Location, Location, Damnation

by Nick Moseley

  'I've had one pint,' Trev admitted, 'that's all. It was a work bash that I couldn't get out of. They'd have asked me lots of annoying questions on Monday if I hadn't turned up.'

  Miss Pine shook her head. 'I'm starting to think you're not taking this seriously. Going out drinking isn't the recommended preparation for hunting vampires.'

  'One pint, honest,' said Trev, holding up his hands in surrender. 'Blimey.'

  Miss Pine gave him a hard look for a second. 'All right then, what's your plan?'

  'Plan?' said Trev, caught off guard. He realised that hadn't really thought about things in those terms. 'Um. Well, you change into a wolf and sniff Corbyn out, I give him a beating, he gives me the info I need, we go home feeling smug. How about that?'

  'You've not thought about this at all, have you?'

  'Well…'

  'For God's sake. I told you, Corbyn is dangerous,' Miss Pine snapped. 'We can't just blunder about and hope for the best. If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm going to go home and leave you to it.'

  'Wait, wait,' said Trev, putting out a hand but stopping short of actually taking hold of her arm. 'Listen, Louise. Can I call you Louise?'

  'No.'

  'How about Lou?'

  'Only if you want me to kill you while you sleep.'

  'That sounds like a "no", then.' Trev sighed. 'OK, fine. Listen, Miss Pine. I am taking this seriously, believe me. I don't want to die.' He patted the weapons at his waist. 'I can do the fighting part, but tracking people down is a bit new to me. I'd appreciate any advice or ideas you have.'

  'Better,' said Miss Pine brusquely. 'Right. When I was looking into Vicki's disappearance the trail led me to the riverside area, specifically one of the new executive housing developments. I had a look around and came to the conclusion that she'd been there but had moved on, or been moved on. There were strong traces of vampire there, as well. I'm pretty sure that Corbyn lives somewhere there, which is why I believe the rumours that he was involved. I didn't have anything solid enough to go to the Custodians with, though, and I didn't think it was a good idea to confront him myself.'

  'Well I'll make sure I ask him about Vicki when I talk to him,' said Trev.

  'I know. It's the only reason I'm helping you.'

  'Damn, I thought it was my natural charm.'

  'I've scraped more charming things than you out of my fur after a night in the woods.'

  'You're too kind. So, do you have a plan of your own?'

  'I have a good idea which block Corbyn lives in. We go there and I'll try to narrow it down to a specific flat for you as best I can. Getting in might be a problem, but there's an underground car park beneath the block – that’s probably our best point of entry. If you can confront him in his flat, I think he'll be less likely to start a fight. He doesn't want the police turning up.'

  'Couldn't he just hypnotise them?'

  'Maybe, but it wouldn't be easy. Vampire hypnosis is good for giving people simple commands, but not so good for making any kind of lasting alterations or suggestions. It needs constant reinforcement. He couldn't do that to one policeman with his colleagues standing there watching.'

  'I get it. You know, I don't think your plan's all that different from my plan,' grumbled Trev. 'It just has more detail.'

  'It's the detail that's the important part,' Miss Pine replied.

  'I suppose,' Trev admitted, although he was quite pleased with the idea that he might not have to fight Corbyn after all. 'Let's give it a try and see if it works. What's the first step?'

  Miss Pine slipped out of her coat and handed it to Trev. 'The first step is that I have to go and change, and if I catch you peeking you're a dead man.'

  Thirty-Eight

  'What sort of bloke do you think I am?' asked an indignant Trev.

  'The fact that you are a bloke is enough,' Miss Pine replied. 'You're all pretty much the same. Any glimpse of naked female flesh and your brains stop working.'

  'That's bollocks, I think you'll find that–' Trev began, but tailed off as Miss Pine pulled at the loose neck of her jumper, exposing both her bare shoulder and her black bra strap. 'Er,' he finished.

  Miss Pine let go of her jumper and smirked at Trev. 'You see?'

  'You caught me off guard, that's all,' muttered Trev half-heartedly. He didn't mind much; it had been a nice-looking shoulder.

