Game of Cages

So I aimed straight for the back of the sapphire dog’s neck. This time, the creature was facing away from me and trapped inside Zahn’s cage. This time it couldn’t get away. The ghost knife sliced through the window pane with only a slight tik, and then it was through the Plexi and the predator.

I immediately called it back. It zipped through the sapphire dog’s neck a second time. The creature’s head tipped forward and rolled free in the bottom of the cage.

The ghost knife landed in my hand at the same moment that Zahn reacted. He said: “Ah!” and gaped at the predator.

Both of them looked up at me. Ursula glanced at the predator, threw the car battery onto the wet lawn, and turned back at me, her face wild with hate. Then she took off toward the front of the building.

Zahn dropped the now-dark Plexiglas cage. “Scheiss doch!” he said, his voice seeming to come from everywhere at once. He raised his arm toward me and opened his palm.

Six shining, buzzing objects came at me, wavering like guided missiles and leaving glowing silver contrails behind them.

Time to go.

I ran for the door, hopping over Stephanie’s corpse. The missiles punched through the window glass, and I saw they weren’t missiles at all—they were some sort of worm as long and as thick as my thumb, and the little round opening at the front was ringed with tiny, jagged teeth.

Damn. Annalise was wrong. Zahn had brought predators with him.

I rushed into the main hall just as Ursula burst through the front door. She raised a rock the size of a woman’s shoe above her head and charged at me, screaming. Guess she’d run out of guns.

I ran at her because I refused to run away. Two of the worms punched through the wall on the right, then two more came a moment behind. Three turned toward me, but the farthest one began to arc toward Ursula.

Damn. As they came close to me, I juked to the left. The worms zipped by, and just being near them made my skin feel sticky and hot. Ursula kept running straight at me—either she didn’t notice the predator flying at her, or she didn’t care.

I threw my ghost knife. It zipped across the room with astonishing speed and sliced through the worm as it came within inches of her flank. The worm disappeared and reappeared at the spot where it had punched through the wall. It went after her again, and since she was coming at me, it was flying at both of us.

I reached for my ghost knife again but didn’t watch for it to come into my hand. I had predators on both sides of me and Ursula, too. Not good. And where were the other two worms?

There were stairs at the far side of the room, but I wasn’t going to get to them without a fight. Ursula swung the rock in a vicious downward hammer swing, but she’d telegraphed it from ten feet away. I slipped it, grabbed hold of the collar of her ski jacket, and tugged her off course. She stumbled into the sewing room door, smashing through it and sprawling on the floor.

Right beside Stephanie’s body. And there, sticking out of Stephanie’s corpse, were the tail ends of two shiny worms, wriggling like they were burrowing into an apple. Just as I’d hoped.

I charged into the room and hauled Stephanie’s body off the ground. It felt sluggish and heavy, and the room filled with a nasty wet odor. I forced myself to ignore all that and rushed toward the door, getting between Ursula and Zahn’s predators.

All four worms zipped straight into the dead body, attracted to whatever meat they could find. And while I knew the society didn’t want me to use them against a human enemy like Ursula, I didn’t think they’d mind if I used a corpse as a shield.

Then Stephanie’s head jerked up. She opened her rotted eyes and looked directly at me.

I screamed something unintelligible and shoved her, stumbling, into the main room. I heard Ursula getting to her feet behind me, and I ducked through the door. I didn’t want my enemies on both sides of me.

Stephanie wobbled, barely able to keep her balance, as the worms disappeared under her stained clothes. Ursula had found a pair of scissors somewhere and was cursing at me in her native language, whatever it was, as she stumbled through the door. I backed away from them both, wondering how I would get to the hall, then the kitchen, and finally the back door, because I expected Zahn to step through the open front door at any moment. And I knew I’d be a dead man if he found me here.

A blast of white fire tore through the wall near the front door. The flames looked like they were roaring through an invisible hose four feet thick, and the spell came from the same spot where Zahn had been standing when I hit the sapphire dog. Maybe he wasn’t coming through the front door after all.

The white fire began to sweep slowly across the room like a flashlight beam, incinerating doors, walls, and support posts. I heard, again, the sound of screaming that I’d heard when the pastor’s house had been destroyed, but because I was close to the spell, I could tell that it wasn’t just one scream but dozens, maybe hundreds of voices—as if the fire still held the deaths of all the lives it had taken.

I jumped back, hitting the edge of the stairs, then vaulted up onto them. Ursula threw herself to the floor as the beam of fire reached her, and Stephanie—or the creatures inside her—didn’t have the same control. It seemed to suddenly lose all strength and collapsed to the floor.

The fire churned through the opposite wall, then dipped down through the floor. I retreated upstairs, watching the bottom of the staircase burn to ashes.

Then the fire stopped. The scorched edges of the wooden floor and walls sputtered with pale flames for a moment but quickly went out. A loud crash from the left drew my attention, and I saw the wall buckle.

Ursula stared up at me from the floor. Her face was pale and her eyes wide with shock. Death had come awfully close to her. She turned and scrambled on her hands and knees toward the front door. Stephanie was nowhere in sight. Hopefully, she’d burned to cinders.

I glanced to my right and looked through the hole that blast of fire had bored through the house. There was Zahn, still standing just where I’d left him, Plexi cage on the ground at his side. The cage looked different— rounder—but I didn’t have the time to study it. Zahn smiled, drew his arm back, and made a throwing motion. A chunk of the wall disappeared at the edge of the fire-blasted hole, then another, larger piece of the wall between the sewing room and the room I was in popped out of existence.