Blood's Shadow: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 3 Read online

  “Do you know why I’m here?” he asked and waved his hands around, “at this school?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “I know things I shouldn’t. Like I know that you have a lot of secrets that you keep from others.”

  “Most grown-ups do.”

  He shook his head and winced. “Not all of them. The soldier is worried you’re going to get hurt because of some of them.”

  The soldier’s uniform sounded like my father’s in the pictures I’d seen of him just before he shipped off to the continent to get killed in the Second Great War. I knew that no matter how desperately he felt the need to communicate with me, he wouldn’t want to hurt the boy.

  “Take it easy there, Alexander,” I said and stood. “I’d like to come back and talk to you more in the future, but only if you promise you’ll be careful and try not to talk to the see-through people too much.”

  His eyes widened as he scrambled out of the chair to stand. “I will, sir.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t want to talk to most of them, anyhow.” He left the room without making much sound, and I suspected that was how he did most things—as unobtrusively as possible. It made me wonder how many secrets he’d spilled in childish innocence before he learned less attention was better than more.

  I unclenched my left hand and forced my jaw to relax. When to demand attention and when to shy away from it was a lesson learned harder by some. And some of us were better at avoiding the limelight than others.

  The rest of the morning passed in a stream of twenty-minute interviews. None of the other children had anything interesting to offer or say, and I noted which ones I suspected would manifest the full CLS spectrum of symptoms. I wished I could tell Corinne exactly what I saw or how I did what I did, but my determinations were based on instinct rather than logic. I only knew my father had had the same ability, one of the few tidbits I’d learned about him in his official capacity. Of course I felt like I was being watched or that he was there, but he didn’t communicate with me, and I wondered whether he was, indeed, there, or if he had left when Alexander did and my mind was playing tricks on me.

  “Tell me about Alexander,” I said when I sat down for lunch with Corinne in her office. “How did he end up here?”

  “Right now, most of our boys are here because of being born with CLS into human families, but he’s the exception. His parents are both lycanthropes, but they’re puzzled with him—he has these strange abilities and no CLS symptoms.”

  “So has he had behavior problems? He seems inclined to stay under the radar.”

  She shook her head. “His father wanted him to come here to be exposed to children with CLS to see if it would ‘toughen him up’. As you can probably guess, he doesn’t really fit in with the bad boys.”

  “Poor lad.”

  “What did he have to tell you that was so important?” She paused with a forkful of salad in her hand.

  “I’m still trying to make sense of it,” I told her. “You know how it is with clairvoyants.”

  “Right, sometimes they’re clear and sometimes not, and when you want them to be one way, they’re usually the opposite.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What did you want him to be?”

  I thought about being told there was a ghost following me and then how it resembled my long-dead father. “I’m not sure.”

  The afternoon passed quickly with two more possible lycanthropes emerging from the group of preadolescent CLS sufferers. That brought me up to four, a typical number for the full phenotypic expression. I gave their names to Corinne before I left.

  “Watch these especially closely,” I told her.

  “When will you be checking on them again?” she asked and opened up her calendar to August. “They’ll be going back to their homes this weekend but will be back end of the summer.”

  “It will likely not be until September. I have a major investigation going on right now.”

  Wrinkles creased her otherwise flawless brow. “Is that the one about the Institute? The murders there?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that. It’s an ongoing case.”

  “Right. Just let me know. I’ll continue to watch over young Alexander as well. His family is actually local.”

  “Thank you.”

  As I walked out of the front door, I felt the weight of someone’s gaze on me and turned to see Alexander standing in one of the second floor windows. He held a hand up to me as if to wave farewell, and rather than sweet, the gesture struck me as creepy. The hair on the back of my neck didn’t stand down until I got well away from the Council School.

  Chapter Seven

  My interviews had ended at the termination of the school day, and although I typically used that as an excuse to knock off early, the investigation beckoned. I wanted to peek at Garou’s preliminary report as to what he’d gathered, although I knew nothing would be back from analysis yet. I also wanted to get a sense of the atmosphere around Lycan Castle to prepare myself for the inevitable backlash from the previous day’s events.

  The first scent that came to me when I walked into the castle was that of candle smoke, which wasn’t too unusual, but the green bite of sage caught my attention. Typically the only time we burned sage along with the candles was to smudge the Council Chamber before a meeting, a tradition dating back to the days when the Council met in secret and needed to clear magical energies from spying wizards. But we weren’t supposed to meet until the following week.

  The look on Laura’s face confirmed my suspicions that I was not expected to be at Lycan Castle that afternoon.

  “Got any live ones this term?” she asked and handed me a stack of messages. “None of these are urgent, by the way.”

  I gave her the file with my notes on my visit to the Council School. “Please type these up. And yes, a few. Nothing unusual except a little clairvoyant chap who’s ended up in the wrong place.”

