The girl's expression turned faintly green. "Rats?"

I nodded. With luck, maybe I could win the kid over. "Good thing your mother had your brush in her purse. I was able to get a couple of hairs from it."

"So?"

I sighed. "So, I used a little thaumaturgy and it led me straight to you. I had to walk most of the way, but straight to you."

"Thauma—what?"

Questions were better than kicks, any day. I kept answering them. Heck, I like to answer questions about magic. Professional pride, maybe. "Thaumaturgy. It's ritual magic. You draw symbolic links between actual persons, places, or events, and representative models. Then you invest a little energy to make something happen on the small scale, and something happens on the large scale as well—"

The kid bent her head the second I was distracted with answering her question and bit my hand.

I yelled something I probably shouldn't have around a kid, and jerked my hand away. The kid dropped to the ground, agile as a monkey, and took off towards the bridge. I shook my hand, growled at myself and took off after her. She was fast, her pigtails flying out behind her, shoes and stained knee-socks flashing.

She got to the bridge first, an ancient, two-lane affair that arched over the Chicago river and hurled herself out onto it.

"Wait!" I shouted after her. "Don't!" She didn't know this town like I did.

"Sucker," she called back, her voice merry. She kept on running.

That is, until a great, rubbery, hairy arm slithered out from beneath a manhole cover at the apex of the bridge and wrapped its greasy fingers around one of her ankles. The kid screamed in sudden terror, pitching forward onto the asphalt and raking the skin from both knees. Blood shone dark on her socks in the glow of the few functioning streetlights.

I cursed beneath my breath and raced towards her along the bridge, lungs laboring. The hand tightened its grip, and started dragging her back and towards the manhole. I could hear deep, growling laughter coming from the darkness in the hole that led down to the understructure of the bridge.