Right before I rounded the corner of the building Lou let out with a volley of warning barks. Kind of superfluous, I thought. But then he sprinted ahead, turned on a dime, and launched himself through the air at me, striking me square in the middle of my chest. At twelve pounds that wasn’t enough to knock me back, but it certainly slowed me up for a second, long enough for my brain to start functioning again. Why had I assumed that was really Victor?
I was going too fast to stop, but I swung wide and sprinted past the corner of the building, angling away in a straight line. When the shape-shifter waiting there for me sprang, it missed me by a good six inches.
It hadn’t had time to completely transform itself back from its Victor persona. Maybe being in the midst of a change had made it clumsier than usual. What I saw was a caricature of Victor, twice life-size, claws like a bear, but with a face almost unchanged. That typical, somewhat supercilious expression remained fixed on the shape-shifter’s face even as its arms grew longer and its teeth lengthened.
I didn’t stop running. I sprinted toward the adjacent building, and by the time it saw what I was doing I had a good head start. It bounded after me, now on all fours, its transformation almost complete. I ran through the door at the end of the next building, a long, low structure with a corridor that ran all the way through. Before I was halfway down the corridor, it had appeared in the doorway behind me. I wasn’t going to make it out the other side before it caught up with me, and even if I did, what then?
I frantically tried several doors until I found one that was unlocked and ducked inside. It was a sculptor’s studio, and thank God the artist wasn’t home. The room was full of large twisted metal sculptures, elongated figures that were all sharp angles and rough surfaces. Interesting, perhaps, but of no use to me. I can work with metal, but barely, and it takes me forever to accomplish anything.
But there was clay there, too, bags of it, and that I can work with. The first thing I needed to do was buy some time. That’s always the case-every time you really need a moment to come up with a clever spell or elegant solution to a problem, something’s just about to rip your heart out. So first things first-block the door and keep it from getting in until I was ready to deal with it.
I grabbed a lump of clay and threw it toward the door. Then I poured some talent into it, expanding both its properties and its size, until the entire door was covered with a thick, gluey coating. More energy, not quite heat, but a magical analogue. It was like having a giant kiln operating at unheard-of temperatures. In seconds, I had the door layered over with a hard shell of baked enamel.
She didn’t even try to open the door. She hit it full force like a grizzly separated from her cubs. The door splintered, and the hardened shell I’d so cleverly constructed shattered like a vase dropped on a stone floor. Shards of hardened clay flew everywhere, and then she was inside, standing in front of me, finally in her true form and glory.
She stood on two legs, like a bear, six and a half feet tall. She was thick, long fur covered her, and long claws grew from the ends of powerful arms ending half in paws and half in hands. Her muzzle was narrow and elongated, like an anteater’s, with an almost perfectly circular mouth like that of a giant lamprey. Useful for sucking out the brains of her victims, I would imagine. A long snakelike tongue flicked in and out the mouth, and when she opened it a double row of teeth gleamed wetly. Where the hell was Victor?
Lou took one look and dove under a workbench, hiding behind a rolled-up tarp. I scrambled behind one of the sharp metal sculptures, putting some cover between her and me. She made a keening sound and reached out with those half-paw-half-hands, hooking a claw over one of the metal struts of the sculpture. Lou came out from under the bench and bolted past her through the ruined door and was gone. So much for the faithful dog defending his master to the death.
The sculpture toppled with a crash, and then she was scrambling over it to get to me. I reached out with talent to the fluorescent light fixture and diverted the flow of electricity into the metal sculpture. The effect wasn’t much; fluorescents don’t use much current, but it was enough to make her howl and jump away as if she’d landed on a hot stove. She stumbled back and tripped on a pile of scrap wood in the corner.
Without thinking, I reached out and gathered up the wood, using one of the metal sculptures as my pattern, and fashioned a creature of my own, one to rival even her. It was tall and spindly, but full of jagged wooden edges and sharp points, and it projected an aura of power and menace. Several of the wood pieces were studded with nails, and I turned those into jaws capable of rending flesh. It was a golem, insensitive to pain, neither alive nor dead, and a formidable creature indeed.
Not really, though. It was all bluff. At heart it was nothing more than random pieces of wood, and one good blow from her paw would scatter it over the room. She didn’t know that, however. I moved it toward her and it creaked noisily forward like a clockwork monster in an old horror film. The bluff wasn’t going to work for long, though. She automatically backed away until she came up against a wall, and I could see her tensing for a desperate spring.
But the distraction worked. I took my chance and was out the door in two seconds. I was halfway down the corridor before she figured out the golem was no real threat at all, destroyed it, and came after me again. She was no more than fifteen feet behind me when I heard a volley of high-pitched barks from up ahead, and then the door at the other end of the hallway flew open and Lou came charging through, followed closely by Victor, Glock automatic in his hand. I stopped short and plastered myself against the corridor wall, giving Victor a clear shot.
The sound of the Glock going off in the confines of the corridor wasn’t nearly as loud as I’d expected. More of a flat cracking sound, a quick series of pops that seemed almost harmless rather than lethal. But that was deceptive.
The shape-shifter jerked, stumbled, and went down snarling. She got back up to her feet, took a few more hesitant steps, and crumpled to the floor again. Victor ran right past me up to where she lay and put two more shots into her head from close range. She jerked twice, quivered, and lay still.
I expected doors to fly open at any moment, questioning heads to appear, and horrified screams to start echoing through the hallway. None of that happened. Maybe there was no one in the building right now, or maybe anyone working there was too immersed in creative throes to notice. Or more likely, they had developed a finely tuned sense of urban self-preservation, and well understood that when you hear gunshots in the hall, sticking your head out of your door to see what is going on is not the smartest thing to do.
But now we had another problem. We were standing in a hallway next to the body of a monster out of a Hierony mus Bosch painting. Somebody was bound to wander in before too long, and we could hardly leave it there to be found. Victor had obviously been thinking the same thing. He straightened up from where he had been crouched down examining the body.
“We need a tarp,” he said.
I remembered the tarp I’d seen in the sculpture room, under a bench. I ran back, squeezed through the ruined door, and pulled it out from under the bench where it had been stashed. We spread it out in the hallway next to the shape-shifter and rolled her onto it. Then we rolled it a couple more times until it was covered up. The shape-shifter was hidden, but now it looked exactly like what it was: a tarp containing a dead body.
Victor bent over the tarp, made some gestures, and tensed with effort. The tarp shimmered briefly and then I was looking at an old spruce tree, like something left over from a long-ago Christmas. It was a perfect illusion-the needles were brown halfway along their length, and little piles had apparently fallen off and onto the floor. The man has ability.