Thaumatology 02 - Demon's Moon Page 5

  ‘Huh,’ Ceri said, ‘True. I had to turn down a were-panther today.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Dane asked.

  Ceri nodded. ‘New dancer at the Collar Club. Carter found her when she tried to get into Southampton docks, apparently.’

  ‘Gay or bi?’ Tabitha asked.

  ‘Lesbian, as far as I could tell,’ Ceri replied and Tabitha winced. ‘Yeah, I’m not really sure whether she left Brazil because she was a were or because she liked girls.’

  ‘I’ve heard some nasty stories about the South American Catholics and their witch-hunts,’ Tabitha said.

  Kort made a grunting noise. ‘Yeah, bring the mood down won’t you? There I was just getting into a daydream about you and Ceri on the hearth rug and you have to mention Catholics.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Catholics,’ Dane said, ‘as long as they’re schoolgirls.’

  ‘Oh well, yeah,’ Kort said. ‘Schoolgirls is different though. Little skirts and knee socks… Strictly over eighteen, mind. No point in lookin’ if they’re too young to do anything with.’

  ‘Well yeah,’ Dane said, ‘they’re better when they’ve filled out a bit anyway.’

  ‘See what I have to put up with?’ Tabitha said, one hand idly playing with Ceri’s hair.

  ‘I live with a half-succubus, Tabby.’ Ceri replied. She knew it was the alcohol and the laid-back sensuality of the wolf pack, but her inhibitions were weakening and Tabitha’s hand was sending shivers down her back.

  ‘Good point,’ Tabitha said, ‘you’re probably used to subtle innuendo. Not that Kort would know subtle innuendo if it sucked his dick.’ Ceri giggled.

  ‘Hey!’ Kort protested. ‘I can be subtle. I can be real subtle. I can do subtle, can’t I, boss?’

  Dane’s lips twitched. ‘Yeah, Kort. You’ve got subtle written all over you. Look in a dictionary, find “subtle,” and there’s a picture of you beside it.’ Kort grinned proudly. ‘Under it, there’s a bit of text saying, “Definition of unsubtle.” Kort sagged, grumbling.

  Tabitha giggled and her hand strayed down the back of Ceri’s neck. Ceri’s lips parted as her breathing quickened. Almost unconsciously, she began to stroke Tabitha’s thigh. Dane was watching them; Ceri did not have to look to feel his eyes on her. Kort had not noticed yet, but she figured he would. It did not matter, Ceri had a pretty good idea what Tabitha was doing and Kort was not the target.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Tabitha asked ‘Sleeping with a succubus, I mean. Must be…’

  ‘Like nothing you’ve ever experienced,’ Ceri said. ‘Imagine you’re right on the edge of coming, and you’re just hanging there.’ Her hand strayed down between Tabitha’s thighs, stroking gently back and forth. ‘Your body is singing, totally out of control. You can’t stop it. You don’t want to stop it, ever, but eventually she lets you climax and it’s like… like every nerve in your body has turned into star-fire.’

  The murmurs of conversation around the room had grown silent as Ceri talked. The only sound left was Tabitha’s soft panting. Ceri realised where her hand was and what it was doing to the she-wolf. Dane was still watching, the whole pack was watching. For a fraction of a second, Ceri considered stopping, but she could see Dane’s tongue running over his lips. Maybe, just maybe, this would get the North Hills Alpha where his pack wanted him again.

  Ceri pulled Tabitha into her lap and pushed her legs open…

  November 25th

  Ceri opened her eyes to find Lily looking down at her. The half-succubus had a bright grin on her face. She leaned closer, placing her lips against Ceri’s ear. ‘Coming to bed?’ she whispered.

  Ceri nodded and struggled to her feet, having to move one of Tabitha’s arms to do it. The wolf-girl grumbled in her sleep, but did not wake. Ceri looked around and frowned. ‘Where’s Dane?’ she said softly.

  Lily waved for her to come with her and led the way through the maze of bodies to the door, waiting until they were outside before speaking. ‘He’s in the study, curled up on the lounger,’ she said.

  Ceri sagged. ‘Damn. I lost track of him. I was hoping he’d hooked up with one of the other girls.’ Lily raised an eyebrow and Ceri shrugged. ‘Tabby and I kind of… well… started an orgy to get Dane interested.’

