I took it out and snapped open the blade. Morgan had spread her fingers wide and seemed to be straining. Her smile faded as she realized nothing was happening, and an expression of frustration appeared on her face. Then the beginning of panic. I allowed myself a moment of sweet satisfaction.
Lou spun around and gave two quick warning barks. Ramsey was up to something. I’d dismissed him as a threat, but that’s never a good idea, no matter who it is. He was on home turf, and desperate, and anyone can be dangerous if you give them the chance.
I turned quickly, leaving the fake Morgan on her own for the moment. Ramsey hadn’t moved from the door, but he wasn’t quite Ramsey anymore. His face had narrowed considerably, his hands had sprouted fresh new claws, and he’d grown a bit in height.
The Wendigo had originally warned me that they traveled in pairs. Always. I’d neglected to ask what happened if one of them died. Since we hadn’t been able to close the energy pool, an open conduit remained between their world and ours, and apparently a bench player had been brought in to help out. Maybe these shape-shifters had a psychic connection between each other, or maybe the Morgan imitator had just been thoroughly briefed. Either way, there were now two of them to deal with and I was in trouble.
My knife, which a moment before had seemed a weapon of deadly purpose, now seemed weak and ineffective. A four-inch blade is a dangerous thing. It can slice through flesh and sever arteries. If you’re strong, you can even plunge it straight into a heart, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’d never before used a knife for anything more violent that cutting rope or slicing salami, and against a tiger or a bear or a brain-eating shape-shifter it seemed a very long shot indeed. But a long shot is better than no shot at all, and at the moment of truth you either do what you must or you die. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.
Lou poked his nose into the back of my knee once, then again, sharper. That’s his signal for when he’s about to do something he thinks is clever. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. I hoped this was one of his cleverer thoughts.
He charged the shape-shifter, snarling in his most ferocious manner, but before he reached it he uttered a strangled yelp, stiffened, and keeled over. Immediately he started twitching, then jerking, then howling with a tone that set my teeth on edge. His legs flailed around and shook with tremors, foam came out of his mouth, and he snapped his jaws over and over, so strongly I thought he was going to break some teeth. He was in the midst of a typical grand mal seizure.
It was impossible to ignore. I had a hard time looking away, and I knew it was all an act. The shape-shifter was momentarily transfixed—it was something totally unexpected, outside its experience. Its head was turned away from me, and for just an instant it forgot I was even there.
I would have bolted past it through the door, but it was blocking the exit. I had one chance, and I took it. I was across the tiny room in half a second, knife held low, and by the time it reacted and turned its head toward me it was too late. I was right up on it, and I plunged the knife into its throat and immediately yanked it out toward the blade side. I sliced partly through the tough trachea, and more important, tore through the carotid artery. Blood spurted out, pulsing with every strong beat of its heart.
It could still have killed me then with one swipe of its powerful claws, but it instinctively reached up in a vain attempt to staunch the gushing blood streaming from its throat. I jumped back as Lou scrambled to his feet, miraculously healed.
The thing was tough. It could have taken a bullet and still have fought on. But when blood is draining from a main artery, it doesn’t take long to sap the strength. And there’s a psychological element as well. A wound like that, a wound you instantly realize must be mortal, produces a paralyzing fear and robs the will. It gave a bloody cough, took two hesitant steps, and sank down with its back against the door. I was no longer even in its thoughts.
I turned to face the Morgan one. She was frantically scraping off the dirt I’d smeared on her, and had managed to get rid of most of it. There was still enough left on her body to inhibit her ability to transform, but not enough left to stop it completely. She was stuck in the middle, a weird hybrid of attractive young woman and voracious shape-shifter, still recognizable as Morgan, but with those trademark claws and a horribly distorted jaw and mouth. She was larger than she’d been, not a full-sized monster, but not a slim girl anymore.
I thought she might run when she saw her partner dying on the floor, but the thought never entered her mind. She bounded over to the fallen shape-shifter, looked down briefly at it, and then sprang at me, claws outstretched.
