Shy Trans Banshee E-Book

Tony Santorella

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 376

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The much-anticipated follow-up to word-of-mouth bestseller Bored Gay Werewolf - order now to get your copy with glow-in-the-dark ink! ________________ Brian, Nik and Darby - three friends practiced in fighting supernatural crime (when Brian's not committing it as a werewolf once a month) - have been sent to London to try to track down a missing colleague. Prowling around the city, they stumble across a clairvoyancy smuggling ring. Who's kidnapping all the fortune tellers in Soho and why? And is it coincidence, fate or something more sinister that Maeve, a timid trans woman taking time out of her job to track down her birth mother, turns up on the gang's doorstep... and has the uncanny ability to know just what's going to happen next? ____________________ Readers love Tony Santorella and Bored Gay Werewolf 'A very compelling and funny novel' 'I absolutely loved this cosy supernatural mystery' 'Feels like Buffy meets Euphoria' 'Really engaging characters' 'Hilarious, witty and something different'

Leseprobe

Also by Tony SantorellaBored Gay Werewolf

Published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Tony Santorella, 2025

The moral right of Tony Santorella to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 339 9

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 340 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 341 2

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For Robert

PROLOGUE

She stirs, levering herself up as if from a dream, but the metal band strapped to her forehead keeps her gaze fixed straight ahead. A panic floods in; she shouts into the leather strap in her mouth. She lifts her hands to remove it, realizing her wrists are cuffed to the sides of the metal gurney. She wriggles her limbs, shifts her body side to side to try and free herself from the vertical steel slab.

Don’t panic. Breathe.

She closes her eyes and steadies her breath, inspiring a brief and tenuous calm to assess her surroundings. The cold laboratory is lit like a surgical theater, silent but for the electrical hum of fluorescent lights and computer servers. The frosted-glass walls meet at steel double doors with a touchscreen keypad. Cables from the metal band on her head snake down to the floor, winding their way to a control panel a few steps in front of her. There, she sees another set of cables and follows their trail, leading to another steel slab to her right where she can just make out the profile of another woman in the corner of her eye.

She muffles a shout to the woman, but there’s no response. Maybe she’s unconscious or, judging by the slow rise and fall of her chest, kept in a pharmaceutical twilight state.

If this is the end, her end, she thinks, wouldn’t she know? Wouldn’t she be able to sense it? If not a vision, at least the pain of imminent loss. Its absence right now must be some kind of cosmic safety valve, keeping her sane. She wishes her mum were here; Mum would know. But she’s gone, been gone. Still, she is sure that if her mum had seen this, she’d have stopped at nothing to save her. Even given the time that’s passed, she knows that if she could save her mum from a similar fate, she’d do anything to prevent it.

An errant click from the servers breaks her out of this thought. Hope isn’t useful; it distracts, muddies the present. In inceptum finis est. It is what it is.

Suddenly, silent-alarm lights strobe throughout the room, illuminating the exterior hallway like camera flashes. She feels hope rush in again, bright in her chest, before it’s offset by the familiar ache of dread at the base of her spine. It sounds like a thunderstorm gaining momentum. As it grows louder and closer, she can distinguish the individual pieces of the cacophony. Combat boots pound the floor. Pops of gunfire like fireworks. Shouts, screams, and … growls?

Beyond the frosted glass, three silhouettes burst into the hallway. The tall slim one is tough to keep track of, disappearing and reappearing with each flash of the alarm lights; they press their face against the glass, cupping their hands around their eyes to try and see through the windows. The two daggers they hold close to their face give their silhouette pointed elven ears.

‘I can’t see shit,’ the elf shouts.

‘She’s gotta be in here,’ replies the short, sturdy woman beneath a beehive of a messy bun barricading the door behind them. She whistles to their third companion, or pet, an imposing dog who, even on all fours, meets the woman eye to eye. The dog stands up onto its hindlegs, a mass of dark fur and muscle, and begins tossing heavy things against the door.

‘All right, now sniff her out. C’mon, boy,’ Messy Bun says to the dog who woofs in acknowledgment. It bounds down the hallway, front claws clacking on the linoleum. It paws excitedly at the double doors. The other two run to meet up with their pet but the lights go out, the doors on the left side of the hallway burst open, and a handful of militiamen open fire on the trio.

She closes her eyes, assuming they’re done for, but then she hears growls and shouts over crackles of gunfire. She steals a peek and catches flashes of the battle in the strobe of the alarm lights.

Flash

The elf redirects the momentum of one of their attackers in a flourish of choreography, thrusting the man towards the ceiling. The dog clamps down on the man’s throat midair as if catching a shrimp at a hibachi restaurant.

Flash

Messy Bun stands firm, bracing herself against a forceful, sudden wind, as she hisses a fireball against the crowd.

