Dead Men's s Boots

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.

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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.