“Don’t go. I won’t hurt you, I just want to talk to you.”

The girl shook her head, twin black braids flying outward, and stepped backward farther. She was wearing a thin, ragged calico dress that brushed over her bare feet. I looked harder at her. She was Native American and I was a strangelooking towering white woman in an alley full of ethnic child prostitutes. I shouldn’t have been surprised she was intimidated.

I squatted down, smothering a wince, in the stinking memory of the unfinished alleyway, bringing my head down below hers. I was appalled at how young she looked—twelve, maybe? None of the men or other girls in the alley took notice of me—one of the men stepped right through me, raising a hard shiver on my back.

The girl backed up to the edge of the entry flap. “No, spirit, go. I should not talk to you.”

I put out my hands, palms up, resting on my knees, so she could see I didn’t have anything in them to hide. “I need your help.”

She made a face. “What help?” she spat. She feared I was trying to trick her—I’d seen that in the living often enough.

“I’m trying to find… a creature. A monster that shouldn’t be here. I want to make it go away. It hurts people—kills them. It killed people here, now.”

The girl jerked back a little farther. “A zeqwa?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s a monster.”

“A monster,” the girl said, nodding and shuffling a little closer. Her English was accented and clumsy. “A zeqwa.” She shook her head with exasperated pity and squatted down in front of me. “Foolish spirit, you. Many zeqwa. Some eat children.” All right, so a monster was a zeqwa and there were a lot of different kinds. Which one was I looking for?

“Some do,” I agreed. “This one eats anyone it can find. It can chew through rocks and it catches people and it eats some of them and some it… makes walk after death. Do you know about it?”

She shook her head. “Not eating or making the walker. But I see Sistu in the water and on the land. I see him in the…” She waved her hand to indicate the depth of the alley and the enclosing buildings. “In this place.”

“What is Sistu? What kind of zeqwa?” I asked, knowing I was frowning with interest and the growing throb in my bent knee and hoping I wasn’t frightening her.

“Monster. A…” She made a motion with both hands that I couldn’t quite understand. Seeing my confusion, she stuck a finger in the mud and made a long, sinuous line and hissed.

“A snake,” I said.

“Bigger than snake!” she snapped. “Big as you stand.”

“A serpent… a sea serpent?”

“Yes! But he comes on the land, too. Three heads. One like a snake on each end, one like a man in the middle. Many, many teeth. Very hungry, very strong. His blood can turn you to stone. His stare make you freeze. I see Sistu in the dark here below.”

“Where did he come from? Where does he live?”

The girl shook her head. “He lives in the pool. He come from the water.” Then she looked over my shoulder and I felt the presence of a ghost nearly on top of me.

I stood, turning and stepping aside as the ghost of a man in work clothes stopped where I’d been crouching. He held out his hand, the phantom sun sending a spark from the coins in it.

The girl ghost stood up and took the coins, looking at them suspiciously. Then, smiling mechanically, she let the man follow her into the crib. As the curtain over the doorway fell, I saw her expression became unseeing and blank as the fragment of time curled on itself in the repetition of her endless loop of memory.

I backed away before I reached out, grabbing for the edges of the temporacline, and slid out of the slice of history, gritting my teeth against impotent fury, frustration, and the grinding ache of old injuries.

I stumbled back into the haunted corridor beneath the street and bumped into Quinton. I could feel the tension in my jaw as I brushed past him. “Get me out of here.”

“What happened?” he asked, catching up to me in a few strides and then passing me to lead the way out.

“I found the ghost of a child prostitute—Indian. She said she saw a zeqwa—a monster—called Sistu about the time of the first deaths.”

“Is it the one we’re looking for?”

“I don’t know. The timing’s right, but she said it’s a sea serpent of some kind with three heads.”

“And you don’t think a three-headed sea serpent is very likely to have done this?”

I felt myself growling and stopped to take a deep breath—or three—and calm down. “I don’t know. Her description doesn’t make sense to me. She must have been twelve! A kid!”

He put his hands on my shoulders. “Shh… Harper. She was a kid, but you can’t do anything about that. Not now. Let’s find out about this monster. Then we’ll have something more to go on. Now, be stealthy or someone may catch us coming up from here.”

I stifled myself and limped after Quinton.

I’d managed to avoid any dire filth this time, so we got a table in Zeitgeist Coffee. We cleaned up and sat down to figure out what to do next.

“I think we need to look at the newspaper archives at the library,” Quinton suggested. “The central branch will be open for a few more hours today, and we might be able to find out more now that we have the info from the morgue.”

“I need to call Fish and find out what he knows about this Sistu thing. Maybe it’s got some signature or habit or something we can look for.”

“And we can look it up and see if there’s more information. If its a local legend, there may be documents in the local folklore and Native American sections.”

I nodded and got out my phone to call Fish. I was still bothered by the ghost, but Quinton was right that there was nothing I could do for her. She had died a century ago and her life couldn’t be changed. I wondered what had led her to be selling herself in an alley, but had to put it out of my mind before I got angry all over again.

Fish was just about to leave the morgue when I called. I asked him about Sistu.

“Huh…” he responded. “No… don’t think I’ve ever heard of a sistu, but zeqwa is a Lushootseed word that means monster—any kind of monster from a man-eating seal to an ogre or a giant dog—so whatever specific thing your source is talking about has gotta be from somewhere around Washington or British Columbia. I’ll ask my mom and my old grandma. One of them will know.”

“Great. Thanks, Fish. Should I call you or will you call me?”

“I’ll call, but let me give you my cell number—I’m off for a couple of days.”

I wrote down the number he offered and disconnected.

Quinton was watching me and pulling a chocolate doughnut to pieces. “What’s he say?”

“He doesn’t know, but he’ll ask some people who might.”

“All right. You want anything aside from coffee before we head out to the library?” He pointed to the part of the doughnut he hadn’t touched yet. “These things are pretty wicked.”

I shook my head. “No thanks. I don’t like chocolate much.”

He just raised his eyebrows and nodded. I appreciated the restraint. Some men might have made a comment about how unfeminine it was not to be gaga for chocolate, but I’d never acquired much taste for sweets—especially chocolate—between my mother’s belief that I was fat and my father’s career as a dentist. I didn’t mind skipping the doughnut, but I didn’t want to abandon my coffee before we went back out into the cold to walk to the library. It was pretty dark and we wouldn’t have a lot of time before the librarians threw us out—no matter what good friends they were with Quinton. I drank a little too fast as we headed out the doors, and yelped.

“What? Are you hurt?” he asked, following me to the corner.

“No,” I mumbled, throwing the cup into the trash. “I burned my tongue.”

“Really? Let me see. Stick it out.”

I did stick out my tongue. And made a face to go with it.

“Oh, God, its horrible! A zeqwa!” he cried, throwing up his hands and cowering in mock fear.