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He shakes his head. “I can’t stay, officer.”
“Detective.”
Now who is correcting minor details out of ego.
“I must go.”
“Hold it…”
But he doesn’t hold anything.
I learn suddenly, and entirely unexpectedly, that the cloak on his back is not a cloak. It is a set of large wings that open up and begin to beat at the air.
My jaw drops.
“The fuck?”
He takes off toward the moon, briefly bumping a building on the way, spiraling up into the sky. I give chase on foot, but it’s not easy. His movements are hard to predict at first, but seem to be a broad spiral, which means I have to run around buildings, which means I lose him fast.
“Holy fucking…” Even as I curse to myself, I am absolutely certain that I am not fucking reporting that. I’m not putting myself in the same category as the drug addled and mentally ill. There’s got to be some rational explanation for what I just saw. Holographic tech, maybe. I didn’t actually touch him. Maybe the entire experience was a fancy trick of light. God knows how many tech startups are lurking in the apartments around here.
Yes. That’s it. This was a trick of the light. There we go. A reasonable explanation. Thank god.
* * *
Istride into the station. Tessie is still at work. Always at work. It’s too late for her ancient little dog to even bother with its usual half-demented bark.
“Tessie, can you please get me the contact information of every audio visual tech TikTok instagram social media number chan geek in a ten-mile radius.”
“Uh. Why?”
I slam the table with the flat of my palm, making cups and bits of old pastry dance.
“Because someone is fucking with us. That’s why.”
She gives me a look over her glasses. Tessie is twenty-six years old, but she channels a much older woman most of the time. It’s her penchant for thick cardigans regardless of the time of year, her perpetually messy bun, and her glasses, which I suspect have been horn-rimmed since long before that became fashionable again for some absolutely godforsaken reason.
“I’ll do what I can,” she says. “But you’re starting to sound like the chief. And you’re starting to treat me like an assistant again. I’m not your assistant. I’m your partner.”
I know I saw what I saw, but I don’t know what to do with what I saw. There’s madness afoot. Some kind of caper, hijinks, or conspiracy that will likely shake the foundations of what we understand humanity to be if I can’t prove it to be bullshit.
At that moment my phone rings. It’s Ilona.
“Tell me something sane,” I say as I answer.
“I found something strange,” she says. “Moth scales.”
“Moth scales?”
“Yes. I suspected some kind of creepy crawly interference, and I found some powder in the wounds. I’ve found it before too. On the other victims, but it didn’t return any immediate result. Not until I got an entomologist involved. He asked me where I got so much moth powder. It’s the scales shed from the wings. Of a moth. But there’s more to it. The amount of powder implies a moth of incredible size. Maybe an entirely new species.”
I’m not sure what specific way I should freak out about this, so I end up standing there, staring blankly. Things are starting to come together in a way they really shouldn’t, according to all laws of, well, I suppose there’s not really a law against massive moth people stalking the streets of New York, but it is definitely illegal for those aforementioned moth people to murder the normies. It’s always illegal to murder.
Alright. First things first. I need to find that moth again, and I need to get cuffs on him, because I am fucking not telling an FBI agent that there’s a big, vicious mothman out there without said creature in custody.
How do you catch a moth?
A big light, that’s fucking how.
