Shifting

Thirty-Six

The air stunk of cordite and still everyone kept firing and still the things kept coming. They were wolves. But they weren’t natural wolves, they came in wide variety of all sizes and they wore collars. I realized they weren’t originally wolves, but had started life as all the town dogs we’d known and played with and hated when they barked too long at night-together all of them charged our walls in a pack. There had to be a hundred of them, wolves the size of schnauzers and rottweilers and collies and random mutts. We shot them as they came and they went down, but sprang up again, yellow teeth snapping and snarling. They stank of rot and evil. Some of them had bones showing through their fur. Their eyes shined in the night and they threw themselves at the windows and chewed at our makeshift door. Why hadn’t we built a proper door? It was plywood for heaven’s sake. It would never hold against a determined assault, even if the Hag didn’t change it into a wriggling sheet of slimy flesh or something equally horrible.

A small wolf the size of a fox got in and went for my boot. It was some kind of terrier I imagined in a previous life and I kicked it away quickly before a wolf the size of a big guard dog that was in and on me. I went down with the weight of its body and this one was smarter, if such a thing can be said of such an unnatural beast, it went for my throat with broken fangs and torn black lips. Vance put several rounds into it with a pistol like the one he’d given me and it stopped functioning. It was then I noticed that Holly was kneeling over the smaller one, stabbing it with her huge knife over and over, even though it had stopped moving. I didn’t feel bad, these creatures were already dead.

“More,” Vance panted in my ear as he helped me back to my feet. “More things are coming in through the gate.”

The next wave was full of scuttling vines and walking rosebushes. The vines moved low to the ground, their dried up flowers and leaves were brown and wilted, but their questing, snaking tendrils were still supple and lashed at us like whips. The rosebushes were worse, their thumb-thick rattling branches being covered in thorns. I made good use of my saber against them, slashing and hacking, but soon my hands and legs were bleeding.

“Gannon!” I heard a cry from the back, I wasn’t sure who it was, maybe Nick or Nelson. “They’re coming into the basement!”

“Hold the door if you can, fall back to the dentist’s offices if we lose the door,” I told Vance and the others that were making their stand in the lobby.

I turned and ran back into the offices. I had to get the doors down into the basements shut and barricaded. They couldn’t be allowed to get into the middle of us. Holly Nelson ran with me. True to her pledge, she was following me everywhere I went.

Monika and Mrs. Hatchell were already there with the rest of the Nelsons. Mr. Nelson looked scared but had two pistols resting in holsters he’d rigged up by stapling them to the sides of his wheelchair. He had big arms, like many men who are wheelchair bound, and I knew he’d make a good accounting of himself if anything got this far past our defenses.

I grabbed Monika by the arm. “Get hammers and nails.”

Behind the nurses’ station was the door that went down into the basement from this section. If anything got in down there it could come up the stairs and into the middle of us. I put my shoulder against the door and grabbed hold of the doorknob with my good hand, preventing it from turning.

“Is anyone down there?” I asked Nelson.

Nelson shook his head. His face was white. “Holly,” he said, “You stay back in here with me.”

Holly didn’t say anything to her father. There wasn’t even a look of pain or defiance on her face; it was as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Mind your daddy, now,” I told her, mostly for Nelson’s sake. I knew she wouldn’t.

She just stared at me and the door I was holding closed. I knew her only thought was of how to back me up. I thought about cats that I’d met up with that had “gone feral” and turned wild. Her eyes were like that, she wasn’t really a kid anymore, no matter what she looked like. She was thinking at an animal level.

Then the door I held closed shook with a heavy impact. I did not have any more time for reflection. Three more times it shivered as something threw itself against the other side with everything it had. The hinges creaked, but it held.

“Monika?” I shouted. “Where’s that hammer?”

The blows on the door stopped and for a moment there was no sound other than our puffing breath. Nelson had out his pistols and they were trained at the door in case I went down.

Then we heard a click, and a rattling sound. The lock had been opened. Then something twisted the doorknob in my hand. I grunted and strained to stop it, but the power of it was incredible, unnatural. I pulled out my other hand, my gloved hand, and clamped it onto the doorknob. It was a strain, but I stopped it, and even managed to ease it back a bit.

Then the door began shivering again as more blows rained down on it. I held on, my whole body shivering with the door and the impacts. Wood splintered and metal bits creaked and groaned. I could not hold it closed for long.