Flash

The elf slides on their knees down the length of the hallway through the crowd of men, slashing their heels on the way and they collapse like dominoes.

‘Find the key. She’s in there,’ Messy Bun calls as she reloads her crossbow.

‘Cujo’s fine motor skills are kinda limited at the moment,’ the elf says from the far end of the hallway.

‘Fine, Darby. You do it!’

‘You don’t have to shout,’ the elf says, appearing at the woman’s back. ‘Plus, I’m busy,’ they say, whizzing a knife into a group of men advancing towards them.

The militia continues to build, funneling them into the center of the corridor. The beast is overwhelmed by a group of attackers and hits the floor in a barrage of baton strikes. It howls itself into a frenzy and the pile of men is pushed off in an eruption of camo-clad bodies. The dog digs its claws into the closest person and cannonballs them both through the laboratory window. Landing on the floor in a heap of glass, fur, and blood, the beast tears the man’s throat out with its jaws. It lifts itself off the body, standing seven feet tall in mangy brown fur and black Converse All Stars. She locks eyes with the beast. It cocks its head to the side and slow-blinks at her like a cat; the glimmer of recognition calms her.

The beast turns around and swipes the keypad off the wall. The doors slide open and a henchman falls to the floor, revealing Messy Bun: a petite tattooed Filipina. She steps confidently over an unconscious man twice her size, who she has just knocked out with the butt of her crossbow. Messy Bun dives right. The beast dives left. The militia pours in after them. The battle continues and she watches helplessly, pulling against her restraints. Then she feels the breath in her ear.

‘Shh … they’re the sizzle. I’m the steak. Don’t be obvious. I’m Darby, by the way.’

She doesn’t know how the elf named Darby got in behind her but she’s immediately relieved. She continues to watch the battle, or deliberately not-watch Darby while they type away on the control panel in front of her. However, Darby’s absence from the battle starts to turn the tide in the henchmen’s favor. The wolfman takes a Taser to the chest and writhes howling on the floor. Messy Bun, separated from her crossbow, inches closer and closer to the perimeter of the room muttering to herself as a faint glow of flames sputters and fades in her palms.

‘Almost done …’ Darby says. ‘And remember what I said, use your diaphragm.’

Then, suddenly, a figure appears before her, pointing a gun at her elf-savior’s chest.

Darby throws their hands up in mock surrender. ‘Oops.’

They reach to their chest to hurl a dagger at the shadowy figure, but before they can retrieve it, a shot rings out. Darby looks at her and smiles faintly as blood blooms from their chest. They fall forward into the control panel, unlocking her from her restraints. She pulls the metal crown from her head, spinning on her feet to run, when she feels a snag at the hem of her skirt. Turning to free herself, she sees the hand of her fellow prisoner gripping her tightly.

ONE

‘Three bears,’ Brian remarks to himself, gnawing on a piece of toast. The twenty-six-year-old is in his briefs lying on a mattress on the floor. Coffee cups, half-drunk glasses of water, and whatever possessions he could fit into his checked bag are strewn about his East London bedroom. His lips are slick with butter and there’s a halo of crumbs around his head on the pillow as he delicately balances his breakfast on his potbelly to watch a livestream of brown bears catching salmon on his phone. He has exhausted all the content on the internet and, through a series of detours, landed on the Bear Cam. He’s been watching it for so long he forgets that he’s a person existing in a body. There is no time before or after Bear Cam. He is but a vessel for content to pass through like the cool Alaskan waters of Naknek Lake. He watches the bears snap their jaws at passing fish and begins to mimic their movements, wondering if he could do it himself. What other lessons could these grizzlies teach a bored gay werewolf? The biting, slashing, and survival instincts always came as second nature to him, but the patience these grizzlies exhibit, their calm, their tranquility, well, that still needs some practice.

But Brian doesn’t beat himself up as much as he used to. When he was first cursed with werewolf-ism by the witch that, he contends, he barely hit with his car six years ago, he didn’t have a modicum of the self-control that he has now. It was tough in those early days, feeling the anger build up slowly as the full moon crept closer and closer. He would blunt his super senses with booze and aim to black out for his monthly transition. He’d bike to the park as quickly as he could, tear off his clothes, and sway, piss-drunk and naked. On one occasion he stared up at the sky and saw two full moons; he stood in shock, wondering what this mysterious event would mean for that night’s transition, but then he closed one eye and the sky snapped back into focus with only one moon hanging up there: crisis averted. His transition was as involuntary as stomach flu. He’d double over and wretch as the wolf assembled itself from under his skin. Those early full moons he was a passenger on a runaway train of lupine rage and aggression, slurping up raccoons, deer, and the occasional early morning jogger. After racking up a bit of a body count, he’d dropped out of university, moved to the city, and resigned himself to living out his days as a hermit in his studio apartment, punctuated with shifts at the local diner to pay his bills.

