Need to wrap this one up!
Following the wolf-man meant taking the stairs up to the roof, and Jill didn’t let them rush; she took her time, and kept her snout fairly close to the floor of the stairwell. “If he thinks we can’t track him magically, he’ll waste time covering his normal trail.” Suddenly she recoiled, and started waving a paw in front of her face. “Oh, gross!” she said.
Maddie looked at her. “What kind of smell grosses out a ghulman?” she asked, with real curiosity.
“Essence of Bradford pear,” Jill said promptly. “It’s just so damned cloying. Like drowning in a vat of dessert. And now I won’t be able to smell anything else for a while.”
“He must have known there’d be ghulmen tracking him,” Jack said as the party cleared the door and reached the roof. Up here the school looked considerably more decayed and half-wrecked; half the third floor was caved-in from the elements, which at least meant that it’d be easy enough to get down. The location of the moon in the sky told the party that they’d start running out of night sooner than later. “Couldn’t have been easy to get the stuff.”
“Probably it came from the caravan,” Anton said as he pulled out an almost priceless pair of Old American binoculars. “They reported a bunch of stuff missing — no, no sign of him. Maddie?”
“Hold up for a second.” Maddie was crouched low, with Susan looming above her, which handily blocked most of the light coming from Maddie’s fingertips. “I just need to find a spirit willing to help — there we go!” The light had congealed into a hazy outline of some sort of small woodland creature. It sniffed a few times at the hair-braid strap Maddie showed it, sniffed the air a few times, then started loping across the broken roof. Maddie immediately followed, with the rest of the party no more than a few steps behind her.