Book Five, Chapter 80: A Werewolf Kiss

~Riley~

“Strangled,” Hawk said, as if he were talking to himself and not to the rest of us. He had his hat off and was pacing back and forth, working through the information.

“Don’t see that a lot with werewolves,” Antoine said. “I’ve never seen that with werewolves, in fact.”

We were On-Screen, so we had to give our characters’ reactions to Lila’s demise.

It didn’t make a lot of sense for a werewolf to strangle a woman. In fact, the only reason I could come up with was completely meta: someone wanted to stop her from screaming. Because if she screamed, she would get the Dead status and couldn’t be attacked. That was the power of her trope.

I had one similar, Cutaway Death, but with that trope, I could still be killed because I only got Written-Off. Whatever wolf killed her must have wanted her dead—or at the very least didn’t want her to be able to report on what she saw.

But that didn’t make sense either because there was another witness.

Allegedly.

“Are you sure that it was a werewolf?” I asked Michael. “What you saw kill her—it was a definitely a wolf? How far away were you?”

Michael had been standing still, his face unmoving as stone.

“It was a werewolf,” he said. “I was on the far wall when it happened. The only thing that was out of the ordinary—” he started to say, but then he paused.

“What is it?” Hawk asked, moving toward him.

“The arms,” Michael said. “The arms were too short.”

Hawk pointed at Michael as if he’d just found his answer. “That’s it,” he said. “It wasn’t finished with its transformation. So, we’re talking about an immature wolf, possibly a brand new one.”

We all exchanged looks.

“I had the understanding that immature wolves were the most dangerous and least controllable,” Andrew said. “A bloodless kill seems out of character.”

Hawk shook his head. “If we’re talking about a wolf that hadn’t completed its transformation, it was probably still more human than wolf. Which means that when she saw it, she may have recognized who it was.”

More exchanging looks. We hadn’t rehearsed this. It was our real reaction.

“Are you saying it killed her to hide its identity?” Kimberly asked. She was sitting near Antoine but still keeping some distance.

“Not exactly,” Hawk said.

“It was hiding its shame,” Antoine interjected. “Newly turned werewolves are ashamed of themselves. That’s why they run away from home and usually don’t seek help.”

Hawk nodded. “I think she recognized who it was, and they were going through such an emotionally turbulent moment during their transformation that they just strangled her because they didn’t want to be seen that way.”

There was a moment of silence among us.

“So it is one of us,” I said.

Antoine looked up at me and asked, “Does that surprise you?”

“Yes,” I said. “We shouldn’t be transforming so soon, and, frankly, I didn’t believe we were actually injected with werewolf saliva to begin with.”

I had to bring this thought forward. It was a fun plot device, sure, but I couldn’t just let go of how… dumb of an idea it seemed at first blush. I needed to dig further and see if there was more to it.

“You thought he was bluffing?” Andrew asked. “Kirst? You thought he was just trying to motivate us?”

I threw up my hands. “At the time, it’s what made the most sense. Gathering experts to hunt werewolves and then turning them into werewolves seems counterproductive.”

“So he’s just an idiot,” Michael said. “He didn’t think it through.”

I looked around at the group, one at a time. We were still On-Screen, so there was more to be said.

“No,” I said. “I’d call Kirst a lot of names, but idiot is not one of them. He’s not stupid.”

“Could have fooled me,” Michael said.

I looked at Hawk. “What is a reason you would intentionally infect someone with the werewolf curse? How does that get him closer to his objectives?”

Hawk looked me in the eye and said, “Couldn’t say.”

Except I thought he was lying—not because of my Moxie or my people skills, but because I felt he was hiding his thoughts for the benefit of the audience, as if he wanted them to know he was hiding something.

After a poignant moment of silence, we went Off-Screen.

We were still in the courtyard of the fort where Lila had fallen. There was a sheet covering her now, and it didn’t take long for mercenaries to show up to carry away her body. They were acting as NPCs, cleaning up the scene and getting ready for the next one.

Shame was our On-Screen reason for her getting killed in such a peculiar manner—we needed one. I didn’t know what the audience had seen, and I didn’t know if Michael was telling the truth, but we were working with what we had.

“All right, everyone, where were you during the murder?” Antoine asked.

It was a topic that couldn’t be avoided. We had to figure out who the werewolf was—if it was any of us—so that our characters could properly figure it out.

“I was in the tunnels under the manor,” I said quickly because I wanted to explain why I was covered in dirt. “I found something big down there. We’re going to have to do a scene with it. Like I said earlier, I was listening when the murder happened. I never heard a scream. Now I know why. I might have heard a struggle, but maybe I was imagining it.”

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“Your Quiet On Set trope only works for things that are On-Screen, right?” Kimberly asked.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Maybe the murder wasn’t On-Screen,” she said. “That would explain why you didn’t hear it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I have a hard time believing Carousel wouldn’t capture that on film. I doubt it will show the audience who the killer is right as it’s happening, but later, it will want to.”

“It was On-Screen,” Michael confirmed.

That was that.

“What exactly did you find down there?” Antoine asked.

I explained my theory that the Withers family might be buried underneath the manor because there was no cemetery on the property.

“Did you find one?” Antoine asked.

“I did,” I said. “I found Clara’s tomb. I didn’t disturb anything, but I opened it enough to know that there’s nothing in there.”

“Nothing in the tomb?” Kimberly asked. “Do you mean, like, the coffin itself is empty? There’s no body?”

“There’s no body,” I said. “No necklace either.”

Kimberly seemed really excited to hear that news.

“That sounds like a really big deal,” she said. “Were you On-Screen or Off-Screen when it happened?”

“Off-Screen from the moment I broke into the room,” I said. “It couldn’t have gotten more than a few seconds of footage of me looking into the crypt with my light.”

“So it’s canon?” she asked.

“The crypt is,” I said. “There’s only one real way to find out.”

Antoine seemed cold to the idea of looking through the tunnels. Maybe he just didn’t want to explore that subplot—I couldn’t tell.

“Okay,” he said. “Michael was at the scene of the crime. I was in the woods on patrol. Andrew, you were inside the library, right?”