He didn’t know how quickly those plans could change. For one, he didn’t anticipate forging such close bonds with his diner comrades, Nik and Darby. Nik, a thirty-something Filipina nursing student, managed the night shift and took Brian under her wing. Darby, in their twenties, an indie-theater darling, used their tip money to fund their one-person show and helped to pull Brian out of his shell. Despite Brian’s attempts to keep them both at a safe distance, lest they find out his big furry secret, he let them in as much as he could. They would go to post-shift drinks and karaoke at their local dive bar, occasionally with Darby’s new boyfriend Abe, a taciturn Dutch florist in his late forties who had become a regular at the diner.

Brian also didn’t know that his arrival would attract the attention of another werewolf. Tyler Gainsborough came to the diner as a wealthy, vaguely employed failson, looking to turn his lupine lessons into a lucrative self-help program. Tyler brought Brian in with promises of helping him understand his ‘talents’ on condition that he helped him build out the platform, The Pack™, into a proper wellness brand. Brian initially scoffed at the idea, but he had such a rough time as a werewolf that he acquiesced. From Tyler, he learned how to control himself during the full moons. But, as Tyler’s training sessions became more and more abusive, Brian became callous and aggressive, driving a wedge between him and his friends that pushed him deeper into Tyler’s thrall. However, when Tyler revealed his expansion plans were not to help other lone wolves like Brian, but rather to amass a pack of unquestioning acolytes molded in his image, Brian refused and made a run for it. But, as with most entrepreneurs with exorbitant generational wealth, Tyler wouldn’t take no for an answer, and threatened to kill Nik and Darby to make Brian comply.

Brian had no choice but to tell his friends about his condition and the immediate threat to their lives. When Brian came out of the were-closet to them, he hadn’t anticipated them accepting him so fully and warmly. Even more surprising was how quickly they acclimated to planning to kill his werewolf mentor, although perhaps it allowed them to finally realize their fantasies of murdering an entitled customer. On the night of the next full moon, the three of them barricaded themselves in the diner, but Tyler broke through. And after a long battle, Darby fired the shot that killed him, from a revolver gifted to them by Abe. A revolver they discovered was loaded with silver bullets.

That morning a new world opened to them. Brian still remembers Abe walking in, his trench coat billowing and loafers crunching on the broken glass of the diner windows, pulling out bullets from the walls with his pocketknife, entreating them to follow him to his flower shop. There, Abe revealed that his shop, V.H. Flowers, was but one in a network of global outposts, established from the largesse of the Van Helsing Trust. It turned out that Abe and his colleagues were responsible for maintaining order between our world and the semi-permeable membrane of the mystical world.

As a Van Helsing, Abe had dedicated his life to this cause, planning, like Brian, to endure a life of isolation until he met Darby. Tyler’s attack was an audition of sorts, to test Darby’s mettle, allowing Abe to side-step V.H. Flowers’ enchanted nondisclosure agreement and take their relationship to the next level. He gained three new staff with unique talents who were all freshly unemployed after allegedly destroying the diner that the local newspaper claimed was a ‘pillar of their community’. Abe made this transition as easy as he could for them. The Van Helsing name carried a lot of sway, though he would insist the international operation was a paragon of egalitarianism. Abe used his influence to smooth over the trio’s entry into the mystical world. He called in a favor from a local pyromancer, who made the evidence of the previous night’s battle disappear, engulfing the diner in a cleansing fire so precise that the insurance claim could write itself and allowing Brian, Nik, and Darby to join V.H. Flowers unencumbered.

Brian, Nik, and Darby promised that morning that, if they were going to dive down the mystical rabbit hole, they were going to do it together and support one another in their career transitions from average waitstaff to paranormal investigators. In the year since their debut on the mystical scene, Abe has been their steward, the Charlie to their Angels, guiding them through this shadowy underbelly and its hidden networks to maintain the tenuous divide between the mystical and the mundane. After solving a couple of high-profile cases on their home turf through their unorthodox methods, the trio developed a reputation as les enfants terribles of the industry. Though Brian contends hindsight is twenty-twenty, and there’s more than one way to eradicate a harpy nest – don’t let their human faces fool you: they’re barely sentient, just sedan-sized vultures – all they were told was to ‘get rid of it’, no one specified ‘how’, and fire is just plain efficient.

After a series of haphazard (yet solved!) cases, V.H. Flowers sent them to their London outpost in search of a missing colleague, Alasdair, who had led the office until his recent disappearance. Abe assured them that this assignment was in recognition of their past success. They were graduating from field agents to managing their very own outpost, or at least until Abe could recruit a suitable replacement. He said that this case required their avantgarde approach, that their ties to the waking world gave them a lens that other, more seasoned investigators had long since severed. Brian was incredulous, suspecting it was a punishment to anchor them to the day-to-day operations of the flower shop and an unsolvable case miles from home. Nik and Darby were more optimistic, seeing it as an opportunity to get out of town for a few weeks and all on the V.H. Flowers expense account. They packed their bags and moved into the Van Helsing pied-à-terre in Shoreditch, the creaky townhouse left vacant when Alasdair vanished. The only thing that could make corporate housing more depressing was that this was also a potential crime scene.

