Into the Mouths of Wolves

Jack Dyllan thought she could order him around, make him do things, make him work hard... Pft. Well, he would do it. But he wasn't doing it for her. Oh no. He was doing it for.. for Max. Yeah! If he didn't bend to the dictatorial will of Jack Dyllan, his poor best friend would suffer the hellfire complaints of the redhead.

Respect and fear? No, that wasn't it at all.

He looked a bit out of place among the trees and in front of the creepy backdrop of the most "haunted" house in all of Britain. He had been visiting his mother, so he was respectively dressed, which was probably going to go against him seeing as he was about to enter the lair of the most bloodthirsty of all of the werewolves.

Fortunately, he would not be doing it alone. Jack's connections had secured him Marcus Belby, who was particularly incensed with Blood for his attacks on the Lupin family. Gabby was pissed on the principle of the thing, as well as for the simple fact that a bad werewolf ruined it for the rest of them. Savages like Blood were what promoted idiotic laws like those that had been passed a year prior. It was time for him to go home.

But they needed information. Marcus wasn't a werewolf, so they were going to have to figure out how to work that out. But between the two of them, Gabby was sure they could figure something out. All he had to do was wait.

"You want a chance to hunt James?" Brian had asked him one morning.  They'd been in the gym at the Lupin house, and the invitation had come completely out of the blue. It had stopped Marcus in his tracks on the treadmill. When he realized he'd slid to the back of the running deck, he merely stepped off, still looking at Brian.

"You serious?" Marcus had asked. The offer had sounded too good to be true.

"Yeah, I'm serious," Brian gave him a bit of an amused grin.

"How are you going to manage that? My order has always been to stay with Khaat no matter what."

"I'll deal with Robert.  You and I both know he isn't going to stop until he gets her, and we both know that your job would be considerably easier if Blood was out of the way."

"It would," Marcus said. "I've been in protections work a long time, though..."

"Yeah, but I've read the other half of your dossier too. I know your espionage skills. Think you're too rusty?"

"No," Marcus grinned. 

"I think I can take care of my family while you're on this assignment," Brian said. "Find him, catch him, drive him off, or kill him.  There's been a warrant out on him for a long time.  The aurors aren't doing crap to catch him. I want this done."

"Do you have a lead on finding him?"

"Yeah.  Possibly.  A friend of Jack's.  Gabriel Short. To find a werewolf, it might help to side with a werewolf."

"Agreed," Marcus nodded. The challenge was too delicious to pass up. Marcus didn't have many close friends. Numerous associates, but very few people he could actually consider a close friend. And, he'd never had a woman as a close friend--until now. To make matters worse, his assignment was to keep her safe "at every cost." That meant being willing to toss himself in front of the werewolf for her, something he had done more than once.  Now, the more he cared about her, the more he wanted to leap in front of the beast for her, the more he wanted to be sure that Blood didn't so much as breathe on her ever again.  It was new for Marcus. A platonic but very intimate friendship with a beautiful woman. And it drove him to be eager to meet Short and find James.

And, so, he found himself finally, blissfully, doing some espionage again. It felt like even the air around him was fresher and more electric.  He chose dark jeans, a dark v-necked cashmere pullover, and a dark jacket.  He used the jacket primarily to make sure he was well armed.  A wand, a back up, and, for his own peace of mind, a shoulder holster with a pistol, a blade strapped to his ankle. 

Marcus didn't figure he could be overly armed, considering Blood was about the size of the Hogwarts express, and just about as powerful.  Or at least, fully transformed, that was how James looked to Marcus.  He knew Blood and had tangled with him before, and knew exactly how sharp those enormous claws were for himself.  Fortunately, he hadn't discovered about the teeth, but he wasn't trying to invite that either.  A human who openly chose to track a werewolf needed to be well armed.  He tucked two extra clips of bullets into his pockets. Okay, so a gun and a blade weren't magical, but they were still damned effective. Besides that, Marcus really liked guns--semi automatics, preferably.

He walked the streets of Hogsmeade in the dark to the appointed meeting place. Hogsmeade at this hour looked entirely abandoned, and Marcus liked it that way. He liked the advantages the dark usually gave him, he liked the noises of night--they were familiar and comfortable. And he liked the smell of the night air. 

His wand drawn but lowered, he entered the Shrieking Shack with no attempts to be stealthy.  He didn't want to put Short perhaps on the offensive.He listened to the sound of his own footsteps on the creaky wood floors.  So much for being subtle.   The floors announced his presence just about as well as any doorbell.