  ‘You and Tabs?’ Lily asked, beaming. ‘Hot damn I wish I’d been there. That is so hot!’ Ceri frowned at her. ‘What? It is! How many people did you do it with?’

  Ceri’s cheeks flushed brightly and she developed a sheepish grin. ‘I, uh, I’m not really sure. I got kind of carried away.’ She sobered up. ‘Didn’t work though,’ she said.

  Lily started for the stairs up to the top floor and the bedrooms. ‘Of course it didn’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t just make someone want to have sex.’ She turned and looked back. ‘Well, I can, but that wouldn’t do any good because they’d know they’d been messed with after.’ She started up the stairs again.

  Ceri followed. ‘The pack is really worried about him,’ she said. ‘Worried he’s… losing his edge or something.’

  ‘Losing his will to live, more like,’ Lily said. ‘Half-succubus, remember? They’re wrong, he hasn’t. He doesn’t want a woman, or a man, but what he wants he can’t have.’ Walking into Ceri’s room, she began to undress; not a long process since she was wearing nothing more than a stupidly short dress, the uniform of the Jade Dragon, and a pair of heels.

  Ceri leant against the doorframe, frowning. ‘What does he want then?’

  Lily looked up at her, sitting on the bed to undo the straps on her sandals. ‘Isn’t it obvious? He wants the demon who killed Aleena, so he can do something much worse to it.’

  Holloway

  ‘All right,’ Cheryl said loudly to make herself heard over the chatter, ‘will everyone not being scanned please go into the cage.’ It was not easy, herding ten naked werewolves; for a start, Cheryl really did not know where to put her eyes. Still, Ceri needed the help and there were worse ways to spend a day.

  Dane was standing in the circle watching Ceri set the instruments with an intent, intelligent look on his face. ‘This is just a very accurate version of the thaumometers I’ve seen magicians use?’ he asked.

  Ceri nodded. ‘Yes, well, they’re very high resolution. There’s a line of tiny holes in a silver-iron plate in front of the receiver head and that gets moved back and forth so that it gets a scanned image of the subject.’ She tapped the box in front of her. ‘This thing takes the combined data streams from all nine heads and combines them, giving a live display which is a fairly rough approximation, and then the data is saved out to the computer which assembles a full, three-D, animated map of whatever you’ve scanned.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘The thaumometers I’ve seen were all, well, mechanical.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got several at home,’ Ceri said, looking up with a smile. ‘Dad swore by them, said the electronic ones were never as reliable, but you can’t make them to read much less than a hundredth of a thaum.’

  ‘So, what’s the difference?’

  Dane seemed genuinely interested, and also seemed to be grasping what she was saying, so she explained. ‘Well, the mechanical ones work using a bi-metallic strip. You know that a properly prepared alloy of silver and iron tends to block magic?’ He nodded that he did. ‘Well, that’s actually because it absorbs thaumitons, inducing a current in the metal. If you stick a thin strip of that to a thin strip of copper with an insulating adhesive, you get heating in the iron, which makes it expand, which makes the strip bend. Attach a needle via some gearing and you have a thaumometer.’ Dane nodded again to indicate he was with her so far.

  ‘These electronic ones have silver-iron circuits,’ she went on, ‘tiny ones fabricated directly onto a silicon substrate. They measure the current induced in the iron. These can measure currents down in the micro-Ampere range so they can pick up very low thaumic emissions.’ She hit the record button. ‘Any time you’re ready,’ she said.

  He nodded and she saw the start of the reaction fla
re. ‘This is one of the reasons we’d like to call you “friend,”’ he said. ‘I think someone like you could be very useful to us in the future.’

  Ceri was about to ask what he meant, but his final words were punctuated by a soft growl. He had changed and she was looking at a large, grey-furred wolf-man who would not be able to answer her, and something about his transformation was odd and she was too busy concentrating on that to consider what he had said.

  Saving the data, she smiled at him. ‘When you’re ready to change back, give me a nod, okay?’ He rumbled an affirmative sounding reply and padded softly over to stand beside her, watching the replay of his change on the computer. ‘Something about that is kind of strange,’ she said. ‘I can’t put my finger on it, but I’ll figure it out.’

