Word count: 2965 words

The murals appeared out of nowhere, on the long retaining wall of the embankment that the Route 1 tram ran along to avoid the steepest section of Darlish Way. Every morning, a new mural would replace the last one, the chemical smell of fresh paint still lingering in the air.

The subject matter was rather varied. A group of people picking mushrooms in a forest. A group of farmworkers in a paddock. A panorama of the Old Pack House. It did not take long before the Instagram influencers and the tourists homed in like moths to a lamp.

At first, Gilles had paid no attention to them, as he went on his daily walk from his loft above the restaurant to the waterfront and back. He'd just dismissed it as another clever artist publicity stunt. They were a dime a dozen in this part of Corviston. It was not until the third day that something about the whole thing began to niggle at his subconscious, and he finally decided to stop and take a closer look at it.

It was clear that the mural before him had been done by a talented artist. The detail was exquisite. Today the subject was Briarleaf, the beating heart of Corviston's nightlife. People were spilling out of clubs and restaurants, streaming along the streets, stars in the night sky above, expensive cars in the streets.

The stars were a bit of overkill, Gilles thought. The light pollution here was rather dire, after all.

He recognised the club where he had arranged the rendezvous with Calvin tomorrow. He looked closer. The drawing was detailed enough to see the people inside the windows. 

It was unmistakably him, in the window of the club. In an embrace with Calvin.

He gave a start. How did they know that? He looked around him. Just some tourists taking a selfie.

He automatically thought of Wesley. He was in Wythaven, on business, as usual. The other side of the country. The mural would be replaced by the time he got back, first flight tomorrow. He wouldn't know, wouldn't suspect a thing. He breathed a sigh of relief.

He thought back to the previous murals. That one with the pack house had his restaurant in the frame, right? And he was working at the restaurant today. And the previous one, that had been at a farm, if he remembered correctly. He had been at an organic farm yesterday, near Sewellstown, checking out their permacultural practices. Could it be?

He dismissed the thought. He was going crazy. It was just a fluke.

***

The next day, the mural was gone, replaced by a simple slogan, done in big blocky letters on a white background, in a style vaguely reminiscent of Keith Haring.

I know what you did last summer.

The embankment shook slightly as a tram passed above, winding its way down to Margate Road.

He felt faint. The earth was watching. Monagh knew all. The old stories were true.

***

Gilles was the sole proprietor of Barlew's, a hole in the wall place just a stone's throw from the Old Pack House, in the heart of the old town. Nominally, the menu was a page long; just the standard hipster eatery fare, poke bowls, kale salad, etc, etc, etc. But say the right combination of words, and the server would surreptitiously slip you a little laminated card, and duck into a secret compartment at the back of the kitchen that was strictly off-limits to health and safety inspectors.

The most popular item on this shadow menu by far was the sauteed ebony oak chantrelles, served in a wild garlic sauce. The chanterelles came, invariably, from a number of pack territories, or from corrupt park rangers that Gilles knew personally. The wild garlic came from a small gully on the pack territory of the Shadow Bluff pack that he had discovered by chance on a visit several years ago.

For the right price, you could request dishes. Sorbet made from the Liarbey crabapple, of which there were only fifteen mature trees remaining. Broiled Silver Moon blind albino crayfish, which were restricted to a remote cave in the territory of the Silver Moon pack. The only limit was your imagination.

***

It had all started purely by accident, around ten years ago. He had travelled across the border. The objective had been to broker a contract with a pack, the name of which he had long forgotten, for the supply of some type of truffle, the specifics of which he had also long forgotten. The deal had fallen through; the Alpha was not willing to lower his prices, and he was not willing to raise his offer.

His car had broken down on the way home, late at night. By pure chance a pack patrol had discovered him and they had offered him an overnight stay in their pack house.

That night, in the little room at the back of the pack house they had allotted him, he had been unable to sleep. The deal had been crucial to the new venue he was planning on developing. He had borrowed a lot of money to make it all happen, and the loss of the deal could bankrupt him, if he played his cards wrong. So he decided to take a midnight stroll in the pack grounds to clear his head.

He realised almost immediately that this had been a mistake. He was unfamiliar with the terrain. The path was unlit and badly kept, and at one point he slipped and fell. He lay there, certain that the pack patrol had heard his tumble, and would be materialising at any moment to frogmarch him back to the pack house, or just tear him from limb to limb right there and then. Pack wolves, after all, were generally of the shoot-and-ask-questions-later type.

But nobody came. Silence reigned.

