The Streets of Vallaki (chapter 4)

The party heads to the West side of town.  They do not find the siblings but they do find a large chapel with a small crowd of people entering as the sun begins to set.  Gilly spies a grave digger and decides to start a conversation.  Grave Keeper Willie is gruff and grumpy.  He talks about how foolish the burgermeister is with his empty beliefs that everything is well.  Gilly hands him some coin and Willie offers to dig her a grave twice as deep as most.

The party eventually heads back to the tavern and meets with some locals.  They invite Lideydri to join their party raising the number of paladins to two.  They speak with wolf hunters, Szoldar and Yevgeni.  One speaks clearly and the other slightly repeats comments.  They talk to two drunk brothers, Nikolai and Karl, who talk of their mother's hatred of Ivanovich.  They ply Victor with booze which quickly goes to his head.  He talks of his wondrous power and his lofty plans but then passes out.  Bjorn takes the boy up to a room.  They talk to a traveler, Rictavio, who tells them he gave Picollo to Mr. Blinsky.  He also talks about a mystic that lives near the Tser Pool.  He suggests that the party visit the fortune teller as that may help them uncover why or how they have come to Barovia.

As the evening wears down the party retire to their rooms.  The girls have individual rooms and the boys share a large chamber.  Bjorn carries Victor into the large chamber.  As the night slowly passes, Gilly wakes up and hears scraping noises.  She thinks it's coming from a sack that Victor had been carrying earlier.  She goes to wake Lideydri but is unable.  She goes to wake the boys.  She picks the lock.  The boys magically all roll natural ones and continue to snore.  Suddenly, something leaps out of the bag and runs out of the room and down the stairs.  Gilly quickly runs back to her room and locks her door.  For the rest of the night the boys room door is wide open.

As the morning arrives Gilly explains what happened overnight.  Victor runs down the stairs and the party follows.  Eventually they corning the foul beast which turns out to be Victor's cat... which is a skeleton.  Victor explains that he loves Spindle and when Spindle passed away, he couldn't bare the loss.  He reanimated the cat.  Spindle is the only thing in Barovia that keeps him from taking his own life.

The party takes off toward the Tser Pool.  They hear howling and are of course surrounded by wolves, one in particular is larger than the others.  After defeating most of the pack, Vannan notices the dire beast is the alpha and is female.  He holds out his stuffed toy and the wolf instantly bows to the ground.  Vannan communicates with the wolf and learns the wolf was under the influence of Strahd but is now free.  Vannan convinces the party to cease their attack and finds he now has a undead dire wolf as a companion, Grimm Tooth.  He has mixed feeling about this.