  'If you're that easy to catch off guard, we're in trouble.' Miss Pine reached behind a tree and pulled out a large rucksack. She took her coat back from Trev, folded it, and tucked it inside. 'All right, I'm going to go into the trees, stash my clothes in this bag and come back to you in my wolf shape. I'll do my best to lead you to Corbyn but then you're on your own. I won't involve myself in any fighting, if it comes to that. I don't want him to see me and decide he wants to take revenge on me and my friends sometime.'

  'If that's how you want it,' Trev said, shrugging. 'How will we communicate once you're wolfed up? How about one bark for yes, two barks for no?'

  'Or how about I nod for yes and shake my head for no?' Miss Pine answered, ably demonstrating the head-shaking part.

  'Oh yeah, that could work.'

  'Let's hope so. Do you want to write it down somewhere, or do you think you can remember it?'

  'You know, I liked you better when you were flashing your bra strap at me.'

  Miss Pine snorted. 'I bet you did. You'd better have a good memory, because that's the last time you'll be seeing any of my underwear.'

  Trev stroked his chin thoughtfully. 'Unless I come round your house and steal some off your washing line.'

  'Now that's just wrong.'

  'Joking.'

  'Are you sure? Come to think of it, you look the knicker-sniffing type.'

  'Do I? Damn, and I thought my image said "successful young professional".'

  'Not unless they have professional knicker-sniffers, and I'm pretty sure they don't.'

  'You mean the Job Centre lied to me?'

  Miss Pine laughed. 'Well, at least you don't mind sending yourself up. I suppose that gets you a few points.' She sighed. 'I've got to go and change now. Can't keep putting it off.'

  'How painful is it?' asked Trev, remembering the horrible sounds Jack had made while transforming.

  'My entire skeletal and muscular structures have to rearrange themselves around my internal organs,' replied Miss Pine. 'How painful do you think it is?'

  Trev grimaced. 'I'm going to guess "very".'

  'Wow, and you didn't even have to phone a friend.'

  'Just as well really, I haven't got any. Nobody likes to socialise with a knicker-sniffer.'

  'You don't say.'

  Trev shifted from one foot to the other. 'Is it something you can control? Your changing, I mean. Could you go your whole life and just… not do it?'

  'No, I couldn't.' Miss Pine's expression said plainly that she wished she could. 'I, we, can keep it suppressed most of the time, but it has to come out every once in a while. I never heard of any werewolf who could go for more than a month without changing.'

  'The full moon?' Trev guessed.

  'That's when the most changes happen, but not because of the full moon itself,' Miss Pine replied.

  Trev looked confused. 'I don't follow.'

  'The full moon doesn't actually have any effect,' she explained. 'It's no more difficult to resist the change at full moon than it is at any other time. The problem is that almost all the historic stories and pop-culture references to werewolves say that the full moon forces the change, and a lot of werewolves believe it, even when they know better. They believe that the full moon weakens their control, and so it does.'

  'So the whole full moon thing is,' Trev groped for the word, 'psychosom… er.'

  'Psychosomatic,' Miss Pine finished for him. 'Yes.'

  'If it's not the full moon then, what does cause the change?'

  'You have the Sight,' Miss Pine said, gesturing at Trev. 'It means you're attuned to a particular type of energy. Werewolves are the
same, in a way, but with less control. Psychically speaking, we're a bit like TV's that can only receive one channel.'

  'And what's on?'

  'Bestial spirits from another plane of existence.'

  'Er…'

  'We have an involuntary link to some pretty freaky entities. Powerful lupine spirits. We’re like beacons to them. They can force their influence through from their own plane, using us as conduits. When they break through they can start messing about with our anatomies. With the right training it's possible to harness the change, but it's not easy.

  'I see.'

  'I doubt it.' She sighed. 'I don't want to be rude, but is that it for the questions? We ought to get started.'

  'Yeah.' Trev scratched his head. 'Go and do your thing. I'll wait over there.'

  Miss Pine walked off without another word. Trev moved a short distance away, gazing out through the trees to the road beyond.

