Jade sighed, but she was smiling. “Admit it: their love story makes you soft because you’re a hopeless romantic.”
Zhang rested his chin on the edge of her seat. “You would know.”
Arthur made a face. “Christ, get a room.”
They were on Stillwell Avenue, barely half a mile from the water, when Zhang suddenly said, “Stop the car.”
Arthur slammed the breaks without hesitation. Up ahead, the Wonder Wheel and the wooden skeleton of the Thunderbolt roller coaster rose up into the sky.
He turned to the back seat. Zhang’s eyes were closed and he looked for all the world like he was napping. Arthur turned back to Jade. “What’s going on? We’re not quite to the harbor yet.”
“Jianwei went scouting ahead on the astral plane.” Jade’s usual smile was gone. “I don’t know what he saw.”
Arthur frowned but waited quietly, eying the Wonder Wheel. It was a lot nicer to look at from a distance rather than chained to the base.
Zhang suddenly spoke again. “Someone was here this morning.”
Arthur whirled around. In the back seat, the other man’s eyes were open. “How do you know?”
“Footprints in the sand, down on the beach where Rory and Gwen made the wave. Not the kind of footprints a woman like Miss Shelley would have made. These are big ones.” Zhang looked at Jade. “Weird ones.”
Arthur parked right by the closed, empty Luna Park. The three of them hurried out of the car and over to the boardwalk, the sea wind whipping at their coats as their rapid footsteps echoed on the wood. The shops and ice cream parlor were boarded shut, the roofs of the booths still torn with their bright fabric in tatters and blowing in this wind. The air was salty and cold, not another soul in sight as they took the stairs from the boardwalk down to the beach.
“There.”
Arthur froze. Leading away from the stairs in the sand were heavy, misshapen indents—footprints, but not from normal shoes.
Zhang pointed. “That’s a bigger footprint than you would make if you walked in the sand now, Ace, and you’re, what, six-four?”
Arthur couldn’t tear his eyes away. “Six-three,” he managed to say, his gaze locked on front most part of the footprint.
“What’s wrong with the edge here?” Jade pointed to exactly where Arthur’s eyes were glued. “This doesn’t look like the outline of a shoe, or even the toes of a human foot.”
Zhang tilted his head. “It looks like claws.”
Arthur took a sharp breath.
“Ace?” Jade took his arm. “You’ve gone extra pale.”
“Have I?” he said numbly.
She stepped up the staircase, so their faces were nearly level. Her deep brown eyes searched his. “Are you all right? This is a terrible thing to see so soon after your nightmare.”
Arthur forced a smile. “I’m fine.” Zhang was watching with concern, so Arthur tried to explain. “The dream I sometimes have is of my interrogation. My German captors must have slipped me something before I was questioned, because I hallucinated a monster.”
The scars on his chest seemed to throb for a moment. He ignored the phantom pain. “I saw my interrogator shift in front of my eyes, into a half man, half beast. Red eyes, jaw distended by fangs, claws sharp as a—” His voice almost broke. He forced it steady. “Sharp as a scalpel.”
Zhang glanced back at the footprints.
“But it was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now,” Arthur said firmly. “Drugs then, an echo of last night’s dream now. It caught me by surprise, that’s all.”
But Zhang was still staring at the footprints. “How certain are you that he was a hallucination?”
Arthur stilled. The beach noises roared in his ears, the waves, the wind, the cry of a gull. “Why would he be anything else?”
A gust of wind swept across the beach, almost a howl. Zhang held his hat against it. “Your interrogator, was he also German? Or was he British?”
Arthur stared. His heart started to quicken. “How did you know something like that?”
