The power came back suddenly. Susheela blinked in the light. The ceiling fans began their laborious circumlocutions, and the still air began to move. Her son laughed, jumped off the bed and went to find his father, holding out his little arms like airplane wings.

Late that evening, after the servant-boy had finished doing the dinner dishes and been dismissed, Susheela stood alone in the kitchen, finishing the day's chores. She could hear the low sound of the TV from the drawing room. In the small bedroom that her son shared with his grandmother, her mother-in-law was singing some old, half-remembered lullaby. In the storeroom, above the bins and sacks of grain, the gods gazed at Susheela from the altar-a brass statuette of Vishnu the Creator, reclining under the sheltering hood of the great serpent Ananth; Krishna with his flute, a meditative Buddha and a print of Lord Shiva. She cleaned the altar of dead flowers, lit an incense stick and watched the smoke curl up to the rough, white-washed ceiling.

One more task remained. She filled a steel bowl with cold milk, put the rest of the milk into the small fridge, and took the flashlight. She had watched her mother do this every night for years in their home in Ujjain. Now, with her mother gone, the ritual gave her comfort. She went into the silent, moonlit courtyard behind the house, staying close to the wall. She walked up to the harsingar tree, which stood green and proud amidst the detritus of dead bushes and thorny shrubs. It always bloomed out of season, as though it obeyed the laws of some other universe. Under the tree lay a great stone, upon which she set down the steel bowl of milk. She turned off the flashlight. Would the snakes come, as her mother had always said? Usually she'd leave the milk on the stone and go back into the house, but today she wanted to wait.

The fragrance of the harsingar flowers filled her nostrils. The little tree was doing well. It had appeared last winter, the day before the festival of Diwali. She had just gotten back from the market with her mother-in-law. The servant boy did not know who had come into the compound in the afternoon and planted the tree. Susheela's mother-in-law said it must be the gardener who worked in the park-he had been trying to hire himself out in the neighborhood. Or maybe it was the lady from the Big House, the wife of Susheela's husband's supervisor, who had the huge ornamental garden that her mother-in-law had frequently admired. That is what Susheela wanted to believe.

The tree itself was innocent of its origins. She had loved it from the first moment she had seen it. Now it stood partly shading the great stone, beautiful in the moonlight. She shut her eyes and breathed in its scent. There was a sound-a soft, dry, sliding sound, scales against stone. When she opened her eyes the gleam of moonlight on the steel bowl vanished abruptly, and she thought she could see dark, coiled shapes against the stone. Let there be rain tomorrow, she said in her mind. She could not name the nebulous other thing she desired.

Very carefully she gathered half a handful of flowers from the tree and walked back to the house without turning on the flashlight. Inside she put the flowers on the altar in the kitchen. I will put some in my hair tomorrow, she told herself, switching off the light.

That night Susheela fell asleep thinking of her mother's mother, the grandmother she had never known except from old family pictures. This grandmother had brought up six children in a huge, old-fashioned house in the ancestral village. One day the river had broken its banks and filled the emptiness of the big house. The family took refuge on the rooftop terrace. The eldest son was missing-he had been visiting a neighbor. Grandfather had injured his leg so Grandmother went in the little boat, steering with a long pole, in the muddy water full of debris, pots and pans and bewildered river fish. She found her son, delivered him, then went to the aid of her neighbors. She rescued a woman stuck in a tree, several other people clinging to hut-roofs, and a variety of animals, including dogs, goat-kids and muskrats. In the evening she cooked dinner on the rooftop over a coal fire, quite calmly, as though nothing unusual had happened. As dark fell, she told her eldest son, who was still awake, that she had to go do one more thing. She looked on the sleeping, exhausted family one more time, got into the boat, pushed off with the pole, and disappeared over the murky water. She was never seen again.

Stories gathered around the legendary grandmother like moths about a candle flame. She had given herself to the river, people said, so the floods would not come again. Susheela's mother, the youngest child, had been a teenager at the time of the disappearance; she remembered it well, years later, but she did not like to talk about it. Her face would fall slack with the memory. Then Susheela would gaze into her mother's eyes and think she saw what her mother saw: the flood, the dark water, the sole woman in the boat, steering herself away between the drowned houses, under a silent sky.

