Not much later, however, the gate opened a little bit, and a man sneeked out. David could only guess that it was Ito, it was much too dark to recognize him. He opened the lock quickly, and whispered: “Good luck,” before hurrying back inside.

Greg left the cage slowly, stretching and yawning. “Can we walk a little?” he asked. “I’m all cramped up.”

David nodded and extinguished his fire. Not that there was much risk of it getting out of control in this weather. Much less risk than Greg losing control.

Greg covered his ears with his hands, wrapping his arms around his head when in the distance another werewolf howled. He swayed in place as if he was considering going back into his cage.

“Bernadette,” he groaned softly.

“Does that make it harder?” David asked. “That she’s an elder?”

Greg nodded and started walking, almost running. David could hear his laboured breathing as he followed his youngest brother into the darkness underneath the trees.

“I hate full moon,” Greg muttered, once there were trees all around them. “Hate it, hate it, hate it!”

He kept pushing forward, away from the camp, much faster than was sensible in the dark. They were both stumbling over branches and other unseen obstacles on the ground. David could hardly make out Greg’s moving shape, followed the sound more than his eyes.

Behind them, there was still a werewolf howling. David wondered if it was Bernadette again, or someone else.

After a while, Greg slowed down, but he never stopped moving forward, until finally the very first hint of pre-dawn light filtered through the trees.

“Moon is setting,” he sighed, and let himself drop to the ground on the spot.

“And you want to go to sleep here?” David asked. He was tired, too, but the wet leaves on the forest floor were not exactly inviting.

“No,” Greg muttered. “Just don’t want to walk anymore.” He did sit up again, rubbing his face. “Where are we, anyway?”

David turned back the way they had been going. “I’d reckon a few miles east of the camp. It’s hard to judge how far we got in the dark.”

Greg started on a moan that turned into a yawn halfway through. “Let’s wait till we can actually see?” he asked when he could talk again.

“Fine,” David said.

“Don’t tell me you’re not tired?” Greg grumbled. “We walked all night.”

“Of course I’m tired,” David said. “Not too bad, though,” he added. “Not my first night of walking through the forest. Also, I don’t have to deal with the moon phase.”

Greg nodded, the movement visible by now. “Sorry to drag you out here,” he said after a moment.

“Don’t worry about it,” David said. This was his fault, after all. In a way, at least.

He wanted to ask Greg whether he regretted what had happened. He didn’t seem resentful, or even particularly sad about the turn his life had taken – but there were some things Nathan had written, just little side remarks usually, that made David wonder.

Right now, though, Greg just looked exhausted, so he kept his mouth shut and an eye and ear on their surroundings.

They started walking again when the sun filtered through underneath the rainclouds, tinting the forest gold for a few moments before the clouds covered it again. Greg was dragging his feet, and David couldn’t stop himself from teasing: “You know, I’m supposed to be the old man here.”

Greg just yawned at him again.

They still made it back to camp within a couple of hours, much faster than when they had stumbled through the darkness. The gates were wide open again, and nobody challenged them when they entered. Greg headed straight for the pub.

Did he live there?

But Greg walked right up to the counter to ask the woman there for breakfast.

“Full moon makes the best customers,” the woman said, grinning, holding out a hand.

Greg rummaged around his pockets and came up with a couple of copper pennies, looking disappointed.

“I’ve got it,” David said quickly. He dropped a coin onto the counter, and for the first time, he saw Greg flinch away from the silver. His little brother caught himself quickly and pulled up a seat to sit at the counter right next to the coin, though.

“And what can I get for you?” the woman asked, looking at David.

“Whatever he’s having,” David said, nodding at Greg.

That turned out to be a rather enormous portion of bacon and eggs, with some bread at the side. David let Greg finish his plate. The workers were just waking up when they left the pub again. Greg led the way over to the barracks. For a moment he seemed undecided, but then picked one of the small, hastily erected buildings. Nathan’s, as it turned out. Their brother was just getting dressed.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Back already?” Nathan asked. “Bed’s all yours,” he added. “Oh, wait.”

He walked out in nothing but his trousers, and was back within a couple of minutes, with another straw mattress like the one on his bed, and blankets, too. He dropped it straight onto the ground in front of the bed.

“That’ll work,” David said. He hadn’t looked forward to sleeping on the naked ground, and there was no way he and Greg could share the far too narrow bed.

Nathan finished dressing quickly. “See you at lunch,” he said and was gone.

Greg did wake up just in time for a late lunch, and David followed him back to the pub. There was a mess hall, too, David learned, but the food at the pub was better, according to Greg. Prof. Audenne joined them at their table, bugging Greg with his questions for nearly an hour before he settled into just watching and taking notes on Greg’s behaviour. They saw nothing of the other werewolves guarding the camp until it was once again time for Greg to step into his cage. This time, he took his clothes off and wrapped himself into an old blanket, to wait for the moon to rise.

Prof. Audenne insisted on following when David and Nathan together settled in to wait it out. He wanted to know everything, every minor detail, about the previous night and was very eager to be there for the third night of full moon, too.

“If I’d known it was possible to watch like this, I’d have been here yesterday,” he said, seriously upset that nobody had invited him.

