I could see, courtesy of the mass of wires that spilled out of a wall, like the innards of a small animal. It was the back of the vandalized junction box, which was being used to power a couple of bare bulbs. It looked like whoever had been last out the door had forgotten to turn off the lights.
I poked around the ash that covered everything like matte gray snow until my back ached and my hands and pant legs were coated. But all I uncovered was a rotting corduroy couch, a few pieces of singed plywood and an empty whiskey bottle. I threw the last against the wall, just to watch it shatter. The Hunter was long gone, after torching anything that might give a clue as to his identity. This was a waste of time.
I hit the corridor again in a foul mood, which wasn’t helped by the sudden appearance of a chorus of crickets. Their chirping filled the drain, echoing weirdly in the small space and sounding like a too-cheerful orchestra had moved in. The noise limited my hearing as effectively as the dark interfered with my sight. It made me progressively more paranoid as I went along; soon I was looking nervously over my shoulder every few seconds.
That was stupid since I couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. I kept doing it anyway, though, and my imagination was working overtime. In that gloomy pit, every unidentified sound became the scrape of claws on cement, every watermark on the walls, a hulking monster.
Which is why I almost ran into the real monsters coming from the other direction.
There were three of them, still in human form, more or less, although the curtains of greasy, stringy hair and the baggy pants made it kind of hard to tell. But they were Weres, as their reaction on catching sight of me made clear. They didn’t change and they didn’t go for guns. But those were the only saving graces.
I flung up a shield in time to keep from being skewered by the first guy’s knife, which slid off to scrape against concrete. But the impact sent me reeling, and successive jolts jarred through my bones as the men took turns battering my less-than-substantial shield. It was weak because of the leech, because of the power drain from my owl, and because shields don’t work that great against Weres anyway. It wasn’t going to last.
“I’m Lia de Croissets!” I told them loudly. “Of Arnou!” If it was revenge they were after, fine, but I wasn’t the Hunter.
The pummeling didn’t change, except maybe to get harder. “I’m Corps!” Nothing.
I reviewed my options and decided they sucked. In such a confined space, a potion grenade would gas me, too, and any spell I could fling at the moment wouldn’t have much effect on three adult Weres. Fortunately, the whole silver bullet thing is a myth; lead works just fine—if you manage to connect.
But therein lay the problem. A Were’s advantages are speed, recovery time, speed, inhuman strength, and speed—as the four of them were busy demonstrating. I couldn’t even see the punches battering my shield, but I could feel every one.
I decided that debate was useless because I was going to be dead in a minute if I didn’t do something. I wrestled the shotgun out of its back holster and got a grip on my Luger. The next time they sent me staggering into the far wall, I whipped around, let the shield go and fired.
And figured out why I was the only idiot using a gun.
I’d emptied the Luger in an arc that was hopefully wide enough to hit at least one of them. It did—one screamed and went down, clutching his leg. But the rest of the bullets hit the walls, sparked off the concrete and ricocheted. The tunnel suddenly felt a lot like a shooting gallery, with bullets whizzing and striking everywhere.
Another Were stumbled like he’d tripped, and crashed face-first into the water. The last tried to get up but slid on the scummy surface and went skating across the tunnel to slam into the other wall. It looked almost like a comedy pratfall, until he recovered, pushed off, and leapt at me, changing in a blur of motion.
In wolf form he was more resistant to magic, and although I managed to get a shield up in time, it did little good. Claws raked my arm, hot and sharp, stripping my gun away. It went skittering across the muck, out of reach, and we hit the floor with the Were on top—all three hundred pounds of him.
The impact alone was enough to drive the breath from my lungs, but I also hit my head against the side of the wall, stunning me. I expected to feel hot breath in my face, teeth ripping my flesh, oblivion. But instead he merely lay there, trapping me under a crushing weight I couldn’t hope to throw off. I heard the sound of feet limping past—his buddies going hell-bent for leather toward the mouth of the tunnel.
And then nothing.
The mountain of fur and muscle on top of me didn’t move, other than to drip something warm and sticky onto my face. After a minute, I realized that one of the ricochets must have hit him as he was leaping for me. What I couldn’t figure out was how to get him off.
And it wasn’t like I had all day. He’d landed across me, with only my head, shoulders and feet sticking out. Water was running up to my ears, and his weight was slowly forcing me farther underneath. If I didn’t get him off, I was going to drown in less than two feet of water.
Pushing and pulling did no good, and neither did attempting to wriggle out from under him. The body was almost completely muscle, with very little give. I had potions that could eat through flesh and bone, but even assuming I could reach one, I couldn’t use them without possibly dissolving me, too.
I needed my power, and there was only one way to get it. My left arm was trapped under the beast, so I used my mouth, muttering the release spell while trying to find an edge to the leech with my tongue. The thing didn’t want to let go, still gorging itself on my power. But I finally snagged a slightly raised corner and ripped it away.
It felt exactly like a huge slug wriggling in my mouth—beyond awful—and it immediately began trying to sink into my tongue. I spat it out, disgusted, and raised a shield, hoping it would lift the Were’s body a foot or so and give me some wiggle room. But instead, I got maybe half that much before the shield collapsed with a final-sounding pop. And the force of his body falling back down was hard enough to push my head under the filthy, mineral-tasting water.
Whatever air was in my lungs rushed out under the pressure. My chest was tight and the urge to breathe, when I knew I couldn’t, was almost overwhelming. I don’t care what training you’ve had, being caught under water seconds away from drowning is one hell of a good reason to panic. So I did, throwing the dumbest possible spell under the circumstances—a fireball.
It shouldn’t have worked. That spell requires a lot more energy than shields, not to mention it works best in dry conditions—or at least when not cast under water. So it was a shock to hear a muffled roar and to feel the huge body suddenly fly off me.
I sat up, spitting out filthy runoff, and dragged in several huge breaths. I was so busy exploring the wonder that was oxygen that it took a second for me to realize what had happened. The red tide swirling around me was my first clue, the shattered bone sizzling in the water was the second. The body had literally exploded on top of me, leaving me sitting in what remained of a rib cage, along with blood and other substances I preferred not to think about.
I’d forgotten: just as the tat took a few seconds to start working, it also took a few to release the stored magic back into my system. The shields had been pulling from a dry well, but the fireball had had more than an hour of accumulated force behind it. I was lucky it hadn’t taken out the whole freaking drain.
A push got me to my knees, a stagger got me to my feet, and a step took me to the wall. I fell against it, the cool cement heaven against my cheek and palms. I just stayed there for a minute, breathing hard.