I wasn’t going to get lucky twice, and she wasn’t going to be taken by surprise. Without thinking, I spun and headed up the stairs to the level above.
Now I had the high ground, and I’d have at least some advantage when she came after me up those narrow stairs. It wasn’t much, but every bit counts. Lou was behind me when I made my break toward the stairs, but he made it to the top before I did.
The room upstairs was windowless and even tinier than the room below. A bureau was pushed up against one wall, and almost the entire rest of the space was taken up by a mattress on the floor, reeking of the creature’s lair and covered with tangled sheets and blankets. And blood. Now it was my turn to be distracted.
Ramsey, the true Ramsey, lay crumpled on a corner of the mattress, chest opened in a familiar fashion, skull shattered and empty and smeared with viscous gray matter. He couldn’t have been dead more than a few hours. Karma. Ramsey might have been weak and morally repugnant, but he’d paid for his sins.
I wrestled the bureau to the front of the room and jammed it between the narrow walls of the stairway. It wouldn’t slow down the shape-shifter for long, but every second was precious. The sight of Ramsey’s body had given me an idea. Not a nice one, but beggars can’t be choosers.
When I was young, before Eli straightened me out, I’d had a brief fling with the dark arts. I never got into it seriously; it just wasn’t me. But I’d learned a few things that I’d just as soon have forgotten, except you don’t forget things like that. And one of those things, not surprisingly, had to do with fresh corpses and blood. There’s a reason they call it the dark arts.
It was no time to be squeamish, though. Moral and ethical considerations tend to vanish when you’re faced with a deadly shape-shifter and nowhere to hide.
I was still covered in the blood that had spurted out from the Ramsey shape-shifter’s carotid artery. I focused all my energy and reached out toward Lou, siphoning a bit of his life force. My own wouldn’t work nearly as well—it’s that whole closed-loop feedback thing again.
Lou felt it, and his knees buckled. He whipped his head around and looked at me with disgust. He knew what I was up to, and he didn’t like it.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Would you rather we both die?”
I wove the life force through the shape-shifter’s blood that was still dripping off my arms. I knew about this spell, but I’d never done it. How could I have? It requires a blood sacrifice. But this time, when I’d cut the shape-shifter’s throat, for all magical intents and purposes, that was exactly what I’d done.
I bound up the blood and the life force and let it flow into Ramsey’s corpse, using every bit of magical energy I possessed. It would leave me helpless on the magical plane, but so what? Talent wasn’t going to affect that shape-shifter anyway. As usual that much effort left me feeling weak and dizzy, but this time I also felt nauseous. I was trembling, and the edges of a panic attack were nibbling at me. Necromancy is more than just dark arts; it’s profoundly disturbing. I suppose after a while you get used to it, but I don’t see how.
But it worked. Ramsey’s corpse stirred and sat up, not slowly, but with a sudden jerk as if its strings had been pulled by a giant puppeteer. It had one good eye left, so apparently it could see. No heart or liver, but that didn’t seem to bother it any. Its head swiveled around with a jerky motion like an animatronic robot. Lou sank down so low he was almost like a black-and-tan puddle on the floor. I stood motionless against the wall, pretending I was a floor lamp.
So far, so good. But the most important part of the spell, and the most difficult, was control. And that was something I’d never learned and never wanted to, thank God. Animating a corpse is one thing; making it do what you want it to is quite another. If I’d had one of those green rune stones, I might have managed it, but they were all gone.
It all depended on timing, and the shape-shifter downstairs did its part perfectly. By this time it had managed to scrape most of the earth off of it, and had transformed itself nearly back to its original form. A loud noise came from the stairs, and the bureau blocking the stairway suddenly splintered, pieces flying off it as the shape-shifter tore it apart like a rotting log.
