A Werebear Scare

by Nova Nelson

  Before he could reply, Virgil stomped out of the kitchen looking frazzled and stopped in his tracks when his eyes landed on Ruby. He rolled his shoulders back and approached at a less hurried rate.

  “Morning, Sleuth Leader. Morning, Ruby.”

  “Morning,” Ruby replied, and Zax simply said, “A word outside?”

  Virgil glanced over his shoulder at the two tables with occupants and hesitated. “It’s just me and Abigail right now.”

  “Abigail,” Zax called to her as she was carrying an empty tray to the kitchen. She looked up, saw who it was, and her eyes grew large. “We need to steal Virgil for a second. Would you cover for him?”

  She nodded adamantly, and Zax nodded and rewarded her with a charming grin.

  “There,” he said, turning to Virgil, “you’re all set.”

  But Virgil’s hesitance didn’t end there. He slinked after Zax as they exited the restaurant, cut through the lobby of the lodge, and stepped out into the pleasant spring air.

  “I understand you weren’t scheduled to work today,” said Zax, jumping right into it. Ruby appreciated the candor.

  Virgil nodded. “Yeah, my brother sent me a message asking if I’d cover for him today. He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

  “And was Abigail scheduled to work?”

  Virgil shrugged. “How would I know?”

  Ruby arched an eyebrow at him. “Is there not a schedule posted?”

  “Well, sure, but why bother checking it? I just come in when I’m told and leave when I’m cut.”

  Ruby doubted that, but she let it drop. The fact that he was being this evasive meant he knew something was up, and had known since before they’d arrived, most likely.

  “So you don’t know where Opal is right now?” Zax asked.

  “Nope. She isn’t my responsibility… thankfully.”

  Ruby cocked her head to the side. “And what do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” he said quickly. “She’s just one of those women who’s a handful.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Ruby persisted, feeling slightly offended on Opal’s behalf and wondering vaguely how many men had referred to her as “a handful” in that diminishing tone before.

  He looked like he was about to clam up completely, but Zax stepped in. “You mean she gets around?”

  Ruby stifled a gasp at the bluntness, then felt a warm heat in her chest as she stared at Zax’s confident expression.

  Virgil shifted his weight on his feet then finally said, “Yeah, that’s about it.”

  “Has she been unfaithful to Swamy with anyone besides your brother?”

  “You know about that?”

  “I could ask you the same,” Zax countered.

  Virgil paused, a muscle in his jaw flexing. Then he said, “Nah, no one that I know of. I mean, it’s not that she hasn’t tried.”

  Both Zax and Ruby stayed quiet, and Virgil went on. “She came onto me a few months back, okay? We were working late together, and—please don’t mention this to Cedric.”

  “Of course not,” said Zax and Ruby together.

  “After our shift, we were closing up, wiping down tables and such, and… she cornered me. Right there in the dining room! Windows all around, a straight view from the lodge. Anyone could have seen.” He paused. “And, you know… I think someone did.”

  Ruby’s gut clenched and she already guessed what he was about to say, but she needed to hear it anyway. “Who was that?”

  Virgil couldn’t meet their eyes, but instead stared at the ground and kicked at some of the decomposing pine needles instead. “Swamy. I think he mighta seen.”

  Zax leaned in close. “Seen what?”

  “She kissed me. And, unfortunately, I didn’t have a good mind to push her off me right away. I mean, it’s Opal. She’s not exactly ugly, and she’s always been a good time to work with. But then I remembered she was in a relationship, and I broke the kiss.”

  “And you saw Swamy watching?” Zax asked.

  “Well, no. But he appeared in the lobby to walk her home maybe twenty seconds later. And he was acting a little strange.”

  “What do you mean?” Ruby prodded.

  Virgil squinted up toward the treetops now, his face scrunching with strain. “I don’t know. Maybe a little too friendly? I might have just been paranoid. Maybe I was expecting him to rush in and kick my hide for kissing his woman, and when he didn’t… it all seemed off. But then again, maybe he just didn’t see it. Maybe I got lucky with timing for once.”