And that was when he saw the mushroom, poking out of the leaf litter. He recognised it immediately.

It was an ebony oak chanterelle. Its only known range was a few scattered patches of mature oak forest in the mountains near Jozendorf. All of these were within protected national parks patrolled by rangers.

Some enterprising poachers had tried making expeditions over the border to see if there were any other places where they could be found, but few had returned in one piece. The packs were not exactly fond of city wolves prowling around their territories in the dead of night. Others had tried cultivating them, with little success.

He had lain there, staring at the mushroom, wondering how much he could get for just one of the things, when he had realised that if there was one, there must be more. Getting up on his knees as quietly as possible, he put his hand into the damp leaves around him, feeling for the soft folds. It only took a few seconds.

He felt his heart race. These things fetched over a thousand dollars a kilo at the auctioneers in the city. And here they were, growing everywhere, and none of the pack members seemed any the wiser. He had picked as many as he could fit into the back of his car and left at daybreak the next morning.

He spent the next week in a state of paranoia, looking over his shoulder every time he went out to the shops, looking up Independent Territories news sites, refreshing tabs every few minutes, looking for a report of stolen mushrooms. But nothing happened. Nothing came up. Nobody was after him. He had gotten away with it.

Getting away with it only bolstered his confidence. He collated distribution maps of endangered species and overlaid them onto maps of pack boundaries. He visited as many thrift stores as he could fit into his schedule, looking for old almanacs. He had a bunch of business cards printed under an assumed name.

His modus operandi was simple, but effective. He would stay as an overnight guest in the pack house, posing as a businessman who did not want to risk driving at night. Under the pretense of a midnight walk, he would venture out into the woods and do the needful. Several times, he had been stopped by a sentry or a pack member, nobody had ever suspected that he was poaching their botanical heritage from right under their noses. All those hillbillies ate was red meat and junk food, anyway. They didn't know any better.

***

The heist last summer had been more audacious than most. He had researched for months, staying until late at the State Library whenever he had an off day, poring through the old almanacs, looking for any references to truffles he could find.

Once the target had been selected, he and a bunch of his fellow restaurateurs and poachers had posed as a rowdy group of bachelors looking for something, ahem, meatier than the usual full moon experience. They had simply driven up to the pack house. The alpha, an old wolf in his sixties, had invited them to dinner and been more than happy to offer them the use of their facilities, delighted to see some city wolves who were willing to stick with the old ways and not waste away the full moon working overtime in an office cubicle.

Once the main pack had shifted and set off, they had headed straight for the forest, simply uprooted a dozen or so of the saplings and dragged them back to their truck, taking care to dislodge as few clods of dirt as possible from the roots, and covered them with a tarpaulin. They had told the sentries that there had been an emergency at home and left a hair after one o'clock in the morning. Two hours later, they were safely across the border.

He'd kept a watchful eye on his newsfeed for the next month or so, looking for any alerts. Not a peep.

***

He took the Laidlaw Rd offramp. He glanced in the rear view mirror. He couldn't see any cars he could recall from earlier in his journey, but he still could not shake the feeling of being watched.

He reached the turn-off for the orchard, taking another look in the rear view mirror. Nobody followed him in.

The asphalt ran out, turning to dirt. He got out to open the orchard gate.

The saplings were exactly where they'd planted them, in neat rows. Hopefully the truffle myceliae in their root systems would take root and spread, and in a few years' time, they'd be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

He breathed a sigh of relief.

His phone vibrated. He took it out. It was a text from Wesley.

This came up in my instagram feed. Care to explain?

There was a picture attached. He looked at the picture and blanched.

It was him and Calvin, in the mural. How the hell had he gotten hold of that?

It was a grainy photo. He could explain. It was simply a weird coincidence. He hadn't actually done anything with Calvin, he had the receipts to prove it. He could handle this.

He felt his heartrate return to normal. He had nothing to fear.

***

The health and safety inspectors had arrived for their annual survey. For the first time, they had sent someone else. No more smiling middle-aged lady. No more service with a smile. This guy looked like he'd stepped off the set of Full Metal Jacket.

Wesley had seemed to believe his story that it was simply a coincidence, although it nearly wasn't necessary, given the ample proof he had offered in the form of expense statements and a printout of his phone log. Calvin had not been too happy when he had cancelled their get-together, but he would understand.

He watched nervously as Full Metal Jacket rifled through his kitchen. So far he looked impressed. Gilles breathed a sigh of relief.

