Thicker Than Water

Feld’s shoulders broadened and his flat face folded down from the neck, so that - while still flat - it was angled forward, the eyes shifting to the front. Speight, already short, became shorter and dropped down onto all fours, his lower jaw elongating both across and down until it was as big as a bear trap. Hair sprouted on his back in ragged clumps that flowed and merged, while the hair on his head lengthened into a spiked mane that looked Ãne bigas though it would cut your hand like a razor if you touched it.

Both men were loup-garous, as I’d more than half suspected already: human souls that had forced their way into animal flesh for a messy, compromised rebirth. I had no idea in this case, though, what animals had been party to the deal. There was something about the increased mass of Feld’s shoulders that suggested a gorilla, but his fanged face and clawed hands looked like someone had crossed a weasel with a leopard and fucked up the vertical hold in the process.

Speight mostly looked like a big dog, but the quills of his mane recalled a porcupine - and surely that mouth had never been seen before on anything that walked, crawled or did the can-can.

‘Write in a book thyself,’ Gwillam intoned, ‘all the words that He hath spoken unto thee. The sun to rule by day, the moon and stars by night, for His mercy endures for ever.’ Feld stretched his elongated body full length on the ground and a ripple ran through his flesh, his spine arching like a bow.

Speight’s terrifying jaws clashed, making a sound like a hundred spears on a hundred shields.

Gwillam looked to the left, then to the right, and it seemed that he was satisfied. ‘Go,’ he said.

Feld and Speight hit the ground running - so fast that they became liquescent blurs and you found yourself staring at their after-images without quite knowing how.

Bricks and bottles and even steel window frames rained down around them as the watchers in the windows higher up reacted to the assault on the barricade, but the missiles landed where the two loup-garous had been, never where they were. In less than two seconds they were across the rubble-strewn walkway and swarming up the barricades.

Then they were gone from our sight, and we could only track them by sound.