After a red-eye flight, dragging their luggage up the tube steps and down the uneven East London streets, they were grateful to have anywhere to drop their bags and rest. The house capped a row of narrow brick buildings on a quiet side street, far from the bustle and traffic. The facade was weathered by time and drizzle, a ghost of its former glory with mortar that was cracked like veins. Through the crooked wrought-iron gate, the front door groaned open into a narrow hallway, thick with the scent of damp wood and wallpaper glue. The formal living room still carried echoes of elegance, with a cluster of sofas and armchairs around the fireplace; pocket doors led to a long, solid table that could seat a dozen dinner guests, though from the must and dust, it didn’t seem like Alasdair did much entertaining. Across the hall was the study, surrounded with bookcases that tilted and dipped under the weight of old leather tomes. In the center, the antique desk was littered with blueprints of various council flats around London and a takeout bag with some scrawled writing on it. They walked to the kitchen in the back that felt like the heart of the house, though it only beat faintly, with windows looking out into an overgrown garden.

In a jetlag-induced haze, Brian dropped his bag in the maid’s quarters by the kitchen. Nik and Darby climbed the alarmingly creaky staircase to lay claim to their beds, squabbling over who should have the primary suite and whether the space and natural light outweighed the creepiness of sleeping in Alasdair’s bed. Nik ended up taking the bedroom, and in the weeks that followed, it began to feel more hers than Alasdair’s. Gradually, they became accustomed to the quirks of the house, with several pots and pans taking up permanent residence on the floor to collect the leaks. The heat never worked, the shower was a dribble, there were constant electrical issues, and, yes, an intrepid vine from the garden had climbed into the house through a crack in the windowpane, but it was theirs, and given the choice they’d much rather put in a little elbow grease on some free company housing than suffer the indignity of ever having to speak with a Foxtons agent.

As the weeks turned to months, and the hopes for new leads diminished, Nik and Darby were sliding closer to Brian’s point of view that Abe had put them there to distract them, managing the flower shop in between forensically analyzing their new digs for clues about Alasdair’s whereabouts.

Increasingly demotivated, and tired of the monotony of serving as the flower shop’s de facto delivery boy, Brian has retreated to his quarters on the ground floor, where his old habits of sequestering himself and binging trash TV have taken root in a new location. Though he has the bedroom farthest from the others, he still misses his studio apartment where he could languish freely without the audience of his flatmates. He looks up from the Bear Cam to the gray sky out his window. ‘Wherever I go, there you are,’ he says to himself, before his attention is pulled back to the grizzlies.

A knock at his bedroom door.

‘Are you alive in there?’

Brian slams the laptop closed, wipes the pillow crumbs onto the floor, and throws on the nearest clothes he can grab.

‘Yeah, hey,’ he clears his throat, tries to fix his bedhead in the mirror, ‘just getting ready. What’s up?’

Brian opens the door and peers down at Nik. She looks over a to-do list in her hand, a pencil snug in her bandana that holds up a tumble of hair. She cocks her head to peek into his room and Brian slides to block her. He shoots her a wide grin.

‘Listen, the shop is closed today and that junk room ain’t gonna clear itself out. We could really use an extra set of paranormally strong hands.’

‘Already?’ Brian whines.

‘It’s 11:30,’ Nik responds matter-of-factly.

‘Fine, just give me a minute to become a human being,’ Brian says, sliding past her and closing his bedroom door behind them. ‘And this can’t take all day. I’ve gotta work and then …’ He twirls his index finger at the sky and grabs his toothbrush.

‘Another one already? Which one is this?’

‘Beaver moon,’ Brian says.

‘All right, take your time but hurry up,’ Nik shouts after him.

After Brian washes his armpits with dish soap in the kitchen sink, he climbs the staircase to the second floor. Nik and Darby are in their bedrooms across the hall from one another. Darby sits on the floor pairing their phone to a Bluetooth speaker.

‘Y’all could have started without me, you know,’ Brian says.

‘Oh, you would have loved that,’ says Darby. ‘I need to pick out a playlist for this. It’s the final room to clear out then we’ll have finally made this haunted house a haunted home.’

‘All right, kids. Let’s get this over with,’ Nik says as they stand at the end of the hall in front of the fourth and final bedroom. Though they had packed up Alasdair’s belongings and stored them in a trunk in the basement for his eventual return, this room had become a dumping ground for everything else they couldn’t make sense of. After weeks of avoiding it, it was finally time to clear it out and, hopefully, unearth a missing puzzle piece.

