The Dragon Done It (6 page)

It roots me to the spot, is what I'm trying to say. Always has done. Seeing a body change like that, whether it's alive or dead, is like getting a glimpse of something you're not meant to see. Not that I want to get all sappy about it—it just gets to me, you know?

The thing is, it's not like it's really the body that's doing the changing. It's like the body is
being changed from outside
. Like there's this invisible sculptor picking things up and molding them into something else, rearranging them, whittling them like soft wood and pressing them like warm clay, only it's happening inside as well as outside. But, get this: it's
gentle
. The noise is moderately alarming, no question, but to look at . . . it's like poetry. And whenever I'm privileged enough to witness it, I get to thinking about who that sculptor might be, and where he might be, and what else he might get up to in his spare time . . .

Enough already. The changeover routine got to me a little, that's all you need to know. I stood like a tree while the dead guy in a hat turned into a dead wolf in a hat. When it was over, I snapped myself out of it and went over to examine the remolded corpse.

The first thing I did was check the beast's pulse. The last thing I wanted in my office was a gun-shot werewolf waking up and deciding lunch was served. I held my breath until I was happy the werewolf didn't have any of its own left to hold, then I set about working out what pack it belonged to.

They all belong to a pack, you see. Like a clan—it's a family thing. There are hundreds of packs scattered, mostly across Europe, although there's a big cluster in Siberia too. Each pack has its own badge. The badges are a kind of uniform, but they have a more important function too: without its badge, a werewolf can't change.

Another little-known fact here.

A werewolf needs the full moon to change, sure, but it also needs its badge. Without the badge: no cracking bones, no explosion of fur, no mystical sculptor doing the muzzle-stretch thing. Oh, and while I'm revealing trade secrets, I'll bet you didn't know that a werewolf is not a human who turns into a wolf. It's the other way round. So, when they die, it's different than what most folk expect. The old cliche of the werewolf melting back to human form the instant it's killed is all backwards. If you don't believe me, just remember what happened to the man in the hat when he finally breathed his last red bubble on my office carpet.

So: pack badges. They vary. There's the
Halskettewolfen
pack, for example. They have to put on a gold necklace before they can change (they're closely related to the infamous
Boxenwolfen
, who use special belts). In Italy you have the
Lupo-guanto
with their metal gloves, in England the cravat-wearing
Tyedogs
, in Spain the
Lobolengua
, who can only change their form when they put in these crazy tongue-piercings. That's just grotesque, if you ask me.

I set to work trying to identify the wolf on my floor.

The words the man had spoken before he died had sounded German, and even through the carpet I knew I'd heard an eastern Bavarian accent. Which narrowed it down to three: my visitor was either a
Ringhund
, a
Glasaugewolf
or a
Knopfwolf
. I checked: there were no rings on any of the beast's paws and both its eyes looked natural enough.
Knopfwolf
, then.

I checked every button on that damned beast—trenchcoat, cuffs and, yes, even its fly—and every single one came up blank. Not a
Knopfwolf
then.

I sat back, careful to avoid the red stain on the floor, and scratched my head. Then I had an idea.

I took the hat off the dead wolf's head, looked inside the lining and saw the official seal of a werewolf pack I'd never heard of in my life: the
Helmwolf Bruderschaft
.

I've had many strange visitors come out of the rain and into my office, but never a werewolf in a hat.

I took time out then to clear up the mess the shooter had made of my coffee-machine. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. The glass jug was history but the rest of the workings looked in good shape. The coffee had stripped the paint where it splattered up the wall, but I'd never really liked that wall in the first place. And at least now it looked like the other walls. Some folk call my office shabby; me, I call it my office.

"You'll be okay, buddy," I whispered to the coffee-machine as I set it straight on the filing cabinet again. "New jug, fresh grounds, you'll be right as rain in no time."

It burped wearily and I turned my attention back to the dead werewolf.

