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after Joel. He shook himself once, then set off for the bridge. Joel and I followed him.
    Even on two feet, I was fast, though the coyote would have been quicker. But I needed to have clothes on when talking to the police—for some reason, I suspected the police wouldn’t take me as seriously if I were naked. So I stayed human and ran with the silver-and-black wolf who was Adam on one side of me and Joel, who no longer could be mistaken for a dog, on the other.
    We garnered attention. Pack magic operates passively to make it difficult for mundane people to notice werewolves. Adam could run down the interstate at high noon and only one or two people would see anything but a stray dog. We’d discovered that wasn’t true of Joel, even though he was a member of the pack. It was as if something in his magic fought to be seen.
    Joel’s eyes were hot coals that glowed like those of a hellish demon out of a comic book. He was bigger than Adam, and he left oily black marks on the ground wherever his feet touched. People noticed. Once they noticed him, they noticed Adam.
    Adam was a public figure, and though he didn’t often appear in his wolf form on the national news, locally, even in his werewolf shape, he was a celebrity. A smallish-town hero, if only because he was sort of famous.
    â€œHey, Mercy,” came a shout from the double line of cars. “What’s up? When you gonna reopen the shop? Sheba has an electrical problem I can’t find.”
    â€œShop phone still gets me, Nick,” I called, waving vaguely without looking around. I didn’t need to see him to recognize him. Nick’s Sheba was a VW bug that broke down with a regularitythat was almost supernatural. “Gotta go help the police with a car-eating monster on the bridge right now.”
    â€œWhat’s on the bridge?” he called, but I just waved again because I was already too far to yell loudly enough for him to hear me.
    But a woman stuck her head out of a car as I passed, and yelled, “Is it werewolf trouble, Mercy?”
    I didn’t know the voice, but I’d been bathing in the reflected glory of Adam long enough that I wasn’t anonymous anymore, either.
    â€œNope,” I told her. “Fae monster, I think.”
    I was sure that Tony wouldn’t have approved: I was informing the public without talking to him. But I figured that in this era of cell phone cameras, whatever was on the bridge was already due to be famous on YouTube anyway.
    The bridge was visible from a long way off on both sides of the river. Something big enough to be “eating cars” was certain to attract people with cameras and cell phones. There would be no covering this up.
    Up ahead, the Lampson Building came into view, as did the blue and red flashing lights of dozens of police cars. Lampson International builds the world’s largest cranes, and they’d built their headquarters right at the base of the Cable Bridge. Four stories tall, the glass-and-steel structure was distinctively odd. It looked very much as though some giant had picked up a pyramid, turned it upside down, and squished it back into the ground.
    The police had set up two barricades. The first was at the last intersection before the bridge, to keep cars away from it. There were several uniformed policemen directing traffic there. The second barricade was closer to the bridge, just past the entrance to the Vietnam Memorial, which was on the edge and up the hill from the parking lot of the Lampson Building.
    We ran past the first barricade without any of the police trying to stop us, though we drew sharp looks. Probably they were too busy with traffic, but it also takes real moxie to try to stop someone who is running with a tibicena and a werewolf. Maybe they recognized Adam.
    The land rose gently to meet the beginning of the suspension bridge. I looked away from the police and the stalled traffic to peer at the bridge.
    It arced