Blood's Shadow
Lycanthropy Files
Book 3
Cecilia Dominic
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Date of Publication: 11/25/2014
ISBN: 9781619223776
ASIN: B00MO9WHFQ
Number of pages: 214
Word Count: 84,000
Cover Artist: Kanaxa
Recently at a signing, someone asked me where I get my ideas. I’ve been fortunate with the Lycanthropy Files series in that I’ve been able to use places I’ve visited for the settings. In The Mountain’s Shadow, I was inspired by tales told by veterans who would come down from the Ozarks while they were getting dialysis at the Central Arkansas VA Hospital, where I was doing my predoctoral internship. The Caribbean setting in Long Shadows is similar to the place my husband and I honeymooned in Rincon, Puerto Rico. Although Lycan Village, one of the main settings in Blood’s Shadow, is a completely made up place, I did bring in some traditional Scottish town aspects I learned while doing an adult education course through Stirling University in 2006.
To give you some context, I married a guy of Scottish heritage. Yes, he wore a kilt at our wedding, as did the groomsmen, and the Scottish attire must have worked because we just celebrated our ten-year anniversary. Yes, he still wears the kilt occasionally – are you jealous yet? One of the other benefits of having married him is that he had been awarded a scholarship through the now defunct Montgomery Highland Games for study in Scotland, possibly to be used toward a semester abroad. It didn’t exactly fit with his course of study or the cute redheaded girlfriend (guess who?) he had in college, so he ended up using the money after he graduated, and I got to take the course with him.
Someday I’ll write a story set during a week-long adult ed course in Scotland because the people we met could easily be characters themselves. The professor, whose first name was Craig, was a jovial guy who knew his stuff and seemed to take everything in stride. At the end of the course, he told me and Hubby that “until we opened our mouths, no one would guess we were Americans.” I took that as a compliment considering the United States at the time had an administration that was very unpopular elsewhere, especially in Europe. Another compliment was that we managed to get more done on our self-touring days than anyone he’d ever seen. I guess all that wine-tasting practice paid off since we’re pretty good at strategizing which wineries to go to and can cover a lot in a day. In Scotland, there was no wine, just castles, which worked, too.
Side note: If you’re in Scotland, go to Doune Castle near Stirling and ask at the gift shop for the coconuts used in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They’ll sigh and roll their eyes at you, but it’s totally worth it to be able to say you clopped the very coconuts used in the movie. I might have even trotted up and down the hallway outside the gift shop while doing so. Doune Castle was also used for the outside Castle Lioch scenes in Outlander, according to this article .
Then there were our classmates, a Hungarian high school history teacher, a nice German lady, and a handful of hilarious older English women. One in particular, Tessa, stands out. She had a sidekick named Bernice, and both of them had come from the south of England for an educational holiday. Hubby and I did our best to not get caught in controversial discussions, but Tessa on occasion would get a mischievous glint in her eyes, pull her cheeks up into a smile worthy of a Disney villainess, and say, “Let’s discuss… politics.”
One of the first lessons the class learned was the layout of a traditional Scottish town. Because the Middle Ages weren’t exactly peaceful times, the towns often had walls with gates, or ports, in them. The gates had names like East Port and West Port to designate where they were. Most of the walls and gates are gone now but still survive in the names of places like the Westport Hotel in Linlithgow, where Hubby and I went for dinner before attending a Scottish dance at the nearby castle. That’s also where we experienced the strangest air conditioning unit we’ve ever encountered. It would click like an oxygen concentrator, blow out a blast of cold air, and then stop for thirty-four seconds and do it again. No, I don’t have compulsive counting tendencies, really. Okay, maybe a little.
My fictional Lycan Village has a mostly intact wall and a West Port Inn at the west gate, where the hero encounters some trouble when he follows a suspicious character into the alley behind it. Knowing those historical details helped me to see the setting through the characters’ eyes and hopefully make the book more real for my readers as well.
For the next post on how I drew inspiration from the course on Scottish towns, please visit my website at www.ceciliadominic.com for the full tour schedule. I’ll be writing about market crosses tomorrow.
