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Professor Firstenaw could see his breath in the morning air outside the Kensington Gardens coffee shop. He could not see the moon setting behind the fog, but he knew it was there, full and mysterious. He was thankful for his fur as he watched some humans all bundled up against the cold. He entered the coffee shop, took off his hat, and gave what he hoped would be seen as a big friendly canine smile to the proprietor, a middle-aged woman in a tidy black gown and an apron.

"Good morning, Professor Firstenaw," she said. "I'd recognize those big pointy ears of yours anywhere. What will you be having?"

"Good morning, Mrs. Miggins. What I wouldn't do for a chocolate cruller and a nice hot mocha!"

"Oh, Professor," she replied, playfully shoving his shoulder, "You know I can't serve you that! Chocolate and coffee are strictly off-limits for you and all our furry friends. I can't have you poisoning yourselves in my shop!"

Firstenaw tilted his head down closed his mouth in a guilty pout as she led him to a table by the window.

"So just a chamomile tea for you this morning?" she asked.

"Yes, please, Mrs. Miggins."

She went back to the counter to prepare the tea. Presently she returned with it.

"Here you go, professor, with a squeeze of lemon, the way you like it. By the way, there are two policemen at the door; they asked for you by name. You're not in trouble, are you?"

Firstenaw turned to look toward the door. He recognized one of them as Inspector Haversham and a leftenant, both human. "Ah, it's the Inspector. No, Mrs. Miggins, I'm not in trouble. But I suspect someone else is."

Firstenaw waved to Haversham; he and the leftenant joined them.

"Inspector Haversham."

"Professor Firstenaw, Professors. This is Leftenant Potter."

"Leftenant. What can I do for you, Inspector?"

"There's been a murder."

"A murder?"

"Two, actually. One here in Kensington Garden and one in a bakery a few blocks away."

"Do you think they're connected?"

"We suspect they were both the deed of a werewolf. A baker was murdered this morning in his shop. One of his assistants found him."

"A baker. Human?"

"Yes, Sir."

Firstenaw looked at him. "There hasn't been a werewolf murder in London in over ten years. What about the other one?"

"One of your people," said Potter. "A wolven, Sir William Archer-Smoot, found under a culvert in the Garden not far from the bakery. He's covered in blood."

"Yes, Sir," said Haversham, "And we're grateful for your help in that effort. But this has all the earmarks--err, sorry Sir; no offense intended. This has all the markings of a werewolf."

"No offense taken, Haversham." Firstenaw drank the rest of his tea. As he left he tipped his hat to Mrs. Miggins. He tossed her a coin and said, "Treat yourself to a chocolate cruller."

"Oh, thank you, Sir."

"A chocolate cruller, Professor?" asked Haversham.

"I do love chocolate, but it is poison to us wolves. If I can't enjoy it, there's no reason she can't."

Havesham and the leftenant looked at each other, not knowing what to say.

"So. To the scene of the crime!"

Firstenaw rode in the coach with Inspector Haversham and the leftenant. They passed by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and turned into a side street. Policemen milled about outside a storefront bakery. A young woman, pale and frightened, sat on a chair outside on the pavement.

"Ah, the hired help," explained Haversham. "She discovered the murder."

The young woman looked up at Firstenaw; her eyes went wide in fear. Firstenaw sighed and tilted his head; he made calming noises as a dog might to her puppies. Trying to make himself small, he crouched before her and took her hands in his furry paw-like hands.

"My dear," he said, trying to hide his teeth and somehow look more like a puppy than a big black wolven. "I'm so sorry for your loss. You must have been terribly frightened."

"Yes, Sir." She tried to compose herself. "I saw ... that," she tilted her head toward the shop door. "And stopped. I ran to the police box and called the police."

"You did the right thing. What time was this?"

"Six o'clock, Sir. Mister Davies arrives at three to start the baking. Then I come to open the shop and serve breakfast."

"But this morning..."

"I opened the shop and found ... Mister Davies, dead."

"Was the front door locked?"

"Yes, Sir. I have a key."

"How do you think he could have got in?"

"The back door, Sir. Mister Davies leaves it open for deliveries and fresh air. It gets quite warm in the bakery."

"Ah, I see. I imagine it would. Well. Thank you. That will be all for now. You just sit here and gather your wits and strength."

"Yes, Sir. Thank you."

Firstenaw turned to the Inspector. "The scene is undisturbed, Haversham?"

"Aside from the victim, the scene is pristine," replied Haversham. "The victim is Howard Davies, a male human, age forty-eight. He owned this bakery."

"Good, thank you. We shall leave no clue undiscovered."

