A shotgun boomed, much closer to us than the earlier gunfire had been. It was immediately followed by the sounds of something heavy being slammed several times into the walls and floor.
The psychic stench of the skinwalker abruptly thickened and I said, "Here it comes!"
By the time I got to "it," the skinwalker was already through the door to the outer office, seemingly moving faster than the splinters that flew off the door when the creature shattered it. Covered in a veil, it was just a flickering blur in the air.
I brought my shield up, focused far forward, filling the doorway to Lara's office with invisible force. The skinwalker hit the barrier with all of its strength and speed. The shield held—barely—but so much energy had gone into the impact that wisps of smoke began curling up from the bracelet, and the skin on my wrist got singed. So much force surged into my shield that it physically drove me back across a foot of carpet.
As it hit, the energies of the skinwalker's veil came into conflict with those in my shield, each canceling out the other, and for a second the creature was visible as an immensely tall, lean, shaggy, vaguely humanoid thing with matted yellow hair and overlong forelimbs tipped in long, almost delicate claws.
As the shield fell, Anastasia pointed a finger at the thing and hissed a word, and a blindingly bright beam of light no thicker than a hair flashed out from her finger. It was fire magic not unlike my own, but infinitely more intense and focused and far more energy efficient. The beam swept past the skinwalker, intersecting with its upper left arm, and where it touched fur burned away and flesh boiled and bubbled and blackened.
The skinwalker flashed to one side of the doorway and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a view of the smoking pinprick hole in the expensive paneling of the outer office.
I pointed my staff at the door and Lara did the same thing with the gun.
For maybe ten seconds, everything was silent.
"Where is it?" Lara hissed.
"Gone?" Justine suggested. "Maybe it got scared when Warden Luccio hurt it."
"No, it didn't," I said. "It's smart. Right now it's looking for a better way to get to us."
I looked around the office, trying to think like the enemy. "Let's see," I said. "IfI was a shapeshifting killing machine, how would I get in here?"
The options were limited. There was the door in front of us and the window behind us. I turned to face the window, still looking. Silence reigned, except for the sigh of the air-conditioning, billowing steadily into the office from the—
From the vents.
I turned and thrust my staff toward a large air vent, covered with the usual slatted steel contraption, drew forth my will, and screamed, "Fulminos!"
Blue-white lightning suddenly filled the air with flickering fire, while a spear of blinding heat and force crackled forth from my staff and slammed into the metal vent. The metal absorbed the electricity, and I knew it would carry it back through the vent itself—and into anything inside.
There was a weird, chirping scream and then the vent cover flew outward, followed by a python-shaped blur in the air. Even as it arced toward us, that shape flowed and changed into that of something low-slung, stocky, and viciously powerful, like maybe a badger or a wolverine.
It hit Anastasia high on the chest and slammed her to the floor.
And on the way down, I caught a flash of golden-yellow eyes dancing with sadistic glee.
I turned to kick the thing off of Anastasia, but Lara beat me to the metaphorical punch. She slammed the barrel of her machine pistol into its flank as if driving a beer tap into a wooden keg with her bare hands, and pulled the trigger on the way.
Fire and noise filled the room, and the skinwalker went bouncing to one side. It hit the ground once, twisted itself in midair and raked its claws across Justine's midsection. Using the reaction to control its momentum, it landed on its feet and hurled itself out of the room by way of the window behind Lara's desk.
Justine staggered and let out a small cry of pain.
Lara stared at the window for a second, her eyes wide, then breathed, "Empty night."
I turned to Anastasia but she waved me off with a grimace. It didn't look like she was bleeding. I turned to Justine and tried to assess her injuries. There were six horizontal lines sliced into the soft flesh of her abdomen, as neatly as if with a scalpel. Blood was welling readily from them—but I didn't think any of them had been deep enough to open the abdominal cavity or reach an artery.
I seized Lara's discarded coat, folded it hastily, and pressed it against Justine's belly. "Hold it here," I snapped to Justine. "You've got to control the bleeding. Hold it here."
Her teeth were bared in pain, but she nodded and grasped at the improvised pad with both hands as I helped her up.
Lara looked from Justine to the window, her eyes a little wide. "Empty night," she said again. "I've never seen anything that fast."
Given that I had once seen her cover ground in a dead sprint at maybe fifty miles an hour, I figured she knew what she was talking about. We were never going to get that thing to hold still long enough to kill it.
I went to the window, hoping to spot it, and found myself staring into an oncoming comet of purple flame, presumably courtesy of the skinwalker. I fell back, hurling my left arm and its shield bracelet in an instinctive gesture, and the fiery hammer of the explosion flung me supine to the floor.
That otherworldly shriek sounded again, mocking and full of spite, and then there was a crash from somewhere below us.
