Six hours before Hysteria woke up from her drug-induced mini coma, Raven drove into Whaterly. The day was drab and overcast, the river high from the previous day's rain. The main street had a few people wandering up and down, the elderly with strollers, a couple of boys on bikes after school about to go trailing up into the forest. The car park they had used previously was a third full, with only a few people dropping in from out of town. A gloomy weekday isn't exactly tourist season, especially not far from Halloween when frost starts to crisp the fallen leaves and people finishing work just want to get home into the warm.
Raven parked up behind The Old Goat, an establishment which claimed to be a hotel but was nothing more than a refurbished old inn, a pub restaurant with a few creaky rooms overhead. He took his suitcase out of the Vauxhall that The Conservatory had let him borrow and went inside.
Downstairs was all dark wooden beams and red carpets. A couple sat in the corner talking over the remains of steak and chips. A pool table stood empty, waiting for the evening's patrons. It wasn't light and airy and full of life, but at least it was cozy.
Raven went up to the bar, where a middle-aged woman with glasses balanced on a squat nose was watching the news.
"See this?" she said. "And he's our MP. Bloody idiot in a suit."
"What am I looking at?"
She looked up at him with eyebrows diving above her glasses. "I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else."
"Most people do. Got a face like that."
She forced a smiled. Swivelled on her stool without standing up to greet him. "What can I do for you?"
"I've got a room here. Under the name of Morrigan."
The woman nodded and turned to a computer screen behind her. She dabbed at the menus one at a time with a plump finger, as if technology had only reached the place in the last few months and she was still distrustful of it. "Morgan, was it?"
"No. Morrigan. Seth Morrigan."
The woman hummed to herself as she poked at the screen a little longer. Then she gave a loud "aha!" and fished a key off a board behind her.
"Here you go. Room 2. Just up the stairs over there and around to the left. No wild parties. We close the front door at midnight, so if you're not in by then, you're sleeping rough until 6 when we unlock it again."
"Thank you. By the way, can I borrow that paper on the side there?"
The woman slid it across the counter to him dismissively. "That's gone downhill recently as well. Everything's change around here, and none of it good."
Raven took the key and paper and thanked her. He picked up his suitcase and headed up the stairs, none of them level and all crooked in different directions to each other. The bartender receptionist returned to the news to find something else to complain about.
The room itself was clean and tidy, if not state of the art. A bed with a wooden headboard, a small desk, kettle, wardrobe with drawers, and the bathroom had a shower with a delightfully gaudy plastic curtain. It's a small place out of season, he said to himself. They're probably surprised we booked a room to begin with. Certainly nobody else was checking into Whaterly. He had seen that all of the other room keys were still there on their own hooks. He was the only visitor in town, near enough.
He set his suitcase down, opened it up, and took out the smaller case from underneath the clothes he'd have to borrow an iron for at some point. He thumbed the code for the little case, opened the clasps, and took out his laptop and his tracking gadget (his pet name for it was Moonbeam, not that he had ever told anyone). Checked it over. Undamaged. Someone back at The Conservatory had asked if, once he got it working, they could make an app for it. Raven wasn't one for giving death stares, but Tom Hatley from forensics very quickly held up his hands, apologised as if he'd just insulted Raven's mother, and backed away slowly.
After the laptop booted up, Raven inputted his password, had his retina scanned, and checked his messages. They were all encrypted to the hilt, firewalls thicker than the lining of a cyberspace bomb shelter, and all of them were mind-numbingly dull. The Conservatory wanted to know if he had arrived yet. He replied that he was in the room they had booked for him. A message came back two minutes later that the agent from Laundry still in the area after the lupe mission beforehand would phone him shortly. He told them that was fine and shut the laptop down again. He put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes with his palms.
The idea that someone had been watching them that night had persisted in the days after their trip to Whaterly. Raven had checked Moonbeam to see if it had picked anything up, but aside from the data on Hysteria and the other wolf (who they could find nothing on, so they were still waiting for a DNA match from the servers for), it had nothing out of the ordinary, at least in werewolf terms.