Her mother was a haunted woman, she knew. Soon after Susheela's marriage she had heard that her mother had gone to visit her ancestral home. At this, Susheela had felt a vague presentiment of disaster. But newly married, and pregnant, she had not been permitted to leave. A month later, Susheela had heard from her brother that their mother had walked to the river one morning, with flowers for worship, and that later that day, her clothes had been found floating some distance down-river from the house. Not long after that, Susheela had received a letter from her mother written a few days before the tragedy; the address on the envelope was nearly illegible and the ink was blurry and unreadable, as though the pages had been left out in the rain. Susheela had felt very clearly then that some intangible thing had passed from her mother's life into her own. For nearly five years it had been a heavy, mysterious presence within her.

She had seen that great river once, as a child. Now it came into her dreams, broad, serpentine, flowing between fragile cities, open fields and wilderness. She dreamed of floods, earthquakes, buildings tottering, the earth heaving, throwing off its old coverings, revealing roots, rocks, darkness. Twice she woke, and lay in the dark, trembling, her eyes wide open, listening to her husband breathe beside her. I must go, she thought, even if it is death that calls me.

Morning filled the house with a pale gray light; a cool breeze came in from the open windows, smelling of dust and anticipation. Susheela, breathless and light-headed, moved from room to room, distractedly applying the dust-cloth. In the kitchen she picked up a few of the harsingar flowers from the altar, hesitated, then put them down the front of her blouse for the fragrance. She did not have the patience to make a flower chain to weave in her hair. When her mother-in-law came into the kitchen Susheela was already rolling paratha dough for breakfast. She fed the family; she herself had no appetite. Her husband pushed away his empty plate with a sigh and unfolded the Sunday newspaper.

Susheela went to the front window in the drawing-room and perched on the cold sill. An army of storm-clouds was poised in the sky, and the breeze rattled the dry leaves on the trees. The raindrops fell, slowly at first, making pockmarks in the dust of the long summer; but in only a few minutes the dust became liquid mud, and the roadside ditches became torrents, and an aroma rose from the earth like a moist, cool breath of relief. All sounds were lost in the music of the rain. Neighbors gathered at their doorways, smiling, watching indulgently as children ran out of the houses and danced in the flooded, sparkling street. Then the clouds rumbled and lightning jagged across the sky. Parents called out to their children. Susheela, watching the rain, tried to decipher what message, if any, lay in its watery speech; what did it sing, as it drummed on the flat rooftops and gurgled in the ditches? She could not bear the thought that after all her waiting it would have nothing to say to her. Listening, she did not at first notice that Kishore was missing.

He'd been sulking; she had not let him go out with the neighborhood children. He must have slipped away while she sat dreaming on the sill. She raised an alarm, feeling her knees beginning to shake. Her husband set down his cup, spilling tea, grabbed an umbrella and went into the storm.

But Susheela knew just where he would be, in the park that sloped down to the lake, their favorite walk. She gathered her sari about her ankles and went into the blinding rain. Her shoes were light and flimsy, they soon filled with muddy water, but she stumbled on. On this day of all days, to lose him like this!

The lake was a blur; the rain fell like thick needles. She looked fearfully around, shading her eyes from the rain. There he was-huddled by one of the neem trees that grew on the lake's edge. He was too heavy to pick up, he bent his head against the rain and sobbed wordlessly, but he let her set him on his feet. She thought she felt or heard something from the direction of the lake, but when she looked back, there was nothing.

She held Kishore to her in a tight grip, half-sobbing in her relief, babbling words of reassurance as she walked him back through the mud and rain to the house. She heard her husband call, saw him running up to them. Kishore looked up at her through a curtain of rain, and she thought she saw wonder in his face, then fear. He left her side and ran to his father, crying. Her mother-in-law was already at the front door with towels, scolding in her relief. Susheela stepped forward to follow her husband and son, anxious to reassure her little boy; what could make him look at her like that? But something made her hesitate on the top step. The rain streamed down her face, running in rivulets down her neck, between her breasts. Her bun had come undone and her hair lay wetly against her neck. Her sari was plastered to her skin. She itched all over. She saw now that there was a faint silvering all along her forearm, spreading rapidly over her skin. A tremor went through her.

