Dead Men's s Boots

I saw Vince first. 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 attacker 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. No bellow of rage this time: it’s hard to make with the primal screams with a five-pound toothpick lodged in your gullet. I kicked and flailed and pulled myself out from under, pulling myself off those clutching claws and trying not to think how much of my own precious skin I was leaving there.

It wouldn’t stay down: I knew damn well it wouldn’t. I’d hurt it, and I’d given it something to think about besides me, but this wasn’t a fight I could win: not without my whistle and a fair bit more lead time than the couple of seconds I probably had.

My eyes were starting to adjust to the dark now, at least a little, and I could see the crazy diagonal of the unhinged door up ahead of me. I half-ran, half-staggered towards it: at the very least, if this bastard followed me I’d be leading him away from Smeet and giving her a fighting chance.

I made it out onto the landing, but my head was still reeling a little from the whack it had taken earlier, and I almost fell down the stairwell before I could skid to a halt and orient myself. Down or up? No contest. If I went up I’d be cornered as soon as I ran out of stairs. At the bottom there was the street, and a slim but measurable chance of getting out of this.

What happened next was kind of a mixed blessing. The loup-garou came cannoning out of the door right behind me and hit me squarely in the back with its full weight, sending me tumbling down the stairwell head over heels. It meant I got to where I wanted to go a whole lot faster: unfortunately, it also meant that I reached the bottom in a sprawling heap, one arm twisted painfully under me: all breath had been slammed out of my lungs on the second or third bounce, so all I could do was lie there, sucking in air in a shuddering, drawn-out gasp.

By a happy chance I fetched up on my back, looking back the way I’d come, so I got to see the thing that was about to kill me for the first time in the light from the street outside. Despite its impressive size, the loup-garou padded down the stairs with an incongruous daintiness, slow at first but accelerating because the stairs were steep and built for two legs rather than four. It was sleek and black – or maybe some dark shade that just looked black in the inadequate light – and it had the basic shape of a panther: more mass in the shoulders and forelegs than in the back, claws as long as the blades of Swiss Army knives, and with a tendency to carry its weight close to the ground. The head was more eclectic, though: the mouth was too wide, and studded with too many different kinds of teeth, to be convincingly cat-like. And the forehead was high, like a human forehead, like the dim memory of a human face stirring behind the bestial shape.

Just for a second, in the near-dark, it reminded me of a face I’d seen before.

When it got halfway down the flight of stairs it launched itself into the air in a graceful, almost lazy leap that would land it right on top of me. Unable to muster enough strength to move I tensed, balling my fists uselessly for a fight that wasn’t going to happen. If the impact didn’t kill me, those claws would – and either way I wouldn’t get to express an opinion about it.

But the loup-garou’s leap ended prematurely as something came streaking in out of the night, jumped and met it in mid-air.

The new something was a whole lot smaller: the loup-garou massed around four hundred pounds and it had gravity on its side. Logically it should have kept on going, the interloper smacking uselessly into it and being brought down by its superior weight and momentum.

Instead the two of them seemed to hang impossibly in space for a moment, all that downward energy cancelled out by some arcane counter-force: then they both crashed together through the delicate balcony rails and came to the ground in a spitting, snarling heap five yards away from me.

The newcomer was a man: long-limbed, lean, cadaverous, and dressed in a full-length coat that had looked