Gabby reclined on one of the dusty, ripped up sofas, yawning a loud, doggish yawn as he stretched his arms far behind him, shaking them loose of strain. The man did not actually have a job, per se, as he had no financial need and no familiar motivation - he preferred to annoy his successful father by living off of his money. Still, he had things that caused him stress. Irene Norwood, for example. Jack Dyllan, for example. Trixie Cunningham, for example.

Women. That was the problem.

That was always the problem.

He heard a loud creaking and Gabby sat up a bit, contracting his stomach to hold himself there - he wasn't going to get up. Not yet. Yeah, he was doing this for Jack, and he'd do a damn good job at it. But he wasn't going to do it any better than was absolutely necessary. That was for sure.

"Halloooo," Gabby called out, before flopping back on the sofa.

Marcus heard the voice call out. He didn't detect any sort of wariness in it. Good.  He kept his easy stride and followed the sound of the voice into a parlor of sorts and saw a man stretched on what looked like it had been perhaps a frat sofa at one time.  


"Mr. Short, I presume?" he asked somewhat rhetorically, putting away his wand.  Short didn't look as if he shared Marcus's desire to be hunting James Blood.


He didn't want to give the presumption that he thought perhaps Short wasn't read in a bit.  Every photo of Khaat in the last couple of years also had Marcus in it someplace--behind her, beside her, in front of her...but never without her. He didn't exactly need to identify himself, he thought.


Well, Marcus knew he was here because of Khaat. Brian had said that he'd gotten his information from Jack, but Marcus didn't know Short or anything about him--other than he was a werewolf. That was just about it. If they were going to be working together, a sentence or two more than that would be probably a good thing.


"So," he said, "I know what my need is in this matter. There's a woman I'm doing this for. Forgive me for asking, but what's your investment in James Blood?"

Gabby wobbled his head, throwing an arm over his eyes as he let out another yawn. As he yawned, he let out an affirmative, "Yeeeep." He knew a but about Belby. Khaat's hardass of a shadow. Good at what he did. There was the slightest possibility that Marcus could have done this on his own. It would have been tricky, sure, but he was a hard-working, intelligent man. Then again, Gabby thought he could have done this on his own, and had been a little off put to discover he'd been given a partner.

It seemed neither man needed the other but was going to have to accept that they were working together.

It already sounded like a bad cop film.

"There's always a woman," Gabby mused, finding it amusing that his own thoughts seemed to have pervaded that of his partners. He shook his head. "I suppose you can say I have the same reason. Only way to stop her nagging, am I right?" He chuckled.

"Something like that," he gave Short a slight smile. "Truth be told, I'd like to see Blood out of business myself. Humans don't have the best survival rates with him, and when he transforms, he's one big nasty looking bloke. I've tangled with him before, but I can't say I felt like I won, unless surviving counts."


He liked Short's calm, composed, casual demeanor. He felt like he was going to be able to work with him.  He'd done solo work and partner work, and generally, when partnerships were forced, they could be difficult. There was something likeable about this guy.


"Ever meet Blood yourself?" he asked.  He didn't know a heck of a lot about Blood except from fighting him a couple of times. And he knew he didn't like him, but those were both obvious.  He was hoping Short had more than he did.

Marcus was humoring him. He was surprised. He had sort of expected to be commanded to sit up, to look alert, to take this more seriously than he seemed to be taking it. Gabby had pegged the bodyguard for a more uptight man, but he seemed at ease with his easy nature, which boded well for them all.

So Gabby sat up. If he wasn't pissing the man off, what was the point? He heaved a sigh and nodded. "Believe it or not, but the werewolf community doesn't like all the negative press, as it is." He drummed his fingers against his knee thoughtfully.

Had he ever met Blood himself. It was an interesting question. "Yeah - though I don't know if he'd remember me. When I was younger, and his pack was smaller, I had a run in with them once. A few months ago, one of his more ambitious women tried to recruit me. And I've taken to transforming nearby them, upwind. I like to keep tabs on them best I can, but sometimes it just doesn't work out."

"Well, what I know is from fighting him and from, largely, rumor," Marcus said. "The last I heard, and this was after we took out that big lair he had under that abandoned flat row, he had to run back to Fenrir for shelter for his pack.  Maybe Fenrir put some controls on him and made him lay low, because I haven't seen much of him lately.