She felt it now like a gravitational pull, as if whatever thread bound her to the lake was at last drawing her in. She turned, stumbled down the steps and began to run through the downpour. Behind her she heard her husband cry out her name, but her steps did not falter. Splashing through the water on the street and in the park, she stood at last, panting, on the lake's edge.

She had lost her shoes on the way and the stone paving felt slippery under her bare feet. There was only the sound of rain, sparkling on the lake's surface, drumming on the earth. Susheela put one foot into the water. A great shudder of desire went through her. She stepped into the lake, slipping a little on the stones. Mud squelched between her toes. The water rose to envelop her-it embraced her hips, her chest, her neck. As the water closed over her head she felt the change, like an electric current through her.

Her first feeling was that of sheer terror, as though something alien had invaded her mind and body. She thrashed about, rearing out of the water and falling back again with a splash, trying to see what or who was holding her arms to her sides, drowning her, but the rain fell in great curtains, obscuring everything. A spasm shook her from head to foot; as she lost consciousness she felt warm currents coursing painlessly through her, stretching and squeezing, shaping and molding, as though she were a lump of clay in a potter's wheel.

When she came to, she found herself afloat in the water, conscious only of a great need to fill her lungs with air. She struggled to free herself of her clothes, turning and twisting until she swam out from the limp, wet folds of her sari, raised her head into the rain, and breathed. She turned slowly, and saw that her new was long, limbless and lithe. Her senses registered a thousand unfamiliar impressions: the agitation of water against her scales; the completely alien sensation of being able to feel, through her skin, tiny reverberations that hinted of life swarming all about her; and the presence, inside her mouth, of a strange tongue, forked and unbearably sensitive. An exultation rose inside her; she became aware of other presences around her, long, sinuous shapes, ancient, powerful, familiar. Their bodies were dark, their heads narrow, their eyes black, beckoning, alive. She turned smoothly in the water and saw that her underbelly was pale, like theirs. Now they were leading her, diving underwater. She took a breath of air and followed them into the depths of the lake, brushing against stone; she sensed she was swimming through the passageways of some underwater structure. Memories that were not her own, yet belonged to her in some mysterious way, came crowding into her mind: warm, narrow spaces in the earth, fluid darkness, the coilings of other bodies beside her. The earth, the womb, shutting out the wide emptiness of the world.

The snakes swam around her, guiding her with gentle nudges. In the dark water they were like slender, graceful ghosts. One touched his head with hers, wheeling around her in an intricate spiral. They went up to the surface together to breathe, and taste the rain. The water was sensuous against her skin, and when the cobra leaned his head close to hers, with bright, ardent, questioning eyes, she felt a small explosion in her chest, as though a dam had burst, letting out all the needs and desires of her barren other life. That life, which she could scarcely remember now, seemed a distant dream; what was real was the movement of scale against scale, coil against coil, the flaring of her partner's majestic hood as they danced, braided about each other in the ancient, intimate rite of procreation. When at last they moved gracefully apart, to lie companionably in the water, spent but not exhausted, a picture came rudely into her mind, an alien intrusion: a small, hot, dusty room, a man asleep, his back to her, unreachable as a distant mountain. It was incomprehensible and disturbing, and she dismissed it sharply. The other snakes were coming up below her, swimming to the surface for air, and she joined them, moving playfully among them, dodging the raindrops. A feeling came to her then that she must have done this before, that this was all familiar, the snakes, the rain, the coupling in the water. That couldn't be-but the seed of a realization took root in her mind, and slowly flowered into certainty: that her mother had once done this. That this was how Susheela had been conceived . . . It was too enormous a discovery to comprehend all at once. When the snakes dived again, calling to her in their wordless tongue, she followed them into the submerged ruins. She understood it was a place of pilgrimage, sacred to her companions, and that they remembered its history in fragments that had been passed on from generation to generation. The pictures that arose in her mind hinted of calamitous events, heroic battles and long, golden periods of peace and prosperity. They were making her a gift of their story, she realized. She had no stories of her own but the memory of her mother and grandmother, which they accepted, she thought, with generosity.