Apparently Ramsey could still hear, as well. He bounced to his feet, surprisingly spry for someone who was dead, and lurched past Lou and me to confront the threat. When the shape-shifter came through the door, the first thing it saw was a creature as frightening as itself. It stopped dead and made a high keening sound of surprise. I’m not sure what it would have done, but Ramsey left it no choice. He threw himself at the shape-shifter and wrapped himself around it, groping for its throat.
When I’d made the golem out of wood and nails, it was frightening but totally ineffective. The Ramsey corpse was a different matter. He might not have been very strong in life, but he was strong now. And being dead, he didn’t get tired. An all-out attack takes up so much energy that if it doesn’t succeed very quickly, it fails. Arms grow tired, breath becomes labored, and before long you can barely stand upright.
But in the best zombie tradition, Ramsey was tireless. And, of course, immune to injury and pain. The shape-shifter recovered in a second, whipped her long muzzle around, and took a good-sized chunk out of his shoulder. Ramsey ignored it and managed to get his hands around the shape-shifter’s throat. It tried to shake him off, but he was glued to it like the death he was. The shape-shifter brought up its powerful claws and ripped his stomach open. Some fluid gushed forth and long ropy intestines dangled out, but again it made no difference. Ramsey’s hands continued to squeeze the shape-shifter’s throat, cutting off its air. And unlike Ramsey, the shape-shifter was getting tired, especially with no oxygen fueling its high metabolism. Worse, as far as the shape-shifter was concerned, blood flow to the brain was being cut off, and if it couldn’t free itself quickly, it would pass out and never wake up.
It was like a scene in a George Romero film, except the blood and gore was real and the combination of feral stink and reek of blood and meat was overwhelming. I’d thought I could slip past them to freedom while they were occupied with each other, but naturally I’d overlooked something again. The two of them were blocking the stairs, the only exit, and there was no way past them.
The shape-shifter was losing the fight. It finally realized its best defense would be to chew off one of Ramsey’s arms, making it impossible for him to maintain a grip. But it had realized that too late. It was losing focus as its blood-deprived brain began to shut down. Its arms started to flail, and it was biting and snapping at random now, with no clear purpose. They both lost balance, the shape-shifter because it was passing out, Ramsey because there wasn’t that much left of his physical body. As they toppled over, Lou took a running start and leapt over them, doing his hurdler imitation again, landing on the stairs below. I took my cue and tried to do the same, but when my trailing leg knocked against Ramsey, he let go of the shape-shifter’s throat and reached up automatically, grabbing my ankle as I passed. I knew his magically enhanced grip would be powerful, but I’d had no idea. A little more pressure and bone would crumble under his fingers. No wonder the shape-shifter had collapsed.
I had to do something quickly. If Ramsey lost focus on the shape-shifter and concentrated on me instead, not only would that be bad in itself but the shape-shifter might recover as well. Monster and zombie together would be a bit too much to deal with. Already, with the choking pressure removed, the shape-shifter was struggling upward with renewed purpose.
But even though I had no idea how to control Ramsey, I was the one who had animated him. That gave me some magical standing. And blood was the key. I threw my jacket down the stairs, stripped off my blood-covered shirt, and dropped it over Ramsey’s head. That blood had been a vital factor in the animation, and so much of it touching him temporarily overloaded the circuits in whatever now passed for a brain. Ramsey’s hand slackened and he lay motionless, like a falcon that had just been hooded.
I pulled my leg free, scrambled over the two bodies on the floor, and then as I made it to the stairs I reached back and plucked the shirt from Ramsey’s head. Instantly his hand snapped back to the shape-shifter’s throat as he resumed his relentless pressure.
I was tempted to run out the door and get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t just yet. I had to make sure the shape-shifter didn’t survive, and equally important, I had to deactivate Ramsey—if he finished the job, his next step might be to shamble around the neighborhood. There are a lot of strange things that people will shrug off because they couldn’t possibly be true, but a ravaged corpse stalking the streets is not one of them. Even if he didn’t manage to kill anyone, it would open a can of worms that would shake the practitioner community to its core.