Monika and Mrs. H. showed up and started nailing strips of wood over the doorway. The hammers rang in my ears and I sweated, gripping the door with the unnatural strength of my shifted hand and leaning all my weight against the bulging wood. I was glad it was an old door, a solid door of the type they didn’t make anymore. It was a thick piece of varnished wood, well-built by craftsmen that were probably all dead now.

Soon, I felt brave enough to give up my hold on the door and help the women with the nailing.

“What’s down there?” asked Monika when we stopped, breathing, long enough to survey our work.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s not a wolf. Wolves can’t twist knobs like that.”

There were screams coming from another part of the center.

I looked at Nelson. “Can you cover this?” I asked.

He nodded.

“If it starts to go, call us.”

“Don’t worry,” he said.

I ran down the hall and Holly followed me. Nelson didn’t call her back.

We were losing the lobby, I saw that right away when I got there. One of our two makeshift plywood doors was down and cold air and splatters of thick raindrops came in, staining the carpet.

The things coming into the door weren’t wolves or plants now, but human shapes, mostly dressed in colorful summer clothes, when they wore anything at all. Jimmy Vanton was there, sitting in a chair with the police shotgun in his hands. His right leg was torn up, but he hardly paid attention to the blood that pumped up out of it. I turned to ask Wilton to stop the bleeding, but she was nowhere in sight.

After a minute or two, we had fought them off. There was a lull in the attacks and I wondered what the next wave would be like. Vance reloaded with shaking fingers. “We can’t hold everything, there are less than twenty of us left,” he told me.

“I know.”

“Let’s pull back out of here and just cover the dentists place.”

“So much for all that fencing we built out there.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, “we are already retreating to our last stronghold.”

“Okay, I’ll cover the door, you get Jimmy up and help him into the back.”

“What about that?” Vance nodded his head toward the lantern on the table. I looked at the lantern, still lying untouched on the kids table with my coat draped over it. There was only the faintest glow coming from under my coat, we had tucked it down as tightly as we could without touching the thing.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s what she is after. Maybe she’ll just take it and go.”

“Or maybe she will use it to finish us off,” said Jimmy Vanton, talking for the first time. We looked at him. He had both hands on his legs and the bleeding had slowed. “Look, I know no one wants to touch it. I’ll carry it, and you guys get me up and help me walk.”

“I’ll carry it,” said Holly quietly. She was staring at the thing on the table. I realized she was probably right, she could do it and leave the rest of us to fight and help Jimmy.

There was a new round of gunfire from the back of the center. It was terrible to listen to, not knowing if everyone back there was dying or just firing out a window at something they thought they saw. I wanted to get all of us together. I wanted to have Monika in my sight at all times.

Then, outside, we heard the fence go down with a wild rattling, snapping sound. There was crashing in the parking lot. Vance and I exchanged glances. We had heard these types of sounds before. Something big was coming.

Jimmy struggled up. “I can carry it! I can do more than a little girl, anyway.”

Vance put an arm out and kept him from toppling over. He clutched his shotgun with one hand and the table with the other.

The whole building shook then. The huge something that was dragging the fence with it had impacted with the building and a section of the wall in the optometrists section caved in. Then the roof buckled over our heads and a hole opened up. There were screams in my ears, and a huge hand reached down through the hole in the ceiling and lifted up a section of it. Acoustical tiles fell in chunks and roofing pelted us. We all just froze and cringed, ducking down, not knowing for a second what to do. Then Vance and Jimmy fired at the hand as it came back down, covered in black twisted bark. One finger splintered and broke off, and then the tree hand came for Jimmy. He tried to duck, to hobble away, but he couldn’t move fast enough. The hand lifted him up and pulled him, screaming, up into the night sky. He flopped and writhed and grabbed onto the sides of the hole. His shotgun boomed once, and then it was over. Blood and bits of roofing rained down when the hand wrenched him, still gripping his shotgun, through the too small opening.

More shapes were humping in through the front door and the building shivered under more impacts. I could see in an instant there was more than one tree out there, I envisioned them smashing away at the building.

We ran then, we simply forgot about the lantern and our job of holding the doorway and we even forgot about Jimmy Vanton, who was as good as dead anyway. We just ran down the halls, Vance and Holly and I.

Chunks of the building were being torn away now, the trees were wading into the lobby like giants. Snake-like roots lashed the old chairs and smashed through the aquarium. Dried-up fish and colored gravel splattered the floor.

