The sliding door was open and bent, so it would never slide open or shut again. From the marks, I was pretty sure that Darryl had opened it, or maybe Zack before he was wholly wolf.

Zack stood beside the open door, looked at me, then rounded the back of the van again to resume his observation of the troll. I felt him settle into a guard position on the driver’s side of the van. If the troll made a move toward us, he’d warn me and do his best to keep us safe.

The car seat was nearest the door. On the other side of it, a woman held a bottle to the baby’s mouth, keeping the baby happy and quiet. Smart woman.

“Hey,” I whispered.

She was not much older than Jesse. One of her arms was obviously broken just above the elbow, and she held it against her side.

“I’m here to help,” I told her. I was being quiet. The troll was making more noise than World War III, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hear us.

“I can’t get my baby out,” she said. She took her cue from me and kept her voice down, but it vibrated with desperation. “The seat belt jammed, and the bottle is almost empty. When it’s gone, she’s going to start crying.”

The baby was not very old, swaddled in a pink blanket and set backward in the seat. She was still in that plastic stage where her mouth and nose looked like every other baby’s mouth and nose instead of the person she would someday become. Her eyes were wide and blue and focused on her mom as she sucked.

I took a good look at the car seat. It wasn’t one of the ones that the bucket holding the baby just popped out. I didn’t know a lot about baby seats, but it looked to me as if it were an older model, and something had jammed the latch, something with a big fang. The button was pressed in, but the catch hadn’t released.

I pulled out Tony’s knife and started working on the tough webbing of the seat belt. The knife looked good, but the blade was as dull as a bad-skin-cleanser commercial.

“When we get out of this,” I said, very quietly, “remind me to give Tony a whetstone and a book on how to use one.”

“Who is Tony?” she asked.

“The police officer whose knife I borrowed,” I told her. The stubborn belt parted at last, and I pulled the seat free. I took a step back—and that’s when I saw that the arm wasn’t the only injury the woman had. Her knee was swollen to twice its normal size.

“Can you walk on that leg?” I asked.