Excerpt Blood's Shadow Chapter One:
I noticed the blood first. Earthy and metallic, its scent wove over and under the olfactory texture of the clinic, a red ribbon among the blues and greens of antiseptic and rubber glove. If it had been any other clinic, and I had been any other type of man, I might have dismissed it or processed it with only mild curiosity. But here among my fellow predators at the Institute of Lycanthropic Reversal, the spilling of blood in the quantities I sensed meant someone had made a deadly mistake.
As Lycanthropy Council Investigator, I was accustomed to fixing mistakes, and I thanked whatever gods may be watching that I had come on this official Council visit instead of one of the others.
“Mister McCord?” The woman’s voice startled me and brought my attention back to the human part of the brain, mostly ruled by the visual.
I was glad to be back in the realm of sight, and my impressions resolved into a lovely picture. The voice came with high cheekbones with a dusting of freckles, large gray-blue eyes, and long dark red hair pulled back in a ponytail. I could even forgive the flat American accent—which stood out to me no matter how often I heard it here in my home country—particularly as it came through pale pink lips pursed in inquiry.
“And you are?” I turned on all my Scottish charm, mindful that, as a former colleague had said, “American chicks dig the accent.”
“I am Doctor Selene Rial, one of the psychologists.” Her tongue rolled the r just enough to make me focus on her mouth and her full lips before she took my outstretched hand. She leaned in and again surprised me, this time by giving me the customary sniff of our kind’s greeting. On our facial cheeks, lest you think I’m being crude. Her scent brought to mind a vivid image of a waterfall in the humid twilight of the American Southeast in summer and a lithe red wolf watching its broken reflection in the ripples of the pool below. I wondered, as usual, what she caught from mine.
Whatever she saw, amusement and some concern flickered across her face when she stepped back. “It is an honor to have you here. We haven’t seen much of the Council since the Institute’s ground breaking ceremony.”
I inclined my head. “I am pleased to be here. But tell me, has there been an accident? I smell blood.”
Her eyes widened. “Do you? I don’t think anyone has spilled any today. We fired the tech who dropped the sample tray last week.” She bit her lip. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”
I would have been charmed by her guilelessness had I not been distracted. “Perhaps we should investigate.”
“Follow me.” She led me through the door and to a stairway on the left. The smell diminished to just the barest hint such that I wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t looking.
Lonna Marconi-Fortuna, the Institute’s co-director and another werewolf, met us in the hall with her husband Doctor Max Fortuna, wizard and other co-director, at her side. The tension eased in my chest when I saw them. They had been my main concern.
“What is it, Gabriel?” Lonna asked when she saw my expression.
“Can you not smell it?”
She shook her head. “No, but your senses are better than ours—just one of the many ways how those of us who were changed by the vector differ from those of you who were born with CLS.” She wrinkled her nose. “But now that you mention it, something smells off.”
“Interesting.” I moved ahead of them, not wanting to lose the faint blood scent. I chased it down the corridor, its ribbon thickening as I ran down another staircase and through a maze of hallways until all that stood between me and full-on assault was the door to an office. Max caught up to me and wrinkled his nose, telling me how strong the odor was since he was a wizard, and therefore limited to human-level senses.
“I told the ladies to stay back,” he said.
I nodded. “Whose office is that?”
“Doctor Otis LeConte. He’s one of our geneticists. He’s a human.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You have full-blooded humans working here already?” As soon as I said it, I recognized how ridiculous it sounded. Of course I knew they hired humans, and the scientists would have started with the others. My attention was only half on the conversation. I wanted to help the poor bugger, but I listened and smelled for signs of an assailant to avoid potential ambush.
“He was the first we hired. It was one of the items we had on our list to talk to you about today. Do you hear anything in there?”
“No, nothing’s moving.”
He moved forward, then stopped and looked at me. “At your command, Gabriel.”
“Go on.”
He opened the door and stumbled back, his hand over his nose and mouth.
“Come now, you’re a physician. It can’t be that—” But it was. LeConte lay splayed out on his desk, his lab coat dripping with the contents of his circulatory system onto the dark brown carpet. Both wrists had been gashed open, as had his neck, and his eyes stared at the ceiling in horror. Files had been turned out on the floor and had become a Red Sea of paper.
