Metal worked because it completed the circuit between the soul and, well, me.
The creature and I separated. It found its feet and spun to face me. The roll had doused its flames; my own, I patted out. But it was clear to see the creature’d taken damage. First off, I could see it. And second, most of its fur had burned away, revealing cracked red-black flesh at once dull in spots and glistening. One ear was a curl-edged nub, looking like the melted-candle counterpart of its intact mate. And one eyelid looked to have burned off completely, revealing a mad, bloodshot orb that rolled wildly by the light of the burning cabin.
The creature raised a hand to the knife handle that jutted from its chest, and with an audible growl, removed knife from flesh, tossing it to the dirt at its feet. The wound pulsed with blood as the blade exited. We faced off a moment, me eyeing him, him eyeing me. His flesh smoked. His outsized, muscular chest heaved in the bitter night air.
And then he pounced.
Not graceful like a cat, more the sheer brute force of an attack dog. Nails as thick as talons bit at the tender flesh of Nicholas’ shoulders, and knocked me flat once more. But this time, I was ready. I jabbed my fingers directly into the seeping knife wound as far as they would go, and the creature howled in pain. The two of us seemed to vibrate all of a sudden, two tuning forks at odds synchronizing.
It bit my neck. Blood soaked warm into my collar. And then the creature’s jaw went wide, my neck released. I held its dead dry soul inside my hand.
I squeezed.
It slackened.
The ground shook beneath my feet. The cabin this creature called home, weakened by flame, collapsed within itself just as its former inhabitant collapsed. A flurry of sparks spiraled skyward toward the star-speckled heavens from what now looked like no more than a goodly bonfire, as if the abode’s soul were now somehow freed as well.
And then there was one.
The problem was, where?
I cast about for Nicky’s — fuck, I mean Nicholas’s — camera, finding it some twenty feet away, and in three pieces. I tried to reassemble it by the firelight, but it was no use. Cold-clumsy hands conspired against me, and it’s not like it’d been carefully disassembled, the goddamn thing was broken, its viewfinder black and dead.
I cast the expensive hunk of useless trash aside, and wondered how the hell I was gonna find the second creature. Then I heard the screams — Topher and Zadie both — and the sickening wet pop of tendons and ligaments separating, like twisting off the turkey leg at Thanksgiving dinner. Zadie’s screams became suddenly more desperate, Topher’s thick and strangled.
Sounded like they’d gotten loose. Sounded like they hadn’t listened when I told them they’d stay safe if they stayed put. To a one, protection spells are locational, not person-specific. If I could have carved the runes into their flesh and kept them from a horrid end, I would have. But as it stood, the best that I could do was bar entry to their cave by those who’d do them harm. I couldn’t do shit for them if they decided to leave them damn selves.
But they could apparently still do something for me.
Because they’d just told me where the creature was.
I sprinted back toward their hidey-hole, stumbling on the uneven earth and slipping here and there on fallen leaves. This far from the cabin, the firelight dwindled, and the world was drawn in deep blues outlined on each object’s eastern edge in orange. It was enough to keep me from bouncing off of trees, at least. And as it turned out it, was enough for me to see the horror of what had happened.
As I rounded the hillock whose far side afforded entrance to Topher and Zadie’s narrow cave, I pulled up short. The beast stood plainly visible, just outside the protective barrier of the cave, back arched, and one hand held high above its head. In its hand was Topher’s severed arm, dripping blood into the creature’s open mouth. It hadn’t seen me coming, it was too focused on the cowering girl inside the shallow cave. This creature was bigger than the last, and more wolven. Its back legs were articulated such that the joints appeared to hinge backward, not forward like a human knee; its broad chest was thick with muscle and dusted here and there with fur. Shriveled flaps of nippled flesh draped from each broad pectoral muscle; it took me a moment to realize that in its prior, human life, this creature was a woman. Its arms were massive, its left one reaching almost to the ground while its right held Topher’s some ten feet in the air. Clawed hands the size of rowboat paddles dangled menacingly at the end of each thick wrist.
Topher’s body lay at the creature’s gnarled bare feet atop a forest floor slick black with blood. He’d been unzipped from crotch to sternum in one clean motion, no doubt by one swipe of razor-sharp claw. His viscera gleamed purple in the dim firelight.
As it drank from Topher’s severed arm, the whole creature seemed to swell, a process accelerated when it cast his arm aside and twisted his head off of his lifeless body, raising it to its mouth and sucking blood and brain from it as if extracting marrow from a bone. Muscles strained its leathery skin to the point of splitting. Teeth pushed through grayish gums, crowding a snout that grew ever longer by the second. Clawed feet knuckled harder into the dirt as the beast struggled to keep its feet through a growth spurt that plainly seemed to pain it.
It rose to eight feet tall. Then ten. Then twelve.
Guess all those years of strict rationing while it fed in dribs and drabs off the life-force of small children left the pump primed for some serious binge-eating. Kinda wish the end result was diabetes and Rascal scooters like the rest of us, and not, you know, “Hulk smash!”.
When it threw back its head and roared, I cowered like a frightened child.
But you know what they say: the bigger they are… the likelier they are to rip the head off your fucking meat-suit and drink lustily from its brainpan.
Then I thought of poor aged Ada, and the countless more like her loosed into the vast empty wilderness once they had nothing left to give, only to die of exposure or starvation because they were not so lucky as to be discovered and I thought, fuck it — let’s kill this creepy hellhound.
But first I’d need a weapon.
Scratch that, I thought, as the creature cocked back one massive fist and punched the shelf of rock that formed the cave lip so hard it cracked directly atop one of my protective runes. This thing wasn’t as dumb as it looked. So my first order of business was to keep it from breaching my hasty defenses and snacking on yet another hapless innocent.
It punched the rock again, so hard its bones cracked, its metacarpals pushing bloodily through the hairy skin. The creature bellowed in pain and animal frustration. Zadie screamed and crab-walked as far back as she could go — a whopping three feet. A chunk of stone the size of a cantaloupe fell from the underside of the lip, right where Zadie’s head had been. The rune was still intact, but damaged; it couldn’t take another blow like that one. No time for me to formulate a plan, I had to do something on the quick. So, as the beast brought back its ruined hand for another devastating blow, I fell back on an old standard: snark and false bravado, with shit-all to back it up.
“Hey, bitch! How’s about you try out a chew toy that might bite back?”
The creature turned toward me and cocked its head. Her head, I found myself thinking, because — warped though this creature was — the eyeshine reflecting off its retinas could not fully mask the humanity they contained, and her features had an inexplicably feminine cast to them at odds with her hulking physicality.
“That’s right,” I said to her. “Who’s a good dog?”
A low rumble started in her throat and trembled her lips. “Who are you to speak to me this way?” she said.