Firstenaw entered the shop. There was blood spattered about in the front. The victim lay in the middle of the floor, bruised, lacerated, and bitten. A baker's cart was askew, some chocolate buns obviously missing. A baker's tool for taking things in and out of an oven lay nearby. He approached the victim.

"Has a cause of death been established?"

"The coroner believes it was caused by bleeding to death from these bite wounds."

"I see," said Firstenaw. "These bite marks..."

"The coroner identified them as being from a wolf."

"Uh huh. This one has too many incisors for a werewolf." Firstenaw made notes and sketches of the wounds in his notebook.

Firstenaw turned his attention to the rest of the room. He looked longingly at some chocolate cakes in the glass counter. He sighed and continued his visual search.

"How did the attacker get out?"

"Same as he got in: the back door. There are faint tracks in the dust on the floor, and drops of blood."

The tile floor was slightly dusty with flour, and prints of shoes and someone walking barefoot ... in both directions.

"These prints," said Firstenaw. "... are not wolf prints. The toes are all wrong. They look human to me."

"Hm. That is strange," said Haversham. "A werewolf with human feet. And teeth."

Firstenaw rolled his eyes, then followed the trail of prints into a storeroom. It seemed mostly undisturbed, but for a paper bag, torn apart and emptied of its contents. He fitted the pieces together: Cadbury's Baker's Chocolate Morsels, 75% Cocoa.

"So our werewolf killed the baker for some chocolate buns, then came back here for more chocolate. He found this bag and emptied it... not on the floor. There aren't any chocolate morsels at all."

Firstenaw looked at the trail in the dust on the floor.

"Our werewolf went back out into the hall and then into the alley. Haversham, have there been any missing persons reports?"

"Not to my knowledge. Leftenant?"

"No, Sir."

"Let's follow this trail. Where does this alley lead?"

"Kensington Garden."

"Where the wolf was found. Leftenant; Haversham: to the garden."

They examined the body of the wolven. Covered in dark brown fur, the wolven was curled up in fetal position and clutching its belly with stained paws. There were no clothes; the wolven was male.

"I've never seen a werewolf, Sir," said Leftenant Potter.

"And you still haven't."

"Sir?"

"A werewolf is a human that takes on a wolfish shape. These have been shot before; that's why I asked Inspector Haversham to issue silver rounds for your weapons. When they are killed, they return to their natural, human, form."

"Yes, and?"

"See here, this one has reverted to its natural form: A wolven, like myself. This wolven was cursed so that under the light of the full moon he would take on human form. No, not a werewolf at all.

"You humans are so convinced that the world revolves around you: it's always a human who turns into a wolf and does evil things. Well, this is a case of the opposite. A perfectly respectable wolven, perhaps a distant cousin of mine, turned into a human and did this evil deed. How tortured he must have felt when he awoke from his moon-induced trance, naked, with blood on his paws."

Firstenaw scraped some of the brown crud off the wolven's claws. He smelled it.

"That's not dried blood on his paws. It's chocolate."

"Chocolate?"

Firstenaw looked at the Leftenant. "You should come to my afternoon lecture at Kings College. You will find it most illuminating."

Firstenaw addressed the class, mostly third- and fourth-year students of Eastern European literature and cultural anthropology. Leftenant Potter and Inspector Haversham were there too; he nodded to them.

"Good morning, gentlemen and ladies. Today we're honored by the presence of officers from London's Police, for reasons that will become clear. Welcome.

"Werewolves frighten most humans, and many of us wolvens, for two principal reasons. First is the immediate threat to our safety: werewolves are fierce atavistic creatures of great strength and reduced mental capacity; hungry and easily angered. Second is the threat to our own identity, the fear that we should suffer the same affliction and become a werewolf, to be cursed by the monthly transformation.

"Of interest to us is how this transformation occurs. Charles Darwin and other naturalists demonstrated that individual parts of the body do not disappear during the evolution of species. They showed that new forms do not appear; Nature adapts existing forms for new purposes. This is demonstrated in the remarkable similarities between all the mammals.

"Robert Hooke, over two hundred years ago and just down the road in Oxford--though some of us might say that was the same thing--invented the microscope, with which we are able to discover and probe the inner workings of the cell. This research has shown the basic connectedness of all living things, as Darwin further confirmed with his work on evolution of morphology.

"The skeletal structure of a human has all the same parts as that of a wolf ... mostly the same parts. The male wolf has a baculum, which human men do not; I suspect this is the actual source of the legend that Eve was made from Adam's rib. If you count the ribs of humans, they have the same number on both sides and male and female. The major bones are the same: the same number of bones in the spinal cord, the same arrangement of bones in the arms and legs. For those of you who are curious, we wolvens, whom you might call anthropomorphic wolves, have the same basic skeletal structure as wolves and humans.

