Dead Men's s Boots

Or to be more correct, I saw his head, staring blindly down at me from the coat-stand on which it had been impaled. A trickle of blood traced a thin straight line from the corner of his mouth to his chin, and his expression was one of mild consternation and puzzlement. The rest of his body was a good few feet away, under a ruptured radiator against which it had been thrown with casual violence.

A second after that I caught sight of Smeet: she was crouched underneath the only desk that was still upright, and both of her hands, balled into fists, were pressed to her mouth. Her impossibly wide eyes were staring at me in uncomprehending shock. It took me a moment to realise that she was still alive.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, inanely, going against all the evidence. Before I could think of anything stupider to add, the lights went out, plunging the room into absolute blackness.

There was a sound in the darkness, a few feet away from me. A hiss? Yeah, let’s call it a hiss. That probably makes you think of snakes, but this wasn’t like a snake. It was the kind of hiss that a big carnivore – say a tiger – makes involuntarily when it opens its jaws as wide as they’ll go.

It wasn’t a very comforting sound to hear right then.

14

The gospel according to Castor, chapter 1, verse 1: when in doubt, duck.

I threw myself forward into the debris and something went over my head fast enough so that I felt the wind of its passing.

I landed heavily on splintered wood and broken glass, cutting my hands as I threw them out in front of me to break my fall. There was a rending crash as my attacŽlanker made his own involuntary touchdown away to my right. Then I rolled, coming up on one knee to bring my whistle to my lips and blow a shrieking discord.

It was a place marker, really, nothing more than that: I didn’t know this were-thing well enough yet to play a tailor-made tune just for him. But loup-garous are more vulnerable than ghosts and demons in one respect, precisely because they’re composites: human souls holding animal flesh in an immaterial full nelson. All you need to do to weaken them is to slide a crowbar between the human and the animal and start working it loose.

That is, assuming they’ll sit still and let you.

The unseen thing I was fighting roared, basso profundo, and the floor shook: or maybe that was just me. There was a swirl of motion and a scrabbling as of claws on polished wood.

I was planning to duck again, but I didn’t get that far: something very solid made contact with my left shoulder, knocking me sprawling and sending the whistle flying out of my hands into the dark.

I would have used my momentum to roll, getting some distance away from the thing, but some overturned piece of furniture was right behind me. I hit it hard, went arse over tip and came down head first on the far side of it. What with the odd angle and the force of the impact, I couldn’t stop my head from hitting the floor hard. Lights danced behind my eyes, and I fought against unconsciousness with fierce desperation – because if I blacked out, even for a second, this was over.

I groped in the blackness for a weapon, knowing that I wasn’t going to find one that would work: knowing that I’d need luck, light and back-up to make a dent in this thing, and that none of them were likely to come my way.

But something came to hand: something rounded, with the texture of wood. The leg of a chair or a desk, maybe. Whatever it was, it was all I had, and it’s a poor workman who picks a fight with his tools. I heard that scrabbling sound again, from right in front of me, as my unseen assailant scaled whatever it was I’d fallen over. I made myself wait for an agonising second and then brought my makeshift club up with all the strength I had left, two-handed, with a silent prayer that the thing would be jumping down on me as the club came up. Its own speed and weight would give the blow a lot more heft than I could right then.

The shock jarred my arms right up to the shoulder. Something went crunch, and then the thing bellowed in agony even as its weight came down on me. I felt claws pierce my shoulder and I yelled too, kicking and rolling to try to get out from under it before it recovered from the pain and the shock.

No dice. I managed to lever my upper body a few inches up off the ground, but then the claws tightened, sending bolts of agony into my captive flesh, and hot stinking breath played over my face like a flameless blowtorch. I threw my head back, heedless of concussion now, and the jaws clashed above me close enough for me to hear the sound. Something warm and wet showered over my face – but at least it wasn’t bits of me.

Out of options, running on pure instinct, I rammed my stick into the place where that mouth had to be, and was rewarded with another shuddering impact.