Behind us, most terrible of all, scintillating light burst in a myriad of colors. Someone or something had uncovered the lantern.

“What’s happening?” Mrs. Hatchell had my shirt in her hands and she had tears in her eyes.

My left hand reached up and snatched her hands away. A look of shock and pain came into her face. My warped hand must have squeezed her too hard.

“You’re crushing my wrists,” she said.

“Gannon, stop,” said Monika, touching my arm. I twitched away from her touch, but then allowed it.

“Jimmy Vanton is dead,” I told them. “And we’ve lost the lobby and the lantern.”

“The Hag has it,” said Vance.

“Maybe she’ll go away now,” said Nelson hopefully.

“Or she’ll make more things to finish us,” returned Vance.

Mrs. Hatchell rubbed her wrists and glared at me. “What about the trees?”

“Let’s get the buckets and gasoline set up again,” suggested Vance.

“We’ll burn ourselves up,” said Holly, and everyone paused, realizing she was probably right. The trees were not out in a parking lot now, but digging right into the building. If we threw gasoline on these walls and set them ablaze, we might kill a tree, but we had no way out ourselves.

We decided to barricade the hallways as best we could with furniture and equipment. I threw computers and monitors and expensive medical lab equipment in a heap on the floor and piled it up. I would have traded it all for a stack of sandbags now.

The Preacher soon joined us from the backdoor. They had lost that entrance as well. We had retreated to our inner stronghold and there was no way out now. I recalled something I’d read about recordings of the crews in black boxes on lost aircraft, that crews going down in aircraft never seemed to completely understand they were dying, never really believed it, not until the very last second. Unlike in movies, they didn’t weep and scream incoherently, but instead fought the situation, battled professionally until the end with whatever they had, trying everything. And always, they had hope, even though they were doomed. Perhaps denial was one of our most useful survival traits. We weren’t as good as dead, we didn’t accept our doom, the thought never even occurred to us. We simply worked hard to solve the problems at hand.

“She’s got what she came for, but she’s still coming,” hissed Mrs. Hatchell to no one in particular. “Why?”

No one answered her.

After another minute or so of scrambled activity, the roof caved in. At least, that’s what I thought at first. What really happened was the floor collapsed under the fantastic weight of the living trees, taking down the walls and a good part of the roof with it. Suddenly, our corridor that had been ten feet wide or so was half that, or less. The building parted with a vast groaning, tearing noise. It sounded like a freight train roaring by inches away from your head. We dove away from it, but not everyone went in the right direction. Carlene Mitts was standing against the wrong wall at the wrong time. She vanished down into the basement along with twenty tons of brick, furniture, roofing and thrashing trees. It was only chance, I suppose, that she had handed her baby over to Monika before it happened. Or maybe, somehow, she had known. Maybe some changed, newly sensitive part of her mind had told her to do it. We’ll never know the truth, but the baby girl lived.

The oddest thing, after the air cleared, was the feeling of suddenly being outside. A moment before we had been in the deepest inner recesses of the building we had made our home in for weeks and then, we were out under the open skies. Everyone was screaming. My own throat was raw, but that could have been the dust. The storm had settled down to a steady rain of fat cold drops. It cleared the dust quickly and turned the floor into a dark gray mud of crumbled cement and plaster. Cold air blew down from the dark sky and occasional red flashes of unnatural lightning still flickered high above us. I looked up and drank in a heavy breath of night air. For all the terror in my heart, the air still tasted fresh and good.

The optometrist’s third of the building had now become a pit, an abyss of dust and rubble. One of the trees was down on its side, not moving. The other, which had the look of a huge black oak, was leaning and struggling to rise. This tree had two arms. One huge branch was straining downward as it leaned on it, trying to raise its fantastic weight with it. The other arm reached up and grabbed the lip of the shelf that had been our corridor, it clamped onto the crumbling remains of carpet and floorboards. I saw the missing finger on that hand, and recognized this was the one that had swooped down and dragged Jimmy Vanton out of the lobby.

