Luther grabbed Curran’s hand and smelled it. “Shapeshifter, feline, probably a lion, but not the run-of-the-mill African Simba. You’ve got an odd scent about you.” He glanced at me. “Why do you always hang out with weirdos?”

“It’s her special talent,” Curran said. “She attracts us like bees to honey.”

Luther shook his head and turned to the corpse of the bug. The Biohazard artist was busily trying to sketch it, while the rest of the crew stood around it with acid and flamethrowers. “Tell me about the thing.”

I explained Mrs. Oswald’s story.

“It spoke?” Luther asked.

“Yes.” Normal apparitions weren’t sentient. They didn’t speak, and if they did, not with that much power. “There was a lot of magic in the voice. You could feel it on your skin.”

“I don’t like it,” Luther said.

I didn’t like it either. “Someone has a grudge against cats. I don’t know if it was Mrs. Oswald’s particular cats or any cats in general. But the cat hater is persistent. First he or she sent a tick. After Eduardo killed it, the Summoner followed it with the griffin, and when the griffin was too small to break through the bars, he or she must’ve sunk some magic into it to make it bigger. And then it turned into that.” I nodded at the corpse. “I don’t even know what the hell it is.”

“We got a bug guy back at HQ. I’ll give you a call when he sorts it out.” Luther pondered the corpse. “The cross-phylum metamorphosis bothers me.”

It bothered me, too.

The sketch artist waved his sketchbook. “Done.”

“Okay, mates,” Luther called. “Bag it, tag it, and chain it up.”

The crew began rolling out plastic.

“Hey, Luther,” I said. “You guys didn’t hire any new ghouls, did you?”

Luther spun to me, his eyes focused, like a shark sensing a drop of blood in the water. “You know something. Tell me.”

“The Pack scouts found a lot of dead ghouls on a road to the east,” Curran said. “We had breakfast with the Beast Lord and he mentioned it.”

Luther pondered him. “Sure, I’ll buy that. Oh wait, I have a brain. Sorry, completely forgot. The ghouls were found in pieces. Someone ripped them apart with claws and cut them to pieces with a sword. And here the two of you are, one has claws and the other has a sword.”

“We’re not the only people in the city with swords and claws,” Curran said.

Luther squinted at us. “What are you two up to?”

“Right now, nothing,” I said.

“I don’t believe you.”