A private investigator with the ability to see magic uses his gifts to handle the supernatural’s cases that the police can’t.
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A private investigator with the ability to see magic uses his gifts to handle the supernatural cases that the police can’t. As his city becomes threatened by a force bigger than himself, he’s forced to make a bargain he knows he’ll regret.
Bad London is a free weekly serial. Chapters are released weekly on Thursday mornings. Paid members get access Monday mornings.
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Full Cast
Season 0:
A string of violent crimes sends Jackson into London, England’s magical underworld. [September 2026]
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Bonus:
Bad Bite - Complete | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
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Sibling rivalry only works on the page if both siblings secretly think the other one got the easier version of their childhood. Nobody thinks they won. Write both of them convinced they lost, and suddenly the fighting makes sense.
I wasn’t sure which of us had the more difficult job; Daniel in convincing Sarah to take Jackson to her sister’s out of town, or myself in scrounging together everything I would need for my niece to turn into a feral animal without resorting to using any official resources. I suspected it was him. Frankly, I didn’t know how he’d managed it, only that he’d muttered something about her sister having picked them up sometime while I was out.
While I might have been able to get supplies couriered from the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence’ office in Oxford, I didn’t think I would be able to do so without some explanation as to why I needed it. If I said it was for research or information, I might be told to go to Oxford and examine them on-site. If I said I knew of a werewolf who needed some support, an expert would be sent and I would lose complete control of what happened after that.
This was my matter to deal with. Evelyn was my responsibility. Not pushing for her to be sent to the Holy Hollow from the minute I suspected what had bitten her was a mistake I had to rectify.
There was still time. There was still time.
I didn’t consider myself to be a particularly religious man, but some higher power must have been looking down on me as I rushed through Camden Market only days before the full moon. I had very little difficulty finding the things Sister Halla had suggested, even if I did have to adapt a little bit. Her email had made it quite clear she thought I was making a mistake attempting to manage this without another werewolf but wished me luck nonetheless. I didn’t disagree with her. If it was anybody else, I would have absolutely called in for reinforcements.
What choice did I have, thought?
The werewolf who had bitten her was dead, assuming it was the one from the article she had sent me. Even if it wasn’t, Evelyn was a minor. There was nothing I could do without her parents’ permission. If Daniel wanted, he could send me packing back to Oxford and bar me from having anything to do with either of them.
This was the best I could offer.
Not being a witch myself, there were plenty of secrets the ones who had their homes and businesses in the borough kept from me, but my work gave me access to many more contacts than I would have had otherwise.
I told a woman who worked with textiles that I needed the blankets woven with soundproofing that my roommate had started a band and was driving my family mad with her practicing. The enchanter who had owned Sagittarii for as long as I could remember gave me the strongest chain bracelet he could enchant, as my niece kept catching them on things and breaking them, yet still insisted on wearing them. Wolfsbane, of course, from a herbalist who barely sold me enough to kill an ant with a warning of how dangerous it was. I didn’t need the reminder.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d by nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine.
John Keats, Ode on Melancholy. I’d taken a course on English Literature during my first undergraduate degree.
There were also the non-magical supplies, namely enough food to sustain her through the shift. That, Sister Halla had warned me, was the biggest mistake people made; they didn’t eat enough beforehand, leaving them with a starving animal that couldn’t exactly make themselves a sandwich, now could they.
Evelyn put on a brave face as I hung the blankets on the wall. The spots of blood around her fingernails where she had picked the skin around them. She had stopped that only to start rotating the silver chain bracelet around her wrist until I worried she was going to rub her skin raw.
“Is this going to hurt?” she asked.
I hadn’t used the w-word with her, but she knew. Of course she knew. Even if she had never said it either, she might have known from the moment she’d been bitten.
“Not more than getting a needle,” I lied. The truth was that I wasn’t certain. Some records called it the most painful experience next to childbirth, some compared to something more akin to taking off a wet piece of clothing. “Your father will be with you the entire time.”
At the very least, we would be right on the other side of the door. It would be far too dangerous to be in the room with her even if she ate an entire cow beforehand.
“I’m not scared,” Evelyn said with an expression that could only belong to a teenage girl.
I squeezed her hands. The pinprick where the IV needle had been stuck was long-healed. “You’re allowed to be afraid, Evie. Saints know I would be terrified if I were you.”
Evelyn shrugged. Her nose twitched in something I couldn’t place. She muttered something I didn’t quite catch, though my brain made sense of the words moments later. Something about not the first time my body’s changed on me. I gave her a sympathetic smile.
Morning passed into afternoon, then into evening. Even without the clocks or the moving sun, we were hyperaware of the passage of time in Evelyn’s increasing winces of pain and restlessness. She paced back and forth, scratching raised lines on her arms, until the pangs had her doubled over.
I mixed the pinch of wolfsbane into a glass of water. I doubted such a small amount would do much, but too much would kill her.
“This, along with the silver, should help dull the transition a bit,” I said.
I forced myself to distance myself from it all, to make myself an outside observer. There was no way I could stand it otherwise. As it was, it took everything I had not to sit down on the floor and cry the way Sarah had been. For Evelyn’s sake, I couldn’t let my emotions get the better of me.
The sun dipped down over the horizon, splaying the sky with pink and purple and orange.
There was no more time.
“Evie,” I said gently.
Evelyn nodded from her position curled up on the floor. Her nails, so much longer than they had been only minutes ago, scraped against the floor as she pushed herself to sit upright. “I’ll be fine.” There was only the slightest waver to her voice. Her shirt, drenched in sweat, clung to her despite being far too big.
I curled my hand around Daniel’s wrist and tugged gently. He didn’t move. His muscles were locked stiff, unmovable as a statue. His lips were pressed into a thin line, the tightness of his expression doing nothing to hide the way they trembled.
“Daniel,” I said.
“It’s all right,” Evelyn said. “It’s—“ A sharp wince and strangled whine. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
I pulled on Daniel’s arm more sharply this time. He moved like a post finally snapping. I pushed him out of Evelyn’s room, trying not to see the dresser covered in stuffed animals, and closed the door behind me.
Daniel paced the floor now as though he were the animal. “What now? We just— What? Wait?”
I shrugged. “Unfortunately, there isn’t much else we can do.”
He pushed both hands through his hair. There was a half-wild look in his eyes that turned to desperation as a pained cry filtered through the gap beneath the door. How, that expression asked, could there be nothing else we could do? With all the knowledge I had of the supernatural, how could there be nothing else I could do?
If I had any answers… I was asking myself the same questions.
Evelyn’s scream broke my resolve to be only an observer. I squeezed my eyes shut. It was all I could do not to clamp my hands over my ears the way Daniel was. I crossed my arms over my stomach and grabbed handfuls of my shirt to brace myself.
Another scream, more animalistic, half a growl. Wet tearing. Cracks and snaps. Heavy scraping of claws against laminate.