As I recoiled in horror, my mind catalogued observations to sift through later. There was a laptop computer on a shelf to the side and several little statues and knickknacks that looked to be made of precious metal also stood in front of books on the bookcases. Not a robbery, then. I would have to wait and see what the coroner said—he was one of us as well—but the wounds didn’t look like they had been made by werewolves. Perhaps someone pretending to be one of us, but definitely not us. Also, the window stood wide open, which allowed the air to circulate. It had likely kept any of the younger ones from smelling the blood, although I still didn’t understand how someone didn’t notice something.
“Oh my god! Otis?”
I caught Selene’s arm before she barged into the room. “There’s nothing to be done for him. You’ll only interfere with evidence now.”
Her face had gone white, even her freckles, and she wobbled. I pulled her to me so she wouldn’t fall should she faint, and I found she fit perfectly against my chest. I filed that away for future consideration as well, turned, and guided her to a chair in the hallway. She slumped forward, her head between her knees, and took deep breaths. Truth be told, I felt woozy as well, and the hand I placed on her trembling shoulder might have been as much to steady myself as her. I hoped my father wasn’t looking down from wherever werewolves went after they died and shaking his head in shame at his weak-stomached son. It seemed unfair I could eviscerate animals with ease, and I could even handle the usual murder victim, but the sight of such brutality always got to me. I blamed childhood trauma.
“I don’t want to know, do I?” asked Lonna. She stood with her arms crossed and looked down at Selene. Max had closed the door and gone to call the police. Not the human ones. Lord knows we didn’t need them mucking about in here.
“You’re going to need to find a new geneticist,” I told her. “He’s been exsanguinated.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You and your big words. Someone sucked his blood?”
I started to shake my head, but then stopped. A man LeConte’s size—and I was pretty good at guessing heights and weights—would contain about five liters of blood. What I had seen looked like a lot, but after a certain point and with the element of surprise, any amount over about a liter would seem excessive. His neck and wrists had still been dripping, which told me the deed was recent. I stood, commanded my knees to stop their schoolboy knocking, and said to Lonna, “Can you take care of her? I need to see if I can find the trail of the perpetrator.”
Lonna nodded and sat next to Selene, whose breathing deepened and lengthened into quiet sobs.
I found Max outside LeConte’s window, which was on the first floor. I half-expected to see him performing some sort of spell or doing something else wizardly, but instead, he shone a light on the ground.
“Ultraviolet with a little magical help,” he said. “If there was blood on the bastard’s shoes, it’ll show, but the sun is too bright for me to see. Can you stand there?”
“I can’t imagine how there wouldn’t be anything on the killer’s shoes unless he’d covered them with something.” I moved to create a shadow on the ground.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t rained in days—an unusual state of affairs for Scotland, even in the summer—and the ground was dry, so there were no impressions to be found. Between the two of us, we detected some blood splotches on the mulch under the bushes outside of the building and some bent grass blades. Of course, the traces petered out, but at least it was along a straight trail leading directly toward the woods.
“I’m going to change and go after him,” I said.
Max nodded and turned to give me some privacy. To his credit, he didn’t say that would have been the thing to do in the first place, although I cursed myself for not thinking of it sooner. Finding LeConte’s body had shaken me, as had the implications. My mind raced with what I would tell the Council and how they would react.
It crossed my mind that someone inside the building may be watching, and the thought made my skin crawl, but time was too precious to waste on privacy concerns, and Max was there in case someone decided to take advantage of that moment of disorientation when the change was almost complete. I divested myself of my garments and left them in as neat a pile as I could, and took a deep breath. The life force of nature of the woods and trees nearby reached out to me, and I to the wild energy. It enveloped my limbs, traveling down my nervous pathways to blood, bone, and sinew, drawing everything to the center. I simultaneously folded inward and outward, gritting my teeth at sensations that, although they had become familiar, were never comfortable—like hands molding and rearranging me with no regard for the limits of my tendons and muscles. I understood the change differed for everyone, and I envied those for whom it was easy. Some legends held that werewolves wore their animal skin on the inside when they were human. Turning inside out would have been easier.
Finally, after I had physically rearranged myself, I panted for a few breaths and then took off. The path that had been illuminated by the UV light now showed itself to me with the scent of LeConte’s blood, heavy and fatty and crying out for vengeance. The dim light of the woods barely registered as my nose directed me to turn right, left, over, under, squeezing between. Whoever had murdered the scientist had his own interesting scent, a combination of pipe smoke and kerosene.
