Wolf loped through the forest on four legs faster than any horse could travel. He carried his clothes in a bag he’d affixed to his back before he’d shifted.
Amanda's words echoed in his head as he shut the door to his cabin. Nothing. The word nothing repeated itself over and over as he glanced at a discarded but recent newspaper article on one bench. The one that featured a picture of a seemingly happy family, a mother, a father, and two young girls. But one of those girls was now dead, killed by the one who smiled behind her and gently rested his hand on her shoulder. Wolf was certain of it. And what had he done? Nothing.
Around him books lay in every direction, stacked on tables, under lamps, fondled by plants. He'd read some of them multiple times, others he'd only skimmed, but he knew their contents well enough. He'd told Amanda they'd keep researching but the truth was he wasn't sure where else to look. He’d looked at everything.
Then there was the house. More missing kids. How many had there been? He was blurry on the numbers now. Furthermore he was sure Coal had taken something. He didn’t know what and he hadn’t seen him do it, but he knew, why else would the aristocrat have been in the house?
After getting dressed he sat down on his stool with a sigh and feeling somewhat useless. Was Amanda right about the time travel? Sirius had obviously talked her out of using it for Lily but Wolf wasn’t so sure. She was almost the easier one to use it on. They’d seen the dead kids in the house and things that were known were always harder to change but Lily’s future zombification was a question. A time traveller could alter something that was a question with much more ease, relatively speaking. But it was still no piece of cake. Time travel was unpredictable. Still, all it would take was a step back to when the ritual was performed, maybe add in a necromancer and a few more sacrifices... oh who was he kidding? That wasn’t really a solution. Was it?
He rested both elbows on the table and rubbed his face with his hands. Even if he did that it would still require the right infusement and most of the time travel magic available in local stores bought you little more than a few minutes. Useful in a fight, a quick jump back in time to dodge a bullet or a blade, to take back a poorly worded phrase. Those were the legal time infusements. If you wanted hours, you had to dig a little deeper, and some places still allowed them. But days? Days were forbidden, unless you were a sorcerer in which case time travel spells of any amount were allowed for historical observation only. Of course this was just for infusements. There were still those who were born with the power. But time travel was one of the rarest magics to be born with. Wolf however, did know one young boy who had that power, a friend of his kids, a 16 year old boy called Matthew. And Amanda’s own daughter Katrina was an infuser. Together they could create an item for use in a spell. Katrina was pretty talented for her age but good infusements depended on the source as much as the infuser and Matthew’s powers were unstable. Powerful enough for sure but still a high risk, and Wolf wasn’t sure about how he felt using the kids like that, especially someone else’s kids. They’d want to know what the item was for and kids shouldn’t be involved in something like this. So that was a dead end. He could try to find an infusement from elsewhere but it wouldn’t be cheap and there were still all the other issues.
His gaze found that newspaper article once more. Maybe he was focusing too much on the past? There were still people alive who were in danger, in situations he could do something about. There were two young girls in that photograph. One was gone, but her sister still lived with that monster. Wolf was tired of thinking, tired of doing nothing. He might have failed the first girl but he wouldn’t fail the second.
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But he still couldn’t risk getting directly involved. If anything pointed back to him he would be putting all the werewolves in danger, his entire pack. It didn’t matter that he didn’t live with them anymore, he still had ties there. But that was okay, he had another idea, someone else who could handle this.
Sirius, Amanda, Zephyr, and Indi didn’t care much for violence. Kass and Falco towed the legal line a little too much. But Cat, she believed only justice, and not anyone else’s versions of it but her own. There was Coal, but Coal was expensive. Most of them would want to involve the police but Wolf knew better than anyone how useless and corrupt the police were. No, there was only one solution here and only one other person he trusted would figure that out.
He grabbed the newspaper clipping and a red marker. He underlined a few key words and then drew and arrow and a circle around the father’s head. He put the article in his bag along with a selection of other items and then headed out the door.
He ran back through the forest on all four legs, letting his mind wander and fill itself with the smell of pine and the large patches of blackberries that grew somewhere out to the right. The worries of the real world always felt more distant when he was a wolf.
He slowed down as he reached Cat’s garage. He paused at the edge of the bush. He did not want to be seen. It was better for everyone that Cat didn’t know who the information came from. He sniffed the air. The smell of petrol fumes filled his nostrils layered with a subtle hint of burnt iron. He could smell people too but the scent wasn’t fresh. No one was in. Cat wasn’t back yet. The place was all shut up.
He shifted back into two-legged form. Keeping his ears wide open for the sound of any engine that might come roaring up that driveway he moved forward. Cat kept her cars silent, stealthy. It was safer in dragon territory, but no engine could be made perfectly quiet, not without a little magic, and Cat didn’t bother with much of that. Wolf had good hearing though and he was certain he would hear anyone coming long before they reached the bend that would put him in their sights. He would have time to flee if he had to. But this would likely not take long.
He tried the doors, just in case, but the obvious ones were all locked up. He spied an open window, but it was on the second floor and hard to reach, not worth the effort. Besides he’d come prepared for this inevitability.
He searched through his bags until he found the infusement he was looking for. He drew some shapes in the dirt and placed the newspaper article in one. This was a sending spell. A rarer magic than summoning but practically its inverse. It let you move things from one place to another, but only in a direction that was away from the sender. It wasn’t a difficult power to use, especially over short distances. Despite being less common to be born a sender than a teleporter, senders were far more likely to survive into adult hood and thus their infusements were cheaper and more common than teleportation infursements, at least for sending small items. Teleportation worked almost as if moving people and larger items was what it had been designed for. Sending non-living things was much easier than summoning or teleporting them but teleporting living things was leagues easier then summoning or sending them. Once you’d mastered them all, teleportation travel was the safest, as long at you knew for sure where it was you wanted to end up. However, it was still the most expensive, requiring far more skill to master, a lot more setup time, and depending where you were, compliance with far more regulation.
Sending something small like a newspaper article a few feet thought a steel door was easy magic. Wolf knew what the inside of the garage looked like. He aimed for the bench along the left hand wall. Sure, he could have slipped it under the door or taped it to the window, but he didn’t want it to be either too obvious or too easily lost. He put it somewhere where Cat, and only Cat was likely to find it, and somewhere that she wouldn’t think so much of it when she did find it. It needed to look almost as if someone had been theorising and simply left it lying around. Cat wouldn’t look too much into where it came from then, and nor would anyone else.
The article disappeared and Wolf felt confident it had ended up exactly where he had intended. He wasn't sure exactly what Cat would do with it but he knew it wouldn’t be nothing.