“Uh, is there something you want to tell me?” I said.
“Coat of many colors.” He pointed at the carpet with an urgent forefinger. “Many many colors.”
“Uh, yeah, but why is that important?”
“Read the next book.”
He vanished before I could test him for Chaos affiliation.
Still, I picked up the second journal and started leafing through more grief, rage, and loneliness. Just when I was ready to hang it up, angel or no angel, a pattern began to develop. I found only hints at first, references to odd e-mails that Pat was afraid to hope meant what he thought they meant—not that he’d deigned to copy any of them into the journal, the annoying little brat! Slowly though the hints added up to possibilities. What if there was a place where he could serve God as he was, wolf nights and all?
At last, with only ten pages to go in that notebook, whoever sent those e-mails contacted him outright. They had smelled Pat running at the full moon, then seen him from a distance right after the wolf-form left him. They had decided to take the chance and approach him. On the second to the last page, Pat sent an e-mail in answer. On the last page, in big letters, he’d printed, “
Fr. LG respondit!
”
By then my eyes were watering, my back ached, and I was beginning to think in Latin. I checked the time: five A.M. Going in to my fake job had become impossible. I could phone in using the landline and leave a message for Mr. Morrison, then go to bed—but damn it, I had to find out who this mysterious “they” were. First, coffee! I stood up, creaking in every joint, and staggered into the kitchen.
I had just poured myself a cup when the landline rang. I drank a couple of mouthfuls and picked up the receiver on the sixth ring.
“Bona matutina,”
I said. “I mean, morning, Nathan.”
“Morning,” Nathan said. “I’m glad you’re safe. I just drove by your place and saw the light on in the window, and I wondered why you hadn’t turned it off. I’ll be right up. We can go out for breakfast.”
“No, we can’t!”
But he’d already hung up on me.
I put the receiver back and stood fuming beside the phone just long enough for his meaning to soak in. “I’m glad you’re safe.” With the light still burning in my window, I could have been lying on the floor dead, murdered by William Johnson in one of his bad moods. Once again I’d forgotten about him.
I began to wonder if he was meddling with my mind, making me forget so he could have an easier shot at me. I tried a Search Mode: Individual scan, just a quick cast into nowhere in particular. I picked up nothing, absolutely nothing. Johnson could have been dead or heading to Mars on a spaceship for all I could find.
Still, I took the warning to heart. When Nathan knocked on my door, I made him repeat our passwords before I opened up. He strode in, freshly shaved, smelling of witch hazel, wearing a blue shirt, and waving a manila folder.
“The police report on the Presidio murder.” Nathan tossed the folder onto my coffee table. “Where do you want to go for breakfast?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I never eat a real breakfast, and I’ve been up all night reading.”
“Ah. That’s why you look like something the cat dragged in.”
I refrained from throwing my coffee into his face only because I probably did.
“You go out to breakfast if you want,” I said. “I need to keep reading Pat’s journals.”
“Find anything in them?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”
Nathan walked over to the couch and leaned over it to pull the curtains open a few inches. The cold gray light of a foggy dawn sliced into the room. He stood there looking out for a minute or two, then switched off the floor lamp.
“I’ll go out for breakfast alone,” he said, “if you’ll do your reading somewhere else. Sitting in a window with the light on! Do you want to get your head blown off?”
“It’s not high on my list of priorities, no.” I began to feel like a fool. “I’ll find a nice safe spot.”
When he left, I shut the door, locked it, slid on the deadbolt, and put on the safety chain for good measure. I took the third journal into the bedroom. The only window there opened onto a narrow air shaft. I put a Chaos ward on the glass and pulled the curtain shut. Since the ward only worked against dedicated followers of Chaos, and I didn’t know yet if Johnson followed that path, I moved my floor lamp and pulled a chair around so I could sit away from the window rather than sprawling on the bed to read as I usually did. I got myself another cup of coffee and opened the third notebook.
