“So where’s Annie? What part did Annie have to play in all of this?” The realization of what was happening and what had gone on was slowly seeping in and I was becoming angry – hurt.

“Annie – she didn’t play any part in this…

like everyone else, she thinks I’m dead,” Pen explained.

“But the notes? She wrote letters to me…

helping me…” I could see Pen slowly shaking her head at me.

“No, Jim, Annie never sent those letters…

I did…they were all from me.”

“All of them?” I asked in utter shock.

“All of them,” she nodded, lowering her eyes as if in shame.

Feeling as if I had been tricked, deceived by her, I eased my way from her, stood up, and began to put my clothes on and went back out into the forest.

“I thought you’d be pleased to see me,”

Pen said, taking her coat and placing it about her shoulders and following me.

“Pleased to see you?” I laughed with tears standing in my eyes. “Do you know what I’ve been through for you? Do you have any idea? ” I shouted.

Pen looked at me and shook her head.

“I was attacked...fucking shot at...God knows how many times! My Inspector thought I was fucking deranged…I had to sit and watch my best friend in a snuff-movie…put up with months of fucking anguish at the thought of you dying...only to find out I have been lied to…been deceived…but do you know what hurts most of all, Pen?” I barked at her.

She looked at me and shook her head numbly again.

“To be lied to by you…to be deceived by you. How could you be so fucking cruel? ” I spat.

It felt as if my whole being, my whole existence had been turned upside down. I wanted to feel relief, pleasure, sheer joy that she was still alive, but instead, I felt only anger and hatred for her.

“I’m sorry, Jim…I really am…but I had to. Marc was hurting me, he was stealing off me…he was destroying me.”

“Why didn’t you come to me, I would’ve helped you! ” I said.

“I couldn’t. Marc said that if he so much as got a whiff that I had involved you, he would have killed me. And besides, I wanted you to be proud of me…I wanted you to think that I had made a success of my life.”

“Pen, I would have been proud of you whatever…” I started.

“I looked at your life and all of your dreams had come true,” Pen cut in. “You had met a beautiful girl; you became a cop and were leading a full and exciting life. The Lycanthrope aren’t meant to achieve anything with their lives.

We are just a bunch of murderous criminals, or so the Vampyrus believe. I wanted to be different. I wanted to prove to you that I was different. The Ooze Bar proved I was making a success of my life – that I didn’t want to be a criminal like my father, uncle...”

I listened as Pen told me how Marc had strolled into The Ooze Bar one day looking for work. He had been charming, funny and delightful at first, and Pen had fallen in love with him. So Pen had taken him on, and at first she thought Marc had some good ideas of how they could improve the bar and he seemed like a really hard worker. Then Steve was brought in as chef, with the intention of making the bar more of a success.

“When I asked Marc what cooking experience his brother had,” Pen explained, “he told me that he had worked in lots of kitchens preparing food. What I didn’t know then, and didn’t find out until it was too late, was Steve had worked in plenty of kitchens but they had all been while serving time in prison in The Hollows.”

When I discovered this, I confronted Marc, and for my trouble, I got a punch in the face.

“And that’s when the violence started and the truth came out. I learnt that my father had given me away to Marc’s father in a card game years ago. To Marc that meant not only was my body his, but everything I owned, too. He didn’t love me. I was just a possession. I’m a wolf just like them, and at first I fought back, but I didn’t stand a chance against the two of them.”

“You should have come to me, Pen,” I told her again.

“Like I said, I couldn’t.”

“So what did you do?”

“One night I was lying in bed, most of the violence started in bed. Marc would come home from the café, angry and spiteful. Marc was incredibly jealous, his jealousy bordered on paranoia. He would accuse me of picking human men up and taking them back to the house for sex while he was working at the bar. He often accused me and you of being lovers. He had got it into his head we had been more than just friends when we were kids and he told me that I was never to see or speak to you again.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him to go fuck himself,” she half-smiled.

“What did he say to that?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

“He attacked me. He threw me onto the bedroom floor and started to strangle me. All the time he was screaming at the top of his voice, ‘ You fucked him! You fucked him – didn’t ya?’