"Okay, buddy," I said to the corpse. "Some questions. One. What brought you through my door? Two. Who shot you and why? Three.
Hilfe
I understand—that means
help
, but what did you want to knock? Four. Why have I never heard of the
Helmwolfen
?"

In truth, I was feeling rattled. I'd thought I knew everything there was to know about werewolves. Call it pride if you like—I just call it knowing my trade. Not knowing about the
Helmwolfen
bugged me even more than having a corpse on my floor so, even though I knew I should be calling the cops, I did the next best thing: I started looking through the Big Dictionary.

All the books on my shelf are for show except one: the Big Dictionary.
Naked Singularities and Their Application to the Law
I know by heart and
Self-Defense in Dimensionally Unstable Environments
is just for beginners. You'll occasionally catch me leafing through
What to Look for in a Femme Fatale
but, if I'm honest, that's only for the pictures. But the Big Dictionary . . . well, it's my Bible.

I cracked the spine backwards until the cover read
V to X
, then turned it to
W
. All the werewolf packs were listed alphabetically but, surprise surprise, no mention of the
Helmfwolfen
. The list went straight from
Hatchet-wolf
to
Hosenhund
without taking a breath.

I closed the book and cracked the spine again until it was an atlas. A quick scan of Bavaria gave me no clues, so I closed and cracked it a third time until it was a history of shapeshifters. Still nothing.

I sighed, put the Big Dictionary back on the shelf and went to pick up the phone. What I saw outside my office door stopped me in my tracks.

It was a
femme
, and she sure was looking
fatale
.

She was tall—tall enough so I'd have had to stand on a box to meet her eye. A long, white sweater, soaked through by the rain, clung to her curves all the way down to her knees. Beneath it there was nothing but her. Water on the glass obscured her face. One hand was perched on her hip, the other was holding a handgun—a big one—up against the door. As I watched, she fired a bullet at point-blank range into the glass.

The door rang like a bell and I saw the bullet ricochet, carving a thin trail of vapor through the rain. It missed the dame's left ear by an inch, maybe two.

"Hey, lady . . ." I began. Then she fired again.

This time, when the bullet ricocheted, it took a chunk out of the sidewalk. It also took a chunk out of the glass.

"Hey," I said again, "what's with the—?"

Another bullet. Another sliver of glass.

The dame fired four more bullets, reloaded quickly and calmly, then started firing again.

The door was tough enough to take this kind of punishment for a while, but not forever. I shot a glance at the filing cabinet—I have my own arsenal of weapons in the second drawer up—but something made me slide my gaze up to the drawer above.

Another bullet hit the door, then she wiped the glass clean and peered inside, showing me her face for the first time. As a rule I don't gasp. Not unless somebody gives me good reason. She did.

"Of all the dames!" I gasped. "It had to be you."

I picked up the hat. Then, without thinking, I strode over to the filing cabinet and did something I hadn't done for nearly ten years: I opened the top drawer, folded myself in half and fell inside.

It was just as bad as I remembered.

I was falling through dark, bitter air. Icy winds tried to grab me with angry fingers. Way in the distance I could see flashes of what looked like lightning, but what sounded like a giant clearing its throat.

I fell like this for what felt like a day. During that time I only blinked my eyes once.

Then, slowly, something began to materialize out of the gloom: a pair of parallel silver lines, writhing like two snakes that had been shackled together but which hated each other's guts. They weren't snakes, of course; they were railroad tracks.

The tracks came closer. The lightning still flashed, but now there was another light smearing its way towards me. It was centered on the tracks, and followed their jitterbug routine like it was glued to them. Which, in a way, it was.

Soon I heard a rumbling sound, more metallic than the throat-clearing, twice as loud and getting louder all the time. The wind gusted, blasting into me from the same direction as the approaching smear of light. Then I heard a whistle, long and glutinous, and suddenly it was on me, an immense iron lobster with two hundred wheels, all interconnected with rods and dripping sinews and sprung cables and grinding cylinders. Brakes engaged and the mammoth train screeched to a halt. Steam erupted from a thousand greasy sphincters, oil oozed through toothsome grilles, chains with links as thick as my arm cracked like whips and flaming coals spilled from a great brazier perched high behind the funnel, half a mile above my head.