This mysterious Fr. LG—I assumed the Fr. meant
frater,
a brother as in some kind of Catholic order, and that LG were his initials—had a lot to say to Patrick over the next few weeks, all of which Pat recorded in the journal. At first LG dropped only hints, a few leading questions, a sliver of information here, a morsel more there. Pat sounded dubious himself, afraid to believe rather than openly skeptical. “The next full moon will prove the test,” he remarked at one point.
A few days before, he met LG for coffee, as casually as you can get at a doughnut shop near campus. LG brought along a Sr. MR, a sister, which ruled out any kind of official religious order in my mind. I considered the possibility of a magical lodge, a kind of anti-Masons, maybe, since Pat would never have had anything to do with the actual Masons or their offshoots. He liked both the
frater
and the
soror
and left the meeting inclined to trust them, though, of course, they’d only chatted about trivial matters in public. He agreed to meet them at Land’s End at the full moon.
I was reading as fast as I could, scanning pages and leaving the details for later. As usual, he’d made no entries on the three days of the full moon’s influence.
The fourth day, he wrote in big shaky letters:
verum!
It’s true. And for the first time I saw the words the Hounds of Heaven. Frater LG, Lupus Gubbionis—his name came from the wolf of Gubbio, the giant wolf who terrorized an entire medieval village until St. Francis tamed it—headed up a small group of lycanthropes dedicated to serving the Good in their own way rather than giving in to the forces of Chaos that always threatened them from within. Soror MR, aka Mater Remi and LG’s fiancée, had taken for her name the wolf mother of the brother who hadn’t founded Rome. An interesting touch, I thought, to identify with the outsider.
By then I was so tired, and my eyes ached so badly, that tears were running down my face, partly for Pat, too, of course, who at last had found the friends and the place in life he’d always wanted, only to die a year later. Well, all right, mostly for Pat. I got up and grabbed a box of tissues.
After I got control of myself, I washed my face, then went back out into the living room for a look at the copy of the police report Nathan had brought by. I was beginning to form a theory about why Johnson had come to the Bay Area. I hoped the young woman found dead in the Presidio had nothing to do with the Hounds, but I worried.
I had just picked up the folder when I heard a sound at the door, a little click, a scrape of metal on metal, another click. The doorknob quivered. I put the folder down on the coffee table and stepped back. Tired though I was, I could still summon plenty of Qi. If Johnson opened that door, he was in for a blast of it.
The door moved inward, then slammed against the safety chain. Through a crack about an inch wide I could see the pale yellow glow of the light above the stairs. I raised my hands and breathed slowly, regularly, feeling the Qi ascend with every breath. I stripped Qi from the air to match what I was summoning from within. The energies twined themselves into a ball of fire between my hands. I waited, ready to let it go as soon as I had a target.
“Brilliant!” Nathan called out. “Nola, you can open it now. You’ve got the right kind of chain in place. I’m glad to see it.”
I was tempted to blast the bastard anyway, but I’d signed a contract restricting ensorcellment to life and death situations. He shut the door again to allow the chain to sag back to normal. I let the Qi spill and dissipate harmlessly as I walked across the room.
“Where does Jake live?” I said.
“Sheboygan,” he said. “Which is in Wisconsin, by the way. I looked it up on the Internet last night.”
I opened the door to find him smiling, a lockpick in one hand, an object wrapped in a paper napkin in the other.
“I brought you an English muffin,” he said. “With butter.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Come in. I’ve got something to tell you about my brother Pat.”
I locked and chained the door behind him, then took the muffin. Coffee on an empty stomach after a long night is never a good idea. I ate the muffin fast to keep it company. Nathan stood beside the window, pushed back one curtain a bare crack, and peered out at the street below.
“One quick question,” I said. “The murdered consular official?”
“What about him?”
“Was he from the Bay Area?”
“Yes, from San Francisco, in fact.” Nathan let the curtain fall and turned back into the room.
“Did Greenbaum have a Bay Area connection?”
“Is Fresno in the Bay Area?” He pronounced it “freez-no.”