I fell upon that hand, chopping with my unnaturally sharp saber. I used both hands, and I shouted while I did it, furiously. Spit ran from my lips and I chopped a finger away, then another, and then split the wood of the hand itself. It shuddered, and groped for me, and then the Preacher was at my side, his axe chopping at it with great heavy thunking sounds. It jerked back the arm, clearly in pain, shuddering, and toppled over backwards as it overbalanced. The small part of my mind that was not in an animal state realized that trees, once free of the earth, had a hard time standing up straight. Like walking telephone poles, balance was not easy for them. Most of my mind was in a barbaric state just then and that part of me loosed a victory howl when I saw the great oak sag down and thrash there in the ruins of the basement, looking like a devil in the very black pits of hell itself.

“Everyone sound off, who have we lost?” demanded the Preacher.

I called out my name, as did others. Carlene Mitts was gone, as were Jimmy Vanton and Mrs. Nelson and the rest of the Nelson kids, only Holly and her father were left. Monika had Carlene’s baby now. She held her with both hands, shushing her. But the baby cried steadily, inconsolable. They weren’t loud cries but rather formed a hoarse, hopeless, keening sound mixed with coughs.

I looked around at them. There were less than a dozen of us left. Normally, any commander would surrender now, but there was no one to accept our surrender, no one to give us quarter. Surely, not the Hag. There was no mercy there, I knew, for I had looked into her shining eyes.

“John, we have to kill the Hag,” I said.

The Preacher looked at me and nodded.

Around the corner, back where the lobby would be now, the lights were wrinkling the air around us again. Looking up, I could see threads of liquid amber and rosy pink and glaring orange. They reflected in the dying smoke and steady raindrops.

At my side, Monika leaned up on her tiptoes, I bent my lips to her and we kissed. Holly came to stand behind me, as always.

The Preacher had his axe out, and he stepped down the corridor toward the lobby. The corridor was shorn in half and full of debris. It made treacherous footing in the wet and dark night. I opened my mouth to protest, to tell him I would go first, but he was already moving forward. The words died in my throat. It was very likely I would get my turn at the front, I knew. We worked our way along the ruined corridor, a cliff into a deadly pit at our feet, ready to swallow us up. His axe’s black blades shone where there was no light to reflect. My saber glimmered faintly as I took my position behind him.

Things were coming down the half corridor now, around the bend up ahead. Now that our inner doors and barricades were gone, there was nothing stopping them, these abominations the Hag was making. They were worse now, now that she had her lantern and she was in the open air of a hellish storm on All Hallows Eve. Her power, I reasoned, was at its peak.

The first thing to come around the bend was the X-ray machine. It took me a moment to recognize it. That strange, elongated arm like an ostrich’s neck with a wide unblinking eye at the tip. The handles on the side of the projector had grown into curved blades. It didn’t walk, so much as dragged itself with appendages grown from the sides of the base. Its power cord now served as a whipping black tail.

It was the first time I’d seen a machine shifted. Always before the changelings had been animal or plant, something alive, but now the rules had changed. Heat emanated from the projector, and I felt the hot kiss of the beam as it touch my cheek. Somewhere in the back of my mind I worried, briefly, about radiation and the retinas of my eyes if the beam were to shine into my head, even for a second. The Preacher cried out something, I think it was something about Joshua, and then he went in hacking with his flashing axe. I hung back, not out of fear of the machine but of his axe. One does not get too close behind a furiously wielded double-bladed axe.

The tail was the first thing to go, it whipped out and wrapped around his ankle, but only for a moment before it was severed and flopping. Then the projector itself darted forward, like the beak of a dinosaur. It smashed into his shoulder and spun him around. I smelled burning cloth. But he was ready for it, he was good. He grabbed the metal neck and hacked wildly at the joint. A normal weapon could never have cut through the aluminum skin of it, but his axe was anything but normal. He had worked his way down to the vital wires in three strokes. The head whipped violently and then the hot lashing beams stopped and the head came off. Still the heavy base of it thrashed horribly.

“Help me,” he grunted and I rushed forward and we heaved it over the edge to smash down into the basement. The oak tree reached over and groped blindly for the thrashing machine, and crushed it. Soon there was silence again down there.

The next things to come around the bend were a pack of bulbous creatures like black jellyfish. There were a lot of them, and they rolled at us like beach balls. But these beach balls had fangs and hard white eyes.

The Preacher took the brunt of it, but some got past his kicks and his swinging axe. Those that got past were left to me and Holly and Vance, we fell on them and stabbed and chopped them up. Once they were punctured, which was hard to do, as they were tough, a mix of air and vile liquid sprayed out. This process reduced them to flopping, fish-like things. It was only when I caught the smell of them, that powerful rubbery stink. I knew then what it was we were fighting.