"As an aside, we find the word anthropomorphic somewhat quaint and self-centered. It graces our ears about as well as I would imagine you humans would welcome being called lykomorphic.

"That said, our physical similarity extends to the teeth: Wolvens and humans have the same kinds of teeth, just in different numbers. If you're a human sitting next to a wolven, you're both in luck: Please take turns and bare your teeth at one another--strictly for scientific purposes, of course. Count the teeth you can see; for our purposes there's no need to go beyond the front ones. Humans have four incisors top and bottom; with the quaintly named canine teeth on either side. Wolvens have six incisors between the canines.

"Now let us return to the subject of this lecture the werewolf. How many incisors do you think a werewolf has? Six? Where do the two new teeth come from during the transformation? Where do they go? As it turns out, werewolves have four, not six, incisors. No one ever finds loose pairs of lost werewolf teeth. Bite marks from true werewolves support this claim.

"One thing we do know is that certain aspects of the underlying biology are preserved. For instance, we all love chocolate, but for us wolvens it is poison. Interestingly, of all the poisons identified for true werewolves, chocolate is not among them. Otherwise, it would be a simple matter to just leave a box of cocoa lying around where a suspected werewolf could get to it. Not sugary milk-chocolate, but concentrated, baker's chocolate, which you humans find bitter. But this is not done. Why? Because chocolate is not poisonous to werewolves.

"The greatest mystery to us is the appearance of the werewolf's distinct tail, and its eventual disappearance as the werewolf reverses its transformation. We know from Lavoisier's work almost a hundred years ago that matter cannot be created or destroyed, and from experience that a werewolf weighs about the same in its human and wolflike forms. Unfortunately we have never caught a werewolf in the instant of its forward transformation to determine the progress of growing its tail, nor have we succeeded in investigating the mystery of the reversal. We don't know how this happens; perhaps one of you will make the key discovery that will solve this riddle.

"But this knowledge helps us solve today' riddle, that of this morning's double murder."

Some gasps could be heard in the lecture hall.

"No doubt you have heard rumors that a werewolf did violence to a baker not far from here, but I will demonstrate that it was not a werewolf at all: not a human taking on wolf form. Based on the evidence gathered at the scene of the crime and where the perpetrator was found, I conclude that this was something else. ..."

The wolven took his leave from family and friends, his bones aching from the evening's chill. He retired to his bedchambers but could not sleep. He felt nauseous, headachey, and sore as though from Influenza, though worse than he could ever recall.

The aching soreness intensified and spread throughout his body; tendons and muscles stretched painfully as bones rearranged themselves. His jaw hurt as his face flattened; he tried to howl his pain away, but what came out was a guttural, almost human sort of bark. His mind fogged; he stood and tore off his bedclothes. He wandered the halls of ... was this his home? A servant saw him, dropped a pile of something, and ran off. Scared, bewildered, needing to be outside, he followed his instincts and found himself in damp darkness. A cool, moist breeze chilled him. He heard screams behind him, so he ran away from them, down the way past glowing things that let him see cobbled pavement and stone ... flat stone everywhere.

An enticing odor tickled his nose. His stomach growled and he followed the bittersweet smell to an opening with light, warmth inside, past things, a man doing something, clutching a stick, now waving it threateningly, and behind the man lots of tasty round things, the source of the smell. He snarled and approached the things, glistening brown-black on lighter brown, so delicious. The man made noises; he felt it should mean something but there was nothing; just the allure of the food. He grabbed a round thing and bit into it, its brown sweet tartness the most delicious thing he could imagine. He bit and chewed and found bliss.

The man kept making noise and tried to take his food away; he lashed out and attacked the man, bit him ... soon the man moved no more. He ate the food, wanted more of the delicious brown. He followed his nose. In a smaller place there was a thing the size of his paws. He peeled its skin off, crinkly and white, and inside were clumps of the delicious goodness. He sat and ate and ate some more. His chest pounded, he felt bliss, such tasty bliss ... and soon his stomach was full. But the food was so alluring, he continued to eat, mashing the clumps in his teeth to a sweet paste, swallowing, eating more and more till there was no more.

Heart racing, he retraced his steps back into the darkness, followed the cobbles and globes of light, and was in an open area with things he recognized: trees and grass. His stomach ached and his chest pounded so quickly. His back hurt on either side. He twitched all over and searched for a place to hide. Here, a low place, a sort of cave: good, he would be safe. His insides ached and spasmed; the bliss he had felt earlier while eating was fading; but the pounding in his chest continued faster and faster. Then silence startled him.

The thumping that had always been there in his chest, and that just now had been so fast and so hard, stopped. He looked out of his cave and saw black sky dotted with points of light and a bright white disk. Then all was darkness.