  Zax said, “And you said this was a couple of months ago?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that why you waited to mention it?”

  “Huh?” Virgil met his eyes now, and genuine concern filled them. “No, no. I didn’t wait to tell you like I was holding it back. I just thought of it now. I mean, fang and claws, Zax, if you haven’t heard the rumors about her before, you haven’t been paying attention! I only told you my story because I know it as a fact. But I’ve heard tales from plenty of other werebears about them having similar experiences with her… and some of them didn’t claim to have exercised the restraint I did.”

  “I’m glad to see you can separate fact from conjecture,” Zax said sharply. “Because we do not spread rumors about each other in this sleuth, understand?”

  Virgil held his hands up, palms out. “Oh, trust me, I know! Why do you think I mentioned my situation first? Like I said, everything else is just rumor, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it to anyone but the two of you and for this situation.”

  Ruby cut in. “You think her cheating is relevant to this situation?”

  He shrugged. “Could be. But then again, it might just be a matter of Taurus.”

  Ruby shut her eyes so no one could see her roll them.

  “You stick by that?” Zax said. “That it was Taurus who attacked you in the woods?”

  “I do,” Virgil replied firmly. “I’ll admit, I started doubting my own eyes right after I spoke with you both the first time, but then… I saw him again last night.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Ruby’s eyes shot wide. “You did? You saw Taurus last night?”

  She turned to Zax to get his reaction, but he was unreadable as he stared at Virgil.

  “Yeah. And I know you don’t believe me. But trust me when I say I’d rather it be anything else that I’ve seen twice now. I don’t want it to be Taurus, but there’s just no getting around it, as far as I’m concerned. He’s attacked me once”—he clutched the bandage on his arm—“and if I hadn’t hurried inside last night, I think he might’ve attacked me again.”

  “And where were you when this occurred?” Zax said.

  “At home. I was sitting on the front porch, having a drink and whittling a rattle for the Fontaines’ new baby girl. I heard a rustling in the woods and near about wet myself when I saw something large move between two trees. I’m not embarrassed to tell you I hurried my hide inside the house and locked the door, and when I looked out the window, I saw him. He’d come out of the clearing and was heading straight for my cabin.”

  “And then what?”

  Virgil cringed. “I don’t know. I hurried to the closet under the stairs to grab the battle hammer my grandfather passed down to me, and then spent the rest of the night in my bedroom clutching the thing.”

  While Virgil wasn’t as tall as Cedric or Zax, he was by no means a dainty man, and the fact that someone of his stature would be so afraid of whatever it was that was outside his window shook Ruby more than she liked to admit. It took everything in her not to check over her shoulder at that very minute to make sure nothing was creeping out of the woods that surrounded the lodge. Thankfully, she had Clifford by her side, and he could smell a threat a hundred yards downwind of him.

  “Describe to me again,” she said, “what Taurus looked like?”

  Virgil humored her, and the description hadn’t changed since the first time.

  “See, here’s the thing,” she sa
id. “I’ve researched Taurus since we last met, and what slim information there is says nothing about him being anything other than a purebred minotaur. But what you describe seems to be more of a cross between a minotaur and a werebear.”

  “Maybe the legend got it wrong,” Virgil offered.

  “Hmm…” said Ruby, unconvinced. “Would you help me disprove a theory, Mr. Pine?”

  He straightened up and nodded.

  “Would you remove your bandages for a moment?”

  The werebears swapped confused looks, then Virgil shrugged and agreed.

  Once the bandages were removed, Ruby inspected the wounds on his arm.

  They were deep and angry, that was for sure, and the entire area was covered in tar-like remnants of a clotted, muddy substance. “Is this the salve you made?” she asked Zax.

  “Yes.”

  “And does it contain any phoenix blood?”

  His cocoa eyebrows shot up his forehead. “No. Why?”

  Rather than answering, she turned to Virgil. “Has the skin begun to rot at all? Any sort of yellowing around the edges of the wound? Any peeling?”

