Books by Bec Bishop

I dragged myself across the hotel room and picked up the receiver. Outside the window was a game of street football, shouts of Italian punctuating the smack of foot on ball. Even through the curtains, the mid-summer Italian sun was almost blisteringly hot. Having spent the bulk of my life in England, this might as well have been the surface of the sun. My t-shirt, soaked through with sweat, clung to the gap between my shoulder blades and the small of my back. I closed my eyes against the dry burning in them.

“Zachariah Barrett Waller speaking,” I said in case the call was intended for the room’s previous resident. There had been another Zachariah Waller in my class all the way from primary school until high school, and it was still difficult not to think of myself without all three names.

“Zach. It’s— It’s Daniel.” My brother’s voice was strained, tight and almost shaking at the same time.

Sleep vanished from my body. My spine snapped into rigidity. Our communication on my trips had always been solely through email, though I always swallowed the long-distance fees to call on his children’s birthdays. For him to be calling me, to be sounding like that, to be calling me Zach rather than—

I braced for the worst. My nails dug into my palm and my shoulders tensed in anticipation.

“Evie is in the hospital. She was attacked. It’s b— It’s bad, Zach. We don’t know if she’s going to pull through.”

Evie. Evelyn. My niece, my eldest godchild, who I had called just a few weeks ago when she’d turned thirteen.

I was wrong. I’d thought I had braced for the worst, but the words still knocked the air out of my lungs. My heart was in my throat, and I was moving toward the door before I realized it. The pull of the phone cord grounded me back to reality. The received was pulled almost violently from my hand and clattered loudly against the side of the desk. I scrambled for it.

“Zach? Zach, you still there?”

“I’m— Yes. I’m here. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I promised, already scrambling to unlock the room safe where I had stored my passport and other items I didn’t want anybody getting their hands on.

Getting back to England took far longer than I would have liked. Granted, if it had taken five minutes, it still would have been far longer than I would have liked. There was no way around it. I had to get first from Pompeii to Naples, a half-hour drive, then an hour flight from Naples to Rome, then finally another two and a half hours to London. My colleagues, of course, were not entirely thrilled at my abrupt departure but were completely understanding about the circumstances. Even if they hadn’t been, I hardly would have cared enough to notice. We’d collected what we had come to Italy for anyway. My absence wasn’t likely to be noticed.

It hardly made sense to drive the four hours it would take to get to my home in Oxford then back to London. As such, I left my belongings with Royse, another colleague who lived in Inner London’s Camden Town, which very quietly held one of the city’s largest population of witches. While I had a key to Daniel’s home and could have easily gone there instead, there were certain items I couldn’t risk anybody getting into. Between all of that, it wasn’t until early evening that I reached the London Royal Hospital. I found my brother, his wife, and their young son in a waiting room near the Critical Care Unit.

“Uncle Zachariah!” Jackson sprinted to meet me. His arms wound around my waist as tight as possible for an 8-year-old. His face pressed hard into the base of my ribs. I pushed my glasses back into place and hunched forward to return the embrace. He looked up at me with watering eyes, the same melted chocolate colour that Daniel, Evelyn, and I had. His lower lip jutted out and trembled in a way that made him look so very young. “Is Evie going to die?”

Something stuttered in my chest. I had to force myself to exhale. “Of course not,” I said. The assurance was just as much for myself as it was for him.

I looked over his head to Daniel, silently searching his face for any clues as to Evie’s condition. He had given me no details over the phone, and his follow-up email only told me where to meet him. He was half-turned away from me, and all I saw of his expression was a jaw clenched as tight as his fist. Looking at his wife Sarah was even less helpful. At Jackson’s question, she had burst into tears and dropped into in an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair with her face in her hands.

Jackson tugged on my rumpled shirt to recapture my attention. “Uncle Zachariah, is Evie going to turn into a werewolf?”

The sound that came out of my chest was between a heave and a laugh. My blood froze in my veins. My skin prickled.

Daniel hadn’t told me who — or what — had attacked Evelyn. I’d assumed a person, but could it have been—

“Werewolves aren’t real,” Daniel snapped. His eyes locked hard on mine with a stern, unspoken warning. Daniel was five years older than myself, the same age difference between Evelyn and Jackson. He looked so much older than 38 right now.

I knelt on one knee to meet to Jackson’s height. I braced both hands on my thigh to keep them from shaking. “Would you like to know what I brought you back from Italy?”

Jackson’s eyes lit up, and I distracted him with stories of my trip — excluding, of course, anything to do with my professional reasons for being there — until his eyes could no longer stay open. Daniel suggested to Sarah that she take Jackson home and get some rest herself, but she made it very clear that she had no intention of leaving this place without her daughter.