The trail ended at a stream, but there was still enough scent in the air to figure out which way the murderer had run. From what I could recall, there were busy roads on either side of the woods where a getaway car and driver could be waiting.
I chose the direction my nose told me to go and found the trail about forty meters north. The blood was gone, but the kerosene-pipe smoke smell was there along with sweat. That scent disappeared along the side of a road, where a small pull-off could have hidden a vehicle behind some trees, and I noted where it was so the police could come look for tire tracks. Not that they’d likely find anything of any help in the dry gravel.
I trotted back toward the Institute, and a lithe red wolf surprised me in the woods on the other side of the stream. She smelled familiar.
“Selene?”
“Gabriel?” She sat back on her haunches and regarded me with a concerned look. “Did you catch them?”
“Obviously not. And what are you doing out here? They could’ve been armed.”
In spite of lacking human facial muscles and their range of expression, we lycanthropes can express our emotions adequately without speaking, and her glare told me she was pissed even without her baring her teeth.
“Otis was my friend. I wasn’t going to let them get away.” She turned and walked in the direction from where she’d come.
“I wasn’t either,” I told her.
“Obviously not,” she tossed over her shoulder at me.
I ran to catch up with her. “Look here, there’s no reason to get sarcastic with me. You’ve had quite a shock, but I’m only trying to help.”
The tears came through her mental voice. “Don’t you think Otis’s murder could have something to do with your visit? The timing is odd, isn’t it?”
Her question would’ve floored me had we been near a floor. Here I had gone chasing after a potentially armed villain—yes, I could acknowledge my own bravado and stupidity here—and she had started sorting through the facts like a scientist. I blamed the surge of attraction I felt toward her on my current animal state, my tendency to fall for smart women, and our situation. We’d faced death and now strolled, albeit briskly, through lovely woods on a summer day. I’d learned two years previously not to fall for scientists. They’ll stick with their own every time.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “I apologize if I offended you.”
“No offense taken. I was just pondering what you said, and I sincerely hope my visit today had nothing to do with your friend’s death.”
“It would be a coincidence, and I don’t believe in those. All I know is that a dear friend has been killed in a horrible manner.”
I wanted to dissect the manner in which she’d said “dear friend” so I could quell the jealousy that blossomed in my chest. Had she and LeConte been lovers but covered it up to avoid a workplace scandal?
Stop acting like a pup, I scolded myself. What the lovely Selene does on her own time is her business. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret when we left the woods, walked into the sunshine of the Institute grounds, and once again became Lycanthropy Council Member and scientist.
“I see the cavalry is here,” she said.
Indeed, the yellow-and-blue marked car, just similar enough to the human police vehicles, had arrived, its lights whirling. When I got close, Lonna’s mental voice came to me: “The police are here, and the detective wants to see you first.”
About the Author:
Cecilia Dominic wrote her first story when she was two years old and has always had a much more interesting life inside her head than outside of it. She became a clinical psychologist because she’s fascinated by people and their stories, but she couldn’t stop writing fiction.
The first draft of her dissertation, while not fiction, was still criticized by her major professor for being written in too entertaining a style.
She made it through graduate school and got her PhD, started her own practice, and by day, she helps people cure their insomnia without using medication. By night, she blogs about wine and writes fiction she hopes will keep her readers turning the pages all night. Yes, she recognizes the conflict of interest between her two careers, so she writes and blogs under a pen name. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with one husband and two cats, which, she’s been told, is a good number of each.
Book 3
Cecilia Dominic
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Date of Publication: 11/25/2014
ISBN: 9781619223776
ASIN: B00MO9WHFQ
Number of pages: 214
Word Count: 84,000
Cover Artist: Kanaxa
Encountering werewolves can be deadly. Trying to cure them? Murder.
As the Investigator for the Lycanthrope Council, Gabriel McCord encountered his share of sticky situations in order to keep werewolf kind under the radar of discovery. Now, as the Council’s liaison to the Institute for Lycanthropic Reversal, he advocates for those who were turned werewolf against their will.
Everyone seems to be on board with the Institute’s controversial experimental process—until one of its geneticists is found lying on his desk in a pool of blood.