She shouldn’t have been alone for this. She should have been with other werewolves. She should have been outside in the wilderness, not cramped in her childhood bedroom.
My mouth was thick with the urge to be sick.
“This isn’t right. This isn’t right. This isn’t right,” Daniel muttered again and again and again.
There was no longer anything human in the sounds coming from Evelyn’s bedroom. It was all animalistic growls and snarls. The door rattled hard against my spine as she threw her weight into it. The second bang reverberated through the wall. From the far side of the room came a whined, desperate-sounding howl that echoed through the inside of my skull.
“I can’t do this,” Daniel said.
I expected him to turn away, to maybe go outside where he couldn’t hear the pads of paws on the floor. Instead, he pushed me aside before I could brace myself and grabbed the doorknob.
“Don’t—!”
Too late.
Daniel was there, in front of the open door.
Then he wasn’t.
The wolf was smaller than I expected her to be. Still large enough to send Daniel sprawling to the floor. Still large enough that I had to use all my strength to wedge my arm beneath her muzzle and wrench her head back. Her teeth snapped at my face.
“Evie—!”
I wasn’t sure which of us shouted her name.
No recognition in her amber eyes.
Daniel sat cowering on the floor, back pressed rigid against the wall, eyes wide, breath coming out in short pants. He truly hadn’t believed it until this minute, had he. Part of him had still believed that I was out of my mind. Well, there was no denying it anymore.
The animal — my niece — stalked towards me, teeth bared, nostrils flared, ears swivelling. Her head twitched to the front door at the sound of laughter from the street.
She moved.
I moved.
Claws caught my arm. My heel caught her shoulder, then her chest. My fingers grasped for the silver chain held in place by the fur around her paw, only to have the links snap at the first tug.
Damn Uther—
I would have some words for him later.
“Some assistance would be appreciated!” I shouted. It took every bit of strength and focus to keep her teeth off my face even as claws raked down my chest. Blood slicked my skin, soaked my clothes. Her breath puffed in my face, hot and putrid.
“Like what?” Daniel shouted back.
Like don’t open the door containing a werewolf!
“Silver! Or iron! Meat!”
No— Did iron work on werewolves? Did it matter? I was scrambling for a shoe to fend her off, for God’s sake.
Something heavy landed beside me. A vintage fire poker. No time to wonder why he had it. I shoved the handle between Evelyn’s sharp teeth. She reared back and shuddered. A shower of silver cutlery, which may have been the same cutlery I’d bought him for his wedding, clattered all over the floor. Evelyn’s paw landed on a spoon. She yelped in pain. Her eyes searched the floor, her body twitching and jerking as she tried to find a safe place to step. Her ears were flat, hackles raised, tail low. She was afraid, and the only thing we could do was make it worse.
“What do I do with this?” Daniel was holding a pack of chicken.
I motioned with my uninjured arm, too breathless to respond verbally, and he tossed it into Evelyn’s bedroom. She fixed her head on him before she dove for the package, leaping over silverware and a headless stuffed animal. I scrambled for the door. Blood slick against my palm made it hard to grasp the doorknob. Daniel’s hand covered mine, and we pulled together.
I saw a flash of amber before the door slammed shut.
“You’re bleeding,” Daniel said. His hands searched my body until he found the source. “You’re bleeding!”
I pressed my arm to my chest to staunch the bleeding in both. My shoulder leaned into him for support. “Thank you, Captain Obvious. My bag— Emergency kit.” It was all I had the energy to say. The support was done, and I had to lean into the wall instead. My heart pounded loud in my toes. I flexed my fingers to move blood into the tips currently turning white. My bag landed beside me with a loud thud drowned out by Evelyn’s snarl.
I dug through with my fully functional hand. Found the small jars of salve I always kept with me. Wiped the blood with a shirt. Daniel’s hands shaking as he helped undo the buttons of the one I wore. Fabric pulled at the wounds. Not as deep as they could have been. The salve stung and burned. It couldn’t have been nearly as bad as what Evelyn had felt.
The knowledge didn’t help.
The bleeding slowed.
I would still likely need stitches, likely have some scars.
It had to be said that I, Zachariah Barrett Waller…
It had to be said that I was a coward.
There was no kind or other way to put it. The knowledge made me want to crawl into a hole every time I tried to make myself face it. I had never been good at delivering bad news. There was a not insignificant number of potential romantic partners that I had simply disappeared from rather than admit to them that it wasn’t working out.
I should have told Daniel first thing in the morning — or mid-afternoon, rather, when he finally emerged from his room — that Evelyn had to be sent to the Holy Hollow of the Blood Moon of Fenrir. I didn’t. Instead, I made breakfast, telling myself that I would tell him after he had eaten something. Evelyn was still sleeping, and Sarah had resumed her post outside her bedroom door with no interest in the food I set beside her. Daniel picked at some eggs and sausage, which was still more than I could make myself eat. Only Jackson seemed to have kept his appetite. He didn’t seem to care that he had eaten two bowls of cereal barely a few hours ago. It was a relief to be able to hand him a second helping of sausages and make him some more toast. Breakfast food was apparently the only thing he was interested in eating these days, which I had no problem accommodating. It was just good to see somebody eating.
“Will you stay and make breakfast every day, Uncle Zachariah?” Jackson asked eagerly.
I slid the butter dish toward him as he stood on his toes to reach across the table for it. I pretended not to notice Daniel’s head lift just slightly, still too low for me to make out his expression. I lifted my tea to my lips to buy myself a moment to think of a response. Daniel, in the meantime, had redoubled his focus on taking apart a sausage as though it held the secrets to the universe inside it. He didn’t take any of it onto his fork. Had I overcooked them? Jackson didn’t seem to think so.
“I will stay as long as I can, but I will have to leave for work again at some point,” I said. There was an affair in Serbia that would require my attention sooner than later, though it could at least wait a little longer. It wasn’t critical yet. I had barely even started my research, not without good reason.
I thought I might have seen Daniel’s mouth turned downward, though I couldn’t quite be sure. Jackson, on the other hand, deflated visibly.
“But I like having you around,” Jackson muttered with an aggressive stab at a half-eaten fried egg.
I pat his hand sympathetically. “I know,” I said. “But I promise I will have plenty of stories and photos to share with you when I return, and I will make you breakfast every day I am here.”
That seemed to brighten Jackson’s spirits some. He finished another piece and a half of toast before he was out to play with his friends, leaving Daniel and I to sit in an uncomfortable silence. I poured myself another cup of tea and forced myself to take a bite of the slice of toast that had long since gone cold and hard.
If there was any time to tell Daniel, it was now.
I didn’t.
Three times I opened my mouth to say something, and three times I chickened out.
Coward.
If I said the words out loud, there would be no taking them back. I had to be completely sure. What if Evelyn wasn’t actually a werewolf? So she had had a massive spike in her appetite. It happened every now and then. I certainly recalled waking up in the afternoon after a night out in uni ready to clear through an entire cow’s worth of burgers.