And there I stood, just as amazed and daunted as I had been the first—and last—time, before the Search Engine.

There was a sudden movement, halfway up, right behind the boiler. Something emerged, a little like a head, a little like a shadow.

"You comin' up?" The voice rolled down to me like syrup, with an afterbite of cheap bourbon.

A ladder made from what looked like human thighbones rattled down in its wake. Reluctantly, I started to climb.

"I need to find something," I shouted when I was nearly at the top.

"Don't they all!" screamed the shadow. Inside the great cylindrical boiler, something crashed like an ocean liner hitting an iceberg.

The Search Engine started to move again, quickly, all at once. The ladder was hurled backwards; grimly I clung on, crawling hand-over-hand along the last few rungs until something like a claw grabbed my shoulder and hauled me inside the cab.

The thermometer dangling outside the cab read ten degrees shy of absolute zero. I watched as a tiny bird made from cosmic string perched briefly on the bracket before darting off into the void. Inside the cab it was hot as a furnace.

The driver turned to me and spoke with something like a mouth.

"So, pilgrim, what ya searchin' for?"

I shivered. If I'd stuck the thermometer into that voice the mercury would have dropped another six degrees.

I held up the hat.

"I need to know where this came from," I said, working hard to keep my voice level. I am a professional, after all.

The driver threw me something like a grin and bore down on a lever the size of a small crane. The Search Engine barrelled left, towards a nearby darkness.

"That everything ya want to know, pilgrim?" shouted the driver, standing suddenly tall on something like legs. With a mighty inhalation the Search Engine plunged into the blackness of the Tunnel of All Ends.

Okay, so I'd seen the dame before. We went back a long way, she and I. Not as far as the coffee-machine, and she couldn't even compete with the filing cabinet. But it was a long way, all the same.

It was seven years ago she first walked into my office. Same curves, different sweater. She must have seen the look on my face because the first thing she'd done was flash me the ring on her left hand, warning me off. But she'd also flashed me her legs when she sat down. And all through the conversation her eyes had bored into mine. Sometimes you just know, you know?

The case had been simple enough. Her husband, who'd spent most of their marriage using her as a punching bag, had gotten himself locked away for his part in one of the biggest vault heists this side of the River Lethe. I knew his gang—everyone in the business did. They'd knocked off a score of places before finally coming unstuck at the Silverlode. The Silverlode is just the other side of the street from the Still Point of the Turning World, which is why they wanted to get into it so bad. A haul from the Silverlode is a good enough haul, but nobody's ever broken their way into the S.P.T.W.—I mean
nobody
. This gang figured if they could break into the Silverlode, maybe they could tunnel their way across the street into the S.P.T.W. Nobody knows what they might have come out with if they'd succeeded but one thing's for certain, they'd have been treated like gods. Well, maybe not gods. Titans, at the very least.

They didn't even make it as far as the end of the street.

All these places are on the Street of Fools and there's not many get past a Fool. No sooner had Cerberus started barking (and barking, and barking) than the tall guy who puts down pennies on the sidewalk sniffed them out and called down the thunder-birds. After that, they practically handed themselves in. Cerberus you probably know, but there's not many have heard of the guy with the pennies. I'll tell you about him another time; suffice it to say, if
you
ever see a penny lying on the sidewalk, my advice is to ignore the old rhyme and cross to the other side of the street. Preferably move to another town. Don't, whatever you do, pick it up.

But I was telling you about the dame, the getaway driver's wife. He got life in Wulan Pen, naturally, but she told me he'd found a loophole, a way of getting to her at weekends. She couldn't prove anything because it was a temporal loophole, so he always managed to leave her apartment and get back to the pen fifteen minutes before he'd arrived, which meant he never showed up on any of the security cameras. But the bruises he gave her showed up all right. All the way up her legs, right up to her pantyhose. I never forgot those bruises.