June jumped to her feet and Brendan fell backwards. Seeing that the voice belonged to a grave, pale young boy, June scrambled for a response. “Umm, trick or treat?” she said hesitantly, forgetting to use a fake voice.

“What?” asked the boy. “It is not Halloween or my father would have told me. We do not miss Halloween.” He pushed a curl of brown hair back from his eyes. “And where are your pillowcases for the candy?”

“Oh, I guess you’re right," June said. "Whoops! We had our dates wrong, sorry! But who are you?”

“I’m Igor,” replied the boy. “Who are you?”

“I’m, er, Jane,” said June, “and this is Brandon. We’re supposed to be—er, bank robbers.”

“You do not look like bank robbers. The bank robbers usually wear something different on their faces.”

June gave Brendan a sharp sideways glance before asking, “Are your parents here, Igor?”

“It is just me. They are at dinner. And Miss Jen is here. I do not like her much. She just sits and watches the TV. She does not play with me.”

“How old are you, Igor?” June asked.

“I am seven.”

“Wow, you seem much older,” June said. “You must be very mature for your age.”

The boy stood a little taller, but a smile never touched his cold face, and June wondered if kids could actually be little demons. Cordelia hadn’t specified whether a demon could still have a child, and what that child would be when it turned seven.

“I was going to the play set. Will you play with me?” Igor asked, and he looked at them hopefully. June thought his face probably resembled the face of a spider when it asked a fly, hopefully, whether it would come play in the web.

She shivered and turned her gaze to the play set. A Shifter didn’t become one until they turned fifteen. And from what Cordelia had said about demons, they didn’t seem like the family type. Plus, Dr. Crushov would never be described as normal, so the chances were pretty high that his son would be weird as well. Maybe Igor wasn’t a little demon child, just a little odd child. A lot of people called June and Brendan odd too.

The pirate ship gave her an idea. If he wants to play with someone, maybe he’d like a new game, June thought. I’ll just keep a close eye on him and be ready if he tries to eat us.

“Hey, since it’s not Halloween after all, do you want to play a treasure hunting game with us instead?” June asked. Brendan made a choking noise.

The boy frowned. “Treasure hunting game?” Then he narrowed his eyes and nodded. "Yes, I think I could play that. But what are the rules?”

“It’s pretty simple," June said. “We sneak around your house like we’re on a dangerous island at night, trying to find a treasure and avoid getting caught. It just so happens we have a treasure hunting device with us and it will click a lot if we get close—”

“And Miss Jen is the British Navy!” Igor chimed in. “If she catches us, we lose.” He assumed a pirate character, squinting out of one eye. “Do I need a mask too?”

June laughed—Igor was a bright kid. “Sure. You can be the brave leader of the treasure hunters, and we’re your henchmen.” Plus a mask will make it harder for you to bite us, she thought.

“No, I’m the captain pirate, and you are the first mate and second mate. I’ll go get my mask and sword and then we start.” With that, Igor disappeared inside and left the door wide open. June could see a dark sunroom through the open door, illuminated now by a small table lamp.

“Can kids be demons?” Brendan asked. “What if he leads us right into a trap?”

“I wondered the same thing," June replied. "I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. He said he has a babysitter here, and if we see her and she’s alive and not half-eaten, then I think we can assume no trap.”

“Fair enough,” Brendan said. “I can’t believe that bit about the treasure hunt worked—that was brilliant! When did you get so good with kids? Have you been babysitting and not telling me?”

“Not a chance. I just don’t mind kids, especially if they aren’t demons. By the way, the serum we’re looking for—Cordelia injected me with it when I was a baby. She thought—”

“The radioactive serum? I thought you meant she gave it to you this week!”

“I know, right? She thought it would cure me, she said. But she thinks it made me into what I am now, instead of—”

Stolen story; please report.

“A werecat—”

“Yeah, instead of an owl like her.”

Brendan’s shoulders hunched forward. “I’m having a hard time finding something to say that doesn’t involve bad words to describe your mom.” He paused, and June only nodded—she didn't stop him or correct him. “But hey,” he continued, “I’d choose a werecat like you over an owl any day. You could eat owls for breakfast. How strong is your bite, do you think?”

At that moment Igor appeared in the doorway, his face covered by a Spiderman mask, and his hand gripping a shockingly realistic, long knife (but plastic, June noted with relief when the light caught it just right). He nodded at them, whipped back around, and marched into the house like a little pirate captain.

“You keep your eyes on the Geiger counter,” June whispered to Brendan, “and I’ll look around with one eye and keep the other eye on Igor.”

Inside the dimly lit sunroom, they found Igor standing on the opposite side of the room, blocking the way deeper into the house, where a hallway and then a sliver of the kitchen could be seen over his head. A house this size might have several kitchens, June thought. Maybe having a guide is worth it, so long as he doesn't try to attack us.