There is only so much time before we know for sure one way or another.
As though I needed the reminder. I had, after all, committed the lunar calendar to memory.
“You know,” Daniel said, shocking me from my thoughts. I hadn’t expected him to say anything. “It has been nice having you around. Even if it isn’t exactly under the best of circumstances.”
The last piece of toast I’d swallowed must have been too big. I coughed against the sudden lump in my throat.
“It has been nice being here,” I said.
It was difficult to say whether or not Daniel and I were particularly close. There had been times in our lives when we were inseparable, and times when we were liable to commit fratricide if we had to be in the same room together. And there had been a time, after our father had died and our mother took to doing anything to stay out of the house, that he had been both parents to me despite being only a handful of years older than myself.
I wondered if he was thinking of those years the way I was.
The silence fell between us again. Daniel soon left the kitchen to the backyard, pack of cigarettes in hand, leaving me to pack up the leftovers and tidy up the table. I ran the dishwasher and laid on the couch with the intention of resting my eyes only for a few minutes. Instead, I was pulled into dreams and memories that had me jerking awake in a cold sweat.
I sat up and wiped by brow with the back of my hand. What time was it? The analog clock on the shelf had run out of batteries and was stuck just after 2:45, though I had no idea whether it had stopped at 2:45 in the morning or in the afternoon. I searched for my watch and found it underneath a pillow.
No, that couldn’t be right.
Had I really slept for six hours?
My joints popped as I stood and stretched. It certainly wasn’t as bright outside as it had been.
Jackson was still outside with a few other boys about his age. Neither Daniel nor his shoes were anywhere to be seen. I found Sarah in Evelyn’s room, fussing over Evelyn and petting her hair and face even as Evelyn batted her hands away. The bedroom lights were off, the only brightness coming from the windows.
“Will you tell her that I’m fine!” Evelyn said, more of a frustrated huff than a plea.
The rich chocolate of her eyes was replaced with pale amber.
I swallowed hard to keep my voice from wavering, shoved my hands in my pocket to keep them from trembling. “Sarah, maybe you should give her a bit of space,” I suggested softly.
Sarah glared at me through tears. Had she stopped crying even for a moment since the attack?
“I’m not leaving my baby!” she wailed.
“God, I am not a baby! Stop smothering me!”
Evelyn shoved Sarah hard enough to knock her off the bed. She was up on her feet before I could even process the motion, shoving off her pyjama bottoms in such a rough motion that the bandage on her thigh ripped off. Where had once been a series of deep, red angry bite marks were instead pink divots. She yanked on a pair of jeans and pulled a hoodie over her baggy t-shirt.
I shifted, only partially blocking the doorway.
“Evie, wait a—“
She braced a hand on my chest and shoved hard enough that my back slammed into the corner of the frame. “Move!” she snarled, teeth bared.
I wasn’t sure if I was more hurt or stunned. I looked down at Sarah for several seconds before I had the presence of mind to follow after Evelyn. She was still in the house, at least, tearing through the fridge in clear frustration.
I should have told Daniel as soon as he got home.
I didn’t.
For a few days after that, it seemed I didn’t have to. Evelyn seemed to settle down; her appetite and temperament returned more or less to normal, though she awoke from sleep screaming more often than not. I was usually the one who sat with her when that happened. Her strength returned. She started taking walks outside, a few minutes at a time, then a light jog.
I told myself I had been worried for nothing. Things were getting better.
They didn’t stay better for long.
I couldn’t keep putting it off, not as her mood swung rapidly and her appetite redoubled in preparation of the full moon. She cleared through cartons of eggs and jars of chocolate spread and packages of raw meat at night when nobody was looking. She smashed plates and put holes in the walls and slammed a door hard enough to splinter the frame.
Evelyn sat next to me outside in a tank top and shorts despite the cold night, blinking tears from her amber eyes.
“What’s wrong with me, Uncle Zachariah?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. My fingers and lungs itched for a cigarette, for any kind of distraction. I dug my nails into the side of my thigh.
“I need to speak with your father,” I said through the tight coil around my throat.
Evelyn’s mouth twitched and her nostrils flared in a clear indication of how she felt about that, but she didn’t argue. There was a fear in her eyes that made me too aware of how young she was. She was thirteen, for every god’s sake. She wasn’t even old enough to drive yet, not that I expected her to be doing much of that in London. I had to remind myself that lycanthropy wasn’t terminal. There were plenty who managed to live perfectly fulfilling lives. Not all the sisters and brothers of the Holy Hollow lived there forever.
Daniel wouldn’t listen to me. Even when he sobered from the night out, even without my using the word werewolf, he wouldn’t listen to me.
“I am not sending my daughter away,” he hissed, “to some fucking cult compound.”
I pushed my hands through my hair. My eyes burned.
“It’s not a cult, and it’s for her protection,” I said.
“I can protect her.”
“You can—” I closed my throat against the shout and forced my voice back down to a whisper. I wanted to shove the article in his face, to show him what werewolf hunters would do to her. “Daniel, she will be dangerous. If anyone finds out what she is now, they will kill her. Do you hear me?”
“Do you even hear yourself, Zachariah? She’s a teenage girl, for God’s sake. How fucking dangerous could she be?”
“Shouldn’t she at least have some say in this? It’s quite literally her life we’re talking about.”
“That goes for how she does her hair. Not for things like this.”
No matter what I said, Daniel just wouldn’t see reason.
Mahomet cald the Hill to come to him. And when the Hill stood still, he was neuer a whit abashed, but said; If the Hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet wil go to the hil.
There were ways to contain werewolves. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be doable. I thought of Jackson, of wolf teeth and claws, and shuddered. He couldn’t be around for it.
“At least humour me and go somewhere safe with Jackson and Sarah. I will pay for a hotel myself. Please. Daniel. Please.”
Something in my tone, or perhaps the break in my voice, must have finally gotten through to him. Daniel stared at me for what felt like hours. His lips pressed into a thin line, but his eyes softened. He closed them and sighed. He rubbed a shaky hand over his face. His Adam’s apple bobbed several times as he swallowed. Though his hand stayed up, his shoulders dropped.
“I can probably get Sarah to take Jackson to her sister’s.”
“You should—”
Daniel dropped his hands. “I am not leaving. Whatever this is, I’m staying.”
For better or worse, this was probably the best that I would get.
By the end of a week, the fever had mostly broken and Evelyn was deemed to be well enough that her bed would be better suited for somebody else. She was sent home with a course of antibiotics, a list of instructions for managing the care of her wounds, and strict orders to rest and avoid any strenuous activity. Evelyn, for her part, seemed eager to get home. She kept talking about the hospital smells that, I had to agree, were less than pleasant.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep all this straight,” Daniel said. He waved the papers in his hand as though he had poured over them for ages rather than barely glancing at them.
