Jack Cold drove Raven back to Whaterly on some impossible reserve of energy brought up from a spiritual well deep inside him, the kind you only accumulated after training with monks under a waterfall for years. He dozed on the way and woke up when Jack shook him awake, parked in the car park for The Open Gate. He had a big red slash down the side of his face where he'd fallen asleep on the seatbelt.
"Go find a proper pillow," Cold said. He offered Raven a friendly fist bump, which Raven gave back weakly.
"And you?"
Cold laughed. "I've been on campaigns in the middle of shit in some jungle out nowhere hunting every manner of horror imaginable on less sleep than this. I'll be fine." He took his phone from his pocket to check it, but fumbled and dropped it by the pedals. Banged his head bending down to retrieve it. Looked at Raven with half an eye open. "OK, I get your point. Maybe I do need a kip."
"Where are you staying?"
"Conservatory's got a house nearby. It looks like an Airbnb, but we've taken it over the whole time. We cover a twenty mile radius from it if we need to."
Raven wanted to ask why he wasn't allowed to hole up there, and decided that having a several minute discussion on Conservatory operational procedures was far beyond his brainpower at that point. Instead, he nodded again to Cold, told him he'd be in touch, and got out of the car.
Cold reversed out of the car park, clipped the inside curb as he pulled onto the street, and left once he'd managed to get the car driving in a straight line.
Raven almost fell over on the crooked stairs up to his room. His stumble caught the attention of a few men at the bar who turned to see what the drama was all about. He smiled and waved away their concern.
Most of the patrons were the regular midday drinkers, nothing unusual in any way about them. One patron in particular, however, caught his eye. The man was older, fifties perhaps, and stood at the bar with an air of dignity that screamed inherited wealth. He was dressed in a black jacket with a tweed cap tight twisted slightly askew on his greying hair. He had a black goatee, a few grey hairs springing around the muzzle.
What stopped Raven even more than his clothing were his eyes. They sparkled, seemingly lit from the inside. Moisture in his eyeballs glittering gold. They were gorgeous, enchanting, and Raven found himself wanting to fall into them, to linger in those pools of starshine forever.
Only when his own eyes threatened to close on their own a moment later did his world go blurry and he finally regain some kind of sense. The spell was broken. He turned and slowly mounted the steps again.
Raven shut the door to his room and sank to the floor, wearied. The wooden door was reassuring and firm against his back. He threw his bag across the room, where it slid up against the side of the bed and stopped with a pleasing thud.
What the hell was that he had just experienced? He'd never felt a single thing like it. It was as if he had been transfixed, taken over by some strange power.
Maybe it was just the tiredness. Exhausted and ready to collapse, twenty-four hours on the go with chases and terror and back and forth to the city, he was losing his mind. That was one answer. But he knew he wasn't in the habit of imagining things. They'd established this in the past few hours, if nothing else. Sleep deprivation might play a part, but it alone couldn't do that to him.
Raven crawled out of his clothes and slipped under the covers. He wanted to fall asleep but couldn't. Despite the tiredness, and despite sleeping eliminating one possibility as to the cause of that strange encounter, he couldn't drift off. The whole thing kept playing in his head. He remembered the way the man had looked at him, the way his eyes shimmered. They seemed to have some kind of mesmeric power, holding him captive, if only for a second.
Hypnotism was well known to The Conservatory. They had their own mystics in to run tests and such, and were considering building in training to resist mesmeric influences as part of the screening process for new employees. Raven had helped out one of his colleagues at The Conservatory with a research paper on hypnotism, mesmerism, voodoo, and other pseudo-sciences, if only for a few days between his own projects. Grants and funding took a while to come through, and convincing the higher-ups that his new device/gadget/tech, whatever he would call it, was worth it, took its time.
He knew, therefore, that mesmerism existed, and in that time helping out had done a little testing on himself with The Conservatory's mystics. He was a little stronger than average, they decided. Nothing to write home about, but anyone trying to get a hold of his mind would need to use a smidge of extra firepower, or consider trying a different tactic. They warned him, however, that any supremely skilled user of the mystic arts, at a certain level of skill, would be able to get a hold of him without problems.
Is that what had happened? Was the man downstairs a mystic?
It was either that or he'd just had a lightning bolt of sexual awakening, and he didn't think that was the case. He'd had his moments experimenting at University, of course, and although rough-and-tumble with guys wasn't bad, it simply wasn't his fun time of choice. If he was drunk enough and a mixed group gave him the eye, sure thing, but he was never going to get the stomach flutters over an older man in an instant.
Could he discount that completely?
Probably not, but he knew himself well enough to be fairly sure that the revolving room stopping for that specific gaze wasn't an instinctual desire to rip the man's clothes off.
Just what are we dealing with here?
Too much to consider. Too many factors, loose threads leading nowhere. His head still running around off its leash, sleep finally overtook him and he dropped into a strange, surrealist dreamland filled with phantom wolves and Hammer horror film villains in castles on the hill. No matter how fast he ran, he never managed to escape. The cape of the great villainous figure would obscure the moon like Mephisto in an old German Expressionist film, and plunge Raven into black once again.