  Virgil cringed at the description. “No. Not at all. Why?”

  She leaned closer over the wounds, inspecting them until she was satisfied. Then she stepped back and said, “Minotaur wounds are necrotic. They kill the skin and tissue, rot it away. The only way to stop that process from happening is with a salve that includes phoenix blood. Therefore, I can conclude with some degree of certainty that you were not attacked by a minotaur.”

  Virgil blinked at her. “Okay. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t Taurus. Maybe his claws don’t work the same.”

  Ruby was losing her patience with this nonsense, but she knew it wouldn’t help her achieve her goal if she let it show. “You mentioned that people had been bringing up Taurus a lot prior to your alleged encounter with him.”

  Virgil nodded.

  “Was there anyone who talked about it more than others?” It was her Insight that had led her to ask this question, and it was her Insight that guessed the answer before he spoke it.

  “Well, yes. But… I promised I wouldn’t say anything.”

  “Ooh, this is interesting,” Clifford said.

  Zax took the bait. “Wouldn’t say anything about what?”

  “He didn’t want me to tell anyone because he was afraid no one would believe him. And now that I’ve seen it too and told people, I know he was right.” A bitterness crept into Virgil’s rushed words. “I mean, heck, I didn’t really believe him when he said it. If I had, I wouldn’t have gone.”

  Zax took a hurried step closer to Virgil and barked, “Slow down.” He did. “Who didn’t want you to tell anyone that he’d seen Taurus?”

  “Swamy.”

  “And where wouldn’t you have gone?”

  “The Silent Reach. That’s where he’d seen Taurus. He said he’d seen the thing a couple of times, and one had been the night before in the Silent Reach. He asked if I wanted to go for a run with him to track it, and I agreed.”

  “And that was the night you were attacked in the woods?” Ruby asked.

  Virgil balled his hands into fists and shoved them in the pockets of his apron. “Yeah.”

  Ruby found this new development equal parts interesting and infuriating, and Zax seemed to be on the same page. His impatience was poorly disguised as he asked his next question. “How come you never mentioned that you had plans to meet with Swamy the night you were attacked and the night before he went missing?”

  Virgil opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. His eyes bounced between Ruby and Zax, and eventually landed on his leader. “Well, it would have seemed suspicious, wouldn’t it? I make plans with the missing person, and I come back with scratches on me. Might look like I tried to kill him but failed, so I finished the job the next night.”

  “Yes,” Ruby said softly, “it might look just like that.”

  “But I didn’t!” he protested. “That wasn’t how it went down at all! So I didn’t see why mentioning it would have done anyone any good. Besides, I never even saw him that night.”

  Ruby’s breath caught in her chest. “Which night? The night you two were going into the Silent Reach or the night he disappeared?”

  “The first one. Well, both, actually. We were supposed to meet there after I got off my shift and closed up. At eleven o’clock, we said. I got off work early, though, and decided to head straight out.”

  “And what time was that?” Ruby prodded.

  “Maybe ten forty-five or thereabouts. Not too much earlier.”

  “And how long were you out there before the attack happened?”

  “Maybe five minutes? I’d just had enough time to shift and get a few runs in. That’s when I saw him.”

  “Swamy?” she asked.

  “No, Taurus. He was standing on the other side of the creek from me.”

  Ruby’s vision of Taurus charging flashed back into her mind and sent a wave of goosebumps washing over her skin. “And you never saw Swamy in the Reach that night?”

  “No. As soon as I was attacked, I fled back home. I spent the rest of the night shook up and cleaning my wounds. I wasn’t sure what to do because I knew no one would believe me. By the next night, the scratches were looking so bad that I asked Zax if he’d bring something over in the morning. ”

  “Did you contact Swamy to let him know what happened?”

  “I did. I thought about going over to his house, but, well, I was scared to leave mine. So I sent an owl over, asking him to come see me after work the next day so we could talk.”

  “And did he?”

  “No. He never responded and never showed.”

  By that point, Virgil was appearing entirely browbeaten, his eyes downcast and his shoulders hunched, and Ruby suspected there wasn’t much left to wring out of him. It was unfortunate that he’d not mentioned all of this sooner, but she understood his reasoning. The whole situation didn’t look good for him.

  “We’d better let you get back to work,” she said, and Virgil nodded somberly.

  Zax, meanwhile, had stood silently with his thick arms crossed in front of his broad chest for the entire last part of the conversation, and remained that way as Virgil turned and left.

  Was he too disappointed in his sleuth member’s conduct to speak, or was that suspicion on his face?

  Ruby waited until Virgil was back inside, then said, “Care for a cup of tea?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Bloom was thankful to be done with the ruckus down at Sheehan’s Pub (five leprechauns, two werewolves, and a knife-wielding pixie in custody until they could all cool down and make good with each other), but she cringed at the thought of how much paperwork was going to come out of it.

  Deputy Titterfield had been right to summon her when he did; the pixie had a crazed look in his eyes, and three of the leprechauns had stuck themselves to a shouting and flailing werewolf by the time she’d arrived.

  Brawls down at Sheehan’s weren’t uncommon, even before noon on a Friday, but they could get ugly.

  However, now she had another important task to attend to and expected it to make prying leprechauns off a werewolf seem like a fun party game in comparison.

  The exterior of the Eastwind Watch’s headquarters was as self-reverential as anyone who’d read the newspaper might expect. It was a wide, one-story stone building with the words The Eastwind Watch carved into an ornate stone archway above the entrance. And below that inscription was, in bold Enochian letters, their motto, which they told everyone translated to “A clear eye in uncertain times.”

  Of course, as one of the only three beings in Eastwind who knew Enochian, the language of angels, and as the only fluent speaker, Sheriff Bloom knew that the phrase translated to more precisely to, “A transparent eyeball in probable intervals.”

  She’d never bothered to correct them on it, mostly because it gave her a much needed chuckle every time she saw it printed at the t
op of the daily paper. And seeing it carved in stone for generations to come was even more delightful.

  On each side of the archway was a statue—the one on the left was a witch pointing his wand up toward Heaven (or the general direction of it), and on the right was a werewolf, mid-shift, howling (again, in the general direction of Heaven).

  How pretentious can you get? she thought.

  Bloom passed between the statues and under the archway and entered through the heavy wooden doors.

  As stately as the outside looked, the inside was an entirely different story.

  While a prim and proper elf sat patiently behind a stone reception desk and asked the sheriff how she could help her, just a little farther on inside, a faun sprinted from one cubical to another, screaming incoherently with a fistful of parchment in his hand, and two ogres shouted monosyllabically at one another across a flimsy wooden desk. Owls swooped low overhead, grabbing sheets of parchment from raised hands and dropping them on the heads of other employees who hardly seemed to notice. Bloom thought she smelled smoke, but she decided not to inquire further into that; unless she saw flames, there was no need to make it her problem.

  “Can I help you?” the elf asked again, smiling like nothing insane was happening right behind her.

  “I need to speak with Mr. Flufferbum.”

  The elf’s grin grew wider, but it didn’t quite show her teeth. “I’m afraid he’s terribly busy at the moment.”

  “I assume he’s always busy, if not with the publication, with keeping this place from collapsing in on itself. But I need to speak with him anyway. It’s official sheriff’s business. And it’s urgent.”

  The elf’s practiced smile drooped. “Fine. Stay here.” And then she turned on her heel and stomped off. Before she disappeared around the corner, an owl came too near to her head, and she swatted it away. It squawked angrily at her before carrying on with its business.

  A few minutes later, the elf returned, looking much worse for the wear, and escorted Bloom past the chaos of the cubicles and into a private office.

  Arthur Flufferbum didn’t look up from the papers on his desk, even as the elf announced Bloom’s presence and left the two of them alone, shutting the door just a little harder than necessary on her way out.