  A clawed hand reached out, tracing a furry knuckle across her cheek as gently as a feather. Ceri looked up into his eyes and reached up to run a hand along his jaw before she had even thought about it. His hand closed around hers before she could touch him and her heart jumped at the look of pain in his eyes. Pushing her hand down, he gave her a firm nod and walked back into the circle to change back.

  A fully human Dane was breathing hard and almost stumbled as he walked out of the circle. Ceri frowned at him. ‘You changed back too quickly,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said quietly. ‘You carry on. I just need to… be alone for a minute or two.’ He turned and walked through into the office Ceri used before she could say anything else.

  A little confused, Ceri looked around at Cheryl, who shrugged back at her. ‘Let’s have the next one,’ Ceri said.

  She had scanned through three more wolves, two males and a female, before the anomaly jumped out at her. Dane had wandered back into the room, dressed only in a pair of black briefs, but no longer naked, and was looking over Ceri’s shoulder at the displays. He frowned as she dropped into the archived data menu and pulled up a file labelled “Alec – to wolf.”

  ‘That’s Alec’s transformation?’ Dane asked. Ceri nodded, her fingers tapping quickly over keys to narrow the analysis parameters to just the end of the sequence. ‘Does he look the same while he’s transforming? Same energy patterns I mean.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Ceri replied. ‘That’s what’s been bugging me.’ Her gaze ran across four sets of readouts from the analysis. ‘Yes! I was right.’

  By now Cheryl had joined them. ‘Is that saying what I think it is?’ she said.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ Dane said.

  ‘This is a frequency and modulation analysis of the final pulse werewolves give off as they actually transform,’ Ceri said.

  ‘We’ve theorised,’ Cheryl said, ‘that it’s the mechanism which causes other nearby wolves to start transforming when one does. The foxes don’t seem to have it, and neither does Naira, the were-panther Ceri tested.’

  ‘Huh,’ Dane said. ‘I always thought that was just psychological.’

  ‘You’re not alone,’ Ceri said. ‘Answer a question for me, if you would. That cascade effect, is it more likely to happen among members of the same pack?’

  ‘I’d never really thought about it…’

  ‘Yes,’ Tabitha said, ‘it is.’ Dane raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Think about it, boss,’ she said. ‘When we get into a fight with another pack and they start changing, their people start shifting, but we don’t tend to shift until you do.’

  Dane nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s true. Again, I always put it down to psychology.’

  ‘Looking at this,’ Cheryl said, ‘there’s a physiological basis to it as well.’

  ‘Dane and Alec have pretty similar profiles,’ Ceri said, nodding. ‘The pulse generated by the other pack members I’ve scanned is of lower amplitude, but the frequency and phase are a match for Dane’s pulse, while Alec’s is different.’

  ‘That can’t be genetic though,’ Cheryl said. ‘I mean, a pack this size, you can’t have many members who are related?’

  Dane shook his head. ‘Wayne and Ben are brothers,’ he said, ‘but no one else. Not had any pups in the pack for a while. Like most packs, we get a lot of our members from outside.’

  ‘So it’s learned behaviour,’ Cheryl said. ‘New pack members must synchronise with the Alpha’s pulse. Part of the bonding process.’ She beamed at Ceri, who was looking just as excited. ‘We’re going to have to put out some preliminary papers before your thesis goes out. This is going to create an explosion in research on the Changing Races.’

  Ceri giggled. ‘Well, let’s get my current subjects sorted before we get too excited,’ she said. ‘Kort, Tabby, I have a special task for you. I want to scan Tabby while Kort changes outside the circle. Everyone else in the cage. Come on people. Don’t force me to make a “herding cats” analogy!’

  Kennington

  Ceri was in the study going over some details of the data she had collected during the day when Dane wandered in, propping himself against the desk. ‘What’re you doing hiding in here?’ he asked. ‘Trying to avoid another orgy?’

  Ceri laughed. ‘Actually I was going over the data from your tests. I wanted to make sure I’d covered every angle before I say “yeah, all done,” and you guys run off to the hills again.’ She looked up. ‘Not that I wouldn’t mind having you here a few more days, but I don’t want to keep you here if you’ve something to do.’

  Dane smiled. ‘We’re good,’ he said. ‘We got paid pretty well for the last job and we weren’t planning on looking for anything else before Monday anyway.’ He paused, looking away. ‘I… owe you an apology,’ he said.