A day after mentioning it to Persephone, he'd mentioned it again. The more he thought about it, the more he felt wrong. It was like having stared into a light and then seeing the spot in your vision even when you closed your eyes. It was always there, still remaining, and he'd managed to get two hours of very broken sleep that night after their phone call. He'd forgotten the dreams but he'd remembered the feeling. He'd showered that morning, eaten breakfast, and showered again to try and get rid of it.
So Persephone pulled some strings with the fieldwork coordinators. She said that Raven, who had only been with the Conservatory for twelve months, should have as much fieldwork as possible to get used to situations on the ground. If he was going to be handler, he might as well. Also, he could keep testing his R&D work. The more practical testing, the better.
Raven had the feeling that not everyone had been convinced by her cock-and-bull story, but they had let him go anyway. Persephone must have dug her heels in hard, because getting them to spend any money was hard enough, let alone a hotel room and taking the car out. Yet here he was, and now, back in the town again, he sat quietly in his room. He closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and tried to see if he felt that same, watchful presence he had first felt behind the shop when running after Hysteria.
Down in the town, the clocktower struck four. A car rumbled through the street just below his window. A door shut somewhere. A laugh downstairs.
No prickly sensation at the back of his neck.
What had he really been expecting? Had he really thought that some M. R. James ghost was going to appear from out of the shadows and slowly slither across the room to him? The setting was apt enough, but that was all it had going for it. He didn't even know what he thought might happen. Just that he had to get rid of the feeling that something could.
He went to the window and looked out over the town. The hotel was near the back edge of town, starting to rise up the hill towards the north, and so he could see over a number of the rooftops. In the distance the river ran across his vision, the road home snaking away from him. When the sun shone clear in summer it must be an idyllic vision of country paradise. Even now, the whole place was quiet and quaint and devoid of even the remotest of negative feelings, despite the overcast sky.
"Maybe Persephone was right," he said aloud to himself. "Maybe I was just anxious."
He'd been recruited by The Conservatory to work in their R&D department a year ago. All details to be kept under wraps and one hundred percent top secret on pain of death. His job was to think like the dark, especially lycanthropes, or werewolves as they were called in the common tongue, which were still occasionally shedding their disguises across the country. Study them. Work them out. Find a way to track them before they change.
He'd been diligent enough. Having lost his aunt recently, the only family he'd had, going into the monastery-like arms of The Conservatory hadn't been too bad a deal for him. Yet a few months in and he wanted to get out, to taste some fresh air again. Even a computer science degree didn't stop one from wanted to experience life out from the underground bunker of the organisation.
And so when the position for Hysteria's handler had become available, he'd offered himself up. He had some things he'd like to try out in the field, and working with a werewolf would be doubly useful. Into training he went, and then when they decided he might be able to tough it out, to meet the one and only Hysteria Scorn, The Conservatory's tame werewolf.
Initially there'd been friction. Of course there would be. Raven was only a year or two older than Hysteria, and their personalities had clashed together like opposing weather fronts. Raven was quieter, Hysteria anything but. He had his mind on the future, and she wanted a simple, bestial past. They didn't get on incredibly even now, but they could work together when it called for it. That was as near as you could get with anyone, let alone a young woman with a monster inside her skin.
On his desk the phone rang. Raven answered the unknown number. "Seth Morrigan speaking."
"Moonlight rises in the east," said a male voice on the other end of the line.
"The sun will come to tame the beast," Raven replied, finishing off the code The Conservatory used to make sure their agents weren't talking to strangers.
"Raven, I assume?"
"That's correct."
"Name's Jack Cold. I'm the Laundry agent still cleaning up after you and Miss Scorn."
"Afternoon, Mr Cold."
"Let's grab a drink. Pint down at the Open Gate in twenty minutes?"
"If I can find my way there."
A scoff from Cold. "You're in tech. If you can't find a pub, we're all in trouble."
Raven hung up. Put the phone in his pocket. Looked back over the town. What was he really expecting to find out here? Maybe someone had looked out of a window at the wrong time and that's what he'd felt. Maybe there'd been some drunk sleeping rough in the woods, heard some commotion on the road. It couldn't be anyone sober, after all, or Laundry would have known. If someone had breathed that they saw something, even if they weren't believed, Cold would have been on it. So it must have been someone drunk.
But if it wasn't? If there was something else, something more than just a werewolf come into puberty?
Raven grabbed his jacket and left for the Open Gate.