to outstare her.
Only when she looked away did I allow myself to breathe again. How much time had I bought myself? I didn't know. What I did know was I'd knocked her off-balance. I had to keep her that way, so I went over to the wolf's corpse and picked up the hat.
"Interesting badge," I said, fingering the lining. "The Helmwolfen Bruderschaft. Not a very well-known pack."
"I wouldn't know," she said listlessly. The big handgun lay on her lap; her fingers lay on the big handgun.
"It's not well-known for one very simple reason," I continued. "It isn't a wolf pack at all."
"Isn't it? But I thought all werewolves belonged to packs."
"They do. But our friend here isn't a werewolf."
I whipped off my coat and made ready to turn it inside-out. The intense heat of the Search Engine's cab had prompted me to turn it into comfortable but penetrable sealskin. Right now it was about as bulletproof as a wet paper towel. I was quick, but the dame was quicker. Throwing back the chair, she stood in a lithe, economical movement and pointed the big handgun right at the center of my head. Since that's a part of my anatomy I'm particularly fond of, I froze.
"Drop the coat," she hissed.
"It's just a coat."
"Drop it!"
I dropped the coat.
"What do you know?" she snapped.
"I'd never heard of the Helmwolfen. There was no mention of any such pack in the book. But not everything gets into the Big Dictionary." I smiled. "You're not in there, for instance, but you exist all right."
"You can be sure of it. Go on."
"When I dug a bit deeper I discovered there's a secret society called the Helmwolfen, but they're not werewolves."
"They're not?"
"No, ma'am, although they move in similar circles. Turns out the Helmwolfen are gamblers. What they do is kind of weird: they take ordinary articles of clothing and lace them with lycanthropia . . ."
"Lycanthropia? What's that?" She looked puzzled, but I wasn't convinced the expression was genuine.
"Essence of werewolf. Musk. Distilled hound-juice. Whatever. It's intense stuff, very, very powerful. You don't even want to think about how they get their hands on it. Anyway, it does pretty much what a werewolf badge does to its owner."
"What do you mean?"
"Put it this way, you put on an outfit laced with lycanthropia and it won't be your own face you see next time you check the mirror."
"It can turn anybody into a werewolf?"
"Not necessarily a wolf. Could be anything. Tiger, bear, stoat, you name it. It's usually a mammal, usually a carnivore. But not always. There's records of wereparrots. One poor bastard turned into a wereshark and suffocated in his own front room."
"So where does the gambling come in?"
"The Helmwolfen bet on what the victim—and these are victims, make no mistake—will turn into. Big money changes hands. It's not a game for the squeamish. Wereism isn't a stable condition. Unless you're born to it, chances are the transformation will only be successful one way."
"One way?"
"Yeah. When you change back, all the different parts of your body go back in the wrong order."
"How do they get the . . . victims . . . to do it?"
"Gambling again. There are Helmwolfen behind most of the big casinos in most of the big towns. Including the Tartarus Club. They see some poor sucker laying down more than he can afford and make him an offer he can't refuse. 'Try this game,' they say. 'Survive, and we'll wipe the slate clean.' "
The gun wavered in her hand.
"You're the one who owes the money," I said, seizing the advantage, "aren't you? I'm just telling you what you already know. Because the truth is that you're the one they made the offer to, not this poor schmuck."
For a moment I didn't know which way she'd tip. Then she collapsed like a bunch of wet noodles into the chair, bent her head to the desk and sobbed her wretched little heart out.
Me, like the poor sap I am, wrapped my arm around her shoulders. Beneath the sodden sweater she felt hot and alive. I told myself to keep my mind on the job.
"I'm s-sorry," she wept. "I didn't know w-what else to do. I w-was so d-desperate. Can you forgive me?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'll need to get it all straight in my head first. Without a guy like me on the case this could all get mighty confusing."
"You can work it out," she said, touching my cheek with ten thousand volts of