I took the instructions and looked them over. There really wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary in them. Clean, dry, Polyspirin, bandages. Antibiotics every four hours, painkillers every six. I suspected it was exhaustion more than anything else that had him so immediately dismissive. I wasn’t sure how much — or how little — Daniel had slept since Evelyn’s attack. Not much, I suspected, not if the shadows under his unfocused eyes were any indication.
“It isn’t terribly complicated. I can handle it if you’d like,” I offered, “provided, of course, that Evelyn is all right with it.”
Daniel clearly didn’t have the capacity to monitor medication schedules, and Sarah even less so. She had been sitting outside Evelyn’s room crying since Evelyn had gone to bed. Jackson was very eager to help take care of his older sister, but the boy was only eight and there was only so much responsibility he could handle. Still, I wasn’t about to crush his need to be helpful and put him in charge of picking out a place to get takeaway for dinner tonight. Where had I heard once that the best thing to do in a crisis was to give everybody a job, no matter how menial?
My brother rubbed his face and shrugged noncommittally. That was the only answer he ever gave about it. He hadn’t shaved in several days. I was fairly certain that he’d worn this shirt multiple times in the past week. It certainly smelled that way. I made a mental note to be sure that I included it in the next round of washing I did. Either that, or to dispose of it as a biohazard.
It was just Jackson and myself for dinner tonight. Evelyn was still sleeping, Sarah still outside her bedroom, and Daniel had stepped out to clear his head. We sat outside on the back patio, eating Indian while I showed him photographs of my most recent visit to Italy. I had done my best to pull out anything related to the Rod of Asclepius I had been there to find. I had missed a couple, but it’s out context, they meant very little.
“Did you know that the Romans used to believe in all sorts of gods?” he said.
“Most people did. Many still do,” I said.
“How many gods to you believe in?”
I cleared my throat. This was one of those topics Daniel might give me a look for getting into. They weren’t particularly religious, but Sarah had her peculiarities towards religion, to use his words.
I glanced back as subtly as I could, made easier by Jackson’s sudden focus on stuffing as much naan into his mouth as humanly possible. My hope that he would lose interest in the topic was short-lived. He looked at me with eyebrows raised expectantly. I held my chin between my thumb and forefinger and hummed in thought. It was difficult to think of the best way to explain it to him when I wasn’t entirely sure myself.
“I suppose that depends on your definition of god,” I said.
Jackson wrinkled his nose. I could practically see his thoughts spinning behind his eyes. I had been significantly older than him when it occurred to me that one could define a god; growing up, God had always been God.
“What’s your definition?” Jackson asked.
A follow-up I should have expected. A dozen definitions bubbled up in my throat; etymological, anthropological, from various times and places. What made something a god versus, say, a deity? Were they simply the personifications of concepts, or overly powerful witches? What did it mean when one culture would consider something a god and another a demon? What happened when an entity stopped being considered a god and fell into the realm of mythology? Did that being cease to exist? Had it ever existed?
I was, according to my diplomas and certificates, a cultural anthropologist with a speciality in folklore. My tax records called me an antiques appraiser. I wasn’t a philosopher. I didn’t have those answer.
“I think,” I said slowly, “a god is something powerful that we look to for hope or when we are afraid, when we need something more than what surrounds us.”
There was an intensity in Jackson’s eyes that surprised me for a an 8-year-old. I’d hoped he would be content to mull that answer over. I couldn’t be so fortunate.
“I read a story about this king from Greece who tried to feed his sons to Zeus, so Zeus turned him into a wolf,” Jackson said.
I nodded slowly. “Lycaon, from which we have the word lycanthrope.”
“There’s all sorts of stories about people turning into wolves. Do you think that’s strange? Why would there be so many stories of it if it weren’t true?”
“Stories are how we explain the world around us,” I said. “And sometimes, they’re just stories.”
Jackson studied me for a moment as I kept my head facing the fence at the back of the garden. What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette right now. Under any other circumstance, I would have loved nothing more than to follow this train of through. Daniel’s warning to keep the occult out of his kids’ lives rang through my mind. Could I really keep it from them when it had forced itself into their lives without me?
I put Jackson to bed not long after, careful to keep him from seeing Sarah asleep on the floor. At least she was sleeping, even if she would be miserable come morning. I waited up until Daniel came home smelling like beer and cigarettes but surprisingly sober given that he had clearly had a few drinks. I might as well have been a ghost for all he acknowledged me before carrying Sarah to bed. He didn’t say a word to me, and I didn’t say a word to him.
Even when the house fell silent, I couldn’t sleep. It was too quiet, and my thoughts were too loud in contrast. I dragged my laptop out from under the sofa, though I hardly expected myself to get much work done at this hour. As much as my mind wouldn’t let me rest, my thoughts were slow and muddled as sluggish as though I was the one who’d been out drinking. I lifted the pack of cigarettes from the inside of Daniel’s jacket pocket. I had quit smoking about seven times already. What was one more time?
There was no need to search for a lighter; No matter where I left mine, it would always find its way to my pocket full of fluid. It was a handy little thing I had picked up in Camden Market a lifetime ago. The woman who made it had long-since been driven from the city for refusing to align herself with a coven. London witches were governed by covens — Minor Covens fell under Major Covens which subsequently fell under the Grand Coven known as the Pentacle. — through whom most of the Assistants worked. They regulated witchcraft in the city quite closely. It always made me grateful that I was not a witch and would therefore never have to join a coven myself. There was more than enough red tape and hierarchy with the Assistants for my taste.
I couldn’t help but stare up at the sliver of moon visible behind clouds. Watching it filled me with a dread I could only explain to a small number of people, and not over email. It was tempting to dig my mobile phone from my bag and call around until I found somebody awake at this hour. I could think of at least one person who would answer no matter when I called.
I couldn’t tell anybody what I suspected. It would be one thing if I suspected her of becoming a witch. While most witchcraft was hereditary, it could develop without a familial connection. I knew people who had become witches following trauma, there were endless stories of warlocks who offered part of their soul for magic, and of course there was always the use of magical items.
Lycanthropy was—
To call lycanthropy another beast entirely would be to use more humour than I could manage right now.
The click of a door being opened and shut, quietly and carefully, caught my ears.
I spotted Evelyn in the kitchen, tearing through the leftover takeaway. I stepped back so as not to make my presence known.
She was hungry. Of course she was hungry. By all the gods and goddesses and deities in between, had she even had solid food since the attack? The only concerning thing about it was whether or not she would make herself sick.
The fact that Uncontrollable Hunger was one of Sister Halla’s signs to watch for meant nothing. Nothing. She was a growing teenage girl who had just been in hospital for several days. Uncontrollable hunger was to be expected. Frankly, I should have been more worried if she wasn’t eating like she’d just quit a hunger strike. It was good and normal and not a sign that my niece was a werewolf.
She couldn’t be a werewolf. She just couldn’t. Because if she was—
Werewolves didn’t have the same kind of strength in numbers that witches had. There were no werewolf packs in England, none that I knew of at least. The Holy Hollow would be her best bet at safety.
