New Decameron Twenty-One: Mary Robinette Kowal (Patreon)

The Children of Nebuchenezzer

By Mary Robinette Kowal

I'll be honest. I hadn't expected it to go down this way.  Two splotches stained the tile floor of the kitchen, one in the pattern of human toes, the other in a paw print. When I knelt to measure the span between them, the blood was still sticky and red. This close, I could spot the fine gray hairs trapped in the blood.  "Well, it's not a werewolf."

The local cop hovering in the doorway cleared his throat. "How are you sure, I mean, look at it."

I sighed and wiped the blood off my spanner, meeting the eyes of my boss. Dennis knew I hated explaining things to the the newbs, but it was part of my job. They always thought they knew everything and they were always wrong.

"This foot print pattern makes it look like he transformed mid-stride and they can't do that." I met his blank stare and just barely kept from rolling my eyes. "It takes a werewolf several hours to change and it is an intensely painful process."

"What else could it be?" The doubt was so thick in his voice you could take a trowel to it.

"A prank.  I can tell you in a minute." Dennis wrinkled his nose, freckles standing out like a spatter of blood.  "Hate to ask, but could you step outside so I can get a clean scent of the apartment?"

"I-- is that okay? Miss?"

I rotated on my toes, still crouching. "Yes. Thank you." Honestly, you'd think that the fact the cops had called us in would mitigate some of this nonsense, but no. The thought of leaving the defenseless woman with a known werewolf always triggered this with the newbs. Not his fault that we hadn't worked with him before, but still.

The cop hesitated in the door, still looking at me like I was some sort of fragile flower. My hair is pink, yes, but I am not a flower. He cleared his throat.  "What about you?"

"I use a neutral deodorant.  You use... Old Spice?"  The cop ducked his head like he was about to sniff his own pits until I took pity and smiled at him. "This won't take long." 

I waited until the crackle of his radio faded down the hall and out the front door of the apartment before letting my grimace show. "Got anything for me?"

Dennis went to all fours and put his nose almost in the blood, nostrils flaring like a wine connoisseur. Whenever I saw him in human form, but in a canine posture, I always had to suppress a shiver at the uncanny valley which people like Dennis embodied.  Ironic, that the understanding which had led to a cure for the disease, also let people with lycanthropy stand up and claim it as a sub-culture. How different, they asked, was being a werewolf from the community of the hearing-impaired?

Not that it had done my dad any good.  He'd opted for the cure when I was twelve and spent the rest of his life regretting it.  That's the trouble with a vaccine. Once you've been cured of lycanthropy, there's no going back. It's not an easy decision to make, you know?

“I smell stress.” Dennis snorted and inhaled again. “High volume of adrenalin, plus overtones of lactic acid, and estrogen. Plus lycanthropy.”

"So it is a werewolf?" I looked at the tracks again. The estrogen was surprising in and of itself. It wasn't possible for a female werewolf to carry a child to term because of the monthly change, so vanishingly few women in werewolf culture chose to complete the rite of passage. But the thing that really boggled me was that it looked like an instant transformation.. "Both blood prints?"

He bent over the other print and nodded.

"Is it the woman who lives here?"

He hesitated, lifting his nose to the air inhaling in a series of huffs.  "I'm not sure, Khadija. The place reeks of lilacs."

“Maybe she’s exceptionally clean, for a werewolf.” I stood, knees popping. “Doesn’t like that doggy scent.”

Dennis stuck his tongue out, revealing sharp canines. "That is racist."

"Can't be racist if it’s caused by a disease." I checked my nails to be sure they were clear of blood, before tucking my hair behind my ear. Rocket pink, this time. "Are you going to track her or not?"

"I want to cross check with the laundry to see if the blood is from the victim or the perp." Dennis crouched next to me, studying the print. We were darn lucky we had even that much. "And my dad was a werewolf, and so was his dad. Is too racist."