Gabriel races to single out a killer from a long list of suspects. Purists, who believe lycanthropy is a gift that shouldn’t be returned. Young Bloods, who want the cure for born lycanthropes as well as made. The Institute’s own very attractive psychologist, whose most precious possession has fallen into the hands of an ancient secret society bent on the destruction of werewolves.
Failure means he’ll lose his place on the Council and endanger the tenuous truce between wizard and lycanthrope. Even if he wins, he could lose his heart to a woman with deadly secrets of her own.
Also Available:
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Guest Blog by C. Dominic
Inspiration for the historical Scottish town in Blood’s Shadow (part one)
Recently at a signing, someone asked me where I get my ideas. I’ve been fortunate with the Lycanthropy Files series in that I’ve been able to use places I’ve visited for the settings. In The Mountain’s Shadow, I was inspired by tales told by veterans who would come down from the Ozarks while they were getting dialysis at the Central Arkansas VA Hospital, where I was doing my predoctoral internship. The Caribbean setting in Long Shadows is similar to the place my husband and I honeymooned in Rincon, Puerto Rico. Although Lycan Village, one of the main settings in Blood’s Shadow, is a completely made up place, I did bring in some traditional Scottish town aspects I learned while doing an adult education course through Stirling University in 2006.
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| Mugdock Castle and Hubby. The arch and stone walls are how I picture the West Port of Lycan Village. |
To give you some context, I married a guy of Scottish heritage. Yes, he wore a kilt at our wedding, as did the groomsmen, and the Scottish attire must have worked because we just celebrated our ten-year anniversary. Yes, he still wears the kilt occasionally – are you jealous yet? One of the other benefits of having married him is that he had been awarded a scholarship through the now defunct Montgomery Highland Games for study in Scotland, possibly to be used toward a semester abroad. It didn’t exactly fit with his course of study or the cute redheaded girlfriend (guess who?) he had in college, so he ended up using the money after he graduated, and I got to take the course with him.
Someday I’ll write a story set during a week-long adult ed course in Scotland because the people we met could easily be characters themselves. The professor, whose first name was Craig, was a jovial guy who knew his stuff and seemed to take everything in stride. At the end of the course, he told me and Hubby that “until we opened our mouths, no one would guess we were Americans.” I took that as a compliment considering the United States at the time had an administration that was very unpopular elsewhere, especially in Europe. Another compliment was that we managed to get more done on our self-touring days than anyone he’d ever seen. I guess all that wine-tasting practice paid off since we’re pretty good at strategizing which wineries to go to and can cover a lot in a day. In Scotland, there was no wine, just castles, which worked, too.
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| Doune Castle might look familiar to Outlander and Monty Python fans. |
Side note: If you’re in Scotland, go to Doune Castle near Stirling and ask at the gift shop for the coconuts used in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They’ll sigh and roll their eyes at you, but it’s totally worth it to be able to say you clopped the very coconuts used in the movie. I might have even trotted up and down the hallway outside the gift shop while doing so. Doune Castle was also used for the outside Castle Lioch scenes in Outlander, according to this article .
Then there were our classmates, a Hungarian high school history teacher, a nice German lady, and a handful of hilarious older English women. One in particular, Tessa, stands out. She had a sidekick named Bernice, and both of them had come from the south of England for an educational holiday. Hubby and I did our best to not get caught in controversial discussions, but Tessa on occasion would get a mischievous glint in her eyes, pull her cheeks up into a smile worthy of a Disney villainess, and say, “Let’s discuss… politics.”
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| Linlithgow Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was born. |
One of the first lessons the class learned was the layout of a traditional Scottish town. Because the Middle Ages weren’t exactly peaceful times, the towns often had walls with gates, or ports, in them. The gates had names like East Port and West Port to designate where they were. Most of the walls and gates are gone now but still survive in the names of places like the Westport Hotel in Linlithgow, where Hubby and I went for dinner before attending a Scottish dance at the nearby castle. That’s also where we experienced the strangest air conditioning unit we’ve ever encountered. It would click like an oxygen concentrator, blow out a blast of cold air, and then stop for thirty-four seconds and do it again. No, I don’t have compulsive counting tendencies, really. Okay, maybe a little.
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| The climb to the top of a tower at Linlithgow Castle was worth it for the sunset. |
My fictional Lycan Village has a mostly intact wall and a West Port Inn at the west gate, where the hero encounters some trouble when he follows a suspicious character into the alley behind it. Knowing those historical details helped me to see the setting through the characters’ eyes and hopefully make the book more real for my readers as well.
