the effect of the moon’s power on the rise of the fullest moon. He or she will also succumb to the beast for the twenty-four hours before as well as twenty-four hours hence. He will metamorphose for three days into the form of a ravenous, consuming wolf, fierce and powerful. Enormous black eyes that reflect the fires of hell. A gnashing mouth, filled with tearing teeth, foams rabid with his blood-lust. He is not a man in control. He is the animal.”
I was suddenly very, very glad I had left Fraidy at home.
“Even in the daylight hours, when he walks among men, the Beast is of snarled brain, wanting only to shred and devour, and waits only for the moon rise to take control.”
“So, you’re saying then, that Rad would not have had the wherewithal to poison Spithilda since she was killed within that three-day period.” Chief Trew summed up.
“It is highly unlikely, Chief Trew. Not, only the wherewithal, but also he would have had no mental or physical faculty to accompli
sh such a thought out, restrained act. Rad always ran a risk when he went out in public during his cycle. I clearly advised him against it and told him, one day, he could lose his tenuous grip on his humanity.”
“Ok, so, Rad wasn’t biologically capable — he would have most likely ripped her apart, not take the time to crush up some pokeberries to feed her. So, we’re one suspect short of an investigation, Hat.” David looked at me with tired eyes. My heart thudded briefly. I just nodded.
“And, so why did he come here? I thought the Fearwyn’s hated werewolves,” I pointed out.
Portia’s face twitched.
“That was always Mother’s opinion. Not mine,” she spat.
The growling and snarling had stopped. Portia’s potion had done its job. The old witch made a move to open the big door. The Chief readied his weapon.
Portia clucked her tongue. “That won’t be at all necessary, Chief. The elixir has quite taken effect by now.”
She opened the weighty door with surprising strength. Just another reminder not to underestimate Portia Fearwyn and what the old sorceress was capable of.
A haggard, ragged Rad Silverback shuffled from the basement.
“How are you feeling, Rad?” Chief Trew asked.
“Tired. I think it may be time for me to stop kidding myself. I’m no longer human, and I should stop pretending to be the same. I had too many close calls this cycle. Thanks to you, Hattie, and to you Portia, I was spared from committing some horrible atrocity that I never would have been able to forgive myself for. Thank you, ladies.”
Portia gave an informal bow. I gave the werewolf a quick salute.
“What will you do now?” the Chief posed.
“I’m going to head out to other side of the Isle. Where the rest of my kind live. Hopefully, they can help me learn how to manage my affliction.”
“You’re always welcome here, Rad,” I offered, remembering the values Grammy Chimera had instilled in me.
Accept everyone, and anyone and your house will never want for friends.
Grammy’s voice echoed again in my mind.
Chief Trew threw me a sudden and very concerned look.
The Infiniti Investigates: Hattie Jenkins & the Infiniti Chronicles Books 1 to 5 Page 30