  “I can only imagine the secrets that child knows. Ghosts do love to talk.” She took my jacket, and for the first time in decades, I reached for my hat, which I hadn’t worn since they went out of fashion.

  The appearance of my father’s ghost must be dragging me into the past.

  “Ah, yes,” I said and pretended to scratch a spot above my left ear. Her lips quirked.

  “It is a pity gentlemen don’t wear hats anymore,” she said. “I’ll make you some tea. Will you be here long?”

  “Right, thank you. I imagine I’ll be here long enough.”

  As soon as the door closed behind me in my office, I sat at the desk and turned on my super listening skills.

  “Yes, he just arrived,” Laura said, presumably into the telephone. “No, I don’t know exactly when he came into the building… He said ‘long enough.’”

  Who is spying on me through my secretary?

  She hung up, so I brought my attention back into my office. Her duplicity didn’t surprise me considering I wasn’t the one who signed her paychecks—Morena was—but it did disappoint me. I thought she was more loyal to me.

  When I opened my eyes, I found that she’d stacked the Institute personnel files on the corner of the desk so I’d have them within easy reach. There was also a file with Garou’s initial report, which I pulled out once I’d sat and made myself comfortable with my cup of tea in front of me. What had started out as a relatively warm day had turned chilly and cloudy toward the end, and even with the thick castle walls and deep-set windows, I could feel it. I hated it when my body reminded me I was older than I looked.

  As I expected, the report only contained a list of what had been gathered with generic descriptions and locations, but I was pleased to see they’d found something that looked like paint flakes on the trees in the pullout I’d directed them to. It would take time to match fingerprints, analyze fiber samples and paint chips, and do the other forensic tasks. It oc
curred to me that with crimes of this nature being so rare in our community, we wouldn’t have the resources to do all that ourselves, so that meant Garou would have to send everything off to the human labs, where our items and requests would likely be in a long queue.

  “Brilliant,” I mumbled and pushed the button on my intercom. “Laura, set up a status meeting for me with Garou for tomorrow morning.”

  “Time preference?”

  “Early so I can get it out of the way.”

  I then took out a notepad and pen so I could jot down thoughts about the personnel files. Dutifully, I pulled Otis LeConte’s to me first with Selene’s next in line. I flipped through the basic demographic stuff, noting only that he was in his early thirties, although his picture showed he was balding prematurely, so he looked older. He’d had a round face with a goatee and mustache, and he stared into the camera with a grim expression, like he was determined to accomplish something if it was the last thing he did. No wife or children, which was a relief—it always depressed me when a victim left behind a young family—but one brother and elderly parents. I noted the contact information for them, sure they’d been notified of their son and brother’s death. I studied his picture again. There was something about his eyes, something angry I couldn’t come to terms with. He looked more likely to commit murder than be the victim of one. There were no disciplinary actions listed, not that I expected any since they’d just gotten started. Nothing else struck me as remarkable in the rest of his file aside from the fact that he’d been a genealogy nerd from a young age and had started tracing his friends’ family trees during adolescence. From there, it made sense he’d gotten into genetics.

  That reminded me—they should have gotten the application files from Iain.

  I called Lonna, conscious I only had a small piece of the picture of who Otis LeConte was. Her Institute number went straight to voice mail, and I suspected she’d left early since there wasn’t much to do with all operations suspended by the Council. I hung up without leaving a message and shot her a quick email requesting a meeting for the next day so I could ask her some more questions and get a peek at the applications. I also wanted to know what Wolf-Lonna had found the night before.

  Selene’s file came next, and I found my lips curling in answer to the smile she’d given for her personnel and badge photo. She looked very excited to be there. She, too, was single, with only a younger brother Curtis Rial listed as family. As for hobbies, she’d left the line blank. I found that omission frustrating.

  The other files passed in a blur of names and paper, but no one had anything interesting that said, “Yes, I am your murderer!” Not that I’d expected it to be that easy, but one never knew when something would pop up. When Laura poked her head in to tell me she was leaving and that I’d be meeting with Garou at nine o’clock the next morning, I was happy to walk her out.

  When I rounded the corner to the house I rented, I was surprised to see a car in the driveway. The forest green Jaguar seemed out of place next to the old brick building, which had been built in the early twentieth century during the Arts and Crafts movement. I always thought it needed a 1920s-era automobile to complete its air of old class. Not that a Jaguar or my BMW were shabby.

  “David, what are you doing here?” I asked once I’d parked in the garage and come back out to meet him. He stretched and grabbed his suit jacket out of the car.

  “Took you long enough,” he said. “I’ve been here for an hour.” His business attire told me he’d been to something important, and my stomach flipped when his sartorial choice clicked into place with the candle smoke and Laura’s strange behavior earlier—it was confirmed, the Council had met without me.

  “Why? I know I got a head injury yesterday, but I don’t recall making an appointment.”

  “No, but I thought you might like to know what happened in the Council meeting today. You’re a smart lad; you’ll have figured out we met.”

