Lee Pryor did not scream at monsters. Monsters were her business, she had jokingly said at more than one cryptozoology convention. She laughed in the faces of cryptids, and ideally took a few blurry pictures for others to dismiss as sandhill cranes and barn owls.

No cranes here, no owls: only monsters.

They were separating, squirming away from one another across the tracks. The light seemed to hurt them. They made sounds that keened into the very last five per cent of her high-frequency hearing. Abruptly, Lee was six years old again, facing the most terrifying memory of her childhood.

It was goddamn Wind in the Willows all over again.

Her parents had taken the whole family. It had been a touring production, only the aesthetic for the masks and make-up had been right out of some Russian folk tale about Baba Yaga. Badger’s louring, vacant-eyed face had been bad enough, with its clacking lower jaw snapping out of time with the actor’s words. Then the weasels had come in en masse, and Lee had had to be taken squalling from the theatre by her embarrassed father.

Twenty years later and the weasels had finally come for her. The monsters had the same long bodies, huge, glassy eyes and nasty little hands. It didn’t matter that they were half Lee’s size—they were sheer nightmare fuel from start to finish.

The Stig woman was in motion instantly, covering the distant between her and Khan far too fast. She grabbed the scientist by the shoulder and pitched her into the dark after Stig. She was reaching for Lee, too, but Lee shrank back, because anything that touched her now might be connected with the writhing ball of weasels that had just been vomited into the world.

And then her cryptozoologist’s eye came into its own, overriding even her panic. Because the thing about cryptids was that they were beasts, animals that time and the world had forgotten. They weren’t supposed to turn up kitted out for expeditions. But those big, glassy eyes were lenses in hoods, and she could see cables or hoses connecting their blunt muzzles with bulky apparatus strapped on their bodies where their hind limbs jutted out. The springy whiskers that jutted eighteen inches from their snouts glinted like metal in the artificial light. Most showed greasy pelts of black or brown or mottled grey, but only where they weren’t wearing rubbery ponchos or sheath-like tunics. They were weaving about as if drunk, clawlike hands raking the air, and she guessed the transition from there hadn’t been kind on them.

One of them, the weasel that had come through first, had absurdly big ears like fuzzy satellite dishes—tufted with elaborately coiffed plumes of hair dyed in stripes. That killed Lee’s fear, switching the creature from terror to cartoon character even as she thought of military officers and rank insignia.