  ‘You do?’ Ceri responded, blinking in surprise.

  ‘Yeah, I do.’ The big man looked a little uncomfortable, not sure where to start. ‘I know you went to all that trouble last night to get me interested,’ he said.

  Ceri’s cheeks coloured. ‘That obvious?’

  He shrugged. ‘I know you’re into guys,’ he said. ‘Well, guys and Lily. And I know the pack’s worried about me, and I figure Tabby talked to you when she was down before.’ He shifted slightly, still looking uncomfortable. ‘Then when I’d changed… Touching you like that was…’ He straightened and took a deep breath. ‘You remind me of Aleena,’ he blurted out. ‘It’s not just me, Tabby and Kort both mentioned it. It’s the hair and the line of your jaw, and she had blue eyes like yours. She was bigger, more muscle, but she was gentle, kind of like you are. That’s why Tabby asked you to do something about me, and why I touched you in the lab, and I’m sorry, okay?’

  ‘Oh,’ Ceri said after a second or two. ‘I, uh… Well, you don’t have to apologise for anything. It’s not like you can help it if I remind you of Aleena. I’m sorry if I’m causing you pain…’

  ‘Pain? No,’ he replied. ‘There’s a little confusion. You are making me want things I haven’t been bothered with for a long time, Ceri. I just have things to do before I let myself indulge those desires.’

  ‘Finding Aleena’s killer,’ Ceri said. It was plain that it was a statement, not a question. ‘Does the pack know? No, don’t answer that, I know they don’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked, his eyes intent and a little distrustful.

  ‘You can’t keep your desires from a succubus, Dane. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything and Lily only told me because I was annoyed that last night’s little orgy didn’t go as planned.’ Ceri watched as Dane visibly relaxed. ‘But Lily said you can’t really have what you want,’ she added.

  Dane nodded. ‘She may be right,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been feeling…’ He stopped, appearing to consider what he should say. ‘Something’s coming,’ he said and then grinned sheepishly. ‘I know that sounds horribly clichéd and a bit melodramatic, but… it’s a feeling like… impending…’

  ‘Doom?’ Ceri suggested.

  ‘Doom-like-ness, yeah.’ He grinned, though there was a hint of something like fear behind his eyes.

  Ceri put her hand on his arm. ‘You’ve got your pack, and your fri
ends,’ she said. ‘Stand together and you can defeat anything. We can defeat anything.’

  ‘I used to think that,’ Dane replied, ‘then Aleena died.’

  Ceri frowned. Anything she could think of to say seemed empty. ‘We should go join the others,’ she finally said. ‘If we hang here too long they might think we have been up to something.’

  This time the grin was genuine. ‘Huh. Maybe it’d calm them down if they did.’

  Ceri rose to her feet and started for the door. ‘I’m not that good an actress,’ she said. Padding across the landing and into the lounge, Ceri stopped, Dane almost bumping into her. The pack turned and grinned at them as one. Tabitha was already sitting on the arm of Ceri’s chair, stark naked, aside from the hopeful smile she was wearing. Ceri sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  Part Two: The Wolves of London

  Soho, London, November 26th, 2010

  It was relatively quiet for a Friday night at the Jade Dragon. A storm front had rolled in during the afternoon and it was not a nice evening outside. However, the pack had left that morning and Ceri found herself wanting company, and she also had an ulterior motive.

  ‘What’s up, kid?’ Alec said, sidling over with a glass and a cloth in his hands.

  ‘Am I that obvious?’ she asked, grinning.

  ‘It’s crappy weather out,’ the werewolf said, ‘but here you are in the club when you could have stayed home, and you’re not really into nightclubs. And then you put on one of your shortest skirts and a lace teddy, and you know I like that. So, yeah, fairly obvious.’

  Ceri pushed her chest out. ‘Is it working?’

  Alec tried manfully, but his eyes darted downward. ‘Damn, yeah, okay. What d’you want?’

  ‘More wolves,’ she said, giggling. ‘I need to scan some wolves from another pack to confirm something. A couple would do, don’t need many, but if I can get a few from a couple of packs that would be really useful.’

  Alec sucked on one of his fangs. ‘Well, we could probably get some of the Royals to do it,’ he said. Ceri blinked at him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not those royals, the Royal pack. Their territory includes Regent’s Park and they’re a bit…’