Powder Witch & Company

Harris stood slumped on the railing, gazing out over the flooded heart of Pittsburgh. What had it been like, he wondered, before 200 feet of water had swept over the city? He watched the waves ripple at the base of the few dozen skyscrapers tall enough to poke out of the river, sparkling in a mix of colors from the lights on the upper floors and the slowly setting sun.

The wind picked up, freezing the back of his neck and blowing strands of loose brown hair into his face. It was already cold that day, enough to warrant breaking out the long coat, but the chill blowing off the river and up the hillside soon drove Harris away from the balcony fence. Harris ducked into the old victorian that acted as the upper station for the old Duquesne incline, now more commonly used as a boat launch. He walked past the little museum that lined the hall, detailing the history of the incline, and into the elevator room. A window was set into the far wall of the small room.

He'd just slumped into the corner hoping it was far enough away from the door to warm up, when his phone chirped. He fished out the cell from an inner pocket of his coat, and found a text from Wyatt.

Wyatt ran a bakery in Hays, on a stretch of road backed up against the woods. It was late when Harris arrived, and only a handful of staff were still in, preparing sauces, doughs, and other dishes that would need to simmer or set up overnight. The door was unlocked, and opened with the ring of a tiny bell.

"We're closed," Shouted one of the bakers in the back, Maria most likely. She stepped out behind the counter, her blond streaked hair slipping out of a low ponytail and vibrant pink eye shadow that had smudged at some point in the day, looking ready for a fight. Her face brightened when she spotted him "Oh, Mr. Harris! Wyatt said you'd be coming around."

"Is he in the basement?" Harris walked up to the counter, glancing over the pastries left over from the day. A few lonely macarons, a babka, part of a cake, and 'Yes!' They still had some of the filled rolls he liked!

"Yep," Maria said, doing her best to hide a frown. "He's been prowling around down there all evening like it's going to blink out of existence if he doesn't." She glanced over to the basement door hidden behind the corner. "Oh, and did you want me to set aside your usual?"

"Yes, please. And one of those raspberry filled things from last time, if you still have any."

"Thought you didn't like raspberry?" She raised an eyebrow.

Mr. Harris shook his head. "I don't, but Mei really liked it."

"Ah, so we finally found something he likes. Fantastic!" She beamed. "The basement's unlocked, I'll get everything put together while you work."

Harris slipped past her and down the stairs. The basement was a simple concrete and wood structure, mostly used for storage and the pool table, that connected the residential part of the building with the bakery.

Wyatt paced noisily in front of the utility area where the seal had been drawn. He looked anxious, his face drawn up tight, black hair curling down over his face. His expression settled a little when he noticed Harris, but the small smile couldn't hide the nervous look in his eyes.

"Harry," Wyatt said, reaching out to hug his friend.

"Hey, Wy." Harris pulled Wyatt into a firm hug. "Got here as soon as I could."

"Thank you," Wyatt said. He pulled back from the hug, and walked over to the seal. "I hope I'm just being paranoid, even though Maria will give me shit for it later."

Harris looked over the seal, an elaborate circle he'd painstakingly inscribed over the course of a week after Wyatt brought his daughter home. "Well, you're not paranoid," Harris said. The energy laced through the seal had definitely faded. "Has that thing in the woods been more active, lately?"

"No," Wyatt said. "Or at least I don't think so. Azdaja hasn't mentioned anything to me. But I'm pretty sure this isn't it. Here, I'll show you." He led Harris up the stairs to the residential part of the building and from there to the back of the house, facing the woods.

The brickwork had been scratched up below one of the second story windows. Long spindly lines, claw marks from something with paws as big as Harris' hand. Scattered in the flower beds below and the surrounding dirt were footprints, some belonging to a dog or wolf, others belonging to a man, and some that seemed like a melding of the two.

"Any ideas?" Wyatt looked anxiously between the scratches and the woods. "The thing that usually comes around doesn't get this close normally."

"I-" Harris' mouth snapped shut, turning the idea around in his head. "I'm going to need to do some research. I'll fix up the seal, and then later I'll look into this."

'Werewolves,' he finally let himself think as he pulled into his driveway. 'That should be impossible.' Harris shook his head. He'd once thought the same about demons, djinn, and the various fae things that he knew lived around town.

The front door was locked and the lights were off inside. 'Mei must still be at rehearsal.' Harris left the bakery box in the fridge, taking one of the buns with him into his office.