David had never actually watched Greg go through the full moon-transformation, though he’d heard him do it a couple of times in the ice house. Maybe it was just his expectation, but it seemed a lot more violent to him than Greg’s usual transformations. Slower than he had expected, too. Audenne measured the time, and it took more than a minute for Greg’s body to tear itself apart and rearrange itself.

And then all the werewolves began to howl at exactly the same moment, all around the camp.

“Oh, look, the pack is back,” Nathan said. “I wonder if Greg will turn human at sunrise.”

“Why wouldn’t he?” David asked.

“No idea. He just didn’t, when he ran with the pack. Remained a wolf from sundown on the first night of full moon until the morning after the third. Behaved much more like a wolf, too. He says he doesn’t remember anything about it. It drove Thoko mad when he ran around with Fleur.”

Prof. Audenne asked about the pack before David could, and Nathan explained about it, but David felt he was keeping it more general than he would have if it had been just the two of them.

Greg did turn human, late in the morning, after sleeping a while in his wolf form. Boris and the others stayed wolf. Prof. Audenne had gone to bed by then, but another one of the scientists was there to take note and mark down the time. By the third night, Greg was too tired to fight against the transformation. When the other werewolves started howling once more in a chorus, he lost control over his shape. Prof. Audenne seemed delighted at this new discovery.

“I wonder if the Morgulon could force another werewolf to transform on a night that isn’t full moon,” he noted. “Maybe we could move on towards one of the more advanced camps in a month or two?”

“Suits me fine,” David said. “I’ll ask Lane what she thinks. But I doubt she’ll mind.”

Staying up all night had another advantage: It gave David an excuse to sleep most of the day, which made it easy to avoid George Louis. David didn’t see him for the first three days, and the camp truly wasn’t big.

It was too good to last, of course.

David, Lane, Nathan, and the whole group of scientists rode out with the workers the second morning after full moon was over. Greg walked on foot with the engineers who supervised the build. The other werewolves hadn’t come into camp at all since David and Lane had arrived. David couldn’t help but wonder if that was still about the disagreement with Greg, or if they stayed away because two more hunters had arrived.

Maybe Audenne and his colleagues would find an answer while they studied the pack.

As hunters, David, Lane, and Nathan didn’t have anything to do besides standing around. There was no danger left here. It gave David plenty of time to watch the strange choreography playing out around them: Bernadette and pack showed little interest in being studied, moving into the forest when one of the scientists came closer than a couple of hundred yards, returning when the scientists backed off. They never really abandoned their guard duty, though. At least one of them was always in sight, right at the edge of the trees. Watching Greg, as far as David could tell.

An hour before noon, he was distracted by the new, small group arriving on horseback: George Louis, with Mr. Brown and two soldiers attending him. They circled the building site once, then left their horses with the field kitchen. On foot, George Louis walked amongst the sweating workmen, who were often toiling shirtless in the humid heat as they lay the bricks that would form the base for the pylons on which the bridge would rest.

David rolled his eyes when the duke offered one of the men a drink from his own water bottle. Sure, the guy was handsome, but still. One could take the whole “I’m just one of the blokes” theatrics too far.

George Louis moved on to talk to the engineers. He looked at the construction plans and diagrams like they meant something to him, nodding along as they explained. He stayed with them until the lunch break for the workmen started, which he used to sit down with more of them, eating the same food as they did. David was surprised that he hadn’t brought a reporter to tell the rest of Loegrion what a kind and caring employer he was. When the duke finished eating, he got up again, to talk to even more men, slowly making his way over to where David was sitting with Greg, Thoko, Nathan, and Lane.

David rolled his eyes again.

He had to admit, he was a little surprised when the duke sat down in their little circle uninvited, and began the conversation by addressing Greg of all people:

“I see you pulled through full moon all right.”

Greg nearly dropped his bowl. “Yes, Your Highness,” he said, and then looked over at David as if waiting for instructions on how he should handle this. David just shrugged, and after a moment, Greg added: “It’s routine by now, even if the cages are new.”

George Louis frowned. “You don’t use them at other camps?”

“No, their walls are enough to keep a werewolf out,” Greg explained. “They’re more worried about the Rot, right at the banks of the Savre.”

“So it hasn’t retreated there as much as here?”

“No, Your Highness. It keeps coming down the river and out of the swamps. I expect it’s worse, now, too, with only the Morgulon as an elder.”

George Louis continued to ask Greg about the more forward lying camps, acting like he was talking to a human, too. David had to admit it was a pretty good act, though he was willing to bet good money that George Louis was only pretending because he was sitting right here. Only when the break was over, did the duke turn to David, as if it was an afterthought.

“Will you be busy tonight?” he asked. “I have some questions regarding the introduction of new werewolves here in the future. I take it there have been issues that could have been avoided?”

That was one way to put it.

“When?” David asked.

“I thought we could discuss the matter at dinner.”

What a surprise.

“Fine,” David said.

“Dinner it is,” George Louis said, altogether too gleeful, and walked off, to watch the men get back to work.

“Want me to come along?” Lane asked.

David considered it but then shook his head. It probably wouldn’t help with the innuendos, anyway. “Better to just get it over with.”