"It's back inside the house," I said. I offered my hand to Anastasia to help her up. She took it, but as I began to pull, she clenched her teeth over a scream, and I eased her back onto the floor at once.
"Can't," she panted, breathing hard. "It's my collarbone."
I spat out a curse. Of every kind of simple fracture there is, a fractured collarbone is one of the most agonizing and debilitating injuries you can get. She wasn't going to be doing any more fighting today. Hell, she wasn't going to be doing any morestanding.
The floor beneath my feet abruptly exploded. I felt a steel cable wrap my ankle and pull, and then I was falling with a hideous stench filling my nose. I crashed down onto something that slowed my fall but gave way, and I went farther down still. The noise was hideous. Then the fall stopped abruptly, though I wasn't quite sure which way was up. About a hundred objects slammed into me all at the same time, pounding the wind out of my lungs.
I lay there stunned for a few seconds, struggling to remember how to breathe. The floor. The skinwalker had smashed its way up to me through the floor. It had pulled me down—but all the falling debris must have crashed through the floor the skinwalker had been standing on in turn.
I'd just fallen two stories amidst maybe a ton of debris, and managed to survive it. Talk about lucky.
And then, beneath my lower back, something moved.
The rubble shifted and a low growl began to reverberate up through it.
In a panic, I tried to force my dazed body to flee, but before I could figure out how it worked, a yellow-furred, too-long forearm exploded up out of the rubble. Quicker than you could say "the late Harry Dresden," its long, clawed fingers closed with terrible strength on my throat and shut off my air.
Here's something a lot of people don't know: being choked unconscious hurts.
There's this horrible, crushing pain on your neck, followed by an almost instant surge of terrible pressure that feels like it's going to blow your head to tiny pieces from the inside. That's the blood that's being trapped in your brain. The pain surges and ebbs in time with your heartbeat, which is probably racing.
It doesn't matter if you're a waifish supermodel or a steroid-popping professional wrestler, because it isn't an issue of strength or willpower—it's simple physiology. If you're human and you need to breathe, you're going down. A properly applied choke will take you from feisty to unconscious in four or five seconds.
Of course, if the choker wants to make the victim hurt more, they can be sloppy about the choke, make it take longer.
I'll let you guess which the skinwalker preferred.
I struggled, but I might as well have saved myself the effort. I couldn't break the grip on my neck. The pile of rubble shifted and surged, and then the skinwalker sat up out of the wreckage, sloughing it off as easily as an arctic wolf emerging from a bed beneath the snow. The skinwalker's nightmarishly long arms hung below its knees, so as it began moving down the hallway, I was able to get my hands and knees underneath me, at least part of the time, preventing my neck from snapping under the strain of supporting my own weight.
I heard boots hitting hardwood. The skinwalker let out a chuckling little growl and casually slammed my head against the wall. Stars and fresh pain flooded my perceptions. Then I felt myself falling through the air and landing in a tumble of arms and legs that only seemed to be connected to me in the technical sense.
I lifted dazed eyes to see the security guy from the entrance hall come around the corner, that little machine gun held to his shoulder, his cheek resting against the stock so that the barrel pointed wherever his eyes were focused. When he saw the skinwalker, uncovered from its veil, he stopped in his tracks. To his credit, he couldn't have hesitated for more than a fraction of a second before he opened fire.
Bullets zipped down the hall, so close that I could have reached out a hand and touched them. The skinwalker flung itself to one side, a golden-furred blur, and rebounded off the wall toward the gunman, its form changing. Then it leapt into the air, flipping its body as it did, and suddenly a spider the size of a subcompact car was racing along the ceiling toward the security guy.
At that point, he impressed me again. He turned and ran, sprinting around a corner with the skinwalker coming hard behind.
"Now!" someone called, as the skinwalker reached the intersection of the two hallways, and a sudden howl of thunder filled the hallways with noise and light. Bullets ripped into the floor, the wall, and the ceiling, coming from some point out of sight around the corner, filling the air with splinters of shattered hardwood.
The skinwalker let out a deafening caterwaul of pain and boundless fury. The gunfire reached a thunderous, frantic crescendo.
Then men began screaming.
I tried to push myself to my feet, but someone had set the hallway on tumble dry, and I fell down again. I kept trying. Whoever had made the hall start acting like a Laundromat dryer had to run out of quarters eventually. By using the wall, I managed to make it to my knees.
I heard a soft sound behind me. I turned my head blearily toward the source of the noise and saw three pale, lithe forms drop silently from the floors above through the hole that the skinwalker had made. The first was Lara Raith. She'd torn her skirt up one side, almost all the way to her hip, and when she landed in a silent crouch, she looked cold and feral and dangerous with her sword in one hand and her machine pistol in the other.