"And so was mine. It's still a disease."  I tapped the floor next to the print. Not for the first time, I envied his sense of smell but not quite enough to accept the side effects that came with it. I mean, I always thought I might go through the rite of passage eventually, but only after I had kids. Crippling pain once a month in exchange for living longer?  Sure. At least it would mean I wouldn't have a period anymore. But maybe not everyone wants children.  "So, you think it's the girl who lives here?"

Dennis hesitated. "It could be, but she's not really old enough to have grey as a werewolf."

The girl who lived here was one Chandra Felty, a college junior, majoring in broadcast journalism with a minor in radio.  She was 5'7", 125 pounds and had marked "other" on her college application in the race box.  That could mean she self-identified as a lycanthrope or that she was just mixed race.  Nothing in her records suggested the former.  Felty's photo from the DMV showed a young woman with skin lighter than mine and hair that had been badly straightened.  Her braces were visible in the photo, peeking out from her full lips even without a smile.

"What if the blood is from the girl and the hair is from the werewolf?"

"Possible, but that's two werewolves then."  He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket and snapped them in place. "The lab can give us an analysis if you don't mind waiting a couple of weeks."

"I prefer your analysis."

"Lovely. I'll find her clothes hamper." Dennis pushed himself upright and crossed the hall heading to the bedroom. He stopped midstride and turned toward the front door, swearing under his breath.

"Please tell me she's not at the end of the hall." I reached for my pepper spray, which beat the heck out of holy water.

He shook his head and walked down the hall to the front door. “We missed some blood on the back of the front door.”

I stuck her head out of the room, unwilling to let go of the pepper-spray just in case Dennis was wrong about the werewolf. On the back of the door, in dried blood, was the smudged print of a woman’s shoulder and breast, as if she’d been slammed against the door. That wasn’t what disturbed me, though. The cross drawn in ash above it, that was a problem.

With his back to me, I could see the hackles on the back of Dennis’s neck standing straight out from his body like orange needles.

This was the second ash cross we had seen. The other one had  been in the room of a teenage boy who had run away last month. I resisted the urge to touch Dennis and kept my voice low and gentle.  "The Hillard kid... that was just a couple of days before the full moon, wasn't it?"

"Yeah. I remember cause I changed during that case. Didn't help with tracking any." He walked close to the door and leaned in without touching it. "Everything smelled like patchouli. Could never get a clean scent."

I wet my lips, thinking.  "Is that the same blood as in the kitchen?"

"Maybe... The blood's a thinner layer so it's dry already."  He snorted and pulled a satchel of coffee beans out of a ziplock  bag to clear his nose.  "Nah. I mostly just get the ash scent down here. Sage. Saw smudging by the windows in the living room, too."

"But do you have enough to track?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. I'll let the local guy back in and we can get started." 

#

We started at the wood steps that led up the side of the house to Felty's apartment. I stood at the foot of the stairs while Dennis went up and down on all fours, until he nodded with a grunt and led us around the back of the house, hardly looking up from the trail.  The trial led down a narrow strip of sidewalk, bordered on one side by raspberry canes and the bland pigeon grey clapboard of the house on the other.

He slowed down by one raspberry cane and pointed out a patch of grey fur clinging to a briar. I dutifully snapped a photo and sent it to the agency's geocache so the local CSI guys could sample it. While Dennis searched low, I kept my gaze lifted, looking for visual clues he might miss.  My mind crawled over itself at the similarities between the Hillard kid and this case.  Would anyone else notice that both had ash crosses?

I should make sure to point it out in my report. It couldn't be normal.  Or maybe the cops knew about it and that was why we got called. I shook my head. That didn't make sense. If the cops had noticed it, they would have mentioned the cross right off. The likely thing was that the scene was so fresh no one had correlated the two.

They turned left when the sidewalk met the street, passing the small detached garage.  Dennis hesitated there before continuing on.

"Something?"

"Her odor intensifies here, but it's not fresh." He straightened and cracked his back. "I'm guessing that she parks here normally and so it's an overlaid trail."

"Where's her car then?"

