Hellforged

zombies, werewolves, vampires, and other assorted creatures of the night—including shapeshifters like me—were required by law to live there. Tina scooped up some paper towels and threw them at Milsap again. “Look at me! Does this look like something I’d fake?” She raised her arms to shoulder height, palms up.

Not what you’d call a pretty sight. Like all zombies, Tina had spongy, gray-green skin and bloodred eyes. But the rest of her—the lashes gummy with mascara, the Barbie fashion sense, the double ponytails sprouting from the top of her head—that was 100 percent Tina. Her point was obvious: She’d rather be a normal teenager than a monster. Who wouldn’t?

Milsap straightened; he’d decided it was time to regain some of his dignity. “I never called you a fraud, young lady. Your condition is the result of a virus. It’s been documented, even if we don’t yet understand it completely. What I said was that Boston’s so-called ‘werewolves’ and ‘vampires’ were either charlatans or deluded.” He turned to me, lifting his eyebrows with earnestness. “I am a man of science, Ms. Vaughn. It is not possible for a corpse to return from the grave and survive on human blood. It is not possible for a human being to transform into a wolf for three nights each month. The laws of physics, not to mention biology, proscribe it. Whatever psychological aberration these people suffer does not—cannot—affect their physical reality.”

Psychological aberration, huh? I was starting to feel like dunking the guy’s head myself. I’m not a werewolf, but I do change form. As one of the Cerddorion, a race of shapeshifting demon fighters that stretches all the way back to the Welsh goddess Ceridwen, I can change into any creature, three shifts per lunar cycle—the laws of physics and biology be damned. Maybe there were some things science hadn’t caught up with yet.

“You saw the demon,” I pointed out, bending over to gather some paper towels. I crumpled the towels into a ball and wet them at another sink.

“I don’t know what I saw. Some kind of animal, perhaps, that escaped from one of the biological research labs.” His expression turned defiant. “I do know, however, that demons do not exist. I opposed the trustees’ decision to hire you. I only volunteered to be your contact because I didn’t trust you. I fully expected you’d crash around the computer room for a while, causing untold damage, and then claim you’d driven out the ‘demon’ ”—his voice went all sarcastic with the word—“after you’d wreaked so much destruction that the so-called Glitch would be moot. So tonight I left this young lady in my office—”

“Locked me in, you mean.”

“—and I went to the security surveillance station to see what you were up to. The officer was sprawled across the desk, and snoring. I woke him, and we both saw you disable the camera. We rushed to the lab before you could do worse.” His glare was just this side of murderous.

“Whoa, Professor.” I held out both hands in a calm-down gesture. “I didn’t disable anything. That was the Glitch. I sprayed the camera to pull it out of your surveillance system. It fried the camera when it came out.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You are so lame!” sputtered Tina. “That Glitch zapped you halfway into next week, it clawed your face all to hell, you’ve got Glitch spit gooping up your hair—and you keep saying there’s no such thing. How can you be so stupid?”

Milsap gaped at her, his face a mixture of dumbfounded dropped-jaw and angry furrowed-forehead. As if never in his whole life had anyone called him stupid before.

“Whatever.” Tina dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “I saw a vending machine back there, Vicky. I’m getting something to eat.” She’d have slammed the door behind her if it wasn’t the self-closing kind.

Zombies are always hungry. Now that I thought of it, I’d never seen Tina go so long without a snack—or twelve. It’d be good for her to work off her emotions by chomping down twenty or thirty chocolate bars.

Milsap stared after her. “Next, you people will be telling me the library is haunted by the ghost of some undergraduate who perished in the stacks.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Professor.” He blinked at me like a purple-spotted owl. “Everyone knows there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

He kept blinking, like he couldn’t tell whether I was kidding or not.

I approached him with the sodden mass of paper towels. “Let me get a look at you.” He leaned over the sink again, turning his head so the spit-covered side was toward me. I used the paper towels to scrub more of the gunk from his face. I can’t say I was all that gentle—I mean, the guy had tried to rip me off and have me arrested. He winced, but he didn’t complain. I inspected the slashes on his cheek where the Glitch had clawed him, checking the broken skin for specks of venom. I dabbed at a couple of spots with the paper towels, lifting the poison out, then rubbed in more soap. Milsap flinched as the soap stung him. Another rinse, and I checked again.

“That’s the best we can do for now,” I said. “I cleaned the venom out of the cuts, but keep scrubbing your face until there’s no trace of purple left. It’ll take a day or two to get rid of it, but you should be okay as long as it’s completely gone in a week. It takes about that long for the poison to work.”

He straightened again and glanced in the mirror. “And my hair?”

“Wash it a hundred times, shave it off, whatever. You could even leave it in for a new look—if you can stand the smell. The stuff in your hair won’t hurt you. But get it off your skin.”

A tremendous crash shuddered the bathroom door. Tina must have been awfully hungry—it sounded like she’d torn the front off the vending machine and hurled it down the hallway. Well, why not? Like I said, zombies are always hungry. And she’d already wrecked her manicure.

2

“I DON’T SEE WHY YOU WOULDN’T LET ME DRIVE.” TINA SAT sideways in an upholstered chair in the lounge of the group home she shared with other zombified teens. A sofa and some chairs formed a semicircle in front of a thirty-two-inch TV mounted on the wall. Behind the chairs stood a battered Ping-Pong table, its net sagging. Bookshelves lined the far wall. An audio system took up more shelf space than any books did.

Tina lay back against one arm of the chair; her legs stuck out over the other, showing off her ripped-knee jeans. Her legs didn’t exactly dangle, thanks to her undead stiffness, but it was as close to lounging as a zombie could get. Empty chip bags and donut boxes littered the floor.

“Why didn’t I let you drive? Hmm. Well, for starters, you don’t have a driver’s license.”

“So? I know how. I almost had my learner’s permit when the stupid plague came along.”

“You were fifteen,” I reminded her. “You need to be sixteen to get a permit.”

She picked at her baby-pink nail polish. “I said almost. Anyway, who’d teach me? My dad promised he would, but he and Mom couldn’t dump me fast enough once they realized I was gonna be stuck this way forever.”

It was true. And I felt for the kid, really—but nobody besides me would ever drive that car. A 1964 E-type Jaguar in classic racing green, Dad had shipped it over from Wales when he and Mom moved to Massachusetts in the 1970s. Now, the Jag was all I had left of him—and Tina would not be wrapping it around a lamppost.

“Enough. Let’s talk about tonight’s job.” Tina was getting work-study credit at her high school for being my apprentice. “What did you know about Glitches going in?”

She swung around in the chair so she was sitting up straight—more or less. She tore open a bag of pretzels and stuffed handfuls into her mouth between sentences. “Anti-technology demons. Glitches are really old—like, older than cavemen. Back in the day, they didn’t bother the norms. They lived in storm clouds, eating electricity. But the Bronze Age dawned, and humans discovered that bronze weapons kill demons. Glitches declared war, attacking any new kind of technology.”

“Right.” I nodded. “That’s why I have to go after them with low-tech weapons like knives and axes. Anything more advanced, and they gum up the weapon itself. You saw what happened when the security guard fired his gun.”

“That was awesome.” She sent me a sidelong glance. “Are you mad at me for busting out of that professor’s office? I know you said I have to stay away from the job site, but—”

“It’s okay. This time.” Back in October, Tina had wreaked all kinds of havoc when she’d followed me into a client’s dream and accidentally torched his dreamscape. “You’re supposed to stay with the client, yes, but this client