Last Creature Bureau

Free Sample — First 3 Chapters

Urban Cryptozoology — First 3 Chapters

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Chapter 1: Chapter 0

The Cascade Wyrm rose from the black water without a sound. Not a ripple, not a splash, not the wet gasp of something breaking the surface tension of the sump it had been sleeping in. One moment Callie Venn stood ankle-deep in sewage, flashlight beam cutting a trembling path across concrete walls furred with mineral growth. The next: a wall of scales, pale grey flesh the color of drowned things, rising from the darkness like a mountain deciding to stand.

She didn't scream. The Bureau trained that out of you by week three. She didn't run either — running in hip waders through two feet of unknown liquid broke your ankle and drowned you facedown in someone else's shit. She stood still, and she watched the Wyrm watch her.

Its head was the size of a refrigerator. Its eyes were the color of old copper, filmed with a nictitating membrane that slid across them like oil on water. It had been in Cascade City since the 1970s, according to the file she'd read exactly once. Paper so old it had the texture of a dead leaf, ink fading into the fibers like a ghost trying to escape its own documentation. It arrived as a juvenile, small enough to fit through a maintenance grate, following the heat of the city's waste processing infrastructure the way a salmon follows current to spawning grounds. The sewer system of Cascade was an accidental paradise for its kind. Warm. Dark. Endless. A network of tunnels beneath every street, every building, every foundation, the air thick with the mineral tang of rust and the sour breath of standing water.

It had grown. It had adapted. It had learned to avoid human contact so completely that most residents of Cascade would deny any such creature existed.

Now it looked at Callie Venn with the calm, patient attention of something that had been alive longer than she had, that had watched a city rise and begin to fall, that had outlasted the Bureau's projections by thirty-two years because the Bureau had stopped coming to Cascade City a long time ago.

The Wyrm blinked. Its head tilted, just slightly, like a dog trying to understand a strange sound.

Then it sank back into the water, as slowly and silently as it had risen, and Callie Venn stood alone in the dark, her heart hammering against her ribs, her flashlight beam shaking across the empty surface of the sump.

She had been tracking it ever since. Nineteen years of crawling through tunnels, reading faded reports, listening for whispers in a city that had learned to keep its secrets. The Bureau had written Cascade off as a Tier 3 monitoring zone. "Probable extinction of Alpha and Sigma class creatures within twenty years." But the Bureau was wrong. The Bureau was wrong about a lot of things.

Callie Venn was the only one left who remembered how to look.

She had been twenty-three years old, fresh out of Bureau field training, still wearing a jacket that smelled like the factory where it was made. Bureau-issue: a heavy canvas field coat with reinforced shoulders and a chemical-resistant lining supposed to protect against the acidic secretions of Class Gamma amphibians. It had never been tested against any such thing. The jacket smelled like formaldehyde, stale coffee, and the particular kind of mildew that grew in Bureau storage closets. A damp, papery smell that clung to the fabric no matter how many times she aired it out. She had loved it anyway. It meant she was a real agent.

The griffin was a misidentification. A malfunctioning HVAC unit throwing sparks in a pattern that matched the creature's thermographic signature. She filed the report, drove back to the field office, and sat in the parking lot until dawn, watching the steam rise from the manhole covers and wondering what else lived beneath the city's skin.

Chapter 2: Chapter 1

The van's engine was still warm when the CODE THREE alert hit.

Callie was already awake, had been for two hours, staring at the corrugated ceiling of the cargo bay, counting rain against metal skin. The cot springs bit into her back. The feeding station. The sedan. The cut fence. The concrete patch already failing, its cold roughness still imprinted on her palm from yesterday's inspection.

She had not told Nasir about the feeding station. She told herself it was evidence-gathering. She told herself it was protecting him. But the truth sat heavier than the wet air: she did not know who was feeding the Wyrm, or whether they were the same people who had cut the fence, or who at the Bureau she could trust with that information.

Then the emergency frequency screamed through the van's speakers, a tone she had not heard in five years, bypassing every protocol, burning through the dedicated override circuit reserved for confirmed Class Omega or Sigma incidents. The electronics heated. Ozone ghosted from the crackling speaker.

"CODE THREE. CLASSIFICATION: SIGMA. SECTOR 12, INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT. REPORTING PARTY: CASCADE PD, OFFICER MARQUEZ. SIGMA-CLASS CONFIRMED SIGHTING. MULTIPLE WITNESSES. CODE THREE ACTIVE. ALL AVAILABLE BUREAU ASSETS RESPOND."

She hit the driver's seat before the message finished. The engine caught on the first try, a small mercy she had no time to acknowledge. Sirens. Gravel lot. The van's suspension groaned as she took the turn onto the main road at speed.

3:48 AM. One minute since dispatch. Sector 12. The same industrial district. The same construction site. The same breach in the bedrock.

Someone had found the Wyrm.

---

Fourteen minutes. She made it in fourteen.

