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baseball bat and a baseball. In Washington, it was illegal to carry
only
a baseball bat in your car. Darryl wasn’t out as a werewolf at his work. I suppose that cat would be out of the bag after today.
    â€œProbably,” I said.
    â€œThen why wasn’t he sprouting fangs and hair?” growled someone else.
    I opened my mouth to snap something back, but then I located the voice. She had a compression bandage on her arm, which was in a sling, and a rosy flush that would be black-and-blue tomorrow covered half her face.
    â€œNo time,” I told her. “Most werewolves take a while to change—ten minutes or even fifteen or twenty. My friends—the two werewolves who beat us here—were driving by when they realized what was going on. They called us, then dove in to help.”
    â€œThank goodness for that,” one of the patrolmen said. I didn’t think I was supposed to hear him because he said it under his breath.
    â€œThe other one was changing,” one of the guys who looked familiar said. “It was pretty freaky.”
    â€œIt’s hard for a werewolf not to change when something’s trying to kill him,” I told them. “A werewolf in midchange isn’t helpless, just not as good in a fight because he’s distracted.” And not as likely to be able to control himself. But they didn’t need to know that.
    â€œWe were hoping you might ID it for us,” Willis said. “So we know what to do about it.”
    I’d helped the police with fae affairs before. But I wasn’t an expert by any means—and my fae connections weren’t available. Samuel and his fae wife, Ariana, were in Europe, and would be for another month or more. Zee and Tad were, as far as I knew, prisoners on the reservation in Walla Walla. But I
had
been studying up, and I’d had access to information that most humans wouldn’t have had.
    â€œIt would help if I could see it,” I told him. Green, I thought. King Kong, though, so we were dealing with something that looked like a large, green gorilla that was big enough to toss cars around. And it stayed on the bridge.
    I closed my eyes and envisioned the book I’d borrowed once, a book that detailed a lot of the fae, what they were, what they could do, and how to protect yourself from them. It had been written by a fae—Samuel’s Ariana, in fact—so the information was pretty accurate.
    â€œTroll,” I said, opening my eyes. “It could be a troll. Green—how tall?” Some of them were green.
    â€œLike a semitruck,” Willis said. “That tall, not that big, though it’s big enough.”
    Someone let out a shout, and I looked at the bridge. Right at thetop of the arc, I could see movement—something green and about the shape of a gorilla. It leaped and grabbed one of the cables—which were bigger around than both of my hands could reach together—and used the cable to climb upward.
    â€œSo look at it,” said Tony, and he handed me a pair of binoculars.
    It had skin the color of a green bell pepper. Sparse, lacy moss green . . .
stuff
grew out of its shoulders and feathered down from its head. It wasn’t hair, but it would give that appearance to anyone not holding a pair of binoculars. Smallish eyes were set a little below a wide-nostriled nose. On either side of the nostrils were slits that looked as though someone had cut its face open with a sharp knife. The inner edge of the slits was bright red—gill slits for breathing underwater, maybe. Trolls lived near water by preference and, when they could, around bridges. There is magic in places that are between: crossroads, thresholds, bridges. Which might explain why he stayed on the Cable Bridge rather than running over the top of the police and into Pasco or Kennewick.
    It was certainly a he, and he really was enjoying his climb. I was a shapeshifter, and I’d grown up in a