Isidore flicked her hands, casting the sizzling point of light toward the intruder. The cat screeched and sprang for his face.
A dark arm caught the cat in midair and flung it aside. At the same time the bolt of power that Isidore sent flying at the man seemed to glance uselessly off the dark figure as he advanced through the room. Stone shattered where the flickering light of Isidore’s power hit the wall, sending shards flying and dust boiling up.
Isidore didn’t waste any time. Another bolt of powerful light ignited. This time, Magda had to turn her face away from the searing heat that slammed into the advancing figure. The shimmering heat turned to white vapor as he pushed through it without slowing.
“Try to get around him and run,” Isidore said.
“I’m not leaving without you,” Magda told her as she tried to think of a way they could get past the hulking man.
“Forget about me—I am already lost!” Isidore yelled as she pushed Magda back.
“You’re not lost!” Magda regained her footing and seized Isidore’s arm. “We both have to get out of here!”
“We can’t both get away.”
“Yes we can. Hold my arm. When I cut him that will give us an opening. Stay with me.”
“You will only have one chance,” Isidore said, ignoring Magda’s command and shaking her arm free. “When that chance comes, take it! Don’t lose your life in here, Magda. You have to get away! You are more important than I am.”
Magda had no intention of leaving a blind woman to her fate with whoever, or whatever, was in the room with them. She grabbed Isidore’s arm again and yanked her back just in time from what the woman couldn’t see. A powerful arm swept past them both.
Magda used the opening to duck under Isidore’s outstretched arm and to slam her knife up into the ribs just under the man’s extended arm as it swung past them. It was a solid strike. She pulled back in time to miss the elbow that cocked back, trying to get her. The arm swept around again, inches from her face. She tried to slash the arm but missed. Magda saw that the fingers were like shriveled, blackened claws.
Isidore pushed both hands out, using all her strength to send a concentrated, focused fist of air at the center of the figure. It bent him only a little. He staggered back a half step but then kept coming forward again as Magda and Isidore kept circling away from him.
The cat leaped out of nowhere up onto the man’s back. He twisted and threw it off. The cat hit the wall hard.
With an angry roar and sudden, ferocious speed, the man lunged toward them. Magda snatched for the blind woman’s arm to yank her back out of the way, but she caught only air as Isidore leaned in and again tried to force a focused wall of air at the attacker.
Magda felt as if she were moving in a dream. Even with all her strength put into the effort, her legs wouldