The Lycanthrope's Lawyer

by Jason Rose

  After the debrief with Adrian, which went about as well as could have been expected, Wilson and Joycee stayed back at the office to continue their search for Whiley MacGee’s DC apartment, while Sinn Eirik and I gated to San Francisco to visit Tollivar, Sinn’s mage friend. Adrian and his team headed to the airport. They’re flying back to the East Coast to meet with some of the Werewolf council. I don’t think Adrian completely believes that I have a viable plan, and I think he’s exploring alternative pathways to maintaining his leadership position. I don’t fault him for not completely trusting me—there is a lot at stake, and we barely know each other. At least he listened to my explanation for the actions I took at court, my assessment of the judges and the case against his father; and with Red’s help, he seems to have come around to accepting my way of thinking. He no longer wants to fire me, which is progress, I guess.

  After listening to me talk, Adrian told me he will pay nearly anything to win this case. No price is too great. He truly believes he is the only hope for his people. Putting aside the conceited, self-centric, self-aggrandizing hypocrisy of someone thinking they are the chosen one; I must admit, I’m coming around on this guy. He seems genuine and seems to have his packs’ best interest in mind. Which is all fine and dandy, but I’m still struggling to come up with a viable path to victory. Wanting to win, needing to win, and actually winning, are three different things. Hopefully, Tollivar finds something useful we can use to converge those three separate ideas into a single reality.

  Tolliver is a funny man, there is really no other way to describe him. He’s very San Francisco, even for San Francisco. He makes his home in a historic Haight-Ashbury Mediterranean villa completely renovated and updated with the newest and fanciest modern home technologies. Everything in the entire house, windows, temperature, lighting, is controlled by an app on his cell phone. The whole house is wired for sound and video; there are hidden monitors and speakers everywhere. It’s a millennial’s wet dream of a home. In contradiction to the techy house, Tolliver dresses like a longtime hippy—baggy pants, sandals, a colorful Dashiki shirt, and he rounds it all out with a long, thick mustache partially covering his baby face, and a black bowler hat with a daisy tucked into the band. I think the hat is intended to be ironic. Tolliver is new school San Francisco to his core.

  Tolliver stops orbiting Eirik and leans against his basement bar where Sinn and I are sitting on stools, sipping on sparkling waters, watching and waiting for his assessment.

  “Well, my first thought was that he got Phil’d.”

  “Filled?” I ask.

  “Yes, Phil’d.”

  “With an F? or a PH?” asks Sinn, mostly for my clarification. I have a feeling she knows exactly what he is talking about.

  “PH like as in he got Punxsutawny Phil’d,” replies Tolliver.

  “What the hell is a punxs-a-whatever Phil’d?” I ask.

  “You know, like the groundhog.” The blank confused look on my face must have convinced him I need a further explanation. “You know, like in the Bill Murray movie. You know the one where he keeps living the same day over and over again. Classic Bill Murray! Not as good as What about Bob? Or Caddyshack. Good flick, though.”

  “Okay. I vaguely recall the groundhog movie. I’m still not understanding how it’s relevant to Eirik’s situation.” I look to Sinn for help and I’m met with a slight be patient head nod.

  “First thing you need to understand is that mind control is hard,” explains Tolliver. “The mind is powerful. It is hard to force someone’s mind to do your will. Most mind magic is subtle and, rather than overpowering a mind and forcing it to take an action, which is nearly impossible, it tricks the mind into taking an action.”

  “Okay. And the groundhog fits in where exactly?”

  “Punxsutawny Phil, I came up with that name because the spell’s original name is hard to pronounce.”

  “And pnuxa-whatever-phil is easy to say?”

  “Yes, it is.” Tolliver answers. “Anyhow, it is a clever mind control spell that causes the user to believe they are reliving the same day over and over. Each time the victim relives the day, they choose to take different actions. Partly in an attempt to escape the repeating day, and partly because most humans, and most beings for that matter, have very little self-discipline and quickly get bored.”

  “How long does each day last?” asks Sinn trying to move past the awkward exchange.

  “Not long at all. I mean, the relived days feel like an eternity for the victim, entire twenty-four-hour days, but it all happens very quickly. While the victim relives the same day hundreds, maybe even thousands of times in their head, only seconds will pass in the real world.”

  “What’s the pay-off for this spell?” I ask.

  “Mind control,” answers Tolliver, clearly confused by my question.

  Sinn glances over at me, a half-smirk possessing her perfectly shaped red lips. “Tolliver, what I think Colt is trying to ask is, how? How does this experience lead to mind control?”

  “That’s the cool part. You see, the caster watches the victim from inside the victim’s own head. He watches every choice the victim makes and when the victim finally chooses to take the actions that the spellcaster wants, the caster releases the victim, who then unknowingly takes those actions in real life.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “First thing you need to understand is that mind control is har—.”

  “No, I got that part. What I don’t understand is how you can convince someone to choose to kill their granddaughter by making them relive the same day over and over again.”

  “Oh, that part is easy; people are violent by nature. Werewolves even more so. You know at some point when you have lived the same day over and over again and nothing ever changes, you become crazy and desperate enough to try anything to escape that day. It’s fascinating; you’d think people who were Punxsutany Phil’d would have to relive the same day hundreds or maybe even thousands of times before they became desperate enough to start mass murdering everyone they see—not true. This mind mage in Italy did a study, and he found that for most humans, it took less than twenty resets before they started killing people. Even people they knew and cared about. He hypothesized that the human mind is murderous by its very nature, and freeing it from the shackles of consequence releases the inner human psychopath. Fascinating stuff.”

  “You think it’s okay to experiment on humans?” An edge of anger is creasing my voice.

  “Of course,” answers Tolliver. “How else would we learn anything? Animal studies are great, but they have their limitations. Animals rarely react in the same way a human does.”

  “Colt,” says Sinn in a calming voice, “focus on why we are here.” I glance over at Sinn and nod, steadying my slightly quivering hands that are filling with rage. She’s right, this isn’t the time to deliver a philosophical lesson about the ethics of experimenting on humans, but there will be a time for that conversation.

  “You think Eirik got Punxatawny Phil’d?” I ask, trying to get us back on track.

  “No,” answers Tolliver. “That’s what I first hypothesized. I was wrong. He definitely didn’t get Phil’d.” I glance over at Sinn, tilting my head to the side, signaling this is becoming a huge waste of time. “It was the first thing that popped into my mind when Sinn called,” continues Tolliver, ignorant of my frustration. “Maybe because I just read that Italian study. Recency bias. Hmm, still, it was a likely scenario . . . Now that I’ve examined him, it’s clear his mind isn’t damaged or tricked—it’s gone. There is nothing in there. He is essentially a blank canvas. There are endless experiments I could use him for. Can I keep him?”

  “No,” I answer gruffly.

  Tolliver sighs with disappointment and pulls at one end of his mustache.

  “You say he’s gone,” I ask. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean his mind is no longer in his body. It has been sucked out. It’s gone.”

  “
Can we find it and put it back?”

  “No. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. I’m not even sure how we could even attempt to try and find it.”

  “Then how is he functioning? He eats, sleeps, presumably shits. Sometimes when I talk to him, he has moments where it looks like he might be remembering something.”

  “His body is alive. His brain is still firing, but there are no memories in there. What you are observing is just leftover muscle memory, biological body functions. The body just doing what the body does. Do you know what I’m saying? Eirik Varulv is dead. That right there is just a walking mindless vegetable.”

  “And you can’t tell me who did that to him?”

  “There are lots of spells and creatures who could suck a mind out. Determining which one did it to Eirik by just examining him is nearly impossible. That is something you will have to figure out with good old-fashioned detective work. Have you tried the hotel cameras?”

  “Yes, they weren’t helpful. So you're telling me you can’t help us?”

  “I can rule some possibilities out, like there are no puncture wounds on his head, so his brain wasn’t physically sucked out. It couldn’t have been a Mindsucker or a zombie. But I can’t tell you which of the remaining potential suspects actually did it. That is the less interesting question, though. The more interesting question is how did they control his body after they sucked his mind out?”

  “Mindsucker?” I mouth to Sinn.

  “Squid-faced boogeymen. I don’t think they’re real.”

  “They’re real,” answers Tolliver, with a faraway look in his eyes. “Terrifyingly real. You don’t want to mess with them.”

  “How do you know it was after?” I ask, again trying to keep us on course, not wanting to get sucked into a debate about the existence or non-existence of some nightmarish man-squid creatures.

  Tolliver twists his mustache while wrinkling his brow, “Mr. Valentine, I’m not following you. What are you asking me?” Tolliver picks an e-cigarette up off the bar counter and takes a hit. The scent of cherries mixed with marijuana wafts through the air.

  “How do you know his body was possessed or controlled after his mind was sucked out and not before?” I ask while batting at the smoke in the air, trying to get it to go in the other direction.

  “Sorry, man,” says Tolliver while coughing.

  I give him a plastic smile. A half-hearted signal that his apology is acknowledged.

  “That’s another easy one,” he answers. “There are lots of reasons I know it was after: common sense, an educated guess, economy of action, and, most importantly, I know magic.” He laughs at himself. Neither Sinn nor I join in. “Seriously, though,” he continues, “why go through the trouble of sucking the mind out if you already made the body do what you wanted it to do? It would be way easier to kill him or just leave him to suffer from the consequences of his actions. Nope, I am sure that his mind was removed first and then his body was hijacked. How they did it, how they used his body to kill those people, that’s the interesting question.”

  “You can’t answer that question, either, can you?” prompts Sinn. I glance over at Sinn and nod, hoping she understands my gesture to mean she should lead this discussion. We are still working out each other’s body language and signals. I think she has a better knowledge base and is better equipped to lead this conversation than I am. I know next to nothing about magic and his weirdness is rubbing me the wrong way.

  Tolliver looks down at the floor as if embarrassed. “That’s true, I can’t. I don’t know how they did it. That’s what’s so interesting. I mean, how did they do it?”

  “Do you have any guesses?”

  Tolliver looks up and then hesitates. “There is one possibility I can think of. It’s kind of out there and I’m not sure I even believe it myself.”

  “Please explain.”

  “It’s just a guess.” Tolliver takes another hit on his e-cigarette.

  “That’s okay, tell us anyway.”

  Tolliver exhales a cloud of smoke. “If we assume that Eirik’s mind was completely ripped out of his body and his body was just an empty vessel; hypothetically, a powerful enough mage could project their mind into that vacant vessel, overcome the brain’s weakened defenses, and take physical control of the body. But even with the mind sucked out and the defense diminished, it would be a monumental task to control the body. It would take a ton of power. Some of my colleagues have done experiments on coma patients, using mind magic. They theorize that it is possible to control the body of a coma patient or someone who is essentially brain dead because they won’t be able to fight back as effectively as someone with a working mind. The studies have been inconclusive. Even in a coma, the human brain has proven to be a tough nut to crack. The body is resilient. The most success anyone has had, at least in the published literature, is getting some fingers to twitch. One guy almost sat up in his hospital bed. Full-on possession of a human being, sufficient to go on an ax murdering spree is far beyond anything I’ve ever heard of. It would have to be a powerful mage.”

  “Could it be Necromancy?” asks Sinn.

  “I don’t think so.” Answers Tolliver.

  I shake my head at Sinn in confusion “Necromancy—you lost me.”

  “Why not?” Presses Sinn.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me,” challenges Sinn.

  “Okay, let me try and explain this so you might understand,” mumbles Tolliver as he takes another puff on his cigarette. “Necromancy only works on the dead, minds with no brain activity. A Necromancer’s magic stimulates a dead brain, bringing it back to life, and consequently bringing the attached body back to life.” Tolliver burps, releasing a small cloud of smoke and then turns red as he covers his mouth, much too late to have any noise-damping effect on the already released belch.

  Sinn smiles, encouraging him to continue with his explanation.

  “Excuse me. Sorry. Imagine your body is a car and your brain is the car’s battery.”

  “Okay.”

  “A car can’t run with a dead battery, right?”

  “Right,” answers Sinn.

  “Just like a car can’t run with a dead battery, a body can’t function with a dead brain. Necromancy gives a dead brain a jump-start, bringing it and the attached body back to life.”

  “So, you’re saying a necromancer is like a glorified tow truck driver?” I analogize interrupting their back and forth.

  Tolliver shrugs. “Pretty much.”

  “Doesn’t a necromancer control the minds of those it brings back to life?” asks Sinn. “Why isn’t that a possibility here?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Sinn frowns.

  Tolliver smiles warmly at Sinn, it’s clear these two have a close friendship built on a shared love of knowledge. “A necromancer doesn’t physically control the dead it brings back to life, that’s a myth.” Explains Tolliver. “A necromancer only controls the corpses it raises through leverage.”

  “What kind of leverage?” I ask, already anticipating where this is likely going.

  “The life and death kind. The necromancer can turn off the flow of electricity to the brain, drain the battery, at any time. The newly raised victim has no choice except to follow the necromancer’s directions, at least if they want to continue living. To the extent you think being a reanimated corpse is living. This, what happened to Eirik, isn’t necromancy. Eirik is still alive, his mind is just gone. The brain is there, it’s fully charged. Continuing the car analogy, there’s just no one sitting in the driver’s seat.”

  “Let’s go back to your hypothesis for a moment. What about a bunch of mages working together? Could they pool enough magic to control Eirik’s mind?” suggests Sinn.

  “That’s unlikely. Mages, especially the really powerful ones, don’t play well with others. Also, our magic doesn’t really pool well, it’s not how it works.”

  “What about witches?”

  “Maybe,” Tolliver looks down, los
t in thought while he strokes the foxtail he’s wearing on his upper lip. “I guess if you got enough witches together, it's possible. It would take a hell of a lot of witches, and witches aren’t really known to be good at or even really interested in mind magic. They are more into destructive magic, transmogrification, trinkets, and potions.”

  “So, what you’re telling us is that the most likely scenarios are either an uber-powerful mage, or a large coven of witches working together, did this to Mr. Varulv,” concludes Sinn.

  “Those are possibilities, it could also just be something else, maybe a creature I’m not familiar with. I don’t know.”

  “You think Arianna and her coven had something to do with this?” Sinn asks, turning to me.

  “No,” I answer quickly. A tinge of red brushing against my cheeks as I remember the awkward moment Arianna and I shared in the storage room of my office. “I think she’s been straight with us on this one.”

  Sinn nods, although the accompanying look screams conflicted uncertainty.

  “Tolliver, I want to make sure I understand everything you just told Sinn and me. Is it correct that you don’t know who or what did this to Eirik?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is it also correct that there’s no way of getting him back to the way he was before?”

  “That’s correct, Mr. Valentine, although I’m not sure you would want him back the way he was before. I didn’t know him personally; but he had a reputation for being a huge asshole. A violent one.”

  “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

  “Thanks, Tolliver.” Sinn embraces Tolliver in a friendly hug. “We appreciate that you took a look at Eirik for us.”

  “No problem. When do you want to get together and do some more work on the vampire genome project?”