‘Here’s the plan,’ Nik says, holding decks of Post-its in different colors, unable to resist an opportunity to organize chaos. She slaps one on the door as she reads out her instructions. ‘Red is toss. Green is sell. Yellow is keep and/or potential clue to Alasdair’s disappearance.’

‘Shouldn’t those be two different colors?’ asks Brian.

‘These are all I have,’ Nik says disappointedly.

‘He’s fucking with you, babe,’ says Darby, grasping the antique brass doorknob and queuing up their disco playlist in the other hand. ‘Let’s get this party started.’

They open the door and a stack of Financial Times falls onto the floor in a puff of dust. Brian grits his teeth remembering when he threw them in there and quickly closed the door last week. He grabs the stack and slaps on a red Post-it to begin the toss pile.

The room is dark, stale, and stuffed to capacity. They pull the first layer of detritus into the hallway, trying to carve a path to the window.

‘So many birdcages,’ says Brian, freeing a large brass cage from a knot of computer cables. ‘Maybe this was what the message meant.’

‘What? The canary is in the goldmine?’ Nik asks. This was the phrase hastily scrawled on the takeout bag, among the blueprints on the desk in Alasdair’s study. Abe thought it meant something. Alasdair was meticulous, he said. Anything on the desk must’ve been the last thing Alasdair was working on before his disappearance. It was a thread, however tenuous, that they could pull to find out what had happened to their London counterpart.

‘Yeah, I’ve been shuttling deliveries across East London for months now and still haven’t heard or seen any reference to it,’ Brian says. Since he cycled everywhere at home and had a preternatural quick-healing ability that allowed him to walk away unscathed from traffic accidents, Brian had begrudgingly become V.H. Flowers’ delivery boy, picking up ancient artifacts, tomes, and, yes, occasionally bouquets and kebab platters, and ensuring that these packages arrived safely at their destination. This used to happen organically, passed hand to hand through those in the know, but with Alasdair’s disappearance, critical contacts went dormant, necessitating, apparently, Werewolf Deliveroo. Abe had hoped, with Brian’s keen canine senses, he’d pick up on something: a hushed conversation, a familiar scent, some tiny detail that only his eyes could see. But nothing. No lead had presented itself.

‘Well, it wasn’t in Alasdair’s handwriting. I compared it with his grocery list,’ Nik says. ‘Maybe it spooked him, and he walked straight out the door?’

‘Or maybe it’s a clue to hidden treasure,’ Brian says, tilting another antique birdcage upside down in the hopes of finding a hidden compartment with some silver drachma inside.

‘Abe seems fixated on it. He knew the guy. Said that Alasdair didn’t have any birds.’

‘Well, clearly he has a thing for them,’ Brian says, slapping a green Post-it onto another.

‘Hey!’ says Darby, snatching it from Brian’s hands. ‘I have an idea for these.’ They march off to their room with another two cages scooped in their arms.

‘Alasdair was doing the Scooby Doo thing for decades, and all alone. This line of work takes a certain kind of personality,’ Nik says, with a stack of Gaelic mythology books in her arms. ‘I mean, look at Abe, he’s alwaysbeen …’

Brian grabs the books from Nik. Darby has returned and is now standing waiting for her to finish describing their boyfriend.

‘... a charming eccentric,’ she redirects with a smile.

‘Nice save,’ says Brian.

‘I like to think we both make each other better people. I pull him out of his shell and he gives me the space to shine.’ Darby pulls out some photo albums and starts flipping through the pages of one on the floor. ‘I miss my lil’ vampire hunter,’ they say wistfully.

‘When’s he coming back from Amsterdam?’ Brian asks, slapping a red Post-it on the album, slamming it shut.

While V.H. Flowers’ leadership had given the three of them the London outpost, it had come with some caveats, in bold and underlined. Chief of which was that Abe would continue to oversee their work in a mentorship program. Brian had scoffed at the idea, imagining a human resources department of cloaked figures in the Alps conducting a two-day retreat to brainstorm talent retention initiatives for V.H. Flowers’ next fiscal year. After they completed their Myers-Briggs assessments, they would brainstorm ideas on flip charts taped to stone castle walls. ‘Let’s circle back to that, Igor,’ some twinkling facilitator would say as she wrote ‘cryptid affinity groups’ in bubble letters on a whiteboard.

But Abe went along with it. He had spent the last couple of months living out of a suitcase, traveling around the globe to recruit a replacement for Alasdair. Someone who, once firmly placed in London, would allow them all to head home, and he could start happily-ever-after with Darby. Abe would spend a couple of days in London when he could, checking in on the flower shop, taking inventory of alchemical items and resolved cases, surprise Darby with tickets to a West End show and make dinner for the team. But all this travel meant that most of his mentorship was on Zoom.