The industrial district at 4 AM was a graveyard of sodium-orange streetlights and rain-slicked concrete. The storm had stopped an hour ago, but the roads still shimmered, headlights scattering into a thousand fractured reflections. The air tasted like damp asphalt and exhaust, metallic, clinging to her throat. Factories and warehouses lined the roads, dark and dead, their machines idling in a low collective hum that vibrated through the pavement and up into the van's chassis.

The Wyrm was here. And someone was feeding it.

The construction site was not dark.

Callie saw the lights from three blocks away, not the floodlights she had observed yesterday, but the strobing blue-and-red of police cruisers, at least six of them, parked at haphazard angles around the perimeter as if the officers had arrived in a hurry and abandoned any pretense of procedure. The chain-link fence that had surrounded the site was open, the main gate swung wide, and beyond it the excavation pit was illuminated by portable floodlights that someone had positioned at the edge, pointing down into the void.

She killed the sirens a block out and pulled the van to the curb, parking behind a police cruiser whose driver's door was still open. She grabbed her field kit and moved on foot, her badge already in her hand, the brass worn smooth from years of thumbing.

The scene was chaos.

A cluster of uniformed officers stood at the edge of the excavation pit, their flashlights trained on something in the shadows below. Two of them had their service weapons drawn, not aimed, but held at low ready, a posture that said they were prepared for something they did not know how to handle. A third officer was on the radio, his voice tight, speaking in controlled bursts that Callie recognized as the cadence of someone trying very hard not to panic.

"Backup requested. I repeat, backup requested. We have a, a situation at the Spire construction site. Need animal control. No, not animal control. Something else. Something, something—"

"Bureau," Callie said, stepping past him and flashing her badge. "I'm taking over this scene. Who's the commanding officer?"

The officer on the radio looked at her with an expression that was equal parts

Chapter 3: Chapter 2

The granola bar tasted like cardboard and regret. Callie chewed mechanically, her eyes fixed on the note against the windshield—the watermark invisible now in the gray morning light, but burned into her memory. She had only caught it because the paper had been backlit by the library's streetlamp at 3 AM. Now, in the van's flat cabin, the paper was just paper. Twelve words. Generic. Untraceable.

She knew better.

Her footsteps echoed through the marble lobby as she crossed to the second-floor terminals. Public-access machines running an operating system Microsoft abandoned eight years ago. Slow but functional. Anonymous. No trail for the Bureau to follow.

She scanned the note at 1200 DPI, the scanner's cold blue light washing over the paper, saved the image to a USB drive on her keychain, and spent two hours running searches she had not run in nineteen years.

The watermark belonged to Cascadia Office Solutions. Their client list was private, but their delivery routes were archived in city business permits. Digitized three years ago and promptly forgotten. Callie cross-referenced the routes with the industrial district, Sector 12, and the construction site perimeter.

Seventeen addresses within three miles of the excavation site. Eleven corporate offices. Five municipal buildings. The seventeenth: ARKIVE GENETICS, Suite 1400, Spire Tower.

The same Spire funding the construction. The same Spire that had dug the foundation that breached the Wyrm's tunnel.

Callie stared at the screen, the fluorescent lights humming overhead with that particular 1970s frequency. A low, insectile buzz vibrating in her teeth. ARKIVE GENETICS. Biological sample preservation. Advanced cryogenic storage.

A genetics company in the building digging into the Wyrm's territory. A genetics company whose printer had produced the threat on her windshield.

The cursor blinked. She had stopped chewing. She saved the search results to her USB drive, cleared the browser history, and logged off the terminal. Then she walked out of the library and drove to the Bureau.

She had questions. She needed answers. The only person who might have them was Dr. Nasir Reid.

---

The Bureau headquarters at mid-morning was a different building than it was at night. During the overnight hours, the converted Victorian fire station felt like a sanctuary. Quiet, insulated, the kind of place where the old pipes settled into a rhythm that resembled breathing. During the day, it was a monument to institutional decay. The fluorescent lights in the hallways flickered. The heating system made a sound like a dying accordion. A wheeze and a groan that rattled through the radiators. The smell of burnt coffee drifted from the break room, acrid and metallic, and the bullpen desks sat empty under a layer of dust accumulating since the last round of budget cuts in 2014.

Callie walked past the empty desks without stopping. She did not look at the nameplate on Agent 19's desk. She did not look at the bulletin board, where a memo from the Director's office remained pinned, dated six months ago, announcing a "thorough review of field operations" that had never happened. She walked directly to the Archive, pushed open the heavy oak door. The hinges groaning in protest. She stepped into the only room in the building that still felt alive.

The Archive was a contradiction. It occupied the entire third floor of the converted fire station. A space that had originally been the hay loft when the building housed horse-drawn fire engines. But it had been subdivided into a maze of shelving units, filing cabinets, and reading tables that made the room feel both vast and claustrophobic. The shelves rose to the ceiling, fifteen feet above the floor, packed with documents dating back to the Bureau's founding in 1887. The oldest files were bound in leather. The newest were in manila folders printed from

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