Big Bad Wolf

by Jayne Hawke

"Describe it? Maybe it's in one of our grimoires, or the database," Ash said.

  I caught a glimpse of a morgen as we passed near the river. The beautiful women drew the attention of anyone interested in women and slowly lured them into a body of water before devouring them. That was a weirdly popular method of predation amongst the fae. I could understand why some people refused to live near the water.

  "It was a heavy black mass of knots."

  Ash pulled up in front of our apartment building. A barghest was lurking in the long grass not too far from our building. I tugged on its internal life magic, just enough to remind it that we weren't weak or easy prey. It slunk away further into the territory, looking for something it could actually handle no doubt.

  "Well, the knots are the natural shifter magic right?"

  "Yea."

  "So, we're looking for something that might possess a shifter and look like a heaving mass of black."

  "Any ideas?"

  Ash dragged his fingers through his hair.

  "Research was always your strong suit."

  I laughed. He'd acted as though he was allergic to books during our training.

  "Didn't you try and tell old Phoenix you were actually allergic to books once?"

  "Yea, I was thirteen, and he was having none of it. That entire supernatural-named generation were such hard asses. I felt pretty bad for poor Cerberus, though. She had it rough with a name like that."

  "She lived up to the name, though! She was vicious, and if anyone dared look at her grimoire they were done for. I'm sure she was behind Swift losing her hand."

  Ash laughed.

  "When we have kids, we're giving them normal names. None of this weird ‘each generation is named after a thing’ business. No, I want to name the boy Rex, and the girl Lily."

  I wrinkled my nose.

  "No, no way. I'm voting for Dean and Bella."

  "Well, Dean is a pretty solid name, and he'd have to be a badass like his Dad."

  I knew he'd approve of the Supernatural reference. Talking about our future kids felt weird though. Ash was my partner, my friend. Sure, he was ridiculously sexy, and I knew there'd be a time when we fell into bed, but that was completely different to madly in love and having kids together.

  "What if it's something from outside of the Isles? It might be worth talking to Rose. Is she still in North Carolina hunting that wendigo?"

  "No, I think she's headed down to Arizona chasing some kitsune. America looks like a lot of fun to do cases in, that huge melting pot of beings. None of the god touched have managed to get a big hold there, either, so there's big shifts between the territories."

  "Maybe we can head over there and grab some cases."

  "In a couple of years maybe, when we're ready."

  Ready to step out of the shadow of our coven and work on our own. Ready to become much more than partners and friends.

  TWENTY

  I'd been through our grimoires twice and hadn't found anything like I'd felt within Ben. That meant it was something we hadn't come across before, which wasn't surprising given I couldn't figure out what it was. Every witch kept a personal grimoire full of their notes about magic and experiences. We put down whatever we learnt from every case, every small detail learnt about magic or magical beings that might be useful. Grimoires were incredibly personal, and no one dared look at another witch's grimoire without clear and explicit permission. Ash and I were always looking through each other grimoires, though. That was just the relationship we had.

  "What about those fae clans that used to hunt shifters? Did they have dullahan in them?" Ash asked as he looked up from his laptop.

  I tried to remember what we'd learnt about those clans. They had been small and kept out of the courts as they were felt to be too uncivilised to deal with running the territories. It was thought that they'd been eradicated a century or so ago when shifters started pushing back and becoming more useful to the ruling fae. Now it was considered very poor form and politically dangerous to do something like that.

  "Maybe. I don't remember much about them. Have you checked our training notes?"

  "I, er... I don't have any notes from that class. I must have been sick."

  "You mean hung over," I said wryly.

  Ash shrugged.

  "Hung over is a type of sick."

  Ash had made the most of his teenage years, taking every moment to drink and enjoy life. I'd been more interested in studying to become the best knight I could be.

  "Ok, have you looked over mine?"

  "Where did you hide them?"

  "I didn't hide them. They're in a perfectly reasonable folder."

  "Your idea of reasonable is very different to mine."

  I took the laptop from him and walked him through my logic.

  Old School > P. > PicaNov > Hunters > Mixed Species

  Ash looked at me.

  "What the Hel is P and PicaNov supposed to mean?"

  "Magpie taught us about them during November when we were sixteen. And P is short for predators."

  "I need to rework your entire file system when we get a break."

  "My system is perfectly logical."

  "P could also stand for prey, or puka, or pixies, or potions. And seriously with Pica Nov? Who calls magpies picapica these days? That's from forever ago."

  I could kind of see his point. It still made complete sense in my head, though.

  "What do my notes say?"

  Small creases formed on Ash's forehead as he focused and read through the short essay I'd written on the subject. Slowly the left corner of his moth scrunched up. He looked downright adorable.

  "So, it looks like there were three main clans throughout the isles. Two more clans fled to Europe when the anti-shifter-hunting law came in. One of those clans was wiped out, it's suspected by pissed off shifters who wanted vengeance, but we can't be sure. Oh, wow, it looks like they cursed some bloodlines and in one case an entire village just so they'd have more shifters to hunt."

  "They were twisted assholes. Got it. Anything that relates to the case? Were any of the packs here linked into these hunting clans somehow? What about the dullahans here?"