“Tires,” said Vance in a wondering tone. “Those were tires from the cars out in the lot.”

Panting, I nodded. I dared to let my hopes grow, for we were winning, we were beating everything she could throw at us. It had to take some length of time for her to make these abominations. The Preacher was good, better than I had any right to hope. But I could tell he was getting tired, that he could not keep this pace up forever. Soon, it would be my turn at the front, after something got him. I thought of telling him to take a breather, to let me take the point for a while, but I knew without asking that he would refuse. I knew the bloodlust he had in his eye. I had felt it myself. When you wielded one of these shadowy weapons made from the very stuff of the shifting, it was hard to quit fighting while there was a fight to be had.

We followed the Preacher, but had only advanced a few more steps, perhaps we were half-way to the bend now, when the next horror came into view. This one made us all gasp and I heard a wail of despair from behind me, but wasn’t sure who made the sound. It could have been any of us.

What stood before us was Jimmy Vanton. He wasn’t quite the same anymore, however. He was dead, of course, and he had been melted together with that shotgun of his. His arm ended just past the elbow and turned into the barrel and firing mechanism of a twelve-gauge shotgun. He raised it slowly, but not slowly enough. The Preacher’s downward stroke lopped off that monstrous fused arm of his, but not before he got off a booming shot.

The sizzling lead spray reached out like a hand, past the Preacher, past me, over Holly Nelson’s ducking head, and caught Nick Hackler full in the face and chest. He fell back with the shock of it, dead before his eyes could close, dead before he hit the cheap dirty carpet of the hallway. I glanced down into his dead eyes for second and thought of those awful squirrel sausages he’d been so proud of.

Then the Preacher’s axe took off the fused arm with the shotgun and the metal barrel crashed to the floor. The bleeding stub flailed, but the Preacher kept Nick back with his left hand. I saw then he had his Bible in that hand, pressed against Nick’s chest. He lifted the axe high again.

“I pass judgment upon thee and thine and cast this thing back into the pit from whence it came!” he cried out. His voice rolled out over us all. The axe removed Nick’s lolling head with a single clean stroke.

We pushed the whole mess over the side and took five more steps forward.

The thing that got the Preacher came next. It was a steel beast, a massive thing with whipping cords and no arms, but it had two legs of round smooth metal. It rattled and clattered and farted blue smoke as it approached. Despite the strange configuration, I knew what it was right away, I had spent too many summers looking at just such creatures, repairing them, to not know one now. It was the contents of a car’s engine compartment, all assembled together into a nightmarish configuration.

It stumped forward and appeared to have no weapons, but very soon its plan of attack became very clear. It would simply push us off into the pit that was now filled with the tree and the flopping remains of a dozen other horrors. It must have weighed near a thousand pounds and the floor sagged under its weight.

The Preacher and I tackled it, grunting, but it was like children tackling a giant. Spark plug wires lashed about and sought to wrap around our necks. The battery opened up chambers and gouted acid.

“Vance, get over here! Heave all at once now!” I shouted and Vance put his shoulder against it. It took another step, ignoring us, and crushed down on Vance’s toes. Vance howled. He struggled but his foot was pinned under those round metal legs-they were exhaust pipes, I realized in a blurry moment.

We heaved together and it shifted off-balance a fraction, and then rocked back.

“That’s it,” gasped the Preacher, straining purple. “Rock it.”

We did as he said and the spark wires whipped harder. Holly cut at the wires with her knife when they wrapped around our necks or wrists.

Thump, thump, we rocked it and the stiff legs were up and off the ground. Inside the thing’s barrel chest, I heard pistons chatter angrily. It farted another stinking blue cloud of exhaust, and then it went over.

Vance and I managed to jump back, but the Preacher went with it. The thing had managed to wrap too many wires around him, and they went over in a lover’s embrace.

“John!” I cried out. And then he crashed down into the basement. I only had time to hope he had gotten on top of it. It weighed so much more, perhaps he had ridden it down, instead of the other way around. It was his only hope for living.

Then it was my turn. More things came. Lots of them.