He cocked his finger at her. "Excellent question.  Let me know the answer."

I rolled her eyes, but dutifully geo-cached it and entered the query as I followed him down the street. I also pinged our massage therapist.  The half-crouch Dennis used when in human form killed his back.  This went so much faster when he was a wolf and I feel less like a third wheel when I have something to do.

Dennis sneezed.

I lowered my handheld, half reaching for my gun with my free hand. 

Eyes streaming, Dennis straightened fast, his nose clamped in his hands.  Backing away from the sidewalk, he sneezed again in rapid succession. Each one doubled him over with the force of his breath.  A high whining keened from his throat between sneezes.

I'd never seen him do that before.  "What's wrong?"

He gasped, bouncing on his toes and pointed at the sidewalk. 

It was covered with a layer of fine dust that looked not much different from sand. I crouched down by it and touched the sand gingerly.  Even to my limited perception, it was obvious. Someone had killed the trail with pepper.

#

I sat in the metal chair at the station and flipped through the files reading old reports of the Hillard kid's disappearance.  On the bench against the wall, Dennis lay down with a damp cloth over his eyes and nose.  The more I looked at the cases, the more similarities I saw.

"Question," I said over my shoulder.  "Would you be surprised if I told you that Mr. Hillard had been successfully treated for lycanthropy?"

"At the moment? No."  He sat up and twisted the rag in his hands. His eyes were still vividly red. 

"If Felty has lycanthropy, the college would have to have that on record, right? So her change days didn't count as absences."

"Not if she's masking it." He put the cloth over his eyes again and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "But if any of her teachers keep attendance, you'd be able to match the absent days with the moon phases."

The door to the briefing room opened and Lieutenant Roland entered. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a tight bun at the base of her neck drawing her face into a mask of severity.  "You two will be the death of me."

"Good to see you, too." Dennis lowered the cloth and gave a grin so big that I had to fight the urge to tell him to put his tongue back in his mouth. He's had a crush on her for years which she ruthlessly ignores. Got to admire the way she boxes off any attempts at flirting as if they don't exist.

Roland slapped three more files down on the table.  "Three more missing person cases. Each with an ash cross. Each close to the full moon. No bodies found for any of them. Very consistent MO until this one. It's the only one with signs of violence."

I cursed and grabbed the top file. I'd have been happier to be wrong.

Dennis got off the bench and came over to the table. "Any lycanthropy connection with these?"

"In one case, definitely. The other two are unclear." Roland straddled a chair opposite us. "We're checking. The question I have is this: Are we looking at someone targeting werewolves or a werewolf on rampage?"

I shivered just at the thought, not so much because of the damage a werewolf could inflict, but because of the public relations nightmare if this turned out to be a werewolf serial killer. I quashed that thought. Roland had said there were no bodies and no signs of violence at the others.

"Well..." Dennis folded the rag, frowning.  "I'm pretty sure that Felty has lycanthropy and that the grey hairs in her apartment came from a different werewolf."

"Pretty sure." She stared at him flatly. "I need more than that."

"Which you'll have when your lab does the analysis. Right now, all I can offer you is my nose and my instinct."

"Speaking of... how's your nose?" Roland studied him the way other people looked at their guns. I twitched in my seat and covered the tension by flipping another page in the file.

"Still pretty fried." Dennis snorted and took in deep breath.  "I took a full breath before I realized what it was."

"That's too bad."

I cocked my head at the other woman's overly casual tone. "What aren't you telling us?"

"Nothing." Roland spread her hands. "I was going to suggest that you go down to evidence and see if anything from the other cases smelled familiar, but if you can't smell anything it's pointless."

Dennis winced.  "Yeah. I could try, but I've been nasal douching for the last hour and my sinuses are still giving me nothing but cayenne."

I held up her hand to stop him from continuing with TMI. Dennis has no filter sometimes.  "I'm not sure that 'nasal douching' is a phrase I needed to hear today."

"I'm not sure it's one I needed to implement."