  He pretended he couldn't hear the cracking and growling noises behind him.

  A minute or two after the sounds stopped, the hair on his arms and the back of his neck suddenly stood up. He swivelled around to find the wolf sitting behind him. It had moved through the trees in absolute silence. Only his spooky sixth sense had alerted him to its presence.

  It. He found he couldn't reconcile the creature eyeballing him, and the attractive woman he had been talking to just a few minutes previously, as the same being. The fact that he knew it was her was neither here nor there. His brain simply rebelled at the idea, refusing to label the wolf as anything other than "it".

  'Ready then?' he asked quietly, trying not to show his unease.

  The wolf dipped its head once and rose to its feet. It was a little smaller than the one Jack had turned into back at the church hall, although it looked more, well, wolflike. Jack's wolf-form had seemed misshapen, the transformation somehow incomplete. Trev wondered if that was a reflection of the man's obvious instability.

  Miss Pine's wolf-form was, in comparison, sleeker and less awkward. It would never have passed for a real wolf under any sort of close inspection, but from a distance or in the dark it would've been convincing enough. The eyes were the biggest give-away, even in the weak half-light of the moon. They were upsettingly human.

  'I'll walk along the pavement, you stay in the trees until we get to the apartments,' Trev said.

  The wolf rolled its eyes, giving Trev a hairier version of the "well duh" expression Miss Pine had favoured him with earlier, and dipped its head again.

  Trev moved out of the trees and started to walk toward the riverside housing developments, doing his best to appear nonchalant. There was a sparse flow of late-night traffic, mostly taxis, but only a handful of pedestrians. The few people that were out walking kept their heads down and paid Trev no attention. Staring at strangers on the street in the middle of the night was not a clever idea, in Brackenford or any other town.

  Trev could feel the presence of the werewolf in the trees to his left as it kept pace with him, and he had to continually fight the urge to look in that direction. Determined to maintain his aura of outward calm, he concentrated his attention on the riverside flats as they came into view to his right.

  Cinnamon Quay enjoyed a reputation as Brackenford's swankiest housing development. It was less than five years old and Trev could clearly remember the pair of large warehouses that had been demolished to make way for its construction. There had been a certain amount of outcry at the time because a local residents' group had wanted the land turned into a park; they had run a well-publicised campaign in the local media – attracting the support of one Alastair Kolley, no less – but in the end the Brackenford Council's planning department had come down in favour of a wealthy property development company, amid rumours of back-handers and clandestine meetings.

  SmoothMove had sold a couple of the flats during Trev's time with the company, and he knew that they weren't cheap. Even the smallest ones sold for the sort of money that could buy a decent-sized house elsewhere in the town. A wall surrounded the site, and although it was tasteful in style its message was unmistakable. The residents of Cinnamon Quay liked to preserve both their privacy and their feeling of exclusivity. The rest of the town could stand outside and peer through the gates, but they couldn't come in without an invitation.

  Trev crossed the road and passed by the main entrance. The front gates were electric and could be opened by the residents from inside their cars. Beyond them lay a small visitors' car park, and beyond that Trev could see the doors to the building's reception area. There was also another, smaller, gate for pedestrian access at the side, which was unlocked by entering a code into a keypad mounted into the wall. Without either a remote transmitter for the main gates or the code for the side gate, the only ways in were either to use the intercom to get one of the residents to buzz you through, or to climb over the wall.

  Considering the wall had ornate, yet still very sharp-looking, spikes atop it, Trev hoped he wouldn't have to resort to climbing. If push came to shove, he reckoned that attempting to talk one of the residents into letting him in was worth a try, but only as a last resort. He didn't think strolling in through the front entrance was a good idea anyway.

  Following the wall, Trev turned off the street and onto an access road which led up the side of the development. Having been to Cinnamon Quay several times to do viewings on the flats SmoothMove had marketed, he knew that this was where the entrance to the underground parking garage Miss Pine had mentioned was located. It was guarded by a large pair of steel doors emblazoned with the words "KEEP CLEAR". Trev knew that these could only be opened from outside by the same remote control devices that opened the main gates.