“I’ll come with you, then,” Daniel said. He kissed the top of Sarah’s head mechanically. She didn’t react.

I carried Jackson on my hip and sat him in my lap throughout the journey. Every time I tried to pass him off to Daniel, he woke just enough to grab at my shirt again. In truth, I didn’t mind it. I had so little time to spend with him, I wanted to take advantage of every minute I could. Time, after all, was precious. Neither I nor Daniel spoke until the boy was tucked into his bed.

“You aren’t going away again, are you?” Jackson mumbled through the sleep pulling him down.

“Not right away,” I promised. I stayed beside him until his grip on my hand slackened and he was finally fully asleep.

I found Daniel in the kitchen sipping at a half-glass of whiskey. He offered me the bottle, and I waved my hand in rejection. I let him finish his drink in silence. Now that I was no longer moving, my body seemed to remember that I was running on barely three hours of sleep, plus maybe an extra half-hour or so on the flight back to England. The copious amounts of caffeine I’d consumed in transit may have been the only thing keeping me upright.

Daniel unscrewed the cap and topped up his drink.

I traced my thumb over the lighter I quite literally could never lose to steady myself against the twisting in my gut. Part of me wanted to extend the silence forever, but I had to know.

“What happened?” I kept my voice quiet so that Jackson didn’t hear me, and perhaps so that Daniel wouldn’t either.

Daniel didn’t answer right away. He sipped at his second drink. A glassiness came over his eyes, either from alcohol or tears or both. He blinked rapidly and rubbed his hand over his beard first, then over his eyes. His shoulders sagged with a heavy sigh.

“She was out camping with a couple friends and one of their dads up in Hertfordshire. Sarah didn’t want her to go but she’s thirteen, for God’s sake. They were supposed to be fine, they—“ A shuddery breath. “They had an adult with them. I’ve camped with her up there half a dozen times. I was her age when I started camping there with my mates. It— It was always fine.”

I knew the place he was talking about. Hertfordshire was about an hour’s drive north of Central London, the country park less than that. I remembered being about Jackson’s age and demanding with tears to know why I couldn’t go camping with Daniel and the other big kids. Wasn’t I old enough, mature enough, brave enough? Thinking of my little nephew, I realized I hadn’t been.

On second thought, maybe I did want a drink. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and poured just enough whiskey to cover the ice I found in the freezer.

“Iain, the father, he had a cell phone. Thank God he had reception out there. He died on the way to the hospital. The other girls—” Daniel gripped the edge of the counter with his free hand and finished his drink with the other. “He said it was a wo— a large dog. There’s no wolves in England,” he added quickly.

Daniel was mostly right about that. Wolves had been hunted to extinction some time ago. Werewolves, on the other hand… Most people knew of the witch hunts. Not as many knew of the werewolf hunts. They were hunted near equally so, but there were still a fair few in England.

I didn’t have to check to know that we were in the middle of a full moon. It was a habit to track the cycle. It wasn’t just for werewolves. Certain witches and artifacts’ powers waxed and waned with the moon.

Just because there were still werewolves in England didn’t mean it was a werewolf that had attacked them. It could have been a large dog, a stray or something wild. There was no reason to think that it was anything supernatural.

“Was she bitten or just scratched?” I asked. An edge of desperation made it into my voice despite my best efforts to tamp it down.

Daniel’s eyes snapped to me with a sharp clarity. “There is no such thing as werewolves, Zachariah.”

Though I had never been explicit in what I dealt with in the course of my work with the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence, I had also never particularly kept my interest in the arcane, occult, and supernatural a secret. He knew, at least on some level, what was out there. At the very least, he knew what I believed was out there.

“You have to at least consider—“

“No, I don’t,” he snapped. “I don’t want my kids involved in any of your magic bullshit. And if you even think about saying that sort of thing in front of Sarah, I’ll—” Daniel shook his head aggressively, his lips pursed as tight as his grip on his glass.

I swallowed down the sting at his words. I had always known what he thought of my work but hearing it phrased that way bit at me in a way I couldn’t explain. Could I really blame him for it, though, especially under these circumstances?

Still...

“Why did you call me here?” I asked.

Daniel hesitated. “I don’t know.”

He did know, just as well as I did. Because if there was a chance that Evelyn had been attacked by a werewolf, even just the slightest chance, no matter just how slight...

I didn’t blame him for not wanting to consider it.