There a flat metallic thing of chrome or stainless steel. A bumper? A the hood of a car? Or maybe a medical table? I couldn’t tell but my sword rang on it and cast only sparks, made no cuts, and we tossed it off over the side into the pit, screeching and hammering on it. It vanished and we took on a procession of things in its wake. They were smaller things now, but they came faster. Lobby chairs with wooden feet that bent impossibly, a bookcase with attached books that snapped like a thousand hungry mouths, an office computer with a glowing face on the screen, the ficus tree from the lobby, and much more. Some things I could identify, others I could not. I rounded the bend and headed down the homestretch to the lobby. I could almost see the Hag at the table now, and the lantern was shining brightly, more brightly than it ever had. It was as bright as a thousand rainbows in there, almost a bright as the summer sun.

Carlene’s body came at me from behind after I turned the bend. Somehow the Hag had awakened her flesh and gotten her up out of the basement. There wasn’t any hesitation left in me, that had been beaten out of my mind over the last hour. I throttled her with both hands. She thrashed at me with newly grown tentacles, even though she should not have been able to breathe. Vance finished her with his Mauser.

After that, all I could think of was Carlene’s face and that of her baby, who Monika held somewhere back behind me. It made me deeply angry, and that anger replaced the horror and the dread and the fear and kept me going.

It went on for minutes or perhaps hours, I’ll never know how long. It was wild and sad and terrifying beyond any nightmare of my childhood. I couldn’t remember much of the things I fought after Carlene until suddenly there were no more of them coming.

I stood before the Hag and she faced me.

“My champion,” she said. She reached out a delicate hand, as if to caress me. Instinctively, my saber lashed out to take her hand.

I slashed that wrist with all my strength, without hesitation, but it was as if her flesh were made of iron. The blade rang off and vibrated painfully in my hand.

She laughed at me, and I stepped forward, furious, and cut at her neck. The blow did nothing but shock my hand so greatly that I almost dropped the sword.

She shook her head, mocking me. “Child, don’t play the fool. Why would I give you a blade so sharp that you could not be stopped?”

I stared at her and my sides heaved with exertion. My eyes were full of dull hate. I made no attempt to answer her. I thought of the pistol I had carried, but it was long since emptied. I glanced back at the others. Vance was there, so was Holly. But they were stock-still. The lantern had them in its gaze. I saw all of them, except for Wilton. None of them were moving.

“Because, child,” she continued gently, “it is enchanted for sharpness, but it is also enchanted so that it can’t harm me. There is only one thing your sword cannot cut, champion of mine, and that one thing is me.”

I understood then, my sword, the gift she had given me, was a trap. I dropped my saber and stepped forward. She pulled her lips back in curling peels. She reached for my throat as I did for hers.

Her grasp was strong, stronger than any woman’s I’d ever known. I gripped her, but could not squeeze her throat. It was like squeezing a block of wood.

She grinned at me as her fingers sunk into my neck.

“Yield,” she said, “yield and serve me and I will spare the rest of them. I have need of a strong champion, and I have chosen you.”

With a flickering movement, I tossed off my glove. It was no longer my hand. It was still hand-shaped, but there were only three fingers and a thumb now, and those fingers were claws, really, not fingers at all. Thick boned scaly claws flexed in a permanent curl. I applied my warped hand to her neck, and squeezed with all its new unnatural strength.

Her breath became labored. Mine all but ceased. I whistled and choked and swallowed through my closing air passage. I was losing, I knew it, but I figured I might as well make her feel my rage before I died.

“All you have to do is look at it,” she hissed out. “Save yourself, fool. Gaze into the Eye.”

The light in the lantern beckoned me, but I stared at her hideous face instead. The black claw tips dug in, making a row of dimples on her dead-white throat. She should have bled, but I doubted there was any blood left in her body. I felt her neck giving way, folding inward slowly like thick cardboard. There were no more sounds that I could make, I could barely get down a gasp of air now and then.

“Your will is too strong,” she gasped, “you must be put down.”

And then she squeezed harder. I was shocked to realize that she had been holding back. My lungs burned and my heart pounded. I wished I had another of Wilton’s potions, but even then, the blood would be cut to my brain soon and I would pass out. My stomach threatened to vomit, but I knew it would be fatal so I fought to relax it.

Then, even as the world had focused down to her face and mine, I felt her stiffen and gurgle. She stiffened again, and again. Her body shuddered. Then the killing grip around my throat eased. I held onto consciousness as the first choking gasps of air entered my lungs.

She sank down, but my left hand kept its grip. Kept squeezing.

Behind her, with a bloody knife in his hand, stood the Captain.