Dark Hunt

by Naomi Clark

  “Sorry for this.” She gestured vaguely at the pizza box and cans. “I am moving in with Thérèse once her boyfriend moves out.”

  “Do you always sleep here?” Shannon asked.

  Clémence shook her head. “My landlord asked me to move out after the murders.” She nodded to the stack of aging newspapers on the table. I picked up the top one, saw the now-familiar Le Monstre headline. “He says people will panic if they know a werewolf is their neighbor.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I bristled with indignation. “He can’t do that. There’s no proof this is a werewolf, is there?”

  Clémence shrugged. “What else?” she asked, sounding tired again. “Humans do not kill this way.” Realization dawned on her face. “Oh merde, you do not think Sun has been attacked?”

  Shannon and I exchanged looks. Neither of us had said it, but I knew we’d both thought it the minute we realized Sun was gone. “No,” Shannon said. “No, I’m sure she’s just wandered off to think and deal with everything, but in her state...”

  Clémence wrinkled her nose. “She is close to giving birth, you think?”

  “Oh, no.” I realized she’d misunderstood and remembered too that we hadn’t told her a whole lot about Sun’s predicament. I had no idea how much Sun herself had told her. “Listen, Clémence, Sun’s boyfriend was... He died. It was...”

  “Le Monstre,” Shannon supplied when I hesitated, unsure if we should be telling Clémence Sun’s business. “Just a couple of nights ago.”

  Clémence’s jaw dropped. “Merde. You’re sure? Le Monstre?”

  “We’re assuming,” Shannon admitted, “based on what we can make of the newspaper articles.”

  “And the smell,” I added.

  Clémence nodded, expression grim. She grabbed one of the papers from the pile and read the cover article to us. “Throat torn out, little blood at the scene, wolf officers report strange smell at the scene...” She looked up at us. “This is like Sun’s boyfriend?”

  I nodded. “She found him herself.” I shuddered, remembering her bone-chilling scream, the frozen fear the scent had triggered in me.

  “And people think it’s a werewolf?” Shannon asked Clémence.

  She nodded. “My neighbors are all human. They all say, what else kills like this? That’s why my landlord asked me to leave. He worried about what might happen.”

  “To them or you?” I asked.

  “Both.” She shrugged. “France has a long, dark history with wolves, you know? People do not forget.”

  We sat in glum silence for a few minutes, before Clémence rose, inadvertently flashing Shannon—me too, but I was too busy watching Shannon’s reaction to notice. “Excuse me. I will shower and change and we will think what to do, okay?” She sloped off towards the bar, disappeared through the door behind it.

  “Should I get my nipple pierced?” I wondered aloud, gazing at the wall mural.

  Shannon flushed. “I wasn’t staring.”

  “You really were.”

  “Well I wasn’t staring because I’m attracted to her then,” she snapped. “Not everyone’s as comfortable being confronted with naked strangers as you are.”

  I started to argue, decided we were being ridiculous, and stopped. “I feel really bad for Clémence,” I said instead, kicking a beer can and sending it rolling under the sofa. “I can’t believe her landlord kicked her out like that.”

  “At least she had somewhere to go,” Shannon said. “And you know, I hate to say it, but what else could be behind the killings? People don’t kill like this.”

  “You don’t know that. All that dark history Clémence was talking about—you know they reckon most of the supposed werewolves burned in the Middle Ages were just humans. Insane, cannibalistic humans.”

  “But the throat wound.” Shannon tapped the newspaper. “That’s typical of wolf kills, isn’t it? I’m not saying it absolutely is a werewolf, but it’s more likely, don’t you think?”

  I grudgingly admitted it was, despite my doubts. “That scent around Mike though, and down in the catacombs, that wasn’t a wolf scent. That wasn’t like anything I’ve smelled before.” I glanced over at the mural again. “I think it’s something like Hesketh.” I was sure the scents were different now, but that didn’t mean anything. What else could it be?

  “Someone using a wolf strap?” She nodded, pursing her lips as she mulled the idea over. “It could be. But you know... Sun and Mikey were arguing when we met them.”

  “So?”

  “So they argued, he walked out on her, he shows up dead. And she’s first on the scene. Normally that would make her the prime suspect. Especially now she’s missing.”

  I bit my lip. It had crossed my mind, briefly, that she might have killed Mikey. A crime of passion, but ... “But Sun can’t exactly wolf out at the moment and the other killings, those couldn’t all be her.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Shannon agreed. “I’m sure the police are looking into all the possibilities.”

  Which was a subtle way of saying ‘it’s nothing to do with us’, I thought, and it wasn’t, of course. For what felt like the millionth time, I reminded myself that we were in Paris to spend some quality time together. The fact that we’d immediately ended up babysitting Sun was a crimp in the plan, but it didn’t mean we had to involve ourselves in every crisis we stumbled across. Right?

  When Clémence returned, her hair was damp and she wore rumpled clothes. “D’accord,” she said, sitting down and fixing us both with a serious look. “How are we to find Sun?”

