City Under the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

at the intersection of First and 30 th . At least the driver had the decency to stop. Getting out of the cold was preferable to giving him a piece of her mind, so she pulled her hemline below her ovaries and climbed inside. The cab was a modest four out of ten on the stench chart, a significant victory for the long drive across town.
    “Chelsea,” she said. The office in Chelsea was the unofficial HQ for the FBI’s counter-terrorism squad. And, essentially, it was Tildascow’s home. She kept an apartment in Hoboken for her off-season clothes, tax records and stale condiments, but she often went weeks between visits.
    The cabbie nodded and turned up the yodeling on his radio. She settled in for the ride, looking forward to a hot drink and a warm blanket—but not the phone call she planned to make afterward.
    The file Anderson had collected from the NYPD contained 23 eyewitness accounts. Somehow this was the one spot in the city where no one had a cellphone camera handy.
    The first statement came from a hippie performance artist who had been on the other side of First while, in his words, “impersonating a tree.”
    The windows shattered up there, his statement read. I think like the sixth floor . A gorilla jump out and lands on top the car. The windshield busted and it was all this noise, people was screaming, and it ran across the street over there. And then another gorilla jump out that other window and go the other way.
    Other eyewitnesses described the animals as hyenas, dogs, cheetahs, or “panthros.” One guy, a “clothing designer who blogs on the side,” insisted he’d seen a similar event staged by a spontaneous performance troupe in a San Francisco mall.
    The best description of the animals had come from a man who’d been escorting his pregnant wife to the hospital. Just as he stepped out of his taxi, the first animal crashed down on its roof.
    It was shaped like a human, his statement read, but it was really hairy and big. It snarled at me and ran away on its hands and feet. And the second one was identical. I’ve never seen anyone move like that. I don’t think they were in costumes. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think they were werewolves.

    Six
    FBI Counter-Terrorism Squad Offices
    Chelsea
    December 30
    11:22 p.m.
    Tildascow hadn’t scored a proper office until she got her second Director’s Award, the FBI’s equivalent of the Oscars. Her investigation into an Al Qaeda plot on New York’s water supply had revealed a loose thread that unraveled a billion-dollar international electronic banking scheme. It was pure serendipity, but she had no qualms about parlaying the glory into a real office. The couch had come out of her own pocket, but at least she got to pick the color.
    She stretched out on the black leather in her cozy jeans and Quantico hoodie, sipping hot chocolate and fiddling with a stupid sleeved blanket. She checked her email, well aware that she was looking for an excuse to procrastinate.
    Anderson had sent a couple of updates: three animal attacks reported within the first hour; now the number had grown to seven. More were sure to come. The police were on alert, but it was a big city and those things were crazy quick.
    She scrolled to “L” on her BlackBerry and picked up her landline. Shitty cell service; they said we’d have a flying car by now, but it took two phones to make a call.
    Tildascow had never before dialed this phone number. She’d gotten it in an email, which she’d never answered.
    By design, she had no connections to her old life. No relatives, no relics, no old friends to call and reminisce. No one who knew that little girl with the curly blond hair and the bright blue eyes, the one who looked just like her mom. They’d all fallen into the chasm between the girl Brianna and the Special Agent Tildascow.
    Except one, who stubbornly refused to go.
    When little Brianna turned seven, her mother had enrolled her in the Brownies, the minor-league Girl Scouts. It