For the next post on how I drew inspiration from the course on Scottish towns, please visit my website at www.ceciliadominic.com for the full tour schedule. I’ll be writing about market crosses tomorrow.
Excerpt Blood's Shadow Chapter One:
I noticed the blood first. Earthy and metallic, its scent wove over and under the olfactory texture of the clinic, a red ribbon among the blues and greens of antiseptic and rubber glove. If it had been any other clinic, and I had been any other type of man, I might have dismissed it or processed it with only mild curiosity. But here among my fellow predators at the Institute of Lycanthropic Reversal, the spilling of blood in the quantities I sensed meant someone had made a deadly mistake.
As Lycanthropy Council Investigator, I was accustomed to fixing mistakes, and I thanked whatever gods may be watching that I had come on this official Council visit instead of one of the others.
“Mister McCord?” The woman’s voice startled me and brought my attention back to the human part of the brain, mostly ruled by the visual.
I was glad to be back in the realm of sight, and my impressions resolved into a lovely picture. The voice came with high cheekbones with a dusting of freckles, large gray-blue eyes, and long dark red hair pulled back in a ponytail. I could even forgive the flat American accent—which stood out to me no matter how often I heard it here in my home country—particularly as it came through pale pink lips pursed in inquiry.
“And you are?” I turned on all my Scottish charm, mindful that, as a former colleague had said, “American chicks dig the accent.”
“I am Doctor Selene Rial, one of the psychologists.” Her tongue rolled the r just enough to make me focus on her mouth and her full lips before she took my outstretched hand. She leaned in and again surprised me, this time by giving me the customary sniff of our kind’s greeting. On our facial cheeks, lest you think I’m being crude. Her scent brought to mind a vivid image of a waterfall in the humid twilight of the American Southeast in summer and a lithe red wolf watching its broken reflection in the ripples of the pool below. I wondered, as usual, what she caught from mine.
Whatever she saw, amusement and some concern flickered across her face when she stepped back. “It is an honor to have you here. We haven’t seen much of the Council since the Institute’s ground breaking ceremony.”
I inclined my head. “I am pleased to be here. But tell me, has there been an accident? I smell blood.”
Her eyes widened. “Do you? I don’t think anyone has spilled any today. We fired the tech who dropped the sample tray last week.” She bit her lip. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”
I would have been charmed by her guilelessness had I not been distracted. “Perhaps we should investigate.”
“Follow me.” She led me through the door and to a stairway on the left. The smell diminished to just the barest hint such that I wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t looking.
Lonna Marconi-Fortuna, the Institute’s co-director and another werewolf, met us in the hall with her husband Doctor Max Fortuna, wizard and other co-director, at her side. The tension eased in my chest when I saw them. They had been my main concern.
“What is it, Gabriel?” Lonna asked when she saw my expression.
“Can you not smell it?”
She shook her head. “No, but your senses are better than ours—just one of the many ways how those of us who were changed by the vector differ from those of you who were born with CLS.” She wrinkled her nose. “But now that you mention it, something smells off.”
“Interesting.” I moved ahead of them, not wanting to lose the faint blood scent. I chased it down the corridor, its ribbon thickening as I ran down another staircase and through a maze of hallways until all that stood between me and full-on assault was the door to an office. Max caught up to me and wrinkled his nose, telling me how strong the odor was since he was a wizard, and therefore limited to human-level senses.
“I told the ladies to stay back,” he said.
I nodded. “Whose office is that?”
“Doctor Otis LeConte. He’s one of our geneticists. He’s a human.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You have full-blooded humans working here already?” As soon as I said it, I recognized how ridiculous it sounded. Of course I knew they hired humans, and the scientists would have started with the others. My attention was only half on the conversation. I wanted to help the poor bugger, but I listened and smelled for signs of an assailant to avoid potential ambush.
“He was the first we hired. It was one of the items we had on our list to talk to you about today. Do you hear anything in there?”
“No, nothing’s moving.”
He moved forward, then stopped and looked at me. “At your command, Gabriel.”
“Go on.”
He opened the door and stumbled back, his hand over his nose and mouth.