Episode 1: Location, Location, Location - Transcript

Episode 2: Foundations - Transcript

Episode 3: No Good Deed - Transcript

Episode 4: Paid With Interest - Transcript

Episode 5: Preparations and Crossroads - Transcript

Episode 6: Return - Transcript

Episode 7: Pit Stop - Transcript

Episode 8: Call and Response - Transcript

Episode 9: Get Lost - Transcript

Episode 10: Long Night - Transcript

Episode 11: Rest and Relaxation - Transcript

Episode 12: Roadmaps - Transcript

Episode 13: Resistance - Transcript

Episode 14: Days and Days and Days - Transcript

Episode 15: Homecoming, Part 1 - Transcript

I dragged myself across the hotel room and picked up the receiver. Outside the window was a game of street football, shouts of Italian punctuating the smack of foot on ball. Even through the curtains, the mid-summer Italian sun was almost blisteringly hot. Having spent the bulk of my life in England, this might as well have been the surface of the sun. My t-shirt, soaked through with sweat, clung to the gap between my shoulder blades and the small of my back. I closed my eyes against the dry burning in them.

“Zachariah Barrett Waller speaking,” I said in case the call was intended for the room’s previous resident. There had been another Zachariah Waller in my class all the way from primary school until high school, and it was still difficult not to think of myself without all three names.

“Zach. It’s— It’s Daniel.” My brother’s voice was strained, tight and almost shaking at the same time.

Sleep vanished from my body. My spine snapped into rigidity. Our communication on my trips had always been solely through email, though I always swallowed the long-distance fees to call on his children’s birthdays. For him to be calling me, to be sounding like that, to be calling me Zach rather than—

I braced for the worst. My nails dug into my palm and my shoulders tensed in anticipation.

“Evie is in the hospital. She was attacked. It’s b— It’s bad, Zach. We don’t know if she’s going to pull through.”

Evie. Evelyn. My niece, my eldest godchild, who I had called just a few weeks ago when she’d turned thirteen.

I was wrong. I’d thought I had braced for the worst, but the words still knocked the air out of my lungs. My heart was in my throat, and I was moving toward the door before I realized it. The pull of the phone cord grounded me back to reality. The received was pulled almost violently from my hand and clattered loudly against the side of the desk. I scrambled for it.

“Zach? Zach, you still there?”

“I’m— Yes. I’m here. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I promised, already scrambling to unlock the room safe where I had stored my passport and other items I didn’t want anybody getting their hands on.

Getting back to England took far longer than I would have liked. Granted, if it had taken five minutes, it still would have been far longer than I would have liked. There was no way around it. I had to get first from Pompeii to Naples, a half-hour drive, then an hour flight from Naples to Rome, then finally another two and a half hours to London. My colleagues, of course, were not entirely thrilled at my abrupt departure but were completely understanding about the circumstances. Even if they hadn’t been, I hardly would have cared enough to notice. We’d collected what we had come to Italy for anyway. My absence wasn’t likely to be noticed.

It hardly made sense to drive the four hours it would take to get to my home in Oxford then back to London. As such, I left my belongings with Royse, another colleague who lived in Inner London’s Camden Town, which very quietly held one of the city’s largest population of witches. While I had a key to Daniel’s home and could have easily gone there instead, there were certain items I couldn’t risk anybody getting into. Between all of that, it wasn’t until early evening that I reached the London Royal Hospital. I found my brother, his wife, and their young son in a waiting room near the Critical Care Unit.

“Uncle Zachariah!” Jackson sprinted to meet me. His arms wound around my waist as tight as possible for an 8-year-old. His face pressed hard into the base of my ribs. I pushed my glasses back into place and hunched forward to return the embrace. He looked up at me with watering eyes, the same melted chocolate colour that Daniel, Evelyn, and I had. His lower lip jutted out and trembled in a way that made him look so very young. “Is Evie going to die?”

Something stuttered in my chest. I had to force myself to exhale. “Of course not,” I said. The assurance was just as much for myself as it was for him.

I looked over his head to Daniel, silently searching his face for any clues as to Evie’s condition. He had given me no details over the phone, and his follow-up email only told me where to meet him. He was half-turned away from me, and all I saw of his expression was a jaw clenched as tight as his fist. Looking at his wife Sarah was even less helpful. At Jackson’s question, she had burst into tears and dropped into in an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair with her face in her hands.

Jackson tugged on my rumpled shirt to recapture my attention. “Uncle Zachariah, is Evie going to turn into a werewolf?”

The sound that came out of my chest was between a heave and a laugh. My blood froze in my veins. My skin prickled.

Daniel hadn’t told me who — or what — had attacked Evelyn. I’d assumed a person, but could it have been—

“Werewolves aren’t real,” Daniel snapped. His eyes locked hard on mine with a stern, unspoken warning. Daniel was five years older than myself, the same age difference between Evelyn and Jackson. He looked so much older than 38 right now.

I knelt on one knee to meet to Jackson’s height. I braced both hands on my thigh to keep them from shaking. “Would you like to know what I brought you back from Italy?”