“What does the treasure look like?” Igor asked. “Is it in a chest?”

“No, not a chest,” June said. “There are two treasures, actually. One is a vial of valuable liquid that’s bright green.” Igor nodded at this, but his features were covered by the Spiderman mask. “The other treasure is actually a prisoner. Someone valuable.”

“A man! A man is the treasure?” Igor asked, and he actually laughed.

“Yep, a man,” Brendan said in a fake, deeper voice. He hadn’t spoken yet and accidentally used his real voice like June. “Have you seen any captives here?”

“Oh no,” Igor replied, “no strange captives here. A strange man in our house would not last long with my father.” He walked over to a floral-patterned couch and looked underneath, while June and Brendan exchanged a long and meaningful glance and Brendan drew a finger along his neck in the universal gesture for “death.” June realized she might need to keep both eyes on Igor after all.

Brendan had the Geiger counter out and fumbled with it until it began to softly click. June remembered their science lesson about it: the device would always click slowly, since background radiation existed everywhere. But if they encountered something really radioactive, it would speed up and click like a time bomb. Brendan walked the room with the device, but nothing changed in its clicking pattern. Igor came up to him and eyed the device closely, bending down until his face was almost touching it.

“A treasure detector?” he asked.

June could see Brendan gulp before he answered, leaning away from Igor a little. “Uh, yeah, treasure detector,” Brendan replied.

A scream tore through the room, coming from beyond the kitchen. Then ominous music swelled. Brendan and Igor hadn’t even reacted to the scream, let alone the music. And it was the music that convinced June a horror movie was playing somewhere inside the house—Miss Jen, most likely, engrossed in a slasher film and entirely ignorant of Igor’s whereabouts. But June dared not close her eyes or turn her back on Igor, so she couldn’t properly concentrate on what else she might hear.

“Where is your babysitter right now, Igor?” she asked.

“She is in the TV room, next to the kitchen.”

“Can your babysitter see us if we go into the kitchen?”

“If she looks out of the doorway, yes.”

“If she sees us, we lose, remember?” June said.

“Then we must sneak,” Igor replied.

So sneak they did, into the hallway that led to the kitchen, although it wasn’t like a hallway in June or Brendan’s house. This hallway was long, with a high ceiling, bronze-colored walls, and a recessed area on either side. Inside those recessed areas, bathed in yellow light, were paintings: one showed a forest, another depicted a field. Neither had the serum hidden behind it.

They entered the kitchen, where the TV room sat through a doorway in the back right corner. To June’s sensitive ears, the TV was so loud it was almost painful, notwithstanding the nearly closed door. She found herself surprisingly irritated—demon child or not, what if something actually happened to Igor? Anything worth doing was worth doing right, and keeping a child alive was certainly something worth doing. The babysitter would never hear Igor screaming if he got injured, but then again, she'd also never hear them moving around the house.

Igor, for his part, was very helpful in the kitchen, pointing out all the locations he would try to hide something. Sitting within easy reach of Igor’s height, on top of a massive island of beige quartz (easily the size of the entire kitchen in a normal house), was a wood block filled with knives. The size of the handles indicated that the blades would be large, like horror-movie large. But Igor never even looked at the knives. The Geiger counter continued to click away slowly. The smell of popcorn hung in the air, so strongly that it penetrated the hot dog aroma of June's yoga-pant mask. June’s stomach growled loudly and Brendan gave her a concerned look. She shook her head “no” and gave him a thumb’s up.

Two different doorways led out of the kitchen deeper into the house, and through each doorway was a corridor similar to the paintings-hallway.

“On the right side,” Igor said, “it is the fancy pillow room, the office, and the piano room. On the left side, it is the guest rooms.”

“Does your babysitter ever walk around the house to check on things?” Brendan asked.

“No. She only leaves the TV room to use the bathroom.”

June groaned inwardly—this babysitter was terrible. Yet, if she spent all her time oblivious to Igor, and he hadn’t eaten her, the odds of him being a little demon were low. “Let’s check the right side first,” June said. “Are you having fun? You’re doing great!”

Igor nodded eagerly and led them into the new hallway, which had alcoves on either side with bookshelves. The books themselves all looked ancient and had Russian letters on the spines. The noise from the TV room faded and the Geiger counter remained steady.

The office came first, and it struck June as unusual for Dr. Crushov, at least compared to his office at Cordelia’s facility. The floor was dark wood, the walls were tall and gray, and a massive, dark oak desk sat framed by windows. Conspicuously absent from the desk were any computer monitors. The rug under the desk, and the curtains framing the windows, were thick and deep red.

“This is a lair,” Brendan said softly. “A villain’s lair.”

Something on the desk grabbed June's attention: a little metal box, slate gray, just like the one that served as a card reader at Cordelia’s lab.

The heavy door leading to the office closed behind them. June realized Igor was nowhere to be found.

“A trap!” Brendan cried. “He wants to eat us!”