The other two women were vampires as well, their pale skin shining with eerie beauty, their eyes glittering like polished silver coins—the sisters Justine had mentioned, I presumed. I guess I'd arrived in the middle of the night, vampire time, and gotten some people out of bed. The first sister wore nothing but weapons and silver body piercings, which gleamed on one eyebrow, one nostril, her lower lip, and her nipples. Her dark hair had been cropped close to her head except for where her bangs fell to veil one of her eyes, and she carried a pair of wavy-bladed swords like Lara's.
The second seemed to be taller and more muscular than the other two. She wore what looked like a man's shirt, closed with only a single button. Her long hair was a mess, still tousled from sleep, and she held an exotic-looking axe in her hands, its blade honed along a concave edge instead of the more conventional convex one.
Without any visible signal, they all started prowling forward at the same time—and it was a prowl, an atavistic, feline motion that carried what were very clearly predators forward in total silence. Lara paused when she reached me, glanced over my injuries with cold silver eyes and whispered, "Stay down."
No problem, I thought dully. Down is easy.
The screaming stopped with a last stuttering burst of gunfire. The security guy came staggering around the corner. Blood matted his hair and covered half of his face. There was a long tear through his jacket on the left side. His left arm hung uselessly, but he still gripped the handle of his miniature assault weapon with his right. He wavered and dropped to one knee as he spotted the three vampires.
Lara gestured with a hand, and the other two spread out and moved forward, while she came to the side of the wounded guard. "What happened?"
"We hit it," he said, his voice slurred. "We hit it with everything. Didn't even slow it down. They're dead. They're all dead."
"You're bleeding," Lara said in a calm tone. "Get behind me. Defend the wizard."
He nodded unsteadily. "Yeah. Okay."
Lara's guy had to be either incredibly lucky or really good to have survived a close-quarters battle with the skinwalker. I stared dully at security guy for a second before my impact-addled brain sent up a warning flag. Nobody was that lucky.
"Lara!" I choked out.
Security guy turned in a blur of motion, sweeping the machine gun at Lara's head like a club—but she had begun moving the instant she'd heard my warning and he missed knocking her head off her shoulders by a fraction of an inch. She flung herself to one side and rolled as security guy's other arm flashed out, lengthening and sprouting yellow fur and claws as it came. She avoided the worst of it, but the skinwalker's claws left a triple line of incisions down one shapely thigh, and they welled with blood a little too pale and pearly to be human.
The skinwalker followed her motion, surging forward, its body broadening and thickening into the form of something like a great bear with oversized jaws and vicious fangs. It overbore her by sheer mass, slapping and raking with its clawed paws, snapping with its steely jaws. I heard a bone break, heard Lara cry out in rage—and then the skinwalker flew straight up into the ceiling, its head and shoulders slamming into it with such force that it went cleanly through it, and out onto the floor above.
Lara had rolled to her back, and had launched the thing away from her with her legs. They were long and smoothly muscled and utterly desirable, even as she lowered them and rolled lightly to her feet, holding one arm tucked in close to her side. Her skin shone with cold, alien power, and her eyes had become spheres of pure white. She stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, slowly lifting and straightening her arm as she did.
Her forearm had received a compound fracture. I could see bone poking out through the flesh. But over the next few seconds, the flesh seemed to ripple and become more malleable. The bone withdrew, vanishing beneath the skin of her arm—even the hole that the bone had torn in the skin sealed slowly closed, and in ten seconds I couldn't even tell she'd been hurt.
She turned those empty white eyes to me and stared at me with an expression of focused naked hunger. For a second, I felt my body responding to her desire, even as woozy as I was, but that was quickly snuffed out by a surge of nausea. I turned my head and threw up onto the expensive floor while my head and neck screamed with pain.
When I looked up again, Lara had turned her head away from me. She picked up her fallen weapon—but the machine pistol had been bent into the shape of a comma by a blow from the skinwalker's sledgehammer paws. She discarded it, recovered her sword, and drew the matching weapon from her belt. She was breathing quickly—not in effort, but in raw excitement, and the tips of her breasts strained against her dirtied blouse. She licked her lips slowly and said, evidently for my benefit, "I sometimes see Madeline's point."
There was a feminine scream from somewhere close by, a challenge that was answered by a leonine roar that shook the hallway. The short-haired sister flew into the wall at the T intersection ahead, and collapsed like a rag doll. There were sounds of swift motion from around the corner, and a gasp.
Then silence.
A moment later, a blur came around the corner, dragging the axe-wielding sister's limp form by the hair. The veil faded as the skinwalker came closer, once more showing us its bestial, not-quite-human form. It stopped in front of us, maybe ten feet away. Then, quite casually, it lifted one of the unconscious vampire's hands to its fanged mouth and, never looking away from Lara, calmly nipped off a finger and swallowed it.
