Riverwind nodded his acknowledgement of Jimmy’s predicament, but didn’t reply. Rather than sit down, the man took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair.
“The ‘psycho’ you’re referring to is a Navajo witch,” the detective explained, now rolling his sleeves up as he talked. “My people call them Skinwalkers because they have the power to assume the shape of an animal to avoid our detection. Seven days ago I beheaded the one you encountered, trapping its spirit inside its body, but the confrontation left me severely wounded and unable to fully dispose of the remains.”
Jimmy gaped at the man’s words, looking to his ravaged face and recalling the coyote-headed corpse ripping out the bathroom wall of the motel.
“I could tell you the whole history of how they came to be,” the detective went on, “but as you said, there isn’t much time. All you need to know is that by consuming the Skinwalker’s flesh, you’ve given it the power to thwart death and seek a new body.”
“Me!” Jimmy gasped. “But how—”
“Your friend Stuart isn’t very good at keeping secrets,” Riverwind answered. “He told me about your little scheme when I questioned the morgue staff about the disappearance of the Skinwalker’s corpse. He mentioned how you’d inadvertently swallowed the creature’s finger. Now it’s using your energy, your life force, to stay in our world until it can transfer its spirit into your body.”
“So how the hell do we stop it?” Jimmy asked. “I mean, you can stop it, right?”
“There are two options,” the man answered. “One is to completely destroy its physical form, either by force or simply by waiting until the creature’s body decomposes to the point of being useless. The only problem is that you’re now linked to the Skinwalker by the same magical bond that reanimated it, which will allow it to follow you wherever you go. It will anticipate our moves.”
“Great! So it could be here any second?”
The man nodded.
“What’s choice number two?”
“I cut off your head.”
Jimmy blinked. “What?”
Riverwind reached behind his back and pulled out a knife large enough to reflect Jimmy’s whole face in the blade. It glinted in the light of the overhead fluorescents.
He jumped to his feet. “You can’t kill me! You’re a cop!”
“Decapitation is a proven method of separating a host’s spirit from his life force. You and Mister Wyllie have left me no choice.”
Jimmy shivered as a sudden pang of understanding ripped through his brain. “You killed Stuart!”
“An act of necessity,” Riverwind admitted. “I had to be sure he wasn’t lying about which one of you ate the finger.”
You stinking motherfu—”
The detective slashed, and Jimmy leapt backward. He dodged death by scant millimeters, but the tip of the blade still managed to plow a red trench across the skin of his chest.
Jimmy dropped back in his chair and kicked upward as the wild-eyed detective lunged over the table. This time Jimmy was faster. His heel slammed into Riverwind’s face, popping loose a score of fresh stitches and peeling back a section of cheek.
The man roared in pain, clutching the wound.
Jimmy ducked under the table and scrambled to the door, throwing it open as six consecutive gunshots blared through the building.
He froze in the doorway.
Across the main room, past the bullpen, the Skinwalker rammed the front desk, demolishing the boards like a runaway wrecking ball. Pickett stood less than ten feet away, frantically reloading his sidearm.
The creature reared up on the hind legs of a horse, displaying the new additions it had made to its body. Jimmy recalled Vern’s mention of an attack at the nearby animal shelter, and he now knew the fate of those various creatures.
Or parts of them, anyway.
The Skinwalker had transplanted its torso onto the body of a horse, looking like a mythological Centaur out of the nightmare of a mental patient. Four new arms sprouted from its sides, each freshly skinned and glistening with red muscle. Two of those newer appendages looked to be human, but the last set clearly came from something much bigger.
The monster’s coyote head snarled, now topped with deer antlers and flanked on each side by the heads of a mountain lion and a goat. Each scanned the room independently from the other, seeking new prey.
Deputy Ferguson emerged from the rubble of the desk and squeezed off five shots from his service pistol before the creature turned and struck out with its powerful hind legs, shattering his skull. Blood sprayed the wall.
Jimmy watched it happen with a dreamlike detachment, unable to react even when the beast plunged two of its hands into the deputy’s chest and tore open his ribcage.
“Move your ass, Cooley!” Sheriff Pickett shouted.
Jimmy flinched at the force of the man’s voice, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Riverwind’s knife hack into the doorframe beside him.
The detective surrendered the knife where it imbedded in the wood and grabbed Jimmy by the hair, yanking him backwards even as his other hand drew a gun and fired three shots into Pickett’s chest.
The Sheriff collapsed into a heap.
The Skinwalker roared.
Then Riverwind hauled Jimmy back into the interrogation room, slamming the door shut as the monster charged forward.
Jimmy grabbed for the knife when he passed it, managing to pull it from the doorframe, but Riverwind preempted his action and slammed the pistol-butt down on his wrist.
The knife clattered to the floor.
“Now we end this!” the detective declared.
A moment later, the entire forward wall of the room bowed inward, shattering the sheetrock and splintering the wall studs. A hand tipped with eagle talons punched through the door paneling, snaring a hunk of Riverwind’s skin before he got clear.
The detective howled in agony, losing his grip on Jimmy’s hair as he strove to slip free of the hooks in his back.
Jimmy elbowed the man and made his escape, scooping up the knife when he did.
He spun around to face the trapped Navajo officer.
“Kill yourself!” Riverwind hissed.
The door to the room and most of the wall had fragmented into a spider web of destruction, and Jimmy watched as a furless bear’s paw reached through one of the cracks and clutched the man’s face, instantly crushing his lower jaw into a handful of mush.
Jimmy stumbled away from the spectacle, shivering with terror when he saw that the man’s eyes still gazed with awareness. When the creature released him, Riverwind raised the gun to his head and ended the pain.
The entire building seemed to shudder as the monster pressed forward.
Ceiling tiles rained to the floor.
Jimmy edged into the corner of the room as he watched the wall crumble, knowing he only had a matter of seconds before the creature exploded inside and did whatever pervoid mystical bullshit it wanted to do with him.
Which left him only one choice.
He reversed his grip on the knife and stabbed it into his stomach.
Outside, the Skinwalker bellowed with rage. Jimmy closed his eyes, blocking it out, then suddenly saw an image of himself in his mind, viewed from the other side of the door, as he plunged his hand into the wound to search for the finger.
An alien world of pain exploded inside his abdomen, and he had to reopen his eyes to be rid of the Skinwalker’s viewpoint when a pale blob of intestine slipped out past his wrist.
Darkness began to creep into his vision as his questing fingers slid over the rubbery landscape of his insides, encountering internal juices that felt too hot to be healthy.
The Skinwalker roared again, and he looked up to see more sections of the wall and door disintegrate in front of him, torn away as if no more than—