"That brings up an interesting question."  Roland leaned across the table. "With your sense of smell, why didn't you notice the pepper before you inhaled it?"

Dennis blinked and then shrugged.  "There's a lot of aromas going on in a natural environment like that. I smelled pepper, sure, but didn't expect it in those concentrations." He rubbed his nose and mine itched in empathy.  "Look.  I've been thinking about it and whoever was in that apartment clearly knew how to screw with a tracker. Everything was doused in lilac, which made it impossible to pick out any new scents. And then outside, I followed the lilac easy, but it led straight to the pepper. My guess is that they had a car waiting and tossed Felty into that at the pepper point.  Even if I could smell anything, I don't think there's going to be a trail past that point."

"So we are looking for a werewolf then."

I squirmed. "Or someone who knows werewolf culture."

Both Dennis and Roland turned to look at me and I wrapped my arms around myself, controlling a shudder.  "Look. If it's a werewolf, why would he be targeting other werewolves? Isn't it more likely that it's someone who grew up in the culture but..." I faltered under their combined stares. "I don't know. It just seemed like a possibility."

"It is worth thinking about." Roland stood, sweeping the files toward her. "Get some rest. I want you and your nose back here first thing in the morning."

The door shut behind her and Dennis sighed, lowering his head.  "Hey, Khadija? What are you doing tonight?"

I had long ago learned to be wary of him when his voice sounded so innocent. "Why?"

"I'm thinking about forcing the change early." Dennis turned, eyes still as red as if he had been crying for days. "Can you be there if I do?"

The shudder that I had suppressed earlier swept over me now.  There were drugs that could push the hormone balance if a werewolf was willing to put up with the side effects.  In Dennis it manifested as thirst and rage. "Are you sure?"

"They need my nose more than they need my opposable thumbs."

I let my breath out in a rush, hating that he was right.  "Okay. But I get to pick the movie."

#

The futon creaked as Dennis shifted his weight again. I kept my eyes on the film, but my peripheral vision dominated my awareness.  Dennis flexed his hands, then balled them into fists, stretching out his arms. He dropped them to his lap and started the routine over again.

"Want me to rub your hands?"

"No." He tucked his hands under his arms and glowered at the film.

I nodded and started counting in my head. I had reached five when he said, "I fucking hate this."

"I know."

"Why the hell did you pick Avatar?"

"Because I would rather have you mad at the film than at me." I glanced at the clock on the wall. Two hours had passed since the injection and he was starting to show signs of bones shifting.  "Besides. Sam Worthington is dreamy."

That earned a snort which was as close as he would come to laughter when he was this cranky. The real reason I picked the film, though I wouldn't admit it to Dennis, was that I didn't have to follow the plot and could focus on where he was in the change.  Beside me, Dennis started kneading his hands again, knuckles cracking loudly and painfully. He snarled and got off the couch, pacing around the room with limping strides. I sighed and paused the film, freezing a grimace on the screen.

"Dennis. It's time to strip."

He whirled on me, eyes dilated with anger. I narrowed mine and very deliberately leaned forward, without rising.

"Now." I held his gaze, projecting Alpha dominance at him with a curled lip. We both knew the game that I was playing but he backed down.  The worst thing about a forced change was establishing that I was in charge when in fact he could kill me without thinking about it. When he finished it, he would still have his human intelligence, but the way he processed information was hardwired to the wolf body. Once, over drinks, he'd tried to explain the perception differences but the words had failed him more completely than when he was a wolf.

Dennis huffed in acknowledgment and headed for the bathroom. He lost his balance in the hall, tumbling forward as the balance in his bones shifted too far. His nails scraped down the wall as he tried to catch himself.

"I'm coming to help you," I rose, careful not to make a sudden movement toward him.

"I'm fine." His voice was guttural and raw.

"You are not fine." My palms tingled with sweat and I hoped he couldn't smell it.  "I'm coming up on your left side."