  “We thought we could track her from her flat, but her trail’s pretty weak and there were too many other scents around,” I told her. “We came here because we couldn’t think of anywhere else she’d go. She hasn’t been in Paris long.”

  Clémence beckoned us over to the computers and switched one on. “I can put a message on our forum. Maybe someone will see her and let us know.”

  It was worth a try. There probably weren’t many pregnant American-Korean werewolves in Paris. “How many wolves use this place?” I asked as Clémence typed furiously.

  “Uh, they come and go, you know? Maybe a hundred or so? Lots of kids hang out here after school, lots of students use it. We have one or two homeless wolves who sleep over sometimes,” Clémence replied. “Thérèse is working on getting us some money to do more, like maybe some night classes.”

  “Cool.” I admired Clémence’s determination. There was nothing like this setup back home and I wondered how much difference it would have made to lone wolves or outcasts like Tina, to have this kind of support centre. Unconnected to the Pack, but rooted in the werewolf community, it would be perfect. We could do with a place like this back home.

  The idea brightened me up and I resolved to at least look into it while I was waiting to hear whether I’d been accepted into the community support branch of the police. I probably wouldn’t find out until after Sly’s trial, so there was plenty of time to get the ball rolling if I could.

  “D’accord, message up,” Clémence announced. “But we should not wait to hear back. Is there anywhere she mentioned, anywhere she would want to go?”

  “Without her bag?” Shannon shook her head. “If she’d gone off on a social jaunt, she’d take her money, at least.”

  “And it was well after midnight,” I added. “I don’t think this was a sightseeing thing.” I tried to bury the thought that it could be a killing thing. Sun couldn’t possibly be responsible for so many deaths, not in her condition.

  “We should call the police,” Shannon said.

  Clémence bit her lip. “She hasn’t been gone too long yet. They might do nothing.”

  “Well how about any local alphas?” I suggested.

  “We could try,” she said. “One of my ex amoureux...uh, like, my past lover? She is the daughter of an alpha.”

  I should have guessed Clémence was gay. It still startled me a little though and I found myself shifting closer to Shannon, subtly moving
between her and the younger wolf and feeling incredibly petty and stupid while I did it.

  Clémence chatted on, oblivious. “Olivie probably is still asleep—she’s not a day person, you know? But she will definitely help.”

  “And in the mean time, what?” I asked, looking at Shannon. “What do we do?”

  She sighed and spread her hands helplessly. “I don’t really feel like sightseeing, do you?”

  I shook my head. Clémence patted my arm comfortingly. “Why not go see the Musée de l’histoire de Lupine?” she suggested. “Kill an hour or two there, then come back here and we will find Sun.”

  She sounded so cheerfully determined that I couldn’t help but catch some of the optimism. My wolf wagged her tail cautiously. Surely with Clémence’s resources, we’d find Sun in no time. Two wolves had to be better than one, right?

  Seven

  The Museum of Lupine History was a weird mix of art and hysteria. Clémence’s comment about France’s long, dark history came back to me as Shannon and I stepped inside to be greeted by a massive black and white blow-up of a seventeenth century woodcut. It depicted an alleged werewolf—Jean Grenier—tearing apart a cherubic little girl in vicious detail. He was shown as a man-wolf, balanced on his hind legs and using his forepaws to hold the girl while he ripped her throat out. His eyes were wild, his jaws foaming. The little girl’s face was frozen in a horrified scream, whilst terrified peasants crowded at the edge of the scene, helpless and furious.

  “Nice,” Shannon observed.

  “Stupid thing was, back then wolves were still in hiding,” I complained, staring at Grenier’s beastly face. “Grenier was probably just a random madman, but because of people like him, we get lumbered with the child-eating reputation.”

  She laughed at that. “Or maybe he was a real werewolf and just got careless with his takeaways.”

  I had to give her that one. Nobody would ever know if people like Grenier were real werewolves or just regular human lunatics, so they were free to portray him however they liked. That, it turned out, was the main theme of the museum. There was nothing about werewolves in World War One, when trench warfare forced us to go public. There was nothing on werewolves’ contribution to society in recent years in military, in construction, in medicine and in just about every facet of modern life. No, it was just one exhibit after another showing the worst of wolf history and more than a little pseudo history thrown into the mix.

  The exhibit on the Inquisition was especially depressing. Pictures of werewolves burning at the stake, coupled with graphic descriptions of the torture methods used to get confessions from suspected witches, wolves and vampires. Iron maidens, thumbscrews, bootikins; I hurt just reading about them. Some lupine historians thought that once there’d been all kinds of supernatural creatures in the world, not just wolves. Fairies, vampires, other species of shifters...and all wiped out in the Middle Ages. I stared at a photo of a vampire from a recent film, the actor made-up to look pallid and corpse-like, but still very alluring. Sharp cheekbones and delicate fangs that didn’t look capable of piercing an apple, let alone human flesh. He held a swooning beauty in his arms, her expression rapt as he bared those useless teeth at her. I wondered if Hollywood would romanticize vampires so much if they existed today, picking on virgins and bleeding them dry.