And when I tried to tell him we were just friends, he rammed paper into my mouth and down my throat until I passed out.”

The images of that video swam back into the front of my mind and my initial anger that I had felt for Pen turned to Marc.

“When I woke up,” Pen continued to explain, “Marc had gone, so I seized my chance and fled from the house and ran out into the night.

I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t know who to turn to, and so I went to Annie’s.”

Pen told me how she had cried in Annie’s arms as she told her everything. Annie had begged her friend to go to the police, but what she didn’t know was that Pen was a werewolf. I learnt that Pen stayed with Annie for a couple of nights until she thought it was safe to go home again.

It was then that Pen started to receive letters from the bank and the brewery, who demanded money for unpaid debts. Pen also found credit cards in her name hidden under the counter at the bar. Pen told me how she had telephoned the credit card companies and they assured her the cards did belong to her. Marc and his brother had been getting cards in her name and Pen was horrified and scared when she discovered they had run up debts of £15,000, £19,000, and £21,000

on different credit cards.

Pen explained her initial confusion as she considered why they needed so much money and what it had been spent on. It was only by chance one day, Pen had gone down into the basement to change a keg where she found Marc and Steve using heroin. Marc and Steve said that it helped them fight their curse.

“It was then I realised I had been unknowingly supporting their drug addiction,” Pen said. “I felt trapped and overwhelmed by them. I didn’t know how to get them out of my life. I knew that if I didn’t, they would drag me down with them, or worse, Marc would end up killing me.”

We walked back to the lake. The snow had begun to ease a little. I looked at Pen as she started to talk again.

“I knew I had to do something and it was you who gave me the idea.”

“How?” I asked.

“It came to me one day when we were talking on the phone. You were telling me all about your adventures at work and how you spy on wolves…you know…what’s the word?

Surveillance? You told me all about those dinky little cameras you used. I got myself one, and as you now know, I hid it in my ruby slippers in that display cabinet,” Pen said.

“Wasn’t that a bit risky? Marc could have found it,” I said.

“You were hiding them from experienced criminals and they never spotted them. Marc was a violent, small-time thug who was always drunk and stoned. He would’ve never spotted it. I put it there for insurance, really. I’d turn it on every night before I went to bed. I was scared that one night he might go too far and kill me. At least then, there would be some evidence of it. It wouldn’t matter that I was a wolf once I was dead, but it would have mattered to Marc if you and your cop friends had found the recording. Anyway, that night…the night I died…he came home in another drunken rage and attacked me again.”

“I saw what happened on the DVD,” I said. “But you looked dead. It looked as if he had killed you.”

Pen pulled her coat tight about her naked frame. “The next thing I knew was when I woke up, in the dark, wrapped in a blanket with my throat feeling raw,” she said. “I knew I was in a vehicle and could tell it was travelling at speed. I guessed I was in the back of Steve’s truck as it was cold and I was outside. I didn’t know how long I had been unconscious for, but I guessed it had been for a while from snippets of conversation I could hear every now and then between Marc and his brother. ‘Why are we bringing her all the way up here? We’ve been going for hours,’ I heard Steve ask Marc.”

“Where were they taking you?” I asked Pen.

“I wasn’t sure, but I was scared of what they were planning to do with me,” she said.

“Didn’t you try and escape?”

“The vehicle stopped a couple of times, I guess at traffic signals, and I did consider uncoiling myself and jumping out the back of the vehicle, but they would have seen me and then finished me off properly,” Pen explained.

“So what did you do?”

“I waited. I didn’t know what else I could’ve done. Eventually, we stopped and I heard them climb out of the cab and come to the back of the vehicle. I could hear them talking clearly now.

‘How do you know this is the right place?’ Steve asked Marc. ‘Because no one ever comes out here other than wolves,’ Marc told him. I couldn’t believe what I had heard. I knew they had brought me here,” Pen said, looking over her shoulder at the forest.

“Here?” I asked, startled. “But why all the way out here?”

“Like Marc said, these forests and the lake is secret from the rest of the world. There was very little chance my body would be found here by anyone other than another wolf,” Pen explained. “They lifted me out of the back of the truck and between them, they carried me through the forest and dumped me back in those bushes.”