His growl mingled anger and exasperation but he stopped trying to rise. He held his head low and turned away from me. As much as I hated embarrassing him, it helped with establishing of dominance and Lord knew he would need all the control I could offer him as the change progressed. Natural changes weren't so bad, but the induced ones sucked.

He groaned as I lifted him to his feet, which really wasn't fair since I was doing all the work. He is not light as a person or a wolf. With an arm around his waist, I helped him the rest of the way to the master bath and eased him onto the tile floor. Panting, he pressed his face against the small white tiles and closed his eyes. A small whine escaped his lips. 

"Can you get your clothes off by yourself or did I let you go too long?"

Dennis's eyes flashed open and he flexed his fingers. "S'okay. I'll call."

Rocking back on my heels, I checked the position of his thumbs to make sure that they were still opposable.  "Okay... Okay. I'll be right outside if you need anything."

He grunted, watching me as I pulled the heavy wood door closed until it clicked. I leaned my head against the frame, closing my eyes to listen until I heard the sound of his clothes coming off and the faint hollow thump as they landed in the tub. "Good boy," I whispered. The last time, he hadn't gotten them into the tub and had vomited all over them. Of course, as a wolf he couldn't exactly do laundry which left clean up to me.

I got my computer and settled into the chair by the bathroom door.  Switching off the movie, I plugged in the USB cable from the hole in the wall beside me and started the webcam.  With the grainy picture of Dennis curled and shivering on the floor, I started researching ash crosses and werewolves. Through the door came occasional grunts and whines, punctuated by meaty smacks as he slammed his hands against the floor in frustration.

We'd installed the camera after the change where he'd smacked his head on the edge of the tub and I'd walked into the bathroom to find a wolf lying in a pool of blood. It had covered us both by the time I got Dennis cleaned up.

I stopped, finger poised over the touchpad on my computer. The blood in the apartment had been in the shape of a woman. I'd assumed that the werewolf had hurt Felty, but what if that wasn't true. What if it was his?  Grimacing, I shook my head. No, Dennis had said that it had estrogen and that meant it was either Felty's or there were two women werewolves in the apartment. Since only one in every 3000 werewolves was female that seemed unlikely but was worth mentioning to Roland when we saw her in the morning.

But it kept nagging at me as I skipped through the internet looking for connections. There was something I was missing. Something obvious.

#

It had taken forever to convince the department that they needed to use neutral odor soaps in the bathrooms. The number of times a sample got contaminated before that had made me want to bite someone and I'm not the one who has to do the actual tracking. The thing about working with a werewolf professional tracker, like Dennis, is that you got the nose of a bloodhound with the intelligence of a person.  He could sort out which scents were garbage but it made his job harder. Sometimes the fact that a perp used Green Apple soap was a clue. Sometimes it was just a clumsy cop.

I watched Dennis through the one-way glass of the interview room, as he buried his muzzle in one of the plastic bins. His ribcage expanded under his coat, which was a deep ginger that would never appear on a real wolf.  He snorted out, went to the middle of the room, sniffed coffee beans to clear his palette and headed to the bin from Felty's apartment.

The door behind me opened and Roland slipped in. "They called me. Told me he was here."  She looked through the glass. "Anything?"

"He keeps going between the bin from Felty's and the one from the Cooker's."

"That's the first one, isn't it?" Roland chewed on her lip. "I want to talk to him."

"Wait." I couldn't believe she didn't see the tension in his movements. He was angry about something and that would only fuel the rage from the change.  "Let him finish. Whatever he's smelling at there is months old. You don't want to introduce another sent into the room until he's isolated whatever he's found."

"I pray to God he's found something useful."

"Speaking of... Do you know if any of the victims belong to a church?"

Roland pivoted to face me, lips pursed in a question. "Why do you ask?"

"There's a church out on Sandy that caters to werewolves. With the ash cross, I thought there might be a connection."

"I thought werewolves were a curse from the devil." 

It was a pretty common belief and only slowly getting chipped away as more folks with lycanthropy came out of the closet, so to speak.  "Ironically, Christianity is riddled with lycanthropy. St. Christopher, St. Francis, Nebuchadnezzar..."

