Longest Night

There seemed, on the surface, nothing mysterious about the events that had transpired as of late in a rural Irish town. A wolf had slain several Irish women in as brutal and bloody a way a beast could, and this was not the only attack by wolves on humans across Europe recently. The Irish culprit had already been killed by a local human, to the relief of all the mortals who lived nearby.

The mystery of the case was that the Irish wolf that had done the killing was a faoladh, an Irish wolf guardian of a clan that shared their land peacefully with mortals. For one of their sons to brutally murder a pair of humans was a strange and terrible thing, wholly unexpected.

Combined with the epidemic of recent European wolf attacks, it suggested any number of conclusions that people could draw. Disease, a curse, cold blooded murder - and the job wanted a detective to determine which conclusion was the right one.

Fortunately for the Guardians, they were recently fortified by one.

Goliath exited the snowglobe wormhole into Ireland first, checking that the scene was clear before Elisa followed behind him. The morning mist turned the sun into a bright smudge over the trees of the nearby forest. The wolf's beheaded body lay on the grass in a browning patch of old blood outside one of a small collection of old, simple homes. A bloody massacre had taken place in one.

"Only one house has windows unlit," Goliath pointed out, looking around instead of closely at the body. His job was to keep Elisa safe and attend to their surroundings while she did her work of attending to small details. "That must be where the murders took place."