***
Hysteria was watching crap TV, her favourite pastime, when Persephone knocked on the door.
"Are we heading out imminently?" Hysteria called through the door. "That better be the reason for the visit."
"Going to open the door and ask me to my face?"
"I'm considering it."
There was silence but Hysteria knew she hadn't gone. Persephone didn't give in to her sarcasm, annoyingly. Pausing an old episode of Jersey Shore, she trudged over and let her boss in.
"They falling out yet?" Persephone asked as she eyed the TV.
"They're always falling out. Them not doing so would be an incredible stroke of luck."
"And bad TV."
"That as well."
Hysteria slumped back down on the sofa. She didn't bother offering Persephone a seat, and she didn't look as if she was after one. She crossed her arms and let out an exaggerated sigh. "What have I done this time?"
"Nothing. Why? Guilty conscience?"
"I've always got a guilty conscience. Guilty that I don't have a conscience to begin with. Comes with the biology."
Persephone walked into the bedroom. The bed was still unmade and there were clothes spilling out of the laundry basket in the corner. The metal slab stood sentinel in the corner, restraints in the open position. She looked back through to the TV. Ducked her head around a bit to get a good angle. "This about where you saw it from?"
"Saw what from? Your ugly mug this morning?"
"Cut the bullshit, Scorn. Is this where you saw the thing?"
Hysteria nodded. She remembered the way it stood over her shoulder, watching her in the TV reflection. Of course, it hadn't been there, but she could still feel the way her hackles had risen on seeing it. She'd felt it standing there, gaunt and gangly and wrong. She shuddered. The beast inside shuddered with her.
"You checked under the bed?"
The TV went back on, where Snooki threw something across the room at one of her supposed friends. "If there had been something under there," Hysteria called over the bickering onscreen, "it would have been in bloody rags in seconds. She was about ready to rip through me without moonlight."
Persephone flicked up the dangling bedsheet for a quick inspection. As if it would have reappeared there for another look, just in case it could catch Hysteria off guard again. She dropped it back down again and walked into the living room. "Would that have been you wanting to kill it, or her?"
Hysteria bowed her head in thought. A genuine question, one she hadn't thought about. She'd been so on edge, especially with the moon coming up, even at reduced power, that she hadn't considered it from that angle. Where had the split been in that moment? Where had she ended and the wolf begun?
"Both," she said at last. "I would have gone at it for her."
Persephone raised an eyebrow. "For her? For the wolf? Why?"
Hysteria thought a moment longer. Tightened her crossed arms. "It, she, was scared."
The TV calmed down as the show cut for an ad break. The room softened and stayed in an eerie hush for a half minute in which Persephone went through a lifetime of reconsiderations of the young woman in front of her. Scared. The wolf had been scared.
Persephone had seen many things in her time working with Hysteria. She had seen the wolf gallop across fields, face down men with machine guns raised at it, seen it rip through flesh and bone like hand-holding paper doll chains. She had never considered the idea that the beast, a thing of sheer aggression, of monstrous hunger, of primal power, could possibly get scared.
She didn't like that.
"You definitely think it's got something to do with Whaterly?"
Hysteria shrugged. The gesture was far less effective at hiding her worry than she believed. "If it is, it'll get rid of it. I can go back to being just a test subject then."
Persephone shivered, but she did her best to suppress it. "Are you sure you're going to be OK heading out?"
"I don't give a shit if I'm missing limbs. I'm getting out of here."
Hysteria was starting to shut down, go into hibernation mode where she'd refuse all contact with people. Persephone nodded, knowing when to give up and accept defeat. Lose the battle, win the war.
"We head out at 8am tomorrow. I'll come get you."
"Nobody going to check me over beforehand?"
"Why? You want Sawbones and Flicker to have a go at you first? I can arrange it if you really want it?"
"No, thank you. I'll manage."
Persephone allowed a smile, and to her surprise, the corner of Hysteria's mouth rose just a little. "Good. I'll see you then."
On her way out of the room she tapped the dispenser on the wall. "I'll get them to refill this. You need all the sleep you can get tonight."
Hysteria nodded. "Thank you, Persephone."
"Don't mention it."
When she was out of the room, Persephone headed straight for the kitchen for coffee. Waiting for the kettle to boil, leaning up against the counter, she put a hand over her eyes. She wasn't about to cry, but there was a well of emotion trying to rip itself out of her through her eyes that she didn't want anyone passing to see.
Hysteria Scorn. A danger to all human life, but also an angsty teenager at the end of the day. What could you do with that? What could you do with a young woman whose mood swings within a tenth of a second could range from sarcasm to lycanthropy?
Her phone pinged as the kettle boiled. She read the email from Dr Saturn confirming that Hysteria and she were allocated the Conservatory House near Whaterly for a period of five days. Jack Cold's team would be removed to allow them to step in. Their job was pretty much done, anyway, save for results coming back on who's hand young Taylor had been gnawing on.
The coffee looked as unappetising as always. She grabbed it and hoped by the time she had walked to her office it would be cool enough to drink in one go, like a caffeine shot to keep her from thinking too hard about what might be coming up in the next week.