A werewolf among us

hysterical, but spoke lucidly enough to point the finger at the boy. He was the wolf, she said. They had been playing, and suddenly he jumped her and he had fangs and his hands had become claws, and he had almost killed her… It was necessary, then, to execute the boy by forcing him to consume a cup of poison made from the bark of the Dead Men. And when he was gone, there were no more murders, no more—
    The vision of the dead boy—face contorted by the poison, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling of the tent—faded from view, as if his flesh were nothing more than smoke.
    It was, of course, even less than that.
    Beyond the tent, the green-gray forest melted.
    Reality intruded: heavy furniture, flickering candles, an old woman with a blanket across her knees…
    "I would like to know—" St. Cyr began.
    Dane said, "She's sleeping."
    "When will she wake?"
    "Perhaps not until morning. It was a hard thing for her to do, but she knew she had to warn us."
    "What now?"
    "We leave. What else?"
    Outside, they stood against a thick Dead Man's trunk and breathed the stale air out of their lungs. "It meant nothing," St. Cyr said.
    "How can you say that?" Dane turned to face him, angry. "You saw how the weapons had no effect on the wolf that bit her brother."
    "The marksmen were nervous—at least, they were in the re-creation that we saw. They could easily have missed and sworn they hit to preserve their reputations."
    "What about his sickness?"
    "The same sickness that everyone got when bitten by a wolf. They carried bacteria. I have the report on them from Climicon."
    "What about the aversion to light?"
    "A symptom in many diseases where the eye may be infected."
    Dane shook his head violently. "But that's not all. What about the second child who was killed, the one sleeping in a tent? Would a wild animal enter a civilized habitat for prey?"
    "It might. It's more probable than Norya's werewolf."
    "And the fact that the men searched but could find no wolf in the neighborhood?"
    "They did not search well enough. Or it eluded them."
    Dane said, "What about the child's story, the little girl who was nearly the third victim?"
    "She knew she was playing with Norya's brother," St. Cyr explained patiently. "She was not expecting anything else. When the wolf jumped her, she became hysterical. She saw the boy driving it off, and in her hysteria, having heard the rumors about a
du-aga-klava
, it all became twisted in her mind until the boy was the wolf, the wolf was the boy."
    "That's a shaky explanation, don't you think?"
    "No," St. Cyr said. "When you're a detective for long, you learn that no witness ever reports things quite the way they were; sometimes they don't get it remotely as it was. A child of the girl's age is an even more unreliable source of information."
    "You're saying they killed an innocent boy, one who wasn't possessed?"
    "I'm afraid it looks that way to me."
    Dane struck one palm with the other fist. "But, dammit, you saw him metamorphosing into a wolf. You saw him trying to tear out the girl's throat!"
    "No, all that I saw was Norya's re-creation of the way she
thought
it was. She was not present when the little girl was attacked; she was only replaying it as she was told it had happened."
    "But she sees the future clearly—why not the past too?"
    "She's precognitive, yes. But, like most precogs, she can't make use of that power at will—let alone employ it to dredge up bits of the past at which she was not ever present. She's a telepathic projectionist, Dane, one who produced some colorful fantasies for us, nothing more."
    "I think you're wrong."
    "I think I'm not. But I'm still glad that I came with you. Up until now, I had given the
du-aga-klava
theory more credence than it deserved—if only in the sense that I considered the possibility of a wolf-transmitted lycanthropic bacterium. Now, having seen the quality of the facts upon which these legends are built, I've rejected the werewolf notion altogether."
    A fine decision.
    Dane didn't agree with the bio-computer's analysis. "You'll see yet," he said. "Norya is right; I'm sure she is."
    St. Cyr said, "I'm also glad I came along because I got to meet Salardi. Or I will meet him. Which tent or trailer is his?"
    "There," Dane said, pointing to a yellow and green tent painted in swirling, abstract patterns. "But what do you want from him?"
    "It's occurred to me that a man running from a criminal offense in the Inner Galaxy, living only a couple of hours