Jackson’s eyes lit up, and I distracted him with stories of my trip — excluding, of course, anything to do with my professional reasons for being there — until his eyes could no longer stay open. Daniel suggested to Sarah that she take Jackson home and get some rest herself, but she made it very clear that she had no intention of leaving this place without her daughter.

“I’ll come with you, then,” Daniel said. He kissed the top of Sarah’s head mechanically. She didn’t react.

I carried Jackson on my hip and sat him in my lap throughout the journey. Every time I tried to pass him off to Daniel, he woke just enough to grab at my shirt again. In truth, I didn’t mind it. I had so little time to spend with him, I wanted to take advantage of every minute I could. Time, after all, was precious. Neither I nor Daniel spoke until the boy was tucked into his bed.

“You aren’t going away again, are you?” Jackson mumbled through the sleep pulling him down.

“Not right away,” I promised. I stayed beside him until his grip on my hand slackened and he was finally fully asleep.

I found Daniel in the kitchen sipping at a half-glass of whiskey. He offered me the bottle, and I waved my hand in rejection. I let him finish his drink in silence. Now that I was no longer moving, my body seemed to remember that I was running on barely three hours of sleep, plus maybe an extra half-hour or so on the flight back to England. The copious amounts of caffeine I’d consumed in transit may have been the only thing keeping me upright.

Daniel unscrewed the cap and topped up his drink.

I traced my thumb over the lighter I quite literally could never lose to steady myself against the twisting in my gut. Part of me wanted to extend the silence forever, but I had to know.

“What happened?” I kept my voice quiet so that Jackson didn’t hear me, and perhaps so that Daniel wouldn’t either.

Daniel didn’t answer right away. He sipped at his second drink. A glassiness came over his eyes, either from alcohol or tears or both. He blinked rapidly and rubbed his hand over his beard first, then over his eyes. His shoulders sagged with a heavy sigh.

“She was out camping with a couple friends and one of their dads up in Hertfordshire. Sarah didn’t want her to go but she’s thirteen, for God’s sake. They were supposed to be fine, they—“ A shuddery breath. “They had an adult with them. I’ve camped with her up there half a dozen times. I was her age when I started camping there with my mates. It— It was always fine.”

I knew the place he was talking about. Hertfordshire was about an hour’s drive north of Central London, the country park less than that. I remembered being about Jackson’s age and demanding with tears to know why I couldn’t go camping with Daniel and the other big kids. Wasn’t I old enough, mature enough, brave enough? Thinking of my little nephew, I realized I hadn’t been.

On second thought, maybe I did want a drink. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and poured just enough whiskey to cover the ice I found in the freezer.

“Iain, the father, he had a cell phone. Thank God he had reception out there. He died on the way to the hospital. The other girls—” Daniel gripped the edge of the counter with his free hand and finished his drink with the other. “He said it was a wo— a large dog. There’s no wolves in England,” he added quickly.

Daniel was mostly right about that. Wolves had been hunted to extinction some time ago. Werewolves, on the other hand… Most people knew of the witch hunts. Not as many knew of the werewolf hunts. They were hunted near equally so, but there were still a fair few in England.

I didn’t have to check to know that we were in the middle of a full moon. It was a habit to track the cycle. It wasn’t just for werewolves. Certain witches and artifacts’ powers waxed and waned with the moon.

Just because there were still werewolves in England didn’t mean it was a werewolf that had attacked them. It could have been a large dog, a stray or something wild. There was no reason to think that it was anything supernatural.

“Was she bitten or just scratched?” I asked. An edge of desperation made it into my voice despite my best efforts to tamp it down.

Daniel’s eyes snapped to me with a sharp clarity. “There is no such thing as werewolves, Zachariah.”

Though I had never been explicit in what I dealt with in the course of my work with the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence, I had also never particularly kept my interest in the arcane, occult, and supernatural a secret. He knew, at least on some level, what was out there. At the very least, he knew what I believed was out there.

“You have to at least consider—“

“No, I don’t,” he snapped. “I don’t want my kids involved in any of your magic bullshit. And if you even think about saying that sort of thing in front of Sarah, I’ll—” Daniel shook his head aggressively, his lips pursed as tight as his grip on his glass.

I swallowed down the sting at his words. I had always known what he thought of my work but hearing it phrased that way bit at me in a way I couldn’t explain. Could I really blame him for it, though, especially under these circumstances?

Still...

“Why did you call me here?” I asked.

Daniel hesitated. “I don’t know.”

He did know, just as well as I did. Because if there was a chance that Evelyn had been attacked by a werewolf, even just the slightest chance, no matter just how slight...

I didn’t blame him for not wanting to consider it.