  Ash frowned at me.

  "Such impatience."

  "Lives are on the line here."

  "You made some note about there being a marker next to the packs who were turned by the clans. Open up the database and look for packs with this little squiggly star next to them."

  I opened the Knight database on my side and filtered the shifter packs down to those who'd settled in or around Edinburgh. There were only four. The Steel Heart pack, the Shadow Hunt pack, the Blood Rose pack, and the Silent Dawn pack.

  "Wait, wasn't the Silent Dawn a cult type thing where they studied magic and dug around trying to find the supernatural truth?"

  Ash laughed.

  "No, that was the something Order of the Golden Dawn. They were those humans who insisted on digging into the supernatural. Some witches say they got a bit too close to the truth in some cases. Rumours were that a few of the higher ranking fae gently guided them to test how humans would react to the Fall."

  "Could they be tied together, though? Could the Silent Dawn pack have some ties to magic? Maybe they want a bigger territory..."

  "Nah, there are a heap of packs with dawn in the name. They don't get long to choose a pack name and usually end up sticking a couple of words together. I'm sure it meant something to someone, but I doubt it's anything we need to worry about."

  I dug deeper into the Knight database, trying to see if I could get a list of the relevant fae. Maybe there was something to this. The black magic could have been fae, after all. And the dullahan did give us a tenuous fae link. Given how fae-orientated Edinburgh was, I wouldn't be surprised if someone was trying to get the shifters out, and turning them rogue was a pretty good way to do it.

  "So, our current working theory is that a fae's behind this. Right?" Ash asked.

  "It's the best we've got."

&n
bsp; "I'll start making us some food and caffeine, this is going to be a long night."

  We hadn't made anywhere near as much progress on the fae front as I'd hoped. The clans has split apart, some moved away entirely. There was a reasonable chance that they'd reformed under new names and remained hidden. There were certainly enough weird shifter deaths that could be pinned on the clans.

  My phone buzzed, and I knew in my gut that it was another wolf gone rogue. The full moon was the next night. The shifters would be feeling it calling, and it'd make them more vulnerable to whatever fucked up magic hid within Ben.

  "Looks like we're heading to Quarter Mile. A rogue's been spotted hunting a partbreed."

  Ash had taken a break from research and had spent the last half an hour practising his quick draw techniques. No one had been able to draw faster than him in training, and his skills had saved our ass more times than I was willing to admit. Still, the whole process was a bit silly, like a little kid at the beginning of a Western.

  "Quarter Mile, huh? Those rich snobs will be eager to get anything dirty gone quick."

  "Yea, we don't have much time. Come on, we want this one alive."

  I loaded my vials and all into my jacket, and we shot out of the door. This was our chance to talk to another rogue and potentially get some key information.

  Quarter Mile was the very expensive part of the city where the richest and most elite lived and worked. It was something like 95% fae, though the Steel Heart pack had managed to open a gallery there. I was surprised that a partbreed had been allowed to step foot in the neighbourhood.

  We drove into Quarter Mile, where everything was glass and steel which stood in stark contrast to the rest of the far more traditional city. It was sleek, modern, and covered in protective fae magic. The rogue tore around the corner with blood dripping from her lips. This was going to be fun.

  “I suppose I can’t just shoot it?” Ash asked, eyeing the beast as it stalked up to us.

  “Not unless you’ve got friendship rounds loaded into one of your twenty guns.”

  Not rising to my bait, he dropped into a Greco-Roman wrestling stance, arms wide and centre of gravity low, slowly approaching the metre-high beast as it tried to circle him. Picking its moment, the wolf leapt at him with its teeth bared. Ash met its lunge with one of his own, headbutting it in the snout with the combined force of their movement and then throwing it over on its back with his forearm pinning its head to the ground.

  The magic in his tattoos was draining fast as he worked to overpower the huge predator. A quick look around showed me a row of trees in carefully contained insets of dirt along the road the rogue had just come from. I began pulling threads from them one by one, feeding them into his strength tattoos as they emptied.

  The rogue slipped his grasp even as I did and returned to circling, but it was tiring far quicker than Ash was without benefit of continuous magical fortification. He dropped back into his wrestling pose and turned as it did, letting it use up energy pacing, keeping his footing precise, each step in place. When the wolf went to turn and move the other way, he lunged forward and swept a kick along the ground, which it nimbly bounced over. Before he could recover, it landed and jumped at him, landing on his back, its teeth closed around his trapezius.

  He threw himself backwards, landing hard with the huge wolf between him and the hard cement surface they were fighting on. It yelped but held on for several seconds even as he lifted up and slammed down repeatedly, the sound of muscle and bone smashing against cement painful to watch but hardly seeming to affect the rogue. By the time it had let go and struggled out from under his weight, his right trap was in bad shape.

  And still the rogue circled. We needed to get some of those extendo-batons that snick out in movies when the bad guy gets serious. Maybe just a taser, for that matter. With that thought, I briefly considered using some storm magic to try and knock him out, but I wasn’t confident I could get the voltage in the right place to stun without killing. It was definitely an idea to practice, though. Maybe I could try it out on Ash next time he was a bit too much himself.

