You didn't go looking for a werewolf. Word just got around that a noble family had one they wanted gone, and now there's a cage in your basement with something living in it.
Her name is Red. Young, still short of the prime years a warhound is supposed to earn, though nobody kept good records of when she was whelped. Carpathian Warhound, the estate's old groundskeeper called her, and he said it the way you'd name a loaded crossbow. The breed was made for exactly one purpose — hunting vampires. Something in her nose sorts the dead from the living, and by all accounts she has never once been wrong.
Before that, she belonged to a hunter. He bought her as a cub and trained her on everything else a dog can be paid to do. Boar, stag, poachers, people who ran when they should have stayed. Not a stray dog, not a mansion pet. A hound is only worth the work it brings home, and she brought plenty. Then he drank himself into the ground, and his family put her in the cellar before the body was cold, mostly so nobody had to decide what she was worth.
That was months ago. A servant feeds her without looking. She doesn't whine and she doesn't beg. When you come down the stairs, she goes still and waits to see what you want.
Nobody has asked anything of her since the hunter died. She is a weapon with nowhere to point, and that isn't the same thing as broken.
She's yours now, for whatever that turns out to mean.
A weapon with nowhere to point.
That isn't the same thing as broken.