‘He should be coming back this week, hopefully in time for Thanksgiving. Which will be great ’cause I don’t know the first thing about roasting a turkey. He’s playing it by ear, though. I don’t think this is a position you can advertise for. Like Nik says, it takes a certain kind of personality,’ Darby says.

‘I could do it,’ says Brian, but the other two laugh.

‘Brian, you don’t want to do the work Abe has you doing now,’ Nik explains.

‘Well, yeah, because it’s not fair. I’m cycling across London every day while Darby gets to sit in the flower shop.’

‘Oh, ’cause you’re so good at customer service,’ Darby retorts. ‘It takes a personal touch to integrate ourselves into the community after the trust we lost when Alasdair went poof. Plus, my flower creations are gorgeous. And don’t act like I don’t get my hands dirty with fieldwork too.’

Darby is a professional dilettante. They love to try new things, gain mastery of them, then quickly move on. Back home, they used these talents for an art performance in a black box theater that they self-financed through tip money and charming the wealthier regulars at the diner. Taking advantage of their new UK base of operations, they performed their self-titled show, DARBY, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Their show received accolades from funky tastemakers for their avant-garde mix of aerial silks, singing, and poetry. The show also prominently featured their expert knife-throwing skills, which have come in handy on their assignments in more ways than one. They’re now in the brainstorming stage for their next show, lending their acrobatics and stealth skills to the flower shop’s clandestine missions.

‘Well, Nik is in the stacks researching,’ Brian says, ‘I could do that.’

‘Brian, you would hate it. You know that,’ Nik says, pulling an oriental rug twice her size from the room. When bartending at the diner, she always had an anatomy book and a stack of flashcards by the register to multitask managing the restaurant and nursing school. When she finally received her degree, they had all assumed she would trade the mystical for the medical, but she kept coming into the flower shop. Brian wasn’t sure if this was just cold feet, that even after all that hard work to finish school, she just wasn’t ready to move on. Or maybe this was something else, that the knowledge catalyzed something within her that otherwise would’ve died on the vine. She was the only one of them who did any extracurricular reading for the job. Whenever Brian would clock in for his shift, Nik was always in the basement library with Abe, thumbing through ancient texts and researching their next assignment.

Brian grabs the rug out of Nik’s arms. ‘Just ’cause I dropped out of school doesn’t mean I don’t know how to read, Nik.’

‘Don’t get defensive.’

‘I’m just saying, biking around East London shuttling deliveries in the hope of catching a reference to ‘the canary’ or of running into Alasdair feels pretty pointless. It’s like another food-service job with the difficulty ramped up to a hundred ’cause this time it involves “active listening”.’

‘You’re right, Brian. Why wouldn’t Nik or I have the task that requires super senses? Let’s have the werewolf do the flower arranging and the book reports,’ Darby says sarcastically.

‘I have other strengths besides riding a bike and lifting heavy objects …’

Darby puts their arms around Brian. ‘Of course you do. You’re the smartest, kindest, prettiest thing that goes bump in the night.’

‘Ahh!’ Nik yelps. Brian and Darby turn to see Nik standing in front of a large oil painting of a silver-haired man of about forty staring directly at them.

‘Sorry, guys. I just pulled the sheet off this thing and it scared the shit out of me,’ Nik says.

Brian blinks back at the painting of Alasdair. The eyes seem to follow him as he shifts his weight back and forth. ‘What kind of egomaniac commissions a self-portrait of themselves?’

‘Maybe it was a gift?’ says Darby. ‘Abe said he came from money. This is just what rich people do. It’s not like he had it hanging.’

‘Well, let’s toss this thing,’ Brian says, picking it up from the floor.

‘No, keep it,’ Nik replies. ‘I’m sure he’ll still want it when he gets back.’

‘It’s been months, Nik. This dude is for sure dead,’ says Brian.

‘Well, then we need to figure out who—’

‘Or what,’ Darby interjects.

‘Yes, or what killed him and why,’ Nik finishes.

‘And the colors in the background will bring out the emerald wallpaper in the study,’ Darby says, snagging the painting from Brian and disappearing downstairs.

They spend the rest of the morning triaging the junk in the room into color-coded piles. The task takes longer than it should, because Brian wants to toss everything out and start over; Nik pores over each object to determine whether there’s some deeper hidden meaning; and Darby refuses to part with anything kitschy, determined to repurpose it in their room that is now festooned with gilded birdcages.

‘What the hell are you going to do with this?’ Brian asks, pushing a carousel horse down the hallway into Darby’s room.

‘She’s vintage! I’m gonna turn her into a unicorn. Now, on the count of three I need you to lift …’

It’s the middle of the afternoon by the time they’re finally finished. They open the curtains to let the light flood into the sizable bedroom with a four-poster bed, dresser, and full-length mirror.