But now the rain was slowing. She swam up to the surface and saw the sun emerge from behind the clouds. The other snakes swam sedately away from her, their farewells echoing in her mind. Until next time, she thought they said, whenever that was, and she had so many questions, so much to ask. But they were already gone, gliding over the ancient paving at the edge of the lake, disappearing into cracks and crevices in the old ruin, and into bushes, tree-holes, and other secret places. All that remained of their presence were wide ripples spreading and crisscrossing on the lake's sunlit surface. Why had they left her alone? Rainwater dripped off the neem trees; in their shade a small emerald-green frog perched on a lotus leaf. She drifted in the middle of the lake, feeling bewildered, abandoned. Then she remembered as if from long ago, the small, heavy weight of her son on her lap, the way he tilted his chin up to her to ask for a story, his upper lip rimmed with milk. She turned and began to swim back to the lake's edge, feeling herself grow heavier and heavier, until she could feel her arms again, and her naked, muddy skin, from which the scales were already fading. Her felt strange, awkward; at last she stood in knee-deep water, looking at her brown arms glowing in the sunshine, her mud-streaked breasts, the shiny stretchmarks on the slight, taut curve of her belly. The world swam into focus; she felt her head clear a little. She passed her tongue over her lips, and felt the slight notch on its tip that had not been there before. Behind her, under the shimmering green surface of the lake, lay the promise of that other world. She looked around and saw that her sari, blouse and undergarments were floating near her, amidst a sprinkling of harsingar flowers.

For a while she stood quietly in the water, feeling dazed and new, thinking, but not in words, or words she had known before. She knew her mother had stood thus once, filled with excitement and confusion, feeling the new life she had made stir inside her. At last she could stand inside her mother's skin and sense what she had gone through-the dilemma of choosing between two worlds, the prison she had made for herself, of love and guilt. Her brother's wistfulness; like her own son, he had been fathered by a man; he would always hear the call of his mother's kind, but could never transform, never know what it was like to turn underwater in an exquisite dance, to taste the world through his skin, to be life-giver, rain-bringer, death-lord. This new child she carried would be like her, an entity capable of existing in two worlds.

Two worlds . . . Pictures rose in her mind: the warm yellow house, the harsingar tree. She remembered the rhythms of the day, the slow course of the white cow Muniya's morning journey from house to house, the taste of fresh milk. And Kishore . . . No, she was not quite ready to leave it all behind. It was not yet time for that. She would come back to the lake again tomorrow, to begin to learn how to parcel her life between water and earth, fire and shadow, until it was time for the final leave-taking. Slowly, dazedly, she gathered her clothes and emerged from the lake. She went behind a bush and began to squeeze the water from her sari.

Her skin prickled; she sensed the gardener's presence a moment before he came around the bush. His eyes were filled with wonder and desire-he came slowly towards her as though she were a dream that would dissolve with the first stumble. She watched him curiously, without fear, still in the twilight state between her two worlds. He put trembling hands on her bare shoulders. She let him draw her close so that her breasts flattened against his wet shirt; she felt the angular roughness of his chin against her cheek. "Lady," he said, and she tasted his skin, his smell with her tongue, and remembered, with the suddenness of a thunderclap, the old fear and confusion. A bitter taste filled her mouth; as he pulled her down into the wet grass she reached up blindly and bit the side of his neck.

She watched him thrashing about on the ground. After he had stopped she spat and rubbed her face with her hands to try to clear her head. Then she gathered her clothes, squeezed and shook the water from them and dressed. Her hair was wet and tangled, but she managed to comb it back with her fingers and tie it into a bun. She looked once more at the gardener's still body, feeling the beginnings of a vague uneasiness.

She began to walk slowly home, looking about her like a child, letting the sights, sounds and smells wash over her: men on bicycles, ringing their bells, children splashing into rainwater puddles, shouting in their clear, shrill voices, cars all shiny and wet, honking, lurching as they negotiated potholes, the smell of wet earth and the vapors already rising from the moist ground, the drip of rainwater from the tree branches above her. Slowly it came back to her. The way home. It was familiar and strange all at once.

And there, meandering down the street was Muniya the cow. She caught up with the great white bovine matriarch and stretched her arm toward her, but the cow shied away from her as though stung, and began to edge away, fear in her dark eyes. Dismayed, Susheela stood there helplessly, tears welling up in her eyes. She made a small, experimental, cajoling sound, thinking of the way Kishore had looked at her last. The cow let out a breath redolent with the odor of grass and carrot ends, and let Susheela come up to her. She shuddered as Susheela stroked her back, but did not move away.