I tried to imagine explaining to Daniel that his daughter had to be sent to a werewolf convent-monastery to avoid being hunted like a wild animal and failed.
There had always been this line, these things that I never said out loud.
Even if I crossed that line, would he believe me?
A small ping came from my laptop. I put out the remnants of my cigarette in the ash tray and turned to face the screen. An email from Sister Halla sat in my email inbox.
Subject: Re: Signs and Symptoms
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I thought you might want to know about this if you do not already.
Takk def,
Søster Halla Vánagandr
Attached to the email was a news article. I covered my mouth with one hand as I skimmed.
Remnants of a man’s body had been found not far from where Evelyn and her friends had been attacked. No head. No heart. Fully charred.
The surest way to kill a werewolf.
I heaved into Sarah’s roses before I could stop it. Chills ran up and down my bones. I gasped for breath and squeezed my eyes against the sudden burning against them. When my stomach was finally done expelling every last ounce of food and fluid, I turned back to my computer. My hands shook against the keyboard as I typed.
There were several articles about the attack that had killed Felecia Neal, Ellie Dixon, and Iain Dixon, and left one survivor. Though Evelyn wasn’t named in any of them, I was sure somebody could figure out it was her with enough persistence.
There was nobody as persistent as werewolf hunters.
She hasn’t hurt anybody. She may never hurt anybody.
I doubted it mattered.
I had no choice, did I. I had to tell my brother that for her own safety, he needed to send his daughter away.
⟢ "I need you to bail me out." - "Again?" - "...the number of times is not the point right now."
⟢ "I have a plan." - "Last time you had a plan I had to explain to three separate adults why we were on a roof." - "This is a different plan." - "Is it though."
⟢ "You're my best friend." - "You literally just said you hated me four minutes ago." - "Yeah and now I need a favor so."
⟢ "I would die for you." - "I just need you to return this library book."- "I would die for you." - "It's two weeks overdue." - "I would absolutely not do that."
⟢ "Nobody has to know." - "Seven people already know." - "Nobody important has to know." - "I'm important." - "Debatable."
⟢ "This is your fault." - "You made the decision." - "Based on your advice." - "I said and I quote 'that sounds like a terrible idea.'" - "In a very convincing tone!"
⟢ "I need you to pretend to be my partner for one evening." - "What do I get out of it." - "My eternal gratitude." - "I have that already." - "Fine, I'll buy you dinner." - "I want to be your fake partner so bad right now."
⟢ "You could've warned me." - "I did warn you." - "You said 'this might be mildly chaotic.'" - "And?" - "There were police involved." - "Mildly is subjective."
⟢ "I'm not saying it was a bad idea." - "It was a terrible idea." - "I'm not saying that." - "You're thinking it." - "So loud."
⟢ "We need a code word." - "For what." - "In case one of us needs to be rescued from a conversation." - "What's wrong with just leaving." - "SOCIAL ANXIETY, DEREK."
⟢ "Tell me honestly, on a scale of one to ten, how much trouble are we in." - "Eleven." "So a four, roughly." - "An eleven." - "I'm going to need you to lie to me right now."
⟢ "I can explain." - "Please don't." - "It's actually a funny story." - "I don't want to laugh right now I want to be angry." - "You're going to laugh." - "...okay but I'm still angry after."
⟢ "You're a bad influence." - "You love me." - "Genuinely against my will."
⟢ "I followed your advice." "- I have never given good advice in my life, why would you do that."
⟢ "We should do something productive today." - "We could." - "Yeah." - "...you wanna do literally anything else." - "So bad."
⟢ "This is fine." - "Nothing about this is fine." - "I'm choosing to believe it's fine." - "That's not how reality works." - "Watch me."
⟢ "Nobody panic." - "Why would we panic." - "No reason. Definitely no reason. How do you feel about light jogging."
⟢ "I googled it." - "You're not a doctor." - "I googled it very confidently." - "That's worse."
⟢ "Do you trust me?" - "Absolutely not." - "Perfect, follow me anyway."
⟢ "We are never doing this again." - "Agreed." - "I mean it this time." - "Same time next week?" - "Obviously."
I kept my promise to Jackson and didn’t leave immediately. How could I? My niece was fighting for her life in the hospital. There was nowhere else I could possibly be right now, something I made very clear to my superiors. I had always appreciated the respect that the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence had for family. It had been made very clear to me a long time ago that no matter how important the work we did was, there were very few matters that would trump something like this. I had leave to spend as much time with my family as I needed. That said, it would be appreciated though not expected, if I had a few moments here and there to handle some non-urgent work… Anything pressing would be handled by other Assistants.
I did not mention the possibility that she had been attacked by a werewolf. I couldn’t, not until I knew for sure. Even if it had been a werewolf, I told myself, that didn’t mean she would become one herself. There was still some uncertainty regarding how the infection was transmitted. I’d heard stories, though admittedly not many, of people bitten by werewolves who never became one themselves.
Evelyn still had a chance.
It had taken several surgeries to stabilize her. She was lucky, in some ways. The wounds along her ribs hadn’t been deep enough to hit any organs, and though the bite to her thigh had been deep, it hadn’t been deep enough to hit the large femoral artery that ran along the bone. That seemed odd to me, given what I heard of the states of the deceased, but what did I know? I wasn’t a doctor. Surely she hadn’t simply healed that quickly. That would be impossible.
My entire life was dedicated to the impossible.
The bigger problem than the wounds was the fever. The spike in white blood cells. The infection the doctors couldn’t quite identify.
I spent much of my time with Jackson, keeping him distracted from the state of his family. Evelyn was in and out of consciousness. Sarah was inconsolable. Daniel always seemed to have the lingering smell of whiskey on his breath. Jackson wasn’t so young as to be unaware of it all, but I still did my best to keep his mind off it. Sitting him with Evelyn would only distress and likely traumatize him, and sitting him in the waiting room wouldn’t do him any favours either. I took him to museums, the zoo, the libraries, the same way I took him and Evelyn every time I was home. He was a very intelligent child, reading well above his year level. On the second library visit, I caught him pulling books about werewolves off the shelves. I knew he saw through my attempt to direct him to something else, to change the subject every time he brought it up.
The easiest thing would have been to tell him, as Daniel had, that werewolves and witches and magic and all the other things he asked about weren’t real. I couldn’t bring myself to lie to him like that. Instead, I did what I thought was a decent job of interesting him in books about Ancient Greece. Surely that was a safe enough topic. I had a vague recollection of reading about Ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt when I was his age.
That, I realized in hindsight, might have been what had started my interest in the occult. Oh well. Too late to do anything about it now. Next time, I would see if I could convince him to take out a book on gardening instead.
At one point, Daniel finally convinced Sarah to let him take her home to shower and rest properly, for pity’s sake, leaving me to sit alone with Evelyn.