‘Well, what do we do with the room now?’ asks Brian. ‘Seems like a shame to have all this space go to waste. We could rent it out. It’s Shoreditch, we could make a killing.’

‘What’s that? Brian “Death to Landlords” Newbury changing his tune when confronted with some marketable square footage?’ Darby chides.

‘Also, this is technically V.H. Flowers property so I’m pretty sure that’s embezzlement,’ Nik says. ‘It’s fine for now. I’ll sort out the books in the study. Brian, could you take the red pile to the trash?’

Brian grumbles before collecting everything into trash bags. He drags them downstairs and out of the door, through the garden that they’ve beaten back into a manageable overgrowth. It’s gray and drizzling, but Brian’s thankful for the mist and fresh air after huffing dust all day. He exits the gate and sees that their trash bin is full. He looks down the narrow, uneven street lined with Victorian townhouses and a few nondescript shops. The streetlamps flicker on though it’s not that dark yet, and the glow reflects off the layer of drizzle on the pavement. He doesn’t hear anyone, just some passing cars and the familiar hum of a bassline from a heavy metal pub a few streets over. He shoots a quick look side to side and tosses the trash in the bins of the tech shop next door.

‘Oi!’ shouts a thirty-something bearded guy in horn-rimmed glasses from the first-story window. ‘You can’t be throwing your rubbish into other people’s bins.’

Brian grumbles before looking up and feigning a dumb American smile. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is yours?’

‘Obviously.’

‘It’s just that we’ve been cleaning out the flat and our bins are full. I hope you don’t mind if—’

‘Yes, I do mind. And this isn’t the first time you’ve done this. This is for my business. If you have an excess of waste, call the council.’

Brian has no idea what ‘the council’ is but assumes, like V.H. Flowers’ HR Department, it’s a group of cloaked noblemen who convene under the decree to eliminate garbage by any means necessary.

‘C’mon, dude. That’s not very neighborly.’

‘Okay, Brian. What’s my name?’ asks the man in the window.

Brian is taken aback and tries to remember when, in the last couple of months, he’s ever spoken to his neighbor. He’s not made a habit of it. Maybe Darby was right that he should stay away from the customers at the flower shop. He quickly runs through the list of English men’s names in his head. There’s really only four, so he takes a guess.

‘Henry?’ he gambles through a sidelong smile.

The man sighs. ‘I’m Quinn. This is my shop. They’re my bins. Tell Nik and Darby I say hello. Now, could you please …?’

Brian sighs and yanks three full bags out one-handed and walks down the street. The drizzle builds as he investigates his neighbors’ bins and drops a bag in each one. Of course he lives next door to the one Londoner who cares to know the names of their neighbors and one whose English politeness he can’t bulldoze over with his American pushiness. He grumbles back into the kitchen to wash his hands.

‘What took you so long?’ Darby asks.

‘Our neighbor, “Quinn”. Wouldn’t let me use his dumpster. Had to walk three blocks in the rain.’

‘Oh, how is he?’ Nik asks.

‘Fine, whatever. Anyways, I’ve gotta head out for the night. You know one use for the room? We could put a padlock on that thing and I could transition at home once a month.’

‘No, never again,’ Nik says.

‘But I’ve got it handled now,’ Brian whines. It’s somewhat true, just a couple of minutes of abject body horror as his bones shift and his pelt comes in, then he’s fine. V.H. Flowers hadn’t ever employed a werewolf as a field agent, the prevailing thought being that they were too unruly, ungovernable, and Brian’s debut on the scene did little to disabuse the organization of that notion. Though there are clear benefits to having a werewolf on the team. His supernatural strength and speed, which he rarely uses outside of work hours, provides the team with brute force for barricades and crowd control. His healing factor gives him a high pain tolerance; shielding his friends from harm, he can take the pain as a mild irritation and be good as new in a few hours. His heightened smell and hearing are a constant source of irritation on public transit and in live music venues, but coupled with his enhanced sight, especially in the dark, they make him an excellent tracker. His ears can pick up on far-off whispered conversations and changes in people’s heart rate, which help for the more nuanced spy-craft aspects of the job, though Darby is always the one to coax a confession out of people.

As a result of his curse, he is resistant to magic, though none of them are sure why. Abe says it’s because magic requires willpower and intent, and that werewolves are ruled by instinct. Nik thinks it has to do with how this curse anchors him to the natural world, that being tied to primal energy and the moon itself makes him repel any magical manipulation. Whatever it is, the resistance comes in handy, especially when they had to deal with two sirens hosting a traveling electro party where revelers would dance until they died. While Nik opted for noisecanceling headphones, Darby insisted that Brian tie them to a support beam like Odysseus to the mast as they vogued against their restraints.