“No, thank God! But it is in California.”
“She was born there. Her parents didn’t emigrate until she was a teenager.”
“So I’ll bet they came to San Francisco now and then to see the sights. Huh, everything fits.”
“Fits what?”
“The pattern that’s emerging. Look, there’s no subtle way for me to say this. My brother was a werewolf, and I’m beginning to think that Johnson may have murdered him, too.”
Nathan opened his mouth and shut it again, several times.
“You’re a nutter, aren’t you?” he said at last. “Beautiful but stark raving, and I’m supposed to work with you.”
I had expected no less. “No, I’m the sane one in my family.”
“That I can believe, having met some of them.”
“Oh, come on, Nathan! There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in whatever that was. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? What happened back in your home territory was so weird that my agency is about the only thing that could help you. Your higher-ups must have known that.” I gave him my version of the gimlet eye. “Either they’re holding out on you, or you’re holding out on me. Why were you given this assignment? A pair of murders by a non-national is a fairly routine Interpol matter. Why bring you and your deep cover connections into it?”
Nathan considered me for a long moment. “You’re sharper than you let on,” he said eventually. “Johnson’s itinerary sounded suspicious, Syria, Iran, and so on.”
“Yeah, but is that all? Why were you put in touch with my agency?”
“I’ve wondered that myself. Your lot apparently have nothing to do with counterterrorism.”
“I have connections with one unit, but that’s in case something comes my way by accident. Any hint of organized Islamist activity, and I turn it over to them.”
“Well, there we are.” He made a fist with his right hand and punched it into his left palm. “That’s really all I can tell you.”
“I don’t like working in the dark. I’ll contact my handler and tell him to end our involvement.”
Again the stare. His Subliminal Psychological Profile registered the highest level of stunned disbelief I’d ever run across.
“I mean it,” I said.
“I can see that.” He hesitated, glanced at the door, glanced back at me. “Oh, very well! It’s because of the gaps in the itinerary. We have no idea of how he got from Israel to Syria, from Syria to Iran, and from Iran to here. For all we know he could have made ten other stops in between, and none of our stringers or operatives saw him—or so they say.”
I could recognize that signal and link it to a remark he’d made during the briefing. His superiors suspected that traitors or moles in their network were suppressing information or supplying disinformation or maybe both. Nathan had been assigned to do an end run around them by working backward from San Francisco.
“I think we’re touching on something that’s none of my business,” I said.
Nathan nodded and sighed in a brief puff of relief.
“Except for one last thing,” I said.
He winced.
“Why my agency?”
“I honestly don’t know. I asked my immediate superior about that last night. He hemmed and hawed and talked all around the point.” Once again he slammed his fist into the palm of the other hand. “I had the distinct impression that he wasn’t completely sure himself. The higher-ups suspect something peculiar is at work, but they don’t know what.” For a brief moment he looked furious. “I’m the one who’s working in the dark, actually.”
His SPP indicated these doubts were genuine.
“As to why I’m here personally,” he went on, “and not some other agent, my language skills may have had something to do with the assignment. I can get by in a number of foreign languages besides English. It allows me to work for Interpol, which I quite legitimately do. Interpol keeps its eyes on terrorism, you know, and I’ve some experience with that.”
Since this matched what our contacts had reported, I believed him there as well.
“Lucky old you.” I gestured at the couch. “Have a seat.”
Nathan sat down on the couch. I pulled the computer chair around to face him across the coffee table.
“About this werewolf business,” he began.
“Let me start with Pat’s friends,” I said. “He belonged to a group of werewolves, a pack, I’d guess you’d call it. That’s one thing I’ve learned from his journals. Let me check something here.”
The printout of the police report still lay where I’d dropped it. I felt my stomach twist as I picked up the folder and opened it. The victim was Mary Rose Romero, a student at the local Catholic college.
“And I bet that this poor girl,” I said, “belonged to it, too. Someone’s on the prowl for werewolves, and just maybe my brother was the first to die.”