She humphed in surprise.  "I had no idea. I'll put someone on checking out that church. Any others or just that one?"

"A meditation center, a massage therapist that does sports and lupine massage, and a 'gentlemen's club' called The Real Big Bad Wolf." I nodded at window where Dennis was still smelling cloth. "Don't tell him about that last one unless it turns out to be a lead."

"He wouldn't know already?"

"If he ever stopped working, maybe."

As if I had cued him, he looked up at the window then at the door and back at the window.  One of the reasons he hired me is that I can read his body language although this one was pretty blatant since he was already trotting to the door.  "He's ready."

When I got to the door, I could already hear him gnawing on the knob, as if that would work. "Hey! Cut that out, you'll break your teeth."

Dennis growled, but the gnawing stopped. I opened the door and he pushed out through it, almost knocking me down in the process. As a wolf he stands not quite as high as my hips, but  under his ginger fur is all compact muscle. He stalked in a circle around us, head lowered with his ears slightly back. The fur on his ruff stood on end. Oh, but the rage had him bad this time.  This was when you knew that there was a thinking person in there because a wolf would have already torn my throat out but Dennis kept control. Some folks didn't. I say "didn't" because I believe that any of them could but that some people use being a wolf as an excuse to do whatever they want. Those are the ones that give werewolves a bad name.

"He wants to show us something." If we didn't move, he'd probably nip at our heels to hurry us along. I pulled his letter board out of my bag as we went into the room and laid it on the floor.  I handed him the laser pointer which he took with delicate precision, teeth flashing but coming nowhere near my skin.  I know some folks who wouldn't trust a lycanthrope near bare skin regardless of where in his cycle he was.  It was only contagious when he was in wolf form and then only if saliva got into a cut or the mucous membranes but that didn't stop people from avoiding contact even when he wasn't contagious. Idiots.

As soon as he had the laser, Dennis pointed it at the board and began spelling, W. E.

"We?"

He nodded and moved on. H. A.

"Have?" Part of my training was in interpreting the letter board when he was in wolf form and my ability to guess his questions was key to speeding up communication. Of course, it helped that I had a pretty good guess at where he was going. "We have a match?"

Again, he nodded, laser dancing crazily on the wall and then circled the number 2. Rowland was used to this and kept her eyes on Dennis, tuning me out while I functioned as his interpreter just the way she ought to. I think that's part of why Dennis had the hots for her because she treated him like a thinking being no matter which form he was in. 

She looked over at the bins. "Between which two?"

Dennis spelled, "Between Felty and Cooker, and I think at Yates but the sample isn't clear. The interesting thing is that all of them have traces of sage ash and lycanthropy." He bared his teeth around the laser.  "Can't tell if the victims were the lycanthropes or the perps. Need to go back to Felty's. Never smelled the laundry."

Rowland snorted. "You know with anyone else that would sound dirty."

"Dirty laundry would be better, yes." In case you didn't know, Dennis has zero sense of humor as a wolf.

********************************************************

It has grown dark without them noticing while they are reading. "Great beginning. I really want to find out what happens," Maya says. "Great characters. Fascinating world."

"But no food," he says. "Bedtime, and nothing to eat."

"Cookies?" she offers.

"I'm not sure real world food would nourish me." He grins. "But I did score some coffee beans, for the morning, if we can't get any better coffee."

"Shall we read one more and then sleep?" Maya asks. "Downstairs by the reading lights?"

"All right." He picks up a book. "This is Marissa Lingen. It's absolutely bound to have something we can eat for supper. Her stories almost always come with excellent snacks. She understands food, and families."

"Didn't she write that great time travel story in Nature, the one about the teenage girl who steals a time machine?" Maya asks, as they head for the stairs.

"That's right." They go down the stairs in the gloom, and make their way through the dimness.

"I've been waiting for a novel from her to come along. I hope one does soon."

"Me too," he says. They settle down at the table. Maya switches on the green-shaded light. And they read.