Despite all the benefits of Brian’s were-powers, Abe still took precautions. Shortly after his onboarding, Brian was sent by Abe to a druid-certified retreat in Romania last summer, both to unlearn what Tyler taught him and to replace it with their curriculum that focused on concentration and controlling his instincts. Since then, he has had a better handle on the beast within, even able to call upon certain wolf ‘upgrades’ like claws and fangs without fully transforming. But it’s still tough, like taking a field sobriety test in a hurricane.

His mentor, Druisán, is an ancient beast master who spoke to him in parables and encouraged him to do annoying stuff like ‘learn the hunt without losing the self’ and ‘listen to the wind in the trees’. Brian was irritated that the guy wasn’t even a werewolf, not to mention that the term ‘beast master’ was problematic, though Abe insisted the training would help. After weeks of Druisán pushing Brian to transition at will, he continued to struggle, unable to internalize the lesson. Until one night, Brian was lying in his cot watching RuPaul’s Drag Race on his phone when he heard RuPaul say that ‘the power we have in drag is available to you when you’re not in drag’. It was then that it all finally clicked, though when he proved himself to Druisán the next day he failed to mention the source of his newfound enlightenment.

The transitions at full moons, though, are still mandatory. In the early days, these full moons were a blacked-out frenzy, where he’d frantically close out his bar tab, bike somewhere quiet, and hang on for dear life, hoping that he wouldn’t kill anyone. But now, that one night a month he’ll head to the park, transform under a canopy of tree cover, and bound around until he tires himself out enough to sleep under the stars, or what little of them he can see with the light pollution. What a difference a lunar yoga retreat in the Carpathian mountains can make. Though, apparently, not enough for his flatmates.

‘Last time you pissed everywhere. Took ages to get it out of the rug,’ Nik says.

‘Smelled like fucking bile,’ Darby says. ‘And the howling and whimpering …’

‘The floors were fucked.’

‘Fine!’ Brian sighs. ‘I can tell when I’m not wanted.’

Brian unchains his bike with the delivery box on the back and rides deeper into East London. He jumps off and lights a cigarette, waiting under the overground for a WhatsApp from Abe to tell him his first delivery.

‘Ready when you are,’ he fires off to pre-empt Abe’s ellipsis that means he’s typing away.

Brian’s first pick-up is from Selamawit, an alchemist in a curio shop on Brick Lane. A thin bookish woman in a caftan with braids down her back hands him a bag of ashes.

‘Ma’am, I need you to sign here that these are not human remains,’ Brian says, holding out his phone for her to drag a lazy squiggly finger signature.

‘Heavens, no. Just some balsam I rendered for my colleague at the guild. That place needs to be cleansed,’ she assures him. ‘Thank you, and godspeed.’

Though he’s not sure if he believes her, he doesn’t care. He jumps back onto his bike and zooms across town to a cigar club and drops the package with a mousey teenager at the front desk. ‘Special-delivery-for-the-alchemistguild-courtesy-of-V.H.-Flowers,’ he says in a droning sentence as if it’s one word and snaps a picture to confirm receipt. His flash is on and it startles the other customers as the light catches plumes of tobacco smoke.

Brian heads to Spitalfields market. He stands amid the food stalls in a crush of men all with the same delivery backpacks pushing their phones in front of beleaguered servers and hostesses. He picks up a burger and chips and spins to a building of council flats in Whitechapel. Abe had alerts set for food deliveries that would go to any council flats from Alasdair’s blueprints. Brian used to feel his adrenaline rush for these deliveries, hoping that this would be the one where something would finally happen. He listens to the flats, their TVs, their mundane conversations, kids chirping when the pizza finally arrives. But this excitement has long since faded and his text history with Abe is a bunch of ‘nopes,’ ‘normies,’ and ‘nadas.’ The drizzle is consistent, making him slick. Despite the chill, he sweats under his raincoat, pumping down streets and through courtyards. Brian knows all the buildings by name now, which saves him time. However, he still miscounts the floors, forgetting ground is number zero here, which seems unnecessary. When counting things, no one starts with zero. There’s a thirty-minute stretch when Brian hears nothing from Abe. He dives into a pub to grab a pint, then doomscrolls on his phone while smoking another cigarette. A text vibrates in his pocket.

‘Cursed-item pick-up,’ Abe texts. ‘Remember your training.’

Brian stubs out his cigarette and gets back on his bike; pumping down the street, he recites the training material from the V.H. Flowers orientation. ‘When dealing with cursed items, remember to “CLEAR”. C – cleanse the item and space. L – Let go of fear and stay calm.’

He narrowly avoids a bus pulling out from a stop.

‘THERE’S A BIKE LANE – JESUS! E – Evaluate; keep or discard. A – Act with purpose. R – restore protective measures.’