Susheela felt an urgent need now to see her son. Taking leave of Muniya she began to walk rapidly, knowing that passersby were staring at her, with her disheveled hair and sodden clothes. She had to win back her little boy, to take that look from his eyes. She would do it, she thought in the wordless tongue, with patience, with stories, but-it came back to her now with horrifying clarity: the of the gardener in the wet grass-how to protect her family from what she had become? What would she tell them? She couldn't even begin to articulate it, she realized in terror. People on the street were talking, laughing, and they might as well have been speaking some incomprehensible foreign language, because their speech had no meaning for her.

Then, slowly, she remembered the words, and understood them. It was Naag Panchami, the Festival of Snakes, and the monsoons had arrived at last. A car went by, fast, and two glittering arcs of water rose in its wake. There was the house; the shisham trees, their round leaves glistening, the trunks dark with moisture. Through the open front window she could see her husband's profile as he waited, reading his paper, one brown hand on the sunlit sill. A picture came into her mind's eye: that brown hand scooping up earth, making a hollow like a womb for the roots of the harsingar tree, patting the soil in place. She trembled, as though a string had been plucked deep inside her. The door was open. She walked into the house as if for the first time.

GROTESQUE ANGELS.

GWENDOLYN CLARE.

The rain turns the city upside down. In the gutters the water pools and flows, each drop fracturing the surface until the slick streets glitter as if seeded with pavement-bound stars. Low-slung clouds glow orange with light pollution, the night sky lit better than the street below. Not that the street is too dark for her eyes; nothing is ever completely dark in Chicago.

From her rooftop perch, Kelsey waits and watches. The city feels wrong tonight. Something old and hungry lurks in her territory, and the streets moan silently under the unwelcome weight of it. The Old One hides behind the city's glamour-her glamour-and she cannot see it. So she waits, wishing shadows were its only disguise, but the Old One is more clever than that.

Kelsey drops off the roof and lands on a narrow ledge part way down the side of the building, her claws scraping the neo-Gothic limestone facade. She crouches, motionless again, and the rainwater runs over her skin and streams from the tips of her wing-feathers as it might from a statue. The sidewalk below grumbles and sighs to her, unsettled by the Old One's passage. It walked this street not long ago.

A muted wail of sirens cuts through the sounds of the storm and the sidewalk's complaints, and Kelsey's head snaps up to catch the distance and direction. The sound lies ahead of her along the path she has already chosen-the path to track the Old One. It could mean nothing.

It's probably not nothing.

The rain stings her face when she flies, and she squints against it. Her nose detects the reek of bad magic from half a block away, vile and sulfurous. It leads her to a narrow alley wedged between a couple of brick four-floor walk-ups. She circles above, evaluating. Police lights paint the old brick in alternating blue and red, and the alley crawls with cops.

She alights on the fire escape above and watches through the black metal grate. The glamour cloaks her from sight. If they were to stare at her hard enough, they might see a shadow shape crouched in her place, but she knows they won't stare; they will not think to look up at all. Humans have an odd deficiency of awareness for what's above their heads. Perhaps their genetic programming is to blame, their pre-historic ancestors never having encountered airborne predators. An odd quirk of human psychology, Kelsey thinks, but convenient.

Below, the flooded alley looks like a biblical curse, rainwater diluting blood until there seems to be much more than a few liters and it flows like a river. Red streaks the side of one building, the evidence already smeared by the weather. Kelsey does not envy the humans as they splash through the remnants of their rapidly deteriorating crime scene. The corpse is a messy pile of ruined flesh likely to win the award for all-time low point in the detectives' careers. Kelsey certainly has no desire to give it a closer inspection.

She has never seen such exuberant carnage before, and it worries her. The Old One's misbehavior is escalating. Time to report in. Perhaps Duncan will know what to do.

A brick-and-glass monolith on State Street, the Harold Washington Library devours an entire city block in downtown Chicago-an impressive feat of architecture, and also Duncan's daytime resting place. Like most grotesques, Duncan has a penchant for dramatic buildings.