For the most part, she slept. She looked so young like that, plugged into monitors. Her skin was both ashen and clammy, with none of the implied tan from a spring and summer spent playing football outside. I read to her from one of the books I had picked up from the library, something the librarian told me was popular with teenage girls. It certainly wasn’t something I would have picked out myself. Still, I found myself getting pulled into the plot more than I wanted to admit. It was certainly a change of pace from the heavy arcane tomes I usually read these days. I might have to pick up the sequel when I finished this one. To read to Evelyn, of course.
When a nurse came to change the bandages, I stepped out of the way. The nurse’s body blocked my view of the bite. Even if I had been able to see it, I doubted I’d be able to identify the animal that had made it.
A large dog. That was it. Nothing worse than that, I told myself.
“It’s healing quite well,” the nurse assured me as she re-bound the bite on her thigh as though that wasn’t exactly what I had feared.
I should have been glad. I was glad. That didn’t mean my stomach didn’t churn with worry.
The nurse left the room, and I sank back into the chair that reminded my lower back of every one of its years. Thirty-three wasn’t terribly old, I reminded myself, but I had my share of injuries from field work. When I had started with the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence, it was purely from a research standpoint. My job had been to research and translate. For a long time, I had been more than happy to sit behind my books and screens. Then, my presence had been requested in Romania where a ring that Atanasie Bălan, either a witch or a vampire or simply a man who knew powerful people, had used to command animals had surfaced. From that moment, I’d been hooked. I loved research, I truly did, but it was nothing compared to actually seeing what I was reading about. Besides, some information wasn’t quite so easy to get my hands on, literally and metaphorically. There were all sorts of libraries all over the world, but not all information was stored in them. My visit to Romania had made me truly appreciate just how much was passed through oral tradition.
Living in libraries had been safe, but it hadn’t been truly living.
The signs of my living sometimes made their appearances in ways I didn’t always appreciate. A dull ache between the bones of my wrist from an old break suggested it was raining outside. I closed my eyes for a moment to ease some of the burning in them. Sarah wasn’t the only one who needed some proper rest. Their couch wasn’t the least comfortable place I had ever slept, but my mind hadn’t quieted since the moment I’d received Daniel’s frantic phone call. Jackson wasn’t the only one who needed distracting. During the day, at least I could look after him or busy myself with the cooking or some cleaning around their house.
At night, though…
I had retrieved my ThinkPad laptop from Royse’s flat, and my sleepless nights were spent either working or researching or some combination of both. I had a handful of translation requests, a question about the history of a cursed Tudor crown, and three verifications sitting in my email to get to at my nearest convenience. The laptop was currently in my bag under Daniel’s couch, evidence of my searches regarding any possible werewolf attacks in the area filling my history. Werewolves weren’t exactly my area of expertise; I specialized in arcane artifacts. That didn’t mean I knew absolutely nothing of werewolves. I knew more than enough to get started, enough to know what to look for in attacks, enough to know to track the lunar cycles the way I tracked the weather, and enough to know when to contact Sister Halla Vánagandr of the Holy Hollow of the Blood Moon of Fenrir. I hadn’t given her any details either, only told her I suspected someone I knew had been bitten by a werewolf. She had sent me a list of symptoms to watch for, many of which seemed to overlap with the symptoms of being a teenage girl, and the reminder that there was hope for all of those with Fenrir’s blood.
Somewhere into the third hour of my silent vigil at her bedside, Evelyn awoke briefly. She sat up slowly. The bones of her knees protruded against her skin as she hugged them to her chest. Her collarbones and ankles stuck out just as much. Daniel had mentioned a few months ago that she’d become a picky eater.
I swallowed down the concern. One thing at a time. There was more than enough to worry about right now.
“Do you remember what happened?” I asked her as gently as I could. My voice came out as barely more than a whisper so as not to upset her. And, a small part of me thought, so she might not actually hear me.
A bead of sweat rolled down the side of Evelyn’s face. She scratched the back of her head. I caught her wrist with two fingers to stop her before she peeled off the scabs that had formed over the scrapes in her scalp. She made a face, a quick grimace, lips pulled back over teeth. She shook her head and gave a slight shudder as though to shake off the expression.
“We were sleeping,” she rasped. Sharp nails left crescent imprints on her shins. She scraped her nails over her skin, raising bright red lines. I handed her the glass of water with a straw to drink from, keeping hold of it so it didn’t fall from her shaky hand. “I don’t know who it got first. Ellie, I think. She was the one at the far end of the tent. Felecia was in the middle, and I was at the other end. There was— Screaming and— and—“
I squeezed Evelyn’s hand, mindful of the IV. My mouth tasted slick and bitter. I had to fight to keep from picturing it. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I assured her. I didn’t need to know that badly, not right now. Deities knew she would likely have to tell the story more than once.
Deities knew I didn’t want to hear the rest of it.
Evelyn shook her head. Her hair was greasy and matted together in some spots. I would have to ask Daniel to bring her hairbrush. There was a spot of dried blood behind her ear, whether hers or somebody else’s was impossible to tell. Her breath stuttered on every inhale. She swallowed hard and took a determined breath. “I think I got out of the tent but I don’t think it was through the door. I think it tore a hole in the side. I remember feeling grass on my feet, even though I’d been wearing socks to sleep. It was cold at night, and my feet were cold, and— And Felecia had lent me a pair of fuzzy socks because my feet were cold. The ground was wet. I thought it had rained but— It wa-wasn’t rain.
“I guess Mr Dixon heard all the screaming. It attacked him. He had a knife. I think he stabbed it maybe. I don’t know. But it—“ Evelyn turned to me. It was, I told myself, the fever and the fluorescent lights and the tears that gave her eyes the impression of being much lighter than they should have been. “He looked at me, Uncle Zachariah. I keep seeing him when I sleep.”
He. Him. I didn’t miss the switch in pronoun.
“Was it a man?” I asked, as though I did not already know the answer.
Evelyn’s lower lip trembled. She swallowed twice and shook her head. Her mouth formed a word, but there was no sound behind it.
She didn’t need to make a sound for me to know what she had said.
One of the classes in my upcoming OSR game A Most Bloody Devotion. She's a literal corpse. Not undead. Just an actual dead body that people get obsessed with when they touch it.
Widdershins go when the moon doth wane, and the werewolf howls by the dread wolfsbane.
The Wiccan Rede
2007
The ringing phone split through my sleep. I groaned against the urge to cover my head with a pillow to smother either the sound or myself. The ringing stopped, the call ending, only for a moment before it started up again. I let the second call go to voice, but tossed the pillow to the side on the third. For someone to be calling me so persistently, it had to be important. I checked my watch for the time, squinting in the dim light. Ten o’clock, morning if the sunlight filtering through the curtains was any indication. A perfectly reasonable time for a phone call, had I not spent the past forty-six hours hunting down what was allegedly the Rod of Asclepius with all its divine healing abilities but was, of course, a poor knockoff — really, it wasn’t terribly impossible to imagine that a Greek artifact might have ended up in Italy — and had barely had enough time to eat let alone sleep.