"I also know that, if it comes again to sheer hand to hand combat, I can't take him by myself, not if he's transformed. Not that I can't enjoy a good brawl, but thats nothing like a good brawl. I've also seen him basically slap down his own pack to keep them in line, but I suppose some of that might be pack mentality.  I'm certainly not an expert in that."  Marcus knew his strengths, and it generally was in staying alive.


"What keeps ringing in my mind is that he's an exception to anyone else with the curse that I've ever been up against.  I haven't found anything in him that's redeeming. And I've never seen him see anything or anyone that he doesn't consider expendable but himself. 


"Maybe that's where the woman comes in. What nags me is what I've seen him do.  I don't ever want him to get his hands on her or her children ever again. He has to be stopped."

Gabby nodded. "At first, I thought he had won over the pack. He was suddenly in their territory, running with some of their weaker wolves... but I saw him scamper back to Fenrir, fairly respectful. A wolf like that, though, doesn't stay that way for long. He's stupid and brutish, so he might try to usurp Fenrir - that's a tried and true way to die. If he has any scrap of brains, and let's hope he hasn't, he's going to wait for his pack to grow, get stronger, and then he's going to break out and do his own thing. I know Jack discovered that he's been having men 'recruit' young for the pack." He shook his head bitterly - that, turning children, that made him sick.

Gabby shook his head. "A single werewolf couldn't take him on during a transformation, so no way a man will. A man and a werewolf," he grimaced a bit at the convenience, "Maybe. I'd be hard-pressed to choose a side to bet on. And you'd have to get through the whole pack to get to him too."

Gabby hummed. "I'd love to understand his obsession with Khaat. It's strange. It's not part of lycanthropy to obsess over a singular human. That's his human side - I just don't understand what." He shook his head. "So. I was hired on for understanding of wolves. But what do we want to get out of him? Am I running with the pack for a full moon?"

Marcus was slightly amused at the thought of James trying to usurp Fenrir. He'd heard just enough talk between Robert and werewolf slayer Edward Donohue to know that Donohue firmly believed that Fenrir was still powerful enough, even if just by reputation, that a takeover bid would fall flat. Fenrir's pack was supposedly a lot larger, and staunchly loyal.

"Well," Marcus said, "Maybe its high time Fenrir had a chance to knock him down a peg or two.  I don't know about his fascination with her, except what Edward Donohue tells us."

Now in his seventies, Edward had both literally and figuratively written one of the foundational texts on rogue werewolves, and it was in dispatching those werewolves that were out of control that Edward has made his name and money. Marcus didn't like name dropping, but since Marcus wasn't well versed on werewolves, he had to rely on Donohue's theory, at least to this point. Besides that, he'd seen some werewolves shiver, their blood running cold at the mention of Donohue, and Marcus didn't want to alienate his new partner.

"I don't know how accurate this will turn out to be, but Edward says he thinks James has developed a sort of obsession with her that has taken on an animalistic tone, sort of a blend because James is embracing the pack and trying to rid himself of being human. 

"James has often tracked her simply by her scent. He's said some oddball things about her 'tasting' different to him, although he's never bitten her. Doesn't mean he's not gotten a taste of her blood, though. That's very possible, and probable, actually. We've found him to have scraps of her clothing he's kept after attacking her. Locks of her hair.

"And he's told us openly some sort of pack business I don't fully get. He's said he's already claimed her. He refuses to recognize her marriage. Refutes it. He says she's his female because he 'marked' her.  Says he's merely claiming what's his. He didn't start saying he'd marked her until after he scarred her face and her shoulder. But he's said she's his now, and her 'cubs' need to be brought up right. Told us he won't stop coming until he gets her and her cubs."

He sat a bit straighter, stretching the muscles in his back a little. "Last spring, he tried to take her daughter once when she was about 2 1/2 or three. Picked her up and started to run with her. We winged him, and he dropped her. Abbey still has nightmares about 'doggies.' Can't say as I blame her much.

"Robert needs James off the streets, after all the murders James has committed.  And he wants James off the trail of his daughter and his grandchildren once and for all. The ministry warrant wants him either way, dead or alive.  Personally, I don't care what happens to him so long as I don't have to keep looking over my shoulder for him. Although, admittedly, dead makes my job easier.

"I don't know how you feel about running with a pack, so I'm not going to ask you to do that.  I presume if you wanted to be with a pack, you already would be. So, no. I'm deferring to you. Its your call. Consider me muscle--or a bit of it--and resources. I do have access to resources."