“Come now, you’re a physician. It can’t be that—” But it was. LeConte lay splayed out on his desk, his lab coat dripping with the contents of his circulatory system onto the dark brown carpet. Both wrists had been gashed open, as had his neck, and his eyes stared at the ceiling in horror. Files had been turned out on the floor and had become a Red Sea of paper.
As I recoiled in horror, my mind catalogued observations to sift through later. There was a laptop computer on a shelf to the side and several little statues and knickknacks that looked to be made of precious metal also stood in front of books on the bookcases. Not a robbery, then. I would have to wait and see what the coroner said—he was one of us as well—but the wounds didn’t look like they had been made by werewolves. Perhaps someone pretending to be one of us, but definitely not us. Also, the window stood wide open, which allowed the air to circulate. It had likely kept any of the younger ones from smelling the blood, although I still didn’t understand how someone didn’t notice something.
“Oh my god! Otis?”
I caught Selene’s arm before she barged into the room. “There’s nothing to be done for him. You’ll only interfere with evidence now.”
Her face had gone white, even her freckles, and she wobbled. I pulled her to me so she wouldn’t fall should she faint, and I found she fit perfectly against my chest. I filed that away for future consideration as well, turned, and guided her to a chair in the hallway. She slumped forward, her head between her knees, and took deep breaths. Truth be told, I felt woozy as well, and the hand I placed on her trembling shoulder might have been as much to steady myself as her. I hoped my father wasn’t looking down from wherever werewolves went after they died and shaking his head in shame at his weak-stomached son. It seemed unfair I could eviscerate animals with ease, and I could even handle the usual murder victim, but the sight of such brutality always got to me. I blamed childhood trauma.
“I don’t want to know, do I?” asked Lonna. She stood with her arms crossed and looked down at Selene. Max had closed the door and gone to call the police. Not the human ones. Lord knows we didn’t need them mucking about in here.
“You’re going to need to find a new geneticist,” I told her. “He’s been exsanguinated.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You and your big words. Someone sucked his blood?”
I started to shake my head, but then stopped. A man LeConte’s size—and I was pretty good at guessing heights and weights—would contain about five liters of blood. What I had seen looked like a lot, but after a certain point and with the element of surprise, any amount over about a liter would seem excessive. His neck and wrists had still been dripping, which told me the deed was recent. I stood, commanded my knees to stop their schoolboy knocking, and said to Lonna, “Can you take care of her? I need to see if I can find the trail of the perpetrator.”
Lonna nodded and sat next to Selene, whose breathing deepened and lengthened into quiet sobs.
I found Max outside LeConte’s window, which was on the first floor. I half-expected to see him performing some sort of spell or doing something else wizardly, but instead, he shone a light on the ground.
“Ultraviolet with a little magical help,” he said. “If there was blood on the bastard’s shoes, it’ll show, but the sun is too bright for me to see. Can you stand there?”
“I can’t imagine how there wouldn’t be anything on the killer’s shoes unless he’d covered them with something.” I moved to create a shadow on the ground.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t rained in days—an unusual state of affairs for Scotland, even in the summer—and the ground was dry, so there were no impressions to be found. Between the two of us, we detected some blood splotches on the mulch under the bushes outside of the building and some bent grass blades. Of course, the traces petered out, but at least it was along a straight trail leading directly toward the woods.
“I’m going to change and go after him,” I said.
Max nodded and turned to give me some privacy. To his credit, he didn’t say that would have been the thing to do in the first place, although I cursed myself for not thinking of it sooner. Finding LeConte’s body had shaken me, as had the implications. My mind raced with what I would tell the Council and how they would react.
It crossed my mind that someone inside the building may be watching, and the thought made my skin crawl, but time was too precious to waste on privacy concerns, and Max was there in case someone decided to take advantage of that moment of disorientation when the change was almost complete. I divested myself of my garments and left them in as neat a pile as I could, and took a deep breath. The life force of nature of the woods and trees nearby reached out to me, and I to the wild energy. It enveloped my limbs, traveling down my nervous pathways to blood, bone, and sinew, drawing everything to the center. I simultaneously folded inward and outward, gritting my teeth at sensations that, although they had become familiar, were never comfortable—like hands molding and rearranging me with no regard for the limits of my tendons and muscles. I understood the change differed for everyone, and I envied those for whom it was easy. Some legends held that werewolves wore their animal skin on the inside when they were human. Turning inside out would have been easier.