  The wolf made yet another lunge as I continued to act as a conduit between the life magic in the trees and the tattoos on Ash’s spine. Ash tried to uppercut it in the jaw, but it twisted its head at the last second and bit down on his hand, swallowing the entire fist in its massive jaws and hanging on even as Ash drew a gun with his opposite hand to club it in the side of the head with.

  “Not that this isn’t a fun challenge, but shouldn’t you be bringing him into human form or something?”

  “I could do that, or you could continue to overuse your strength ink until you have to start actually using those pretty muscles.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense! Just fix her!”

  The wolf wasn’t letting go, but I could see it tiring. Ash might win this if I kept feeding him trees, but there were only so many trees to go around and the fae here probably didn’t take kindly to witches using their decorations as batteries. Plus, we’d need the rogue in human form when it was all over anyway.

  I gave him one last burst of strength and then changed my focus, trusting him to handle himself. Sometimes partnership was about blind faith. I reached for the moonlight and began to gather tiny threads. It was slow and difficult, and I had no time to dawdle. I resolved to fill a couple vials of it when time permitted. The moon is one of the more challenging sources of magic despite the legends. When I had enough material to work with, I began to weave a spell to remove the wolf from the rogue in front of us. It wouldn’t be permanent - if such a thing was even possible, it would be a far greater working than this - just enough to put him in a more useful form for the night.

  When I had the spell formed, I resisted the urge to say a semi-ironic prayer to the moon goddesses and unleashed it towards the wolf pinned beneath Ash but still gnawing on his arm for all it was worth. The transformation happened fast, quicker than a natural change, and the sudden change was enough to let her slip free of Ash’s hold and get in several punishing blows to his kidneys before Ash recovered.

  “Calm and easy, doggy,” Ash said, putting some distance between them. “You don’t want to eat Little Red Riding Hood, you want to go back to peacefully pissing on fire hydrants and sniffing buttholes.”

  The jibe didn’t seem to penetrate the fog of whatever was affecting her. Without even appearing to hear it, she cocked her head momentarily and then went for Ash’s legs in a textbook jiu jitsu takedown. Without the wolf in her to give her the supernatural strength needed to face Ash on even terms, her attempt was quickly thwarted. Several painful-looking elbows and a few tense seconds of scuffling later, she was in a knee bar, still struggling but clearly beaten.

  I bent down in front of her to try and get her to calm down and answer our questions, but before I could even open my mouth she had dislocated her own leg and was making a truly feral attempt to fight on.

  “Keep her still,” I said, exasperated, reaching for the bare earth beneath the trees I’d been exploiting at the beginning of the fight.

  Slowly but surely, I pulled the concrete up and over them, threads of earth magic tugging on the sand in the pseudo-rock humans had covered everything in long before shaping rock directly became common practice. The process was easier than it seemed, and within a minute or two of work both combatants were encased to the neck in newly moulded sidewalk.

  Ash glared at me but I ignored him. The sidewalk would only hold them for so long, I hadn’t put enough magic into it to make it permanent, it would fade away in a couple of minutes.

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you hunting here?” I asked the rogue.

  She was thrashing around as best as she could trying to gnaw on the stone around her. Her lips were becoming a bloody mess.

  “Why are you doing this?” I demanded.

  “I need a particular blood to stop the nightmares. They’re devouring my mind. I need to make the nightmares stop,” she snarled.

 
The stone was already beginning to weaken a little giving her more room to throw herself against it.

  “What nightmares? When did they start?”

  “Bad dark nightmares. They haunt me even when my eyes are open. I need blood. I don’t know which blood, a specific blood will end this.”

  She began trying to chew on the stone near her shoulder. Blood trickled down the grey stone. Ash gave me a flat look. She was a frenzied mess. We needed to put her out of her misery.

  I sighed and stepped back pulling on the threads of the stone as I did so. It faded away and settled back into its original form over a few seconds. Ash pulled his gun and shot her between the eyes as she lunged at him. There was a look of peace on her face as the life faded from her there on the tarmac.

  “The snobs are going to be pissed about the mess.”

  “At least she’s not suffering any more.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  "You wrapped me in stone!" Ash huffed.

  "You were entwined with the rogue wolf! What was I supposed to do, wait for you to stop trying to feel her up? Time was ticking."

  "Hey! I wasn't feeling her up."

  "You definitely got closer to her when she was in human form."

  "I admit she was kinda hot... but I wouldn't do that to you! And we're on a job. I'm a pro, dammit."

  "Mhm. Pro. Sure."

  "You still owe me a meal."

  "For what? Saving your ass?"

  "How is wrapping me in stone saving my ass!?"

  "She would have ripped your throat out otherwise!"

  "Have some faith. I totally had her."

  "Of course you did, Romeo."

  "You could at least get me something nice for wrapping me in stone."

  I laughed as he tried to get some stone out of his hair.

  "I suppose I could make you a cup of coffee."

  "No way, I've earnt way more than a measly cup of coffee."

  "You should be congratulating me. I haven't been able to push a shifter from one form to another before."

  He gave me a big sarcastic clap of his hands.