  To the left of the garage doors was the pedestrian entrance to the garage, an unmarked door that was, like the equivalent gate at the front, secured with a keypad-activated lock.

  Trev stopped in front of the door and frowned. He knew that the easiest way to get the door open would be to use one of his vapour weapons, but he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to add breaking and entering to his CV. Although he'd been given the code for the gates when he'd visited for the viewings, the intervening months meant that he couldn't quite remember it.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of claws on tarmac as the werewolf broke the cover of the trees, sprinted across the road and ducked into the shadowy bushes growing alongside the wall. Its head emerged and regarded Trev with a questioning expression.

  'I'm trying to remember the code for the door,' Trev whispered. 'They gave it to me when I came here to do some viewings a few months ago.'

  The werewolf scowled, then looked pointedly from Trev's waist to the door and back again.

  Trev sighed. 'Yes, I could use a vapour weapon to cut my way in, but I think we should keep that as plan "B" for now.'

  The werewolf cocked its head to one side and stared at him. Trev ignored it and tried to think. The code had definitely been four digits, and he remembered it beginning with a "1".

  The werewolf growled and looked from Trev to the door again.

  'I'm thinking,' he said. The reply was another growl, this one quite a lot more threatening. 'Right, fine,' snapped Trev, drawing Caladbolg. The lightning-blade flashed into life, illuminating the door. Trev stepped forward, intending to run the sword up the door frame and cut through the lock, but then he stopped and peered at the keypad.

  In the glare of the sword's light, fingerprints showed up on four of the smooth metal keys. This immediately told Trev which four digits he needed, and with that information his memory obligingly coughed up the code.

  'Aha!' he said.

  Another werewolf? observed Caladbolg. You keep some accursed company, lad.

  'Whatever,' said Trev, shutting the sword down and holstering it. He pressed 1-8-7-9 on the keypad and the door clicked. 'OK, let's have a look inside.'

  He eased the door open and peered through the crack. The interior of the garage was far more utilitarian than the smart façade presented by t
he flats above. A shallow ramp descended from the entrance down to a plain concrete floor, stained here and there with patches of oil and tyre marks. Thick concrete pillars supported the roof; each had a number stencilled on it in yellow paint, identifying which flats the parking spaces belonged to.

  'No-one down there,' Trev called back over his shoulder to the werewolf lurking in the bushes. 'Shall we?'

  He held the door open and the creature shot past him in a brown blur, slipping between two of the parked cars and crouching down. Trev pulled the door shut behind him and strode down the ramp.

  'A few nice motors in here,' he remarked, casting an eye around the garage. The expected BMW's, Mercedes-Benzes and Audis were interspersed with a few rather more exotic marques. Trev spotted a couple of Maseratis, an Aston Martin, three Ferraris and a Lamborghini, along with a handful of classics. Trev had had a keen interest in classic cars as a child, and he paused to peer in through the driver's window of a gleaming E-Type Jaguar, noting that the interior was similarly pristine. 'Nice,' he said again.

  A low growl from behind him brought his mind back to the present. 'All right, all right,' he muttered. He turned around. 'So, any trace of Corbyn?' The werewolf dipped its head. 'We're in the right place then. Can you sniff out which is his parking space? Then we'll be able to get his flat number.'

  The werewolf nodded again and moved off between the cars, its nose held close to the concrete. Keeping a nervous watch on the doors, Trev followed.

  He was led around the outside of the garage at first, then as his guide picked up the scent they began to circle inwards. Eventually the werewolf sat down in the middle of an empty parking space and barked.

  'Number twenty-nine,' said Trev, checking the pillar. He scuffed at a patch of oil with his foot, smearing it. 'There's been a car here recently, by the looks of it. Corbyn must've gone out for a drive.' He puffed out his cheeks. 'What now? We could try and get into his flat and wait for him to get back, but for all we know he's gone away for a week or something.' The werewolf opened its jaws in a wide yawn and settled down on the floor. 'You want to wait for a bit, then?' He got a nod.