In case you have been wondering where I have been the past several months, the answer is simple: in a Sisterhood hospital recovering from bullet wounds. How I got there is a rather long story. It began in a London club and took me first to Estonia, and then to Venezuela and finally to the Mexican state of Michoacán, where I took three silver bullets.
That I wound up being shot was ultimately my own fault. Following the unpleasantness in Libya last year, I had steadfastly refused all assignments to the Middle East – especially Syria – so my section chief at MI6 decided to deal with my intransigence by lending me to the organised crime unit of our domestic sister organisation MI5. I considered this job to be well beneath my abilities and took the matter much too lightly, with nearly fatal results.
The task as assigned was ludicrous: I was to assist in tracing the origins of some particularly high-grade crystal meth which had been appearing recently in the London club scene. The stuff was much more potent than what was usually cooked in amateur labs, and intel had suggested that the Russian mafia was involved. As I was fluent in the language and had many contacts within the ex-KGB, it was argued, there was no one better qualified to support MI5 in this investigation. Of course, if I chose Damascus instead, they would find someone else to play drug cop.
Since I had little interest in spending another desert holiday fighting an Arab dictator, the next evening found me in an upscale West End club wearing a psychedelic miniskirt I had not worn since 1969. The clubbers called me “retro girl” and I was soon the centre of attention. It didn’t take long before they invited me into a back room to share some whizz, as they called it.
Take my advice and keep far, far away from crystal meth. Don’t try this stuff even once. It is probably the most dangerous substance humans have ever concocted. Werewolves cannot be harmed by it, of course, but we are not immune to the effects. After snorting a small amount of the innocuous-looking white powder, it required every ounce of self-control to restrain myself from shifting and tearing everyone in the room to shreds, and this after only one hit. After recovering from the initial burst of aggressiveness caused by the drug, I managed to collect my wits sufficiently to ask how I could hook up for more. They gave me an address in Brick Lane.
Needless to say, I didn’t visit the house directly. Instead I planted myself on the roof of an adjacent building and eavesdropped. Other MI6 agents would need special equipment for this, but my wolf ears proved quite adequate to the task. After two days of surveillance, I had learned the names of several middle-level dealers (subsequently turned over to Metropolitan Police) and followed one of them back to a Georgian terraced house in Camden owned by a respectable Lithuanian businessman. At a distance of thirty metres from the front door, I caught the scent of an Apostate. It didn’t surprise me that they had taken to drug smuggling, as there are few professions too despicable for those beasts.