The Dragon Done It by Mike Resnick, Eric Flint Read Free Book Online Page A

see. Like a clan—it's a family thing. There are hundreds of packs scattered, mostly across Europe, although there's a big cluster in Siberia too. Each pack has its own badge. The badges are a kind of uniform, but they have a more important function too: without its badge, a werewolf can't change.
    Another little-known fact here.
    A werewolf needs the full moon to change, sure, but it also needs its badge. Without the badge: no cracking bones, no explosion of fur, no mystical sculptor doing the muzzle-stretch thing. Oh, and while I'm revealing trade secrets, I'll bet you didn't know that a werewolf is not a human who turns into a wolf. It's the other way round. So, when they die, it's different than what most folk expect. The old cliche of the werewolf melting back to human form the instant it's killed is all backwards. If you don't believe me, just remember what happened to the man in the hat when he finally breathed his last red bubble on my office carpet.
    So: pack badges. They vary. There's the Halskettewolfen pack, for example. They have to put on a gold necklace before they can change (they're closely related to the infamous Boxenwolfen , who use special belts). In Italy you have the Lupo-guanto with their metal gloves, in England the cravat-wearing Tyedogs , in Spain the Lobolengua , who can only change their form when they put in these crazy tongue-piercings. That's just grotesque, if you ask me.
    I set to work trying to identify the wolf on my floor.
    The words the man had spoken before he died had sounded German, and even through the carpet I knew I'd heard an eastern Bavarian accent. Which narrowed it down to three: my visitor was either a Ringhund , a Glasaugewolf or a Knopfwolf . I checked: there were no rings on any of the beast's paws and both its eyes looked natural enough. Knopfwolf , then.
    I checked every button on that damned beast—trenchcoat, cuffs and, yes, even its fly—and every single one came up blank. Not a Knopfwolf then.
    I sat back, careful to avoid the red stain on the floor, and scratched my head. Then I had an idea.
    I took the hat off the dead wolf's head, looked inside the lining and saw the official seal of a werewolf pack I'd never heard of in my life: the Helmwolf Bruderschaft .
    I've had many strange visitors come out of the rain and into my office, but never a werewolf in a hat.
     
    I took time out then to clear up the mess the shooter had made of my coffee-machine. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. The glass jug was history but the rest of the workings looked in good shape. The coffee had stripped the paint where it splattered up the wall, but I'd never really liked that wall in the first place. And at least now it looked like the other walls. Some folk call my office shabby; me, I call it my office.
    "You'll be okay, buddy," I whispered to the coffee-machine as I set it straight on the filing cabinet again. "New jug, fresh grounds, you'll be right as rain in no time."
    It burped wearily and I turned my attention back to the dead werewolf.
    "Okay, buddy," I said to the corpse. "Some questions. One. What brought you through my door? Two. Who shot you and why? Three. Hilfe I understand—that means help , but what did you want to knock? Four. Why have I never heard of the Helmwolfen ?"
    In truth, I was feeling rattled. I'd thought I knew everything there was to know about werewolves. Call it pride if you like—I just call it knowing my trade. Not knowing about the Helmwolfen bugged me even more than having a corpse on my floor so, even though I knew I should be calling the cops, I did the next best thing: I started looking through the Big Dictionary.
    All the books on my shelf are for show except one: the Big Dictionary. Naked Singularities and Their Application to the Law I know by heart and Self-Defense in Dimensionally Unstable Environments is just for beginners. You'll occasionally catch me leafing through What to Look for in a Femme Fatale but, if I'm honest, that's only for the