Then he started poking around the back wall, peering at the built-in stainless steel shelves, feeling around them. Gilles felt his heart begin to race, as Full Metal Jacket's hand edged closer to the underside of the fourth shelf.

Gilles felt his stomach turn inside out as Full Metal Jacket's hand closed around the latch, located under the right-hand side corner.

"Ah-ha," Full Metal Jacket said. "What have we here?"

Full Metal Jacket pulled down on the latch, which gave way with a click. The shelf swung away, revealing the secret compartment. He spied the chanterelles immediately. "Looks like my friends at the Environmental Protection Bureau might be getting a call." He looked back at Gilles. "What do you say about that?"

Gilles had fainted.

***

It was full moon. All the roads out of Corviston were clogged as people hightailed it for the mountains. A semitrailer had jacknifed on the M1, which was not helping things.

Gilles sat in bumper to bumper traffic on the M5, his foot on the clutch. He briefly regretted not having bought an automatic.

Ordinarily he would have swallowed two Lupinex and just carried on working instead of joining the hordes heading out into the backwoods, but he needed the distraction today. He had managed to leverage his connections to get the story out of the headlines, but the EPB bust at his eatery was nevertheless now the talk of the restaurant community. He had escaped public crucifixion, but his career was beyond salvaging.

Wesley had gone to Wythaven again. Business, again. He was not returning his calls.

***

He pulled into the lodge just as dusk fell. He swiped his pass and the automatic gate in the barbed wire fence opened. It would lock after ten o'clock.

There was one other car in the carpark. He signed himself in.

His cabin was sparsely furnished. Just a day bed, a table with two chairs, a kitchenette, a bathroom in the corner. He walked out onto the porch and watched the last embers of the sunset.

There was little else to be done after the sun had set. He lay down and waited for the inevitable to happen.

Just after eight o'clock, he felt it. The pull of the moon, only slight, but growing stronger every minute. The beast inside him stirred and awakened.

He breathed in and let it take over.

***

He cantered through the forest, relishing the feeling of freedom, soaking in the sounds and scents of the night. For one night, all the worries of the past few days melted away.

There was another wolf running parallel, matching his pace step for step, coat shining in the slivers of moonlight that filtered through the treetops. He could smell the scent of other wolves, too, further away. They must have come in the other car. It was always nice to have company.

The other wolf was gradually coming closer. Only two trees separated them, then one. Then for a split second, they were running side by side.

Then the other wolf pounced on him. Gilles was caught off guard, his legs flailing as the other wolf pinned him to the ground.

He did not belong to the same pack as the other wolf. He was not part of any pack, for that matter. And so the message came through the mind link faint and oddly distorted. But the message was crystal clear.

Last summer, you took something from our pack.

Gilles froze. Even in its distorted state, it was unmistakably the voice of the old alpha. The last time his voice had been welcoming, jovial. Today it was cold as ice.

I'll take them back, he linked the other wolf. I'll plant them where they belong.

To his surprise, the other wolf let go. He stood up on all fours and shook out his pelt, still not believing his luck.

Thirty seconds.

First he thought that it was impossible for him to return the saplings in just thirty seconds. Then he realised what the other wolf was doing. He was giving him a head start.

Gilles ran for his life, trying to think of a plan on the go. The grounds of the lodge were fenced, ostensibly to protect the local wildlife. Ten foot tall, with barbed wire on top. There was no point in escaping. His only hope would be to make it to one of the cabins and hope that luck was on his side.

He bounded into his cabin and shut the door with his nose. Then he crouched on the floor, under the day bed, and waited.

His ears pricked at the sound of rapidly approaching footfalls. His pursuer was close. He tensed his body.

The cabin window shattered, the shockwave reverberating around the room. A dark shape landed on its feet in a maelstrom of broken glass.

Gilles charged from under the bed, before the other wolf was able to orient itself, ignoring the glass shards that dug into his pelt. He tried to go for the neck but missed, his jaws closing harmlessly on the creature's shoulder instead.

The other wolf shook Gilles free, throwing him into a corner of the room. The force was such that Gilles heard several of his bones crack. The other wolf shrugged off the glass from its pelt and strode towards him.

Gilles cowered, whimpering. Please don't.

The other wolf closed its jaws around the scruff of his neck and lifted him up like a rag doll, dragging him out through the door, into the night. Oh no. I would love to. But I have other pack members who would also like to have some fun.

Trying not to pass out from the pain, Gilles saw the gleaming eyes in the shadows of the cabin adjacent to his. Eight of them. Four sets.

He felt his blood run cold.