He was right. I peeled out of there, doing eighty down a residential street until I cut back onto Alameda. And then once on Victory, I opened her up to almost a hundred. Every time Sam looked up he saw creatures flying in all directions. Some of them had people in their claws.

I turned on the radio.

“. . . UNKNOWN SPECIES OF CREATURES NUMBERING IN THE HUNDREDS ARE ATTACKING AND KILLING CITIZENS. THERE IS NO WORD ON WHAT THEY ARE OR WHY THEY ARE ATTACKING . . .”

It was madness.

I changed the station.

“. . . CITIZENS ARE WARNED TO STAY IN THEIR HOMES . . .”

I turned off the radio. Christ.

Just as I saw the hills of Griffith Park ahead through the bleak haze of darkness, I noticed movement on the streets. Instead of listening to the radio reports, people were coming out of their homes and into the streets. Suddenly there was a crowd in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and skidded within an inch of killing more than a dozen people.

But they weren’t people. It was Emek and a group of other ghouls. Emek came around to the window.

“What’s the word?” I asked.

“Complete chaos.”

“I’m heading up to the observatory. Can you and your buddies deal with the . . . whatever the fuck they are?”

Emek nodded.

“Thanks. Sam, head back to your place,” I said as I began to shift to my wolf form, “I’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”

I was gone before he even answered.

I dropped on all fours and ran into the park as fast as my legs would carry me. I could smell action ahead. The scent of Mo’Lock and Sabrina guided me to the top of the thickly wooded hill.

The observatory came into view at the crest of the hill. There was a small crowd waiting. Mo’Lock stood by Sabrina near the main building, speaking with the two LAPD ghouls. At the gate of the observatory grounds other cops guarded the roads. I assumed they were ghouls too, but it was the floating black hole that I was most interested in. That was my way to get to Billy and put an end to this madness once and for all.

Mo’Lock, Sabrina, and the cops approached me as I rose to my feet and shifted back to human. Sabrina was looking at me strangely, but I couldn’t tell if she’d seen me in wolf form or not.

“Anything happened here? The valley is bedlam.”

“A bunch of those red things flew out,” Mo’Lock said, “but we couldn’t do anything. It was right after it went dark.”

Sabrina smiled. “I got the photos to prove it.”

I smiled at her. If she saw me shift, she wasn’t letting on.

Hamm and Shooter looked worried. “We have a report of another hole in South Central,” Hamm said.