I dragged myself across the hotel room and picked up the receiver. Outside the window was a game of street football, shouts of Italian punctuating the smack of foot on ball. Even through the curtains, the mid-summer Italian sun was almost blisteringly hot. Having spent the bulk of my life in England, this might as well have been the surface of the sun. My t-shirt, soaked through with sweat, clung to the gap between my shoulder blades and the small of my back. I closed my eyes against the dry burning in them.
“Zachariah Barrett Waller speaking,” I said in case the call was intended for the room’s previous resident. There had been another Zachariah Waller in my class all the way from primary school until high school, and it was still difficult not to think of myself without all three names.
“Zach. It’s— It’s Daniel.” My brother’s voice was strained, tight and almost shaking at the same time.
Sleep vanished from my body. My spine snapped into rigidity. Our communication on my trips had always been solely through email, though I always swallowed the long-distance fees to call on his children’s birthdays. For him to be calling me, to be sounding like that, to be calling me Zach rather than—
I braced for the worst. My nails dug into my palm and my shoulders tensed in anticipation.
“Evie is in the hospital. She was attacked. It’s b— It’s bad, Zach. We don’t know if she’s going to pull through.”
Evie. Evelyn. My niece, my eldest godchild, who I had called just a few weeks ago when she’d turned thirteen.
I was wrong. I’d thought I had braced for the worst, but the words still knocked the air out of my lungs. My heart was in my throat, and I was moving toward the door before I realized it. The pull of the phone cord grounded me back to reality. The received was pulled almost violently from my hand and clattered loudly against the side of the desk. I scrambled for it.
“Zach? Zach, you still there?”
“I’m— Yes. I’m here. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I promised, already scrambling to unlock the room safe where I had stored my passport and other items I didn’t want anybody getting their hands on.
Getting back to England took far longer than I would have liked. Granted, if it had taken five minutes, it still would have been far longer than I would have liked. There was no way around it. I had to get first from Pompeii to Naples, a half-hour drive, then an hour flight from Naples to Rome, then finally another two and a half hours to London. My colleagues, of course, were not entirely thrilled at my abrupt departure but were completely understanding about the circumstances. Even if they hadn’t been, I hardly would have cared enough to notice. We’d collected what we had come to Italy for anyway. My absence wasn’t likely to be noticed.
It hardly made sense to drive the four hours it would take to get to my home in Oxford then back to London. As such, I left my belongings with Royse, another colleague who lived in Inner London’s Camden Town, which very quietly held one of the city’s largest population of witches. While I had a key to Daniel’s home and could have easily gone there instead, there were certain items I couldn’t risk anybody getting into. Between all of that, it wasn’t until early evening that I reached the London Royal Hospital. I found my brother, his wife, and their young son in a waiting room near the Critical Care Unit.
“Uncle Zachariah!” Jackson sprinted to meet me. His arms wound around my waist as tight as possible for an 8-year-old. His face pressed hard into the base of my ribs. I pushed my glasses back into place and hunched forward to return the embrace. He looked up at me with watering eyes, the same melted chocolate colour that Daniel, Evelyn, and I had. His lower lip jutted out and trembled in a way that made him look so very young. “Is Evie going to die?”
Something stuttered in my chest. I had to force myself to exhale. “Of course not,” I said. The assurance was just as much for myself as it was for him.
I looked over his head to Daniel, silently searching his face for any clues as to Evie’s condition. He had given me no details over the phone, and his follow-up email only told me where to meet him. He was half-turned away from me, and all I saw of his expression was a jaw clenched as tight as his fist. Looking at his wife Sarah was even less helpful. At Jackson’s question, she had burst into tears and dropped into in an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair with her face in her hands.
Jackson tugged on my rumpled shirt to recapture my attention. “Uncle Zachariah, is Evie going to turn into a werewolf?”
The sound that came out of my chest was between a heave and a laugh. My blood froze in my veins. My skin prickled.
Daniel hadn’t told me who — or what — had attacked Evelyn. I’d assumed a person, but could it have been—
“Werewolves aren’t real,” Daniel snapped. His eyes locked hard on mine with a stern, unspoken warning. Daniel was five years older than myself, the same age difference between Evelyn and Jackson. He looked so much older than 38 right now.
I knelt on one knee to meet to Jackson’s height. I braced both hands on my thigh to keep them from shaking. “Would you like to know what I brought you back from Italy?”
Jackson’s eyes lit up, and I distracted him with stories of my trip — excluding, of course, anything to do with my professional reasons for being there — until his eyes could no longer stay open. Daniel suggested to Sarah that she take Jackson home and get some rest herself, but she made it very clear that she had no intention of leaving this place without her daughter.
“I’ll come with you, then,” Daniel said. He kissed the top of Sarah’s head mechanically. She didn’t react.
I carried Jackson on my hip and sat him in my lap throughout the journey. Every time I tried to pass him off to Daniel, he woke just enough to grab at my shirt again. In truth, I didn’t mind it. I had so little time to spend with him, I wanted to take advantage of every minute I could. Time, after all, was precious. Neither I nor Daniel spoke until the boy was tucked into his bed.
“You aren’t going away again, are you?” Jackson mumbled through the sleep pulling him down.
“Not right away,” I promised. I stayed beside him until his grip on my hand slackened and he was finally fully asleep.
I found Daniel in the kitchen sipping at a half-glass of whiskey. He offered me the bottle, and I waved my hand in rejection. I let him finish his drink in silence. Now that I was no longer moving, my body seemed to remember that I was running on barely three hours of sleep, plus maybe an extra half-hour or so on the flight back to England. The copious amounts of caffeine I’d consumed in transit may have been the only thing keeping me upright.
Daniel unscrewed the cap and topped up his drink.
I traced my thumb over the lighter I quite literally could never lose to steady myself against the twisting in my gut. Part of me wanted to extend the silence forever, but I had to know.
“What happened?” I kept my voice quiet so that Jackson didn’t hear me, and perhaps so that Daniel wouldn’t either.
Daniel didn’t answer right away. He sipped at his second drink. A glassiness came over his eyes, either from alcohol or tears or both. He blinked rapidly and rubbed his hand over his beard first, then over his eyes. His shoulders sagged with a heavy sigh.
“She was out camping with a couple friends and one of their dads up in Hertfordshire. Sarah didn’t want her to go but she’s thirteen, for God’s sake. They were supposed to be fine, they—“ A shuddery breath. “They had an adult with them. I’ve camped with her up there half a dozen times. I was her age when I started camping there with my mates. It— It was always fine.”
I knew the place he was talking about. Hertfordshire was about an hour’s drive north of Central London, the country park less than that. I remembered being about Jackson’s age and demanding with tears to know why I couldn’t go camping with Daniel and the other big kids. Wasn’t I old enough, mature enough, brave enough? Thinking of my little nephew, I realized I hadn’t been.