Kelsey finds him on the broad balcony that circles the top floor. She lands beside him, drops down on one knee in a quick obeisance, and straightens. Duncan seems pensive tonight, and the rain slicks his shale-gray skin giving him a polished look. The feathers of his headcrest are the color of olivine-a deep greenish hue that darkens to black when wet.

Staring out over his city, he says, "What news of the Old One?"

Kelsey spits over the rail with savage disgust. "It has begun taking human lives, and messily. The police are investigating already. Problematic."

"Find out what they know. Use it if you can."

"And how am I supposed to do that?"

He turns to look at her, meeting her reluctance with a stern command in his eyes. "How do you think? The Change, of course."

She spits again. "Fantastic."

The first time, she was only a child and she thought she was dying. Her claws shrunk to useless, flat nails; her pale gray skin soured to a disgusting pink shade; her silver crest feathers yellowed like old paper and curled into strings of hair. Worst of all her wings melted away, feathers deliquescing and bones softening like hot wax, and the drops of her flesh vanished before they hit the ground as if the limbs had never existed.

She lived, but sometimes wished she hadn't.

The other grotesques called her "half-breed" and "werehuman." It didn't matter that pure bloods were rare; it didn't matter that few if any of them could claim a heritage untainted by humanity. The Change cursed her alone, and so she grew apart from them.

As she takes to wing, Kelsey's stomach clenches with disgust at the thought of becoming that version of herself she has fought so hard to suppress. Duncan sends her forth to the task as if the Change were a gift and not a reason for shame. He knows what it costs her, but it doesn't matter. Anything and everything in service of the city.

Kelsey wonders: if she is not a true grotesque, why does the city still compel her? Surely her human-self would let her sense of duty slide.

The question will have to wait for tomorrow night. Sunlight pales the cloud cover to the east, dull gray light invading the orange city-glow. She already feels the sluggishness of dawn pulling at her, turning her wing-strokes clumsy. She flies south to the university-her beautiful neo-Gothic university-where her own daytime resting place awaits. She takes her post atop the stone archway of Hull Gate and settles down, camouflaged by the city's glamour to look like an architectural flourish, a gargoyle of the inanimate stone variety.

The city sighs relief as somewhere out there the Old One quiets too. Kelsey's eyelids slip closed.

The storm blew off during the daylight hours, leaving the night cold and newly dry. Kelsey stretches her wings in the fading twilight and launches into the air to begin tracking the groans and shivers of the streets. The Old One has awoken, too, and the city hunkers down to endure the long hours ahead.

Tracking is slow business. The Old One keeps to a particular course for several blocks, then suddenly zigzags as if it knows it's being followed and is trying to shake her. She must stop often to listen for the worst creaks and complaints from the pavement below. Perhaps if she were faster, perhaps if she could see her quarry-but "perhaps" is worth its weight in air.

So she keeps moving.

Up ahead the city wails softly to itself, the sound emanating from a spot too ravaged to send out a louder distress call. Another alley, chosen more hastily than the last kill site. Happenstance, or escalation? If the Old One is escalating, this won't be the only tonight. Kelsey drops onto the edge of a rooftop to survey the damage.

The scene below is a blood splatter analyst's wet dream: the full five liters sprayed in a spectacular starburst that spans the alley and climbs the brick walls on either side. No one is allowed close to the body-or what's left of it-before the photographers finish their work, lest they trample the evidence.

A pair of detectives huddle off to one side, alternately staring and trying not to stare at the bloodbath while they wait for the forensics team to give them the okay. One of the detectives is tall and too narrow at the shoulders for his height, so his trench coat hangs loose on his skinny frame. The other's somewhat shorter, somewhat older, and working on his coffee-and-donuts belly.

Kelsey drops quietly to the ground several yards away from them, landing barefoot on the wailing blacktop. Her clothes will be a problem soon-shorts and a tank top and no shoes in the middle of October-since her grotesque-form doesn't mind the cold. Nothing to be done about it now.

With a deep breath, Kelsey reaches within herself for the closed door, the locked vault, the sealed box-every mental metaphor she used to suppress her blasphemous other half-and she spins the locks, releases the seals, turns the knob and pulls.