The 'office' was really more of a library, except for the computer desk and file cabinet shoved in the far corner. Shelves lined, or had been built into, the walls of the room. Some had glass doors to enclose rarer or more fragile books and trinkets, and all were full to bursting with his collected research materials.

He sat at his desk and pulled up the regional monster hunting forum. 'Please don't actually be werewolves. I don't have silver to waste on shells.' A thought crossed his mind and he stopped scrolling through the forum to open his calendar. The last full moon had been over a week ago.

"Assuming werewolves even work like that." Harris sighed. "I'm gonna have to try and sort out what's real and what was made up for centuries of stories. Again."

He flipped back to the forum. There was a recent thread following the sightings of some unidentified thing first spotted by a researcher studying the rewilding efforts near Stratford in Ontario. Their description of the beast implied something bipedal and the photos taken of its tracks were similar to the ones he'd seen by the bakery.

There were follow ups by a couple in London, this time with a photo of the beast. The lighting was against them, and the overall quality of the photo meant that only the silhouette of the beast was clear, or at least clear enough. It looked like a man with the head of some kind of dog, and between the lighting and shadows it almost looked like it had extra arms.

The beast had spotted them and darted off through the trees. They'd accidentally destroyed the tracks in chasing it.

Another post a day later, from a cyclist out on County Road 46, which was just a collection of photos of similar tracks.

Then nearly a dozen posts of teams on both sides of the lake coordinating searches, with little to show for it. Until a few photos came out of first Kearsage, then the Conneaut Lakeshore, then Greenville, with the last featuring a partially obscured shot of the beast. The most recent sighting, as of a few days ago, was near Cranberry.

Harris messaged his friend among the moderators.

Powderwitch: Is that Stratford thread legit?

Barbrawire: As far I'm aware, yeah. Star lives out near New Castle and found where that photo was taken. The tracks were pretty much gone by then, but the trees were still damaged.

Powderwitch: Wonderful...

Barbrawire: I'm not saying its NOT an ARG, but it seems above board for now. Has it reached the south side already?

Powderwitch: If this is the same thing. I'm guessing werewolf atm, but what about you?

Barbrawire: I haven't seen enough to say for sure. But if you find it, send me pictures if you can!

Harris pulled into the bakery's parking lot as quietly as he could. It was the early hours of the morning and most of the lights were off. He hopped out of his truck and walked around to the modified bed. Harris popped open the cover he'd built, made tall enough for him to comfortably sit in, and sifted through his tools.

He stashed his usual sealing and binding materials in his coat pockets, along with a few small explosives, some custom shells, and his medical kit. His Great-grandfather's shotgun might be overkill if the beast was sapient, but there were other things to worry about in the woods.

Harris walked around to the back of the building. The trail Wyatt had shown him might be cold, but it was better than no trail at all. And when he reached the scratched up wall, he noticed new tracks, mostly from a large dog.

The tracks led back into the woods, winding around trees and wild shrubs, and were soon obscured by roots and fallen leaves. They were mostly headed in the same direction.

'Out to the river?' The Monongahela had risen when everything had flooded, and plenty of Mer used the shallower banks as a shortcut into town.

The trees behind him shifted suddenly, their branches swayed against the wind.

"Harry!" Wyatt's voice, but wrong. "There you are!"

"You know I don't appreciate you borrowing my friend's voice," Harris said. He turned slightly. The thing in the woods didn't like to be looked at, but a glance out of the corner of the eye was usually enough to keep it still without turning it hostile. Usually.

"Aw," the thing whined. Harris could practically hear its grin. "But aren't I your friend too?"

"Hm."

"Anyway," It said dismissively. "I have a favor to ask. I've got a new neighbor, they moved in from across the river a few days ago." Harris didn't need to see it to know that it was scowling. "Normally I wouldn't think much of it, except now they're targeting my favorite." Its voice grew harsh, and the tree branches creaked, before it stopped and asked in its sweetest voice. "Get rid of them for me?"

"That's what I'm here for."

"Wonderful! They settled in a copse not far from the bank-"

"But," Harris interrupted. The air stilled around him. "You need to stay away from the bakery."

The trees shifted, slowly but all at once. He could feel it looming, the branches reaching out around him, and couldn't stop himself from thinking how he'd never really seen what it looked like. Or how big it was.

His hand twitched toward his gun, but stopped short of grabbing it.

"I will agree to one week, if you get rid of this pest tonight," the thing said. "But no more."