Finally, after I had physically rearranged myself, I panted for a few breaths and then took off. The path that had been illuminated by the UV light now showed itself to me with the scent of LeConte’s blood, heavy and fatty and crying out for vengeance. The dim light of the woods barely registered as my nose directed me to turn right, left, over, under, squeezing between. Whoever had murdered the scientist had his own interesting scent, a combination of pipe smoke and kerosene.
The trail ended at a stream, but there was still enough scent in the air to figure out which way the murderer had run. From what I could recall, there were busy roads on either side of the woods where a getaway car and driver could be waiting.
I chose the direction my nose told me to go and found the trail about forty meters north. The blood was gone, but the kerosene-pipe smoke smell was there along with sweat. That scent disappeared along the side of a road, where a small pull-off could have hidden a vehicle behind some trees, and I noted where it was so the police could come look for tire tracks. Not that they’d likely find anything of any help in the dry gravel.
I trotted back toward the Institute, and a lithe red wolf surprised me in the woods on the other side of the stream. She smelled familiar.
“Selene?”
“Gabriel?” She sat back on her haunches and regarded me with a concerned look. “Did you catch them?”
“Obviously not. And what are you doing out here? They could’ve been armed.”
In spite of lacking human facial muscles and their range of expression, we lycanthropes can express our emotions adequately without speaking, and her glare told me she was pissed even without her baring her teeth.
“Otis was my friend. I wasn’t going to let them get away.” She turned and walked in the direction from where she’d come.
“I wasn’t either,” I told her.
“Obviously not,” she tossed over her shoulder at me.
I ran to catch up with her. “Look here, there’s no reason to get sarcastic with me. You’ve had quite a shock, but I’m only trying to help.”
The tears came through her mental voice. “Don’t you think Otis’s murder could have something to do with your visit? The timing is odd, isn’t it?”
Her question would’ve floored me had we been near a floor. Here I had gone chasing after a potentially armed villain—yes, I could acknowledge my own bravado and stupidity here—and she had started sorting through the facts like a scientist. I blamed the surge of attraction I felt toward her on my current animal state, my tendency to fall for smart women, and our situation. We’d faced death and now strolled, albeit briskly, through lovely woods on a summer day. I’d learned two years previously not to fall for scientists. They’ll stick with their own every time.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “I apologize if I offended you.”
“No offense taken. I was just pondering what you said, and I sincerely hope my visit today had nothing to do with your friend’s death.”
“It would be a coincidence, and I don’t believe in those. All I know is that a dear friend has been killed in a horrible manner.”
I wanted to dissect the manner in which she’d said “dear friend” so I could quell the jealousy that blossomed in my chest. Had she and LeConte been lovers but covered it up to avoid a workplace scandal?
Stop acting like a pup, I scolded myself. What the lovely Selene does on her own time is her business. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret when we left the woods, walked into the sunshine of the Institute grounds, and once again became Lycanthropy Council Member and scientist.
“I see the cavalry is here,” she said.
Indeed, the yellow-and-blue marked car, just similar enough to the human police vehicles, had arrived, its lights whirling. When I got close, Lonna’s mental voice came to me: “The police are here, and the detective wants to see you first.”
About the Author:
Cecilia Dominic wrote her first story when she was two years old and has always had a much more interesting life inside her head than outside of it. She became a clinical psychologist because she’s fascinated by people and their stories, but she couldn’t stop writing fiction.
The first draft of her dissertation, while not fiction, was still criticized by her major professor for being written in too entertaining a style.
She made it through graduate school and got her PhD, started her own practice, and by day, she helps people cure their insomnia without using medication. By night, she blogs about wine and writes fiction she hopes will keep her readers turning the pages all night. Yes, she recognizes the conflict of interest between her two careers, so she writes and blogs under a pen name. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with one husband and two cats, which, she’s been told, is a good number of each.
So sorry for stopping by so late! The internet was down at my office, and I couldn't get comments to work on my phone. Thank you so much for hosting me! Writing this post brought back a lot of good memories.
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No worries! I've been MIA today too, littlest one broke her arm yesterday :( Thank you for stopping by!
ReplyDeleteOh, no! I hope she heals quickly. :-(
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