Lara narrowed her eyes, and her rich mouth split into a wide, hungry smile. "Did you need a break before we continue?"
The skinwalker spoke, its voice weirdly modulated, as if several different creatures were approximating speech at the same time. "Break?"
With the word, it calmly snapped the vampire girl's left arm in midhumerus.
Hell's bells.
"I am going to kill you," Lara said calmly.
The skinwalker laughed. It was a hideous sound. "Little phage. Even here at the center of your power, you could not stop me. Your warriors lay slain. Your fellow phages are fallen. Even the foolish pretenders to power visiting your house could not stop me."
I'd gotten enough of my head back together to push myself to my feet. Lara never looked at me, but I could sense her attention on me nonetheless. I didn't have time to gather my will for a magical strike. The skinwalker would feel me doing it long before it became a fact.
Fortunately, I plan for such contingencies.
The eight silver rings I wore, one on each of my fingers, served a couple of purposes. The triple bands of silver were moderately heavy, and if I had to slug someone, they made a passably good imitation of brass knuckles. But their main purpose was to store back a little kinetic energy every time I moved one of my arms. It took a while to build up a charge, but when they were ready to go, I could release the force stored in each ring with instant precision. A blast from a single band of a ring could knock a big man off his feet and take the fight out of him in the process. There were three bands to each ring—which meant that I had a dozen times that much force ready to go on each hand.
I didn't bother to say anything to Lara. I just lifted my right fist and triggered every ring on it, unleashing a pile driver of kinetic energy at the skinwalker. Lara bounded forward at the same instant, swords spinning, ready to lay into the skinwalker when my strike threw it off balance and distracted it.
But the skinwalker lifted its left hand, fingers crooked into a familiar defensive gesture, and the wave of force that should have knocked it tail over teakettle bounced back from it like light from a mirror—and struck Lara full-on instead.
Lara let out a startled whuffas the equivalent force of a speeding car slammed into her, knocked her back, and flattened her against the mound of rubble still filling the hallway behind me.
The skinwalker's mouth split into a leering smile of its own, and its bestial voice purred, "Break, little phage. Break."
Lara gasped and lifted herself up with her arms. Her white eyes were fixed on the skinwalker, her lips twisted into a defiant snarl.
I stood there staring at the skinwalker. It was hard, and I had to use the wall to help me balance. Then I took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall, moving very carefully, until I stood between the skinwalker and Lara. I turned to face it squarely.
"Okay," I said. "Let's have it."
"Have what, pretender?" the skinwalker growled.
"You aren't here to kill us," I said. "You could have done it by now."
"Oh, so true," it murmured, its eyes dancing with malicious pleasure.
"You don't have to gloat about it, prick," I muttered under my breath. Then I addressed the skinwalker again. "You must want to talk. So why don't you just say what you came to say?"
The skinwalker studied me, and idly nipped another finger from the unconscious vampire girl. It chewed slowly, with some truly unsettling snapping, popping sounds, and then swallowed. "You will trade with me."
I frowned. "Trade?"
The skinwalker smiled again and tugged something from around its neck with one talon. Then it caught the object and tossed it to me. I caught it. It was a silver pentacle necklace, a twin to my own, if considerably less battered and worn.
It was Thomas's necklace.
My belly went cold.
"Trade," the skinwalker said. "Thomas of Raith. For the doomed warrior."
I eyed the thing. So it wanted Morgan, too. "Suppose I tell you to fuck off."
"I will no longer be in a playful mood," it purred. "I will come for you. I will kill you. I will kill your blood, your friends, your beasts. I will kill the flowers in your home and the trees in your tiny fields. I will visit such death upon whatever is yours that your very name will be remembered only in curses and tales of terror."
I believed the creature.
No reflexive comeback quip sprang from my lips. Given what I'd seen of the skinwalker's power, I had to give that one a five-star rating on the threatometer.
"And to encourage you . . ." Its gaze shifted to Lara. "If the wizard does not obey, I will unmake you as well. I will do it every bit as easily as I have done today. And it will bring me intense pleasure to do so."
Lara stared at the skinwalker with pure white eyes, her expression locked into a snarl of hate.
"Do you understand me, little phage? You and that rotting bag of flesh you've attached yourself to?"
"I understand," Lara spat.
The skinwalker's smile widened for an instant. "If the doomed warrior is not delivered to me by sundown tomorrow, I will begin my hunt."
"It might take more time than that," I said.
"For your sake, pretender, pray it does not." It idly flung the unconscious vampire away from it, to land in a heap atop the other sister. "You may reach me through his speaking devices," the skinwalker said.
Then it leapt lightly up through one of the holes in the ceiling, and was gone.
I slumped against the wall, almost falling.
"Thomas," I whispered.
That nightmare had my brother
