The kids in the back were suspiciously well behaved for the whole trip. Normally, having Luke and Charity stuck together without any responsible adult to mediate was a recipe for tears and hair-pulling. They didn’t dislike each other, exactly, but Charity liked needling people and Luke was a pincushion. With the state he was in, I thought she might manage to poke him hard enough that he finally snapped, but she was almost respectful, nothing but the occasional mostly-tasteful wisecrack. In the end I decided that she was probably saving them up for later. In any case, I was grateful that we got all the way to Fall’s Bay before having any real incidents.

Fall’s Bay was a big city, almost a hundred and fifty thousand people from what I remembered. And yeah, that was nothing compared to the literal millions you got in some places, but that didn’t make Fall’s Bay small, it made those other cities ridiculous. It was big enough that even after we made it into the city limits, I still had to drive around for half an hour to find our destination, and then spend another fifteen minutes trying to find a parking spot that didn’t cost twenty dollars.

Once that ordeal was finally over, it was straight to business. We banded together, the three of us against the world, and walked a few blocks over to reach our goal: a coffee shop that had some decent reviews.

I hadn’t brought Charity along for backup in a fight. If it came down to that, Luke and I had things pretty well covered. She was were because her illusions gave us a shot of poking around without getting into trouble. Problem was, normally all she could do was create simple lights and sounds, which wasn’t going to hide anybody. In order to sneak us in, we needed to be in the centre of her web, where she could work real magic. The way she described it, she could lay threads of power down in an area over time, then draw on that power to enchant people near them, making them see whatever she wanted them to see. The more threads, the stronger the effect. So no matter how impatient Luke got, we had to spend a while orbiting the scene of the crime first.

Over the next three hours, we visited four coffee shops, bought Luke a pair of new t-shirts, sat under a tree in the city’s biggest park, and visited a second-hand book store, where Charity found a trashy romance novel about a time travelling businessman who falls in love with the pirate who’d kidnapped him for ransom. She didn’t look up from it a single time until she’d finished the whole thing, even during the moments where she was laughing too hard to actually read.

Finally she announced that she was ready, and we made our way in towards the glitziest part of the city with all the unreasonably expensive waterfront properties, giant things in ultra-modern styles with all the taste and sophistication of a ballet dancer ripping a wet fart. We still had to walk slowly, since Charity needed time to connect the circle of threads she’d made and weave them all together in the centre, but that was a lot faster than laying them out in the first place.

Even at the best of times, this was the kind of neighbourhood where you needed to show your ID and credit score before they let you in, so right now there were patrols of cops loitering around every corner. We still weren’t at the centre of the web, and this new web was tiny and fragile compared to the one Charity had back at home, so we couldn’t magic our way in, but we had another secret weapon: Luke. His family wasn’t rich enough to own property here, but they weren’t far off either, so we’d had him dress up in his fanciest clothes with a matching thousand dollar watch he’d got as a birthday present, slick his hair back and strut around like he owned the place, which was enough to move the whole group of us out of the ‘suspicious youths’ category, and we were waved straight in.

Getting into White’s house wouldn’t have been quite so easy, but that’s where the magic came in. Charity could feel people walking around on her web and was estimating that about twenty people were in the house, but the unawakened had close to zero ability to resist magic being cast on them. Even with that many people there, she deleted us from the perception of everybody in the building without any trouble, and we strolled right through the front door.

As soon as we reached the scene of the murder, I took a deep breath, turned to face the others, and with a grave finality made a profound announcement.

“Fuck.”

Luke nodded. “Yeah. Looks bad.”

He wasn’t wrong. Mr White was positioned on the couch in front of the TV, and on the stairs leading up, and on the windows too, no one part of him bigger than a golf ball. And the whole building smelled like a hospital that was being used as a training centre for apprentice janitors, so this was what it looked like after they cleaned up some. Luke’s rumours turned out to be true, too. All kinds of weird squiggly symbols had been painted on the walls in White’s blood. They’d been very neat and precise before the slow drip of the blood smeared everything. But that wasn’t what I’d been referring to.

“I just wish that for once in my life, I’d have some cynical feeling deep in my gut and then find out later that it wasn’t right.”

“Never going to happen,” Charity said.

“Maybe not. I’m ninety five percent sure that this was done by a werewolf.”

“Great! That makes our job easy. We can head back, arrest Grace and have this all wrapped up before dinner.”

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I rolled my eyes. “A male werewolf, who I’ve never met before. Whose relatives I’ve never met before, either.” They might have scrubbed the building with twenty different kinds of disinfectant, but there were some smells you couldn’t get out of a place that easily.

Luke looked sick, though that was probably because of the gore. “You’re certain about that?”