The Change snaps through her more swiftly than the first time, the pressure of being bottled up making for a rapid release. She wavers on her too-small human feet with their useless short toes and almost meets the pavement the hard way before her new sense of balance kicks in. The cold starts to seep into her weak human flesh. Time to get this over with.

Twisting a scrap of glamour around herself, Kelsey fashions a fluffy coat and shoes that do nothing to warm her shivering human-form. At least she'll look a little less odd. She lifts the rest of the glamour slowly, sliding into the realm of human awareness as if strolling into view.

The tall detective notices her first and closes the distance in six strides. "Ma'am, I need you to get behind the line. This is a crime scene." He puts a guiding hand on her elbow, though she does not let him pull her away.

"No explosives," she says softly, looking past him at the remains.

He freezes. Then his hand drops from her arm to hang limp at his side. "What did you say?"

"You won't find any traces of explosives," she elaborates. "Just like the last one. Or have there been more?"

Not so subtly he sweeps back his trench coat to rest his hands on his narrow hips, the right one within easy reach of his gun. "If you could come with me, I'll need to ask-"

"No. No police stations, no interrogation rooms. When you're ready to talk, you tell me what you know about the case, and then I'll take care of your problem." She waves a hand in the vague direction of the carnage.

"Look, I don't know who you think you are sweetheart, but this is a homicide investigation."

"You're out of your depth. You need my help. Call me when your ego deflates enough to admit it."

Kelsey tosses a folded scrap of paper between his feet, and his eyes track it. By the time he glances up again, she has wrapped herself in the glamour and faded from view.

After her first Change, she went to Duncan for guidance. Or for penance, or absolution perhaps-she didn't know what she expected from him, but whatever he could give, it had to be a step up from the hollow dread inside her.

She explained to him what had happened, though she doubted he hadn't already heard a secondhand account. Still, he let her speak until she fell quiet, then let the silence stretch for several seconds.

Finally, he answered, "And what would you have me say to this?"

"Well," Kelsey hesitated, knotting her fingers together. "Should I leave the clan?"

Duncan frowned. "I do not know. The city will decide."

She looked away, cautiously persistent. "You could decide."

"If you're looking to me for a way out, for an excuse to run from your duties, you'll not find it here."

"We all know I am an abomination, not fit to serve the city."

Duncan's mouth quirked. "If you truly believed that, you would not need to ask my permission to go."

One on the North Side, one on the South Side. Kelsey decides to wait for the detective's call at an intermediate location, or as close as she can get to one. The Tribune Tower just north of the Loop has a glamour relay atop it and comes with additional benefits, such as five hundred feet of gloriously intricate neo-Gothic limestone facade. She lands on the highest peak of the building, with a pleasant view from above of the eight flying buttresses that circle the uppermost floors.

With architecture like that, the Tribune has its own grotesques, but luckily they're away from their roost for the night. Kelsey needs to tap into the glamour relay, and she doesn't want to be disturbed.

The relay consists of a pentagonal brass box and fifteen feet of antenna, and is one of several stations that spread the glamour through the city like an invisible web. Kelsey pops open a side panel and tinkers with the mechanical innards. The number she gave the detective piggybacks on the glamour network. It probably wouldn't please the Engineer who made the network to know she uses it thus, but he's an important being with more important concerns than Kelsey's personal communications.

When she's done tinkering she crouches, motionless. Kelsey is good at waiting, because she has to be. Finally, the air hisses with an incoming call. She places her palm on the slick brass to finish the connection.

She says, "Yes," not really a question.

A male voice thrums through the air. "This is Detective Novak from Chicago Homicide."

Ah, so tall and narrow has a name. "What can I do for you, Detective Novak?"

"You can tell me who you are and how you knew we wouldn't find any traces," he snaps.

"I knew there wouldn't be traces of explosive because explosives weren't used. And I am the person who's going to stop your killer."

He pauses. "Department policy doesn't endorse vigilantes."

At least he no longer seems to have her on his suspect list. "And how far have your policies gotten you on this case?"

He heaves an audible sigh. When he speaks, his words slur with sleep deprivation. "I've been standing in an empty alley for forty minutes, and I'm nowhere. I thought if I went back to the first scene, maybe I missed something . . . "