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shoulder in the direction the dog had barked.
    Toward Edie.
    Suddenly—so fast your eyes had to twist to keep up—it switched the position of its body so it faced her bush. Keeping the claw-tipped wings spread in a nasty echo of the umbrella Edie had just watched the woman unfurl, it crouched lower to the ground and sniffed toward her.
    Very slowly, one wing tip pushed the bush aside, and suddenly Edie had nowhere to run. The stone eyes looked at her. Edie had time to note that the whistling breath came from a corroded copper pipe sticking straight out of the things mouth, like a gun barrel.
    Edie reached into her pocket and pulled out the disk of glass. Where it had glowed blue, it now blazed like a torch, like a blue-green torch. She held it out straight at the end of her arm, with only the merest fraction of a shake. The rest of the shake was in her voice. Go away.
    She cleared her throat. Lost the shake from her voice and tried again.
    “GO AWAY! You have to GO AWAY!”
    One stone eyebrow rose in a question. And then the fierce snarl stretched even farther back, and the horns flattened like the dog’s ears had. And it didn’t go away at all. It stepped toward her, pulling the bush apart, opening her to the world and whatever it was about to do.
    And then the rain came—a spitter, a spatter, then all at once like a block falling from the sky. Edie set her jaw and glared defiantly at the stone eyes through the falling water.
    “You. Don’t. Scare. Me,” she lied. “Nothing scares me. Not anymore. You can’t hurt me. You have to GO AWAY!”
    The cat-gargoyle shook itself in a shiver, looked her in the eye.
    “You don’t scare me… .” she lied again.
    And then the cat-gargoyle jumped.
    Backward. Up into the sky. Into the rain. Away from her.
    Edie stared very hard at the place where it had been, until her eyes had convinced her brain that there was nothing to see except rain and grass and the ugly orange light.
    She looked at the glass disk in her hand. As she was staring at it, the light died in it, and it looked like what it was, an old piece of sea glass, the bottom of a bottle washed to and fro by the tide, worn smooth by the pebbles and sand. Something anyone might find on a day at the sea. She stuffed it back in the pocket of her sheepskin jacket. Took several deep breaths, and headed across the grass down onto the ramp of the parking garage.

C HAPTER N INE
    Parked Up
    G eorge and the Gunner stared up at the concrete ceiling. The gunner smiled. Its gone.
    George slumped back against the wall and stared at the radiator grille of the Mercedes in front of them. “What was it?”
    “A taint.”
    “A taint?”
    The Gunner shrugged and scratched himself with more human pleasure than you’d expect from a statue.
    “Probably a gargoyle. It was flying. Most of the flying taints are gargoyles.”
    George filed this under “New Information” and found he was overloaded in that department.
    “Wait a minute. The thing that chased me from the Natural History Museum. The three lizard things that came off the building. The things you shot. Were they taints?”
    “There you go. Catch on quick, you do. Keep going like that you might even make it through the night.”
    George was opening his mouth to ask a question he didn’t really want the answer to, when there was a scuff of feet approaching. The Gunner held him still with a hand on his knee. The footsteps stopped in front of them. There was the scrape of a key in a lock, the solid click-clunk of a Mercedes door opening and closing, and then the boom of an engine coming alive behind the radiator grille in front of their noses.
    “Er …” said George.
    The headlights came on. George and the Gunner were splashed against the raincoat gray of the walls by the high beams, like cartoon prisoners caught in a searchlight.
    “Help?” George shouted hopefully to the face behind the steering wheel in front of him. The face looked through him, then away as it craned