Scarlett Wrappley's Arc

Chapter 4 of 9

Miles away, in the dark back alley, Garrison Howle followed a scent that pulled him off his usual path. He was the werewolf barman who poured drinks for Scarlett and covered her exits. She had missed their meeting. That silence worried him. His long black hair hung over his yellow eyes as he crouched low. His nose caught two smells at once: her blood and old gun oil. "Scarlett," he muttered. He knew her scent from a hundred nights behind the bar. This was fresh. And wrong. Fear didn't fit under her name. He found the red bottle first. It lay on its side against a wet crate. The glass glowed faint, even here in the dark. He picked it up. He remembered her stealing it from his shelf, laughing about what it might teach her. She would never leave it. Not this bottle. Not for anything. He turned the bottle in his hand. The enchanted glass still held the smell of her fingers. Around it, the alley told the rest. He pressed his nose to the stones. He caught the drag of a heavy sack. He caught the old man's boots. He caught the cat rot from a trap sprung and gone. Garrison's lip pulled back over his teeth. He knew the gun-oil smell. The old hunter from the bar. The one who had watched them both. So the man had taken her. And the man was coming for him next. He stood slowly. Anger burned off the fear. He tucked the glowing bottle inside his vest, against his chest. It was hers. He would carry it until he put it back in her hands. He walked to the alley mouth and lifted his head. The old man's trail cut clean through the night air, thin but steady. Boots and blood and pine sap. It led out of the town, up toward the tree line. Garrison had smelled that pine before. A cabin. Far out. The kind of place a man takes a thing he doesn't want found. He knelt one more time and breathed the ground. The trail held. Every step the hunter had taken pressed into the stone and dirt, and Garrison could read each one. He rose and started to run. The bottle no longer sat in the alley, waiting for any hand to take it. It rode against a werewolf's chest, moving toward the cabin where Scarlett bled in the chair. Her research still had its key. And now something with claws was following her captor home.