The sound echoed off the walls and three-story high ceiling, bouncing off glass and huddling around taxidermied animals. The muffled confusion, nevertheless, grew more distinct as he grew nearer to it. Past the warthogs, past the goats. He’d studied the Dead Zoo enough to know what lay around each corner, which species was housed where. He passed beneath the suspended skeleton of the giant whale and approached the seals.
Suddenly, the sound stopped, and silence fell heavy around him. He held the lantern aloft as he circled the seal display. The light scratches he’d seen in the wood frame were not the only signs of wear he spotted now. Deep gouges marred the surface. New gouges. A powder of wood bits made a light coating on the floor below.
Someone meant to make off with a seal. How in heaven’s name did the miscreant intend to do that? Such a thing would require multiple people and a large wagon with a strong team. Seals were enormous, their only natural predator being the massive polar bear.
Amos glanced over his shoulder at the creature in question. But it was gone.
The polar bear was gone.
How had someone made off with such a large item without making noise, without being seen? It was impossible. Utterly impossible!
He studied the stand on which the bear was—or ought to have been—displayed. There was absolutely no sign of tampering. None at all. There was not even the tiniest speck of dust. It was almost as if the polar bear had simply walked away.
His mind insisted that was impossible even as his eyes darted frantically around.
Something heavy and soft, by the sound of it, landed upon the floor somewhere out of sight. The same sound again. Then again.
It sounded not unlike the pad of a dog’s feet on the floor. A rolling paw, soft enough to muffle the noise but made loud by the weight it bore.
Paws. Against the floor.
An empty polar bear display.
An inelegant attempt to gain access to a seal, the polar bear’s natural diet.
Amos shook his head, insisting the theory forming in his mind was too ridiculous to be true. There had to be another explanation. There simply had to be.
Heavier and quicker came the sounds of paws on stone.
Amos’s heart rate rose. He backed up, watching and holding his breath.
He could hear breathing—heavy, deep-throated breathing.
The wide expanse of the museum, its columns and high ceiling, turned even the tiniest sound into a cacophony, and nothing about these sounds were tiny. Fast, heavy paws and threatening growls came at him from every direction.
He did all he could think to do. He ran. Every turn he made, the sounds followed him. He swore he could feel hot breath on his neck, though he did not turn back long enough to look. He ran. Ran. Ran.
The door to the museum was locked. It would not give at his frantic pulling. He pounded and shouted, his own voice bouncing off the walls and attacking him anew. Perhaps another door? A window?
He raced back into the enormous room. Where were the windows? Why could he not find them? He knew there were windows. He’d seen William standing at one, looking at him. There were windows. There were! But where?
He could find nothing. His mind refused to identify anything. The shapes around him shifted and contorted, monstrous collections of limbs and heads. They moved. He swore they did. They turned and watched him as he ran past, and he never felt their eyes leave him.
He was running in circles, passing the same skeletons, the same animals, over and over again. But they were positioned differently, facing him no matter where he was. And all the while the fall of heavy paws continued.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of white. He dove behind the glass-sided display of deer.
A roar split the darkness. The display shook. Glass shattered.
Amos tried to scramble to his feet, but he couldn’t rise.
Closer came the sound of paws on the stone floor. Closer. Louder. Slower.
Deep, growling breaths.
A shadow fell across him. A shadow despite the darkness.
And then a face.
As it was morning still, Móirín wasn’t at home. That simplified things. How Brogan would’ve explained Fletcher’s visit without giving away secrets, he didn’t know. And the complication of it proved bigger than he’d expected.
Fletcher arrived, but not alone. Stone, another of the Dreadfuls, was with him.
“Lower the eyebrows, mate,” Fletcher said, stepping past Brogan and making himself at home in the sitting room. “Stone was sent here by a higher power.”
“Divine direction?” Brogan asked dryly.
Stone didn’t take the bait, but Fletcher most certainly did.
“Not quite that high.” Fletcher tossed him a tightly folded note with a familiar wax seal.
Brogan opened the note and read quickly.
Stone is being brought into this. Tell him what you know.
DM
He looked to Stone. “Did you know I was still working on behalf of the DPS?”
“Not ’til right now,” Stone said.
Brogan had never known anyone else from America’s South and didn’t know if his friend’s manner of speaking was common to everyone who lived there. The man didn’t talk often. And he never appeared the least upended. He was the sort of person one was lucky to call a friend but would fear having as an enemy.
“Henry tossed me your coin,” Fletcher said. “What do you have for me?”
“Slipped these out of Sorokin’s shop this morning.” Brogan pulled the stack of papers from the table drawer where he’d hidden them. “Took me a blessed minute to sort out what I was seeing.”
He dropped them on the table. Stone began studying them immediately. Fletcher moved from the settee to the table and did the same.
“The letter mentions a document?” Fletcher looked back at him. “What document?”
Brogan motioned with his head. “The rest of the stack.”
The men looked them over.
“These are all the same,” Fletcher said.
“No, they ain’t.” Stone was, of course, fully correct.
“Near as I can tell,” Brogan said, “they’re versions of the same document. Mr. Sorokin was refining it, trying to get it right.”
“This is dated more than forty years ago,” Fletcher said. “That don’t make a lick of sense.”
Stone snatched up the paper containing nothing but dozens of versions of Baron Chelmsford’s signature, each a little different from the others. Some shaky with uncertainty, some more sure and flowing.