The officers had fallen back, leaving a wide radius around Junior Detective Charlie Cane. He was doubled over, clutching his sides as a spasm shook his body. Something was terribly strange about his arms. They looked dark, and the texture was all wrong; then his leg buckled and he dropped to the ground. His head shot up, and I saw his face in the unforgiving clarity of the moonlight—only it was not the same gentle face I had come to recognize over the past two days on the streets of New Fiddleham. It was not the face of a man at all, but the feral grimace of a beast.
I stood, transfixed, as my heart and stomach raced each other into my throat. Charlie’s legs looked broken, bending in places a man should not have joints, but still he rose, pivoted, and launched himself into a run down the cobbled streets away from the stunned officers. He stumbled and caught his fall with his hands, throwing himself back into his run so quickly he scarcely broke stride. He tore off his uniform shirt, and tossed it behind him, revealing stiff, dark hair now covering his torso. His whole body shook with another spasm, and again he stumbled, and again, until he was on his hands nearly as much as his feet. As he ran, those polished shoes clattered, empty, to the pavement behind him, the moon highlighting the sharp point of the toe. By the time the figure that had been Charlie Cane vanished into the billowing steam of an alleyway, it was not a fleeing man, but the form of a massive hound, bounding away on four great paws.
The square was tensed in silence as the sound of the beast’s footfalls receded into the distance. First to break the stunned hush was the commissioner. The flush of anger had left his cheeks completely, and he was now as pale as a ghost, but he puffed himself up nonetheless and yelled, “Stop him!” His voice cracked just a little and he coughed. Then he found his voice and bellowed, “After him! All of you! I want that monster dead!”
The crowd of uniforms hummed with building energy for a moment, like a pot about to boil, and then burst suddenly into frantic motion. Jackaby snapped out of his own surprise at last and hollered, “Wait! Stop!” It had all happened so quickly, I couldn’t tell if he was trying to keep the police from rushing into disaster, or if he was screaming after the creature . . . after Charlie Cane.
I tried to move toward Jackaby, fighting not to be carried away by the tide of uniforms. I had to plant my feet firmly on the brickwork just to keep from losing ground as they sped after Charlie. The books were nearly knocked from my hands, but I hugged them to my chest as I weathered the storm. I glanced around, lost in the human current. The commissioner and Marlowe had vanished into the thick of the surge, but Jackaby was suddenly off his pedestal and beside me.
“Quickly, Miss Rook!” he hollered, and pulled me into motion, the two of us sweeping along in the tail of the swarm.
“But . . . that was Officer Cane!” I stammered.
“Yes, and it is essential we catch up with him before this mob does. Everything’s gone all wrong. If we don’t move quickly, there will most certainly be more deaths tonight.”
I swallowed hard. If people were going to die, then reaching the beast before the police would simply increase the likelihood those deaths would be ours.
At the end of the street, the police force began to split. Someone up ahead was barking orders, urging the men to spread out the search and cover as much ground as possible. The pressing crowd of policemen thinned as I followed Jackaby, darting to the left and right down narrow New Fiddleham streets. A yell issued from an alleyway in the opposite direction, followed by the clattering of boxes and breaking wood. Two of the officers ahead of us turned and ran back toward the commotion, but Jackaby pressed forward. His hands moved about him while he ran, feeling the air as if tracing invisible lines of smoke.
“Do you see something?” I panted.
“He’s been this way. It’s fading too quickly—we need to hurry.”
The chase took us out of the city center and toward the outskirts of town. We ran along the backside of several factory yards before the shrubs and bushes gave way to a grassy stretch spotted with birch trees. Away from the icy brickwork, my feet found purchase more reliably, and it was a little easier to keep pace with Jackaby as we cut across the sod. I even began to spot the telltale signs of the creature now. The moonlight sparkled on the tall, icy grasses, except in one long, dark path, cut like a scar down the center of the field. Something had carved a quick route through here, leaving a wake of bent and trampled plant life. As we hopped over a mud puddle, I spotted a giant, smeary paw print. I didn’t need to be a seer or a master sleuth to know we were headed in the right direction.
The tracks took us along the edge of a stream, its banks lined with ice and slush, and ahead I spotted the familiar sight of Hammett’s bridge. I hardly recognized it at first, though it had been scarcely a day since we had met Hatun on this very spot. How different it had seemed then, with the funny little woman hanging her fishing line over the ice in full daylight. Now, with water churning past chunks of ice and foreboding shadows bleeding into more ominous darkness, the old woman’s superstitions about monsters lurking under the bridge seemed suddenly less benign.
I pushed the idea away as we hit the bridge, not wanting idle thoughts of trolls gnawing on my bones to get in the way of my genuine, reasonable fear of being ripped to shreds by—I allowed myself to think it—a werewolf. I noticed that even in his haste, Jackaby still absently pitched a couple of copper coins over the side of the bridge as he crossed it. I guess he, like Hatun with her token fishing efforts, felt it never hurt to cover all your bases. An idea flashed through my head.
“Jackaby, wait!” I skidded around the corner at the end of the bridge and stumbled down to the water’s edge, to the spot where I had first seen Hatun. I laid the old books to the side and peered into the shadows under the bridge. It was pitch-black beneath the little arch, but my probing fingers quickly found what I was looking for. For the briefest of moments I could have sworn I felt clammy fingers on my wrist as I pulled it free. “I just have to borrow this for a bit,” I assured the darkness. “I swear I’ll bring you a whole halibut if we make it through this alive.” My hand slid free, holding tight to the pole.
Jackaby skidded down the slope to stop beside me. “What on earth are you doing?” he demanded. “We don’t have time to go fishing!”
I laid Hatun’s fishing pole on the ground and fumbled with the knot, resolving after a few failed attempts to simply snap the line. I held out the pear-shaped metal sinker.
Jackaby looked unimpressed. He looked, in fact, only more annoyed.
“It’s lead!” I exclaimed.
My employer’s expression did not improve. “What are we supposed to do with a thimble’s worth of lead?” he asked, his eyes darting back up to the path above us. “That little bauble could hardly coat his big toe! Tell me, Miss Rook.” He looked back at me. “If you could outrun the fastest man in the world, how significantly do you think three or four grams of lead around your big toe would slow you down?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “But you never said how you intended to use it! There are lots of ways people use lead.”