They spent the rest of the afternoon asking around, though "asking around" mostly meant being aggressively complimented by strangers who seemed constitutionally incapable of discussing anything unpleasant. Nobody could describe the werewolf with any real detail. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by it, either.
"It howls," one man offered helpfully, still smiling. "At night. Very loud. Wonderful, really. It gives the whole town something to talk about!"
"Does it hurt anyone?" Xavier asked.
"Oh, sometimes! But everything works out fine in the end, doesn't it?" The man patted Xavier's shoulder with unsettling warmth and wandered off, humming.
They tried a dozen more people after that, and got a dozen more variations on the same non-answer. A seamstress insisted the werewolf was "practically a local celebrity at this point." A pair of children playing in the street informed them, with total confidence and zero corroborating detail, that it was "as big as a house and made entirely of teeth." An elderly woman selling flowers simply patted Xavier's cheek and told him he had lovely eyes, which was not useful information by any measure.
"Nobody's actually seen it do anything," Bruce said, low, once they'd put some distance between themselves and the flower stall. "Not one description that matches another. Not one person who's actually been hurt, or knows someone who has."
"Because there's nothing to see," Xavier said. "I'm more sure of it by the hour. Whatever's happening after dark in this town, it isn't a werewolf. It's something the town's decided to call a werewolf because the truth's either scarier or stranger than that, and everyone here's too busy grinning to think too hard about which."
By nightfall, they'd learned exactly nothing useful and eaten entirely too many free pastries pressed on them by grinning strangers. They set up a quiet watch near the town square instead, waiting for whatever passed for a werewolf around here to make an appearance.
The square emptied out slowly as the sun dropped, townsfolk drifting home still smiling, still humming, windows going dark one by one until only the three of them remained, tucked into the shadow of the well at the square's center.
"This town is going to give me nightmares regardless of whether anything shows up," Stephan said, breaking a long stretch of silence. "I keep thinking about the orange juice."
"Don't," Bruce said immediately. "We agreed not to talk about the orange juice."
"I'm just saying, it really did taste-"
"Stephan."
"Fine, fine."
They didn't have to wait long after that.
A shape came tearing down the main street around midnight, moving on all fours, snarling, hair wild and matted, clothes torn to shreds. Stephan was on his feet immediately, Ember half-drawn, and Xavier had a spear of ice already forming in his palm before the shape lurched into the moonlight properly and revealed itself to be, unmistakably, a middle-aged woman in a nightgown, cackling hysterically as she bounded down the street on hands and feet.
"...That's not a werewolf," Bruce said.
"That is very much a human woman," Xavier agreed, lowering his hand slowly.
"Best night of my life!" the woman howled, and vaulted clean over a market stall with an agility that seemed, honestly, a little insulting given how normal she'd looked that morning selling turnips.
The three of them stood frozen for a long moment, processing.
"So there's no werewolf?" Stephan said.
"There was never a werewolf," Xavier corrected. "There's just... this. Whatever this is. Whatever this cheery hell is."
They gave chase more out of confusion than any real plan. The woman ducked and weaved through the town's narrow streets with an eerie, boneless agility, laughing the entire way, occasionally pausing just long enough to wave cheerfully at them over her shoulder before sprinting off again. She cleared a low fence without breaking stride. She scampered across a rooftop for a stretch that made absolutely no physical sense given she was, by all appearances, still just a middle-aged turnip vendor.
"How is she doing that?" Stephan gasped, vaulting a barrel considerably less gracefully.
"I don't think 'she' is the operative word anymore," Xavier called back, ice already crackling faintly along his knuckles in case this turned into something worse than a chase. "Something's wearing her like a coat and having the time of its life."
They lost her entirely around a corner near the town well, the sound of her laughter fading into the general, ambient hum of everyone else's laughter until it was impossible to tell which shriek of delight belonged to their quarry and which belonged to some perfectly ordinary, perfectly cursed townsperson enjoying a midnight stroll. Winded and thoroughly rattled, they ducked into a narrow alley between two buildings to catch their breath.
And found they weren't alone.
A thin man in mayoral robes several sizes too large stood pressed against the far wall, looking at them with the wide, hunted eyes of someone who had not smiled in a very long time, which, in this town, made him possibly the only sane person Xavier had met all day. His robes were rumpled like he'd slept in them, or hadn't slept at all, and his hands trembled faintly where he clutched a lantern turned down low, as if even that small light felt like too much of a risk.
Xavier raised both hands slowly, ice fading from his knuckles. "We're not here to hurt you."
"I know... I think. I know who you are. I've been watching the roads for someone like you for longer than I'd like to admit." The man's eyes darted between the three of them, lingering longest on Xavier, like he was trying to decide if he could actually trust the mercy in a stranger's face. "You're the outsiders," he whispered urgently. "The ones asking about the werewolf."
"...Yes?" Xavier said.
"Good. Good, good, good." The man glanced past them, up and down the alley, before continuing in a hushed, trembling voice. "You need to understand. There is no werewolf. There never was. What's happening in this town is so much worse, and it's entirely, completely my fault."