  “Ever hear of a phone?” I asked and unlocked the door from the garage into my kitchen. “And we weren’t supposed to meet until next week.” I kept my tone light to cover my growing sense of dread.

  He waved the modern technology off like it was an insistent gnat buzzing around his head. “There’s no substitute for face-to-face communication, Gabriel. Electronic gadgets can fail or distort. Morena’s always complaining about the battery dying on hers.”

  “That reminds me…” I put my smartphone on a charger on the kitchen counter. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Well, I can’t help but notice that open bottle of Oban you’ve got.”

  I poured two fingers of the whiskey into a square glass, and he waved off my offer of water or ice to go in it. I grabbed a glass of water and led him into the den, where I sat on the brown and green-striped couch. He took the leather recliner.

  “Ah, now this is more like it,” he said and leaned back. “Can’t complain about this modern invention.”

  “Right, because back in the day, all you had to sit on were rocks and piles of straw.” I took a deep breath, trying to keep my patience, but all I wanted was to take a long run and then a hot bath. Both would help me process the day, but I needed to know what the Council had met about and what it meant for the continuation of the Institute.

  “You’re getting better,” he observed. “I remember a time when you would have snapped at me to spill my news.”

  “I was very young. I haven’t gotten impatient with a Council member since the seventies.”

  “You’re doing better than your father, then. Back in the Victorian days, he was a hothead.”

  Again, a mention of my father. I wondered if the uniform-clad ghost followed me still, but I didn’t feel any cold drafts or other signs of something supernatural, which gave me some small sense of relief. Not that I thought he’d hurt me, but it did cause some discomfort knowing I was being watched and possibly judged.

  “Well, I’m not him, although I am starting to grow impatient. You come to my home, drink my whiskey, and drop hints but nothing of substance. What did the Council meet about?”

  He set his empty glass on the coffee table and leaned forward. “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “That’s what the Council met about: you. That’s why you weren’t invited.”

  I raised my eyebrows, my strange meeting with Morena coming to mind. “Are they considering replacing me as Investigator?”

  “No, you’re coming into your maturity, so they’re thinking of promoting you to full Council member.”

  “About damn time. But why now? I’ve been mature for decades. I’m close to eighty years old, David.”

  He nodded slowly. “It’s something we don’t talk about generally—don’t want others to know too much about our inner workings, you see—but that’s how it works: the youngest member starts out as Investigator, and if they come into their full power, they get promoted up. If not, they get asked to leave, but that’s not happened in recent memory because the Council families are, through careful mate selection for offspring, very strong, and it’s rare for one of them to not achieve full lycanthrope power. You were a wild card, though, because of your human mother.”

  “Wait…” I massaged my temples. “What indicates that something’s happening now? As I said, I’ve been fully grown for several decades.”

  “Some of it’s how you’ve recently learned to use your werewolf senses while in human form, although you’re still developing that talent. You can only use one at a time, after all.”

  “I thought that was because males don’t multitask.”

  “It’s also a sense not unlike what you do with the schoolboys,” he continued, ignoring my attempt at humor. “Some things you just know.”

  “What am I supposed to do? What did the Council decide?”

  “We voted four to two to wait it out and see what happens.” He drew his brows tog
ether. “Some are not convinced that you will achieve full power in spite of the signs, and they’re especially cautious because your championed cause—the Institute—seems to be falling apart.”

  “And you can’t tell me who voted against me,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You can likely guess.”

  “Probably Cora because of her connection to the Purists and Dimitri, who’s been cool to me lately. Why are you helping me, David? You said you had some interest in the Institute, but this is personal, and you could get in serious trouble for telling me as much as you have.”

  “A very old promise, lad.” He drew a yellowed envelope out of his jacket breast pocket. From it, he extracted a letter, its creases darkened and worn like it would fall into pieces at any moment. He held it gingerly and looked at me. “It’s from your father.”

  “To me?” I asked.

  “No, about you.” He unfolded the letter and squinted at it, although I suspected he’d memorized it by now. “‘Lachlan, I hope this greeting finds you well and indeed, better than I am. Our suspicions were correct, and I fear I am in mortal danger. Remember your promise to me, the one you made before I left. Regards, McCord.’”

  “What does it mean?” I couldn’t help but ask. I struggled to push away the memory of the images of my father’s demise, my mother’s tear-streaked face and the fear in her eyes.

  David re-folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “He was behind enemy lines, and it’s a miracle that letter made it out at all. It’s deliberately vague, of course.” He looked down at the envelope, his expression one I’d never seen on his face before, of grief and sadness. “Although I didn’t want to, I had to keep my distance from you and your mother because you were in grave danger.”

  “From who?”

  He looked around. “Are you sure this place is secure?”

  “I believe so. I’m just renting, so I haven’t been able to do much to it.”

  “Then let’s go for a run and discuss it somewhere we won’t be overheard.”