On second thought, maybe I did want a drink. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and poured just enough whiskey to cover the ice I found in the freezer.
“Iain, the father, he had a cell phone. Thank God he had reception out there. He died on the way to the hospital. The other girls—” Daniel gripped the edge of the counter with his free hand and finished his drink with the other. “He said it was a wo— a large dog. There’s no wolves in England,” he added quickly.
Daniel was mostly right about that. Wolves had been hunted to extinction some time ago. Werewolves, on the other hand… Most people knew of the witch hunts. Not as many knew of the werewolf hunts. They were hunted near equally so, but there were still a fair few in England.
I didn’t have to check to know that we were in the middle of a full moon. It was a habit to track the cycle. It wasn’t just for werewolves. Certain witches and artifacts’ powers waxed and waned with the moon.
Just because there were still werewolves in England didn’t mean it was a werewolf that had attacked them. It could have been a large dog, a stray or something wild. There was no reason to think that it was anything supernatural.
“Was she bitten or just scratched?” I asked. An edge of desperation made it into my voice despite my best efforts to tamp it down.
Daniel’s eyes snapped to me with a sharp clarity. “There is no such thing as werewolves, Zachariah.”
Though I had never been explicit in what I dealt with in the course of my work with the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence, I had also never particularly kept my interest in the arcane, occult, and supernatural a secret. He knew, at least on some level, what was out there. At the very least, he knew what I believed was out there.
“You have to at least consider—“
“No, I don’t,” he snapped. “I don’t want my kids involved in any of your magic bullshit. And if you even think about saying that sort of thing in front of Sarah, I’ll—” Daniel shook his head aggressively, his lips pursed as tight as his grip on his glass.
I swallowed down the sting at his words. I had always known what he thought of my work but hearing it phrased that way bit at me in a way I couldn’t explain. Could I really blame him for it, though, especially under these circumstances?
Still...
“Why did you call me here?” I asked.
Daniel hesitated. “I don’t know.”
He did know, just as well as I did. Because if there was a chance that Evelyn had been attacked by a werewolf, even just the slightest chance, no matter just how slight...
I didn’t blame him for not wanting to consider it.
A tragic attack. A niece in hospital. A ticking clock.
As an occultist, Zachariah travels the world searching for arcane artifacts.
When his teenage niece is attacked on a camping trip, Zachariah drops everything and races home.
The official story is a stray dog, but Zachariah knows the truth: Evie and her friends were attacked by a werewolf. In a matter of weeks, she will become the same kind of animal that killed her friends.
All hope is not lost. The Holy Hollow of the Blood Moon of Fenrir, a convent and monastery for werewolves, will keep her safe. Explaining to her family that she has to go away is one thing; explaining why is another matter entirely. If she stays, she and everyone close to her will be in danger.
As the full moon approaches, Zachariah has to make a choice that will, one way or another, quite literally rip his family apart.
Bad Bite is a free weekly serial coming July 16th.
Bad London came about while my partner and I were out for dinner to celebrate a friend’s birthday in our usual Hot Goth splendor. I couldn’t tell you how the conversation started; something about us always looking like witches, something about one of our friends being a shoulder demon, something about colourblindness and werewolves. Being mostly a group of writers, our “Yes, and?” game is unmatched. And so, the conversation escalated.
The story that brewed alongside the coffee I had ordered was too perfect, too solid in my mind to ignore. By the time I reached home, the characters were already coming to life: the not-witch forced to sell part of his soul, the demon who now owns it, the eclectic necromancer who thinks she’s one of the dead, the werewolf forced to abandon the life he loved and the one who became a nun for her own safety. Within a couple weeks, I had written nearly the entire draft.
Bad London combines three of my favourite things in stories: city magic, noir detectives, and stories set in Canada. Each book in this novella series follows a former detective inspector and British expat with the ability to see magic, who now uses those abilities as a private investigator in the southwestern Ontario city of London. When his new home is threatened by a danger beyond his capabilities, he’s forced to make a bargain he knows he will regret.
Bad London is a free urban fantasy series. Chapters are posted Thursdays on Tumblr, Substack, and Patreon.
Definitely didn't expect this one to get so long. Actually, I didn't expect to write it at all. But I guess I had a sudden burst of inspiration last Saturday and powered through 12k words in a week. I still want to get Warlock to alpha read before I get before I get into edits, but I'm hoping to have it done very soon.
I might have started a new short story that definitely hasn't immediately gotten away from me 😅
---
A small ping came from my laptop. I put out the remnants of my cigarette in the ash tray and turned to face the screen. An email from Sister Halla sat in my email inbox.
Subject: Re: Signs and Symptoms
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I thought you might want to know about this if you do not already.
Takk def,
Søster Halla Vánagandr
Attached to the email was a news article. I covered my mouth with one hand as I skimmed.
Remnants of a man’s body had been found not far from where Evelyn and her friends had been attacked. No head. No heart. Fully charred.
The surest way to kill a werewolf.
I heaved into Sarah’s roses before I could stop it. Chills ran up and down my bones. I gasped for breath and squeezed my eyes against the sudden burning against them. When my stomach was finally done expelling every last ounce of food and fluid, I turned back to my computer. My hands shook against the keyboard as I typed.
There were several articles about the attack that had killed Ellie Dixon, Felecia Neal, and Iain Dixon, and left one survivor. Though Evelyn wasn’t named in any of them, I was sure somebody could figure out it was her with enough persistence.
There was nobody as persistent as werewolf hunters.
She hasn’t hurt anybody. She may never hurt anybody.
I doubted it mattered.
I had no choice, did I. I had to tell my brother that for her own safety, he needed to send his daughter away.
I might have started a new short story that definitely hasn't immediately gotten away from me 😅
---
A small ping came from my laptop. I put out the remnants of my cigarette in the ash tray and turned to face the screen. An email from Sister Halla sat in my email inbox.
Subject: Re: Signs and Symptoms
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I thought you might want to know about this if you do not already.
Takk def,
Søster Halla Vánagandr
Attached to the email was a news article. I covered my mouth with one hand as I skimmed.
Remnants of a man’s body had been found not far from where Evelyn and her friends had been attacked. No head. No heart. Fully charred.
The surest way to kill a werewolf.
I heaved into Sarah’s roses before I could stop it. Chills ran up and down my bones. I gasped for breath and squeezed my eyes against the sudden burning against them. When my stomach was finally done expelling every last ounce of food and fluid, I turned back to my computer. My hands shook against the keyboard as I typed.
There were several articles about the attack that had killed Ellie Dixon, Felecia Neal, and Iain Dixon, and left one survivor. Though Evelyn wasn’t named in any of them, I was sure somebody could figure out it was her with enough persistence.
There was nobody as persistent as werewolf hunters.
She hasn’t hurt anybody. She may never hurt anybody.
I doubted it mattered.
I had no choice, did I. I had to tell my brother that for her own safety, he needed to send his daughter away.