“I said ninety five percent. He was here last night, during the full moon, he’d never been here before then, and nobody else came in here last night. Unless White did this to himself to try winning some kind of Suicide Olympics while our guy stood by doing the judging, he’s the killer.”

This kind of thing pissed me the hell off. You spend your whole life railing against assholes who assume that you must be a violent murderer because of an accident of birth, then just when you start to think you might be making progress, some idiot plays into every single stereotype and ruins it all.

“So now what? Grab our pitchforks and silver bullets and go slay the beast?”

Luke turned away from the whole scene and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know. I just wanted to be able to do something.”

Charity smiled at him. “Hey, bright side: your family’s probably safe. Werewolves are happy to eat anybody, magic or no, aren’t you Alex? So statistically speaking, that cute little cousin of yours is way more likely to die in a totally normal way, like getting hit by a car.”

“Thanks so much for the encouraging words,” I told her.

Without any actual plan, we didn’t hang around for much longer before silently agreeing to leave. As we were heading out, we bumped into a few more cops were arriving to replace some who’d left, so we had to back off from the door a bit to make sure we didn’t literally bump into them. It wouldn’t break the illusion, from what I understood, it’d just cause a lot of unnecessary confusion. The first two walked straight past us, oblivous as everyone else. Then the third stepped into the house, looked me right in the eyes, smiled, and waved.

“Oh,” I said. “This is awkward.”

The woman beamed at me and nodded, still standing in the doorway.

“Charity?”

“Yeah yeah, I’m on it.” A moment later she said, “You can talk to us. Nobody will notice.”

“Wonderful! You have such a fascinating kind of power, I just had to see who it belonged to.” She closed in on Charity, looking her up and down. She wasn’t as tall as Charity was, but bounced up on tip toes to get a better view. Friendly, energetic, cute, pixie cut - she was a headache on legs. She smelled of copious amounts of floral perfume, obviously, and a few other things I couldn’t quite make out under all the chemicals the house was filled with.

“You’re a seer then?”, Charity asked. Being able to see magic was like opening a bag of chips and finding a giant deformed one made from three regular chips all fused together - not exactly common, but not so rare that you’d feel the need to run to your friends and tell them all about it.

The woman curtsied. “A pleasure to meet you. And you are?”

“Charity, and my servants are Luke and Alex. I forget which is which.”

“Servants?” Luke almost swallowed his tongue. “We’re not servants! We’re her friends! Or at least we were until now!”

Charity flapped a hand at him. “What’s the difference?”

The woman tittered, and said, “Oh, stop it! You really should be nicer to your servants. You can call me Genevieve, by the way. Now I know I would have seen you around before if you were local - where are you from?”

Still giving Charity the evil eye, Luke said, “Summerview.”

Genevieve offered a handshake to Charity, then to Luke, then to me, while saying, “A lovely place! I’ve visited before, but never stayed as long as I should have. Oh, now I hate to be a bother, but could we move this conversation a bit further inside? I do have a crime scene to investigate - though you could speed things up if you told me what you’d found. That must be why you’re here?”

I caught a whiff of something else while shaking her hand. Still couldn’t make out exactly what it was, but it was enough to make me agree to follow her back into the house. Genevieve was gossiping excitedly about the murder with Charity, which seemed a little tone deaf for a detective, but then, we’d come all the way from out of town just to gawp at it.

Then we arrived at the scene of the crime itself, and I took another breath in.

God fucking shit damn it.

“You know,” I said, “we’ve been here all day looking for something useful and didn’t find anything, so maybe we should head back. I have work tonight.”

Luke tilted his head. “Didn’t you say you had the night off?”

“Uh, yeah, I misremembered. Just realised I lost track of which day it was. I need to get back home right now-ish.”

“Oh, crap. Sorry for dragging you out here then. But we did find out one useful thing, right? That it was a werewolf who did it?” His face had never looked quite so punchable before.

“A werewolf?” Genevieve doubled over in shock, hand over her heart. There’d been a sliver of doubt in my mind until then, but the exaggerated reaction sealed it. She didn’t have the werewolf’s scent on her by accident, she knew him and she knew what he was. “Are you sure? How do you know?”

Luke didn’t respond to that, at least. Instead it was Charity who said, “Trade secret. Can’t spill all of our beans, or we’ll contaminate your crime scene.”

Genevieve laughed obnoxiously loud. “Can’t blame a girl for trying! I’ll let you go, then. Thanks ever so much for the tip.”

Charity, who had the apparently rare and valuable power of taking a hint, curled an arm around Luke and led him out. I stayed a few steps behind them, keeping an eye on Genevieve as she began chatting to the other cops and poking around the crime scene. She saw me looking at her, smiled, and waved with all the enthusiasm you’d expect. So much enthusiasm that I didn’t notice the gun in her other hand until it was too late.

The sound of the gunshot vibrated through my bones, and my knees hit the floor.