"Thank you," Harris said slowly. "You've been very helpful."

It laughed, low and in a voice he didn't recognize before switching back to Wyatt's. "Now, get out of my forest!"

Harris held still until its presence retreated, and let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

The trail out to the river bank of Hays Woods was a familiar one. Harris had been out that way a number of times to help the clam farming collective that had set up on the other side of the river.

The sound of waves lapping at the shoreline was still faint when he spotted the beast's tracks. The trail crossed over itself a number of times, and had been smudged or washed away in places, but led the way to a small gap in the underbrush. A dip in the earth surrounding a burrow dug under the roots of a tree.

The burrow seemed empty and so did the surrounding area, so Harris jumped in and set to work. Around the edge of the pit he set up a small spell trap, which should, if his mixture was correct, trap the beast in its den. Further in he looked for a good spot to hide a small camera, when he heard a rustling in the brush above.

Harris cautiously peaked out of the burrow. A dog, some kind of Lab mix but bigger, stood near the edge of the hole.

The dog hopped back a step with a ruff when Harris climbed out of the pit, its ears folded back, but not quite flattened against its skull.

"Hey, buddy," Harris said softly. He backed away from the burrow and the dog, slowly stepping towards the river. "What are you doing out here?"

The dog growled and hunched its back. And then its back kept going.

A loud crack rang out, that nauseatingly familiar sound of bones snapping. The dog's spine shifted, its hips tipped back becoming almost bipedal. And then its limbs split. One leg split at the knee, becoming two calves ending in almost human feet. The other leg split just below the hip, one side ending in a dog's paw and the other in a foot halfway between human and dog. Its arms similarly had split just past the shoulder and ended in hands at various points between human and dog. And its body was wider, though Harris couldn't tell if its shoulders had actually widened or if its muscles had simply shifted. But, strangely, it still had a dog's head.

"Ah," Harris said, casually reaching for his gun. "Well..."

The beast howled and lunged at him.

Harris jumped back to avoid the beast's claws and snapped his gun around. His foot slipped down into the burrow as he fired both shells, buckshot with standard gunpowder. The first shell went wide, spraying shot up the beast's chest and shoulder, and the second all but missed, just grazing its nose and ear.

The beast tumbled backwards, from the force of the shot and the pain, writhing on the ground and whining.

Harris scrambled back out of the burrow and ran for the trail, all the while fishing out a pair of his hand made slugs, with iron shavings mixed into the powder and a coating of oleander and foxglove oil. He cracked the gun open and replaced the spent shells.

Something snapped behind him, branches violently forced out of the way of something large. Harris dropped to the ground just barely avoiding being caught by the beast's claws.

He surged up and bashed the beast across its nose with the butt of his gun. It flinched, then lashed out wildly. One arm caught Harris across the gut and sent him flying back into a tree a few feet away.

The impact forced the air from his lungs, and nearly knocked the gun from his hands. Harris raised his gun with shaky arms as the beast loped toward him, and fired.

The beast's head burst like a melon. Its body seized and collapsed mere steps away from where Harris lay.

Harris dropped his gun and slumped back against the tree. He took a few slow breaths before sitting up and gently feeling around his stomach and back. "Ow, ow, ow!" Harris couldn't help but grimace. "Ahhhh, this is going to make driving home fun." There would be bruises, but nothing seemed cracked, broken, or burst.

He pulled out his medkit and downed a few painkillers, then shimmied over to the corpse and set to sample collection. Photos from as many different angles as he could manage, blood, tissue, and what fur he could cobble together.

"Hopefully this will be enough for Devon," Harris said. It wouldn't be, he already knew that, not for something as unusual as this beast had been. 'But dragging it back isn't an option tonight.'

Harris carefully packed away his samples and hoisted himself onto his shaking legs. The walk back to the bakery was slow, but thankfully quiet.

Someone had turned on the lights downstairs, including a handful of external lamps casting a welcoming glow out into the tree line. Harris hobbled into the yard and was greeted by the backdoor opening. Wyatt stepped out in sweatpants and a hastily thrown on bathrobe, a small pistol in hand.

"Harry!" Wyatt lowered the gun and stepped into the yard. "I was hoping it was you. Are you ok?" He reached out with his other hand and pulled a twig from Harris' hair.

"I've been worse," Harris said. "I found what damaged your wards."

Wyatt gently tugged him towards the door. "Come inside and tell me about it."