  “This place is miserable,” I told Shannon after the torture-chamber display. The room was full of life-size models of racks and ducking stools, the walls lined with yet more pictures of people burned alive. I knew I was imagining the smell of smoke and ash, but in the dimly-lit room, surrounded by instruments of death, it was hard to think of anything else. My wolf, restless again, hated it. She longed for sunlight and open spaces and this cramped room of torture-porn contraptions was too much for her.

  Shannon nodded. “I think we’ve seen enough,” she agreed. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so depressing.”

  “No wonder so many people think Le Monstre is a werewolf,” I said as we headed for the exit. “The whole bloody country’s conditioned to see us as cannibals.”

  A passing tourist entering the museum shot me an odd look. I ignored him, focusing on the smell of ham and cheese crêpes cooking on the street outside. My wolf wanted meat, wanted to hunt, in fact. This morning’s little romp round the living room felt like a lifetime ago and hadn’t done much to take the edge off the wolf’s impatience.

  “I need to change,” I told Shannon, feeling the wolf scrape her claws inside me, pushing her way to the front of my mind. It was an itch I couldn’t scratch, a burn I couldn’t relieve. Changing this morning for such a short time had probably just made things worse, frustrating the wolf with a quick taste of freedom.

  We scanned the street for a changing booth, but there was nothing nearby. “Can’t you wait till we get to Loup Garou?” Shannon asked.

  I shook my head. I could have, but I didn’t want to. Running around Loup Garou wouldn’t be any more satisfying that running around the flat. I needed real exercise, the chance to stretch my legs and work off this bubbling energy before it got the better of me.

  Once, when we were kids, Vince and I had dared each other to see how long we could go without shifting. I didn’t have much impulse control as a child: I lasted a day before I gave in. Vince did much better, lasting a whole three days. The problem was, when he reached his limit, he was in school. Geography, I think. He didn’t choose to end the dare and shapeshift. His wolf took over and he fell into an involuntary change in the middle of the lesson. It was all down to good luck and a very patient teacher that nobody was hurt. Suppressing the instinct to shift was dangerous. Some pregnant wolves coped just fine, the maternal instinct to protect the cub overriding the urge to shift. Others needed all the help they could get to keep it under control, all the herbs and potions on the market. For the rest of us, it was dangerous to ignore the instinct, physically, psychologically and socially. Vince could have hurt someone—could have hurt himself. The pair of us got a severe dressing down, a week’s worth of detention and weren’t allowed to sit next to each other in class for the rest of the year because we were clearly corrupting each other.

  The memory of Vince’s shift had stayed with me. It was like an epileptic fit almost, limbs shaking, body seizing as the wolf forced itself out. Unlike a controlled shift, where you were at least ready for the flashes of pain and could keep a grip on yourself, an involuntary shift grabbed you by surprise and threw you into wolf shape in a riot of agony and nausea. I didn’t fancy going through that in the middle of dinner in a fancy Parisian bistro.

  In the end, feeling a little dirty for it, I ducked into a public toilet and shifted in the disabled cubical, passing my clothes under the door to Shannon beforehand. The change was a massive relief, my wolf body feeling far more natural, far more comfortable than the human body I’d abandoned. I sniffed around the cubicle quickly to make sure there was nothing interesting I’d missed with my dull human nose, then nudged the door open to join Shannon.

  I butted my head against her hip, demanding attention, and she ruffled my ears quickly. “Happy now?” she asked. I swiped my tongue across her hand in the affirmative and she grinned down at me. “Then let’s see if Clémence has found our wayward mother-to-be yet, shall we?”

  I resisted the urge to growl at Clémence’s name, obviously more jealous than I’d let myself believe. I kept quiet though, feeling very proud of myself for doing so, and trotted down the street with Shannon, pressing as close to her as I could without knocking her over. The day had turned bright and warm and the streets of Versailles were crowded. We had to push our way through knots of teenagers and aimless wanderers. It wasn’t quite the run I’d wanted, but it was better than nothing and there were plenty of interesting things on the pavement for me to sniff at, causing Shannon to grumble in mock-annoyance.

  “If I knew all it took to make you happy was the occasional piece of dried-up chewing gum—” She broke off with a yelp as a brick came flying out of the crowd, smashing i
nto the wall behind her.

  I yelped too, leaping away from my tantalizing bit of gum to look for the culprit. Shannon jumped away from where she’d been standing, shaking with adrenaline. “Fucking hell...”

  Another brick crashed into the pavement at my feet, missing me by a hair’s breadth. I barked, leapt in front of Shannon to protect her. Shannon was looking around, blonde hair whipping across her face as she searched the crowd. Suddenly she cried out, drawing an instinctive snarl from me.

  “You little twat!” she shouted. “What is wrong with you?”

  I spun in the direction she was yelling, saw a teenager hefting a third brick in his hand a few feet away. The crowd had cleared around him, people either stopping to watch with gaping interest or hurrying past with their eyes fixed firmly ahead. He spat at us, face twisted in a nasty sneer.