As dusk settled I couldn’t stop wondering if we were just wasting time, if we had to stop pursuing this guy’s sick game. It was just one girl after all. I had no idea why I wanted to solve this one so badly; I was becoming obsessed by it. Just one girl. The thought was still haunted me as Victor turned to me and sighed.
“Why are we doing this?” he said. “You’re running all over the city to find this girl. If I didn’t know any better I would almost swear you knew the girl and wanted badly to save her.” “I just don’t know anymore. There are moments I think we should just let him win. Stop playing his game, stop jumping through his hoops and just let this one die.”
Victor looked at me, surprised by my words. He shook his head making his mane wave wind in my face. “You are not the type to give up. You want to find this girl, to hold her in your arms and tell her she is saved. I understand why you would think about just stopping, it is normal; but you can’t,” he replied.
I sighed. He was right: I wasn’t a quitter. “Why did I get the feeling you knew that red-headed girl?” I asked him. He gazed out the car window and cleared his throat. “We … had sex,” he said.
I looked at him and laughed. “You old lion, you! I knew you liked pretty girls, just not that way,” I said teasingly. He sighed. “She was a student of mine. She is pretty and was nice to work with, and one day she asked me if she could model for me. I agreed – I loved to draw my students, it’s my way of remembering them – and she showed up at my door in the same outfit she had on today. She flirted with me. I liked it, it made me feel good, to be flirting with a student. I was shocked when she took off her clothing for a nude drawing, but I still drew her, getting more and more comfortable around her naked form. When I was done I told her she could come over and see the result, then she kissed me, I kissed her back, and then we fucked.”
I smiled at him. I hadn’t figured him for the type to do something like that. “Did you know what she was?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No, I had no idea what she was until I heard it from the other students, during one of the art exhibits we held for more talented students’ paintings. Go figure, an old lion furry having sex with a rare lycan,” he chuckled. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and looked at him. “She is the reason you still stay in the school, isn’t she?” I asked him.
Victor gave me a meaningful look, and nodded. “She’s no longer a student anymore, but she still visits the school, visits me,” he replied, smiling. “No sex, though.”
I looked out the window at the city as she turned darker by the minute. “What to do?” I mused. “Have the cops comb the city as we carry on chasing the riddles? Where will lead that to; more riddles?”
Victor turned to me. “That sounds like a solid plan,” he replied. I shook my head. “They won’t do that; it is just one girl. They put me and Petra on the case; they won’t invoke martial law to check every house, that would be an act of war to many of the creatures in the city, and that would be a disaster. The civil war I stopped will still take place, and they will blame me for it.”
I took out some pepper leaf and put it in the smoker, lighting it. Victor gave me a concerned look. “You can’t keep this up. It is destroying you, I can see that. This case you’re working on, it is almost like it was meant to do just that; to just destroy you entirely,” he said.
He was right. The case had been getting to me, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on. I reached into my pocket and handed Victor a card. “Call Kendra for me and tell her to meet me at the Marion Hotel. I need to take a rest and a break from all this; I’ll give her some tasks to do.”I put the car in gear and pulled out. “I’ll drop you off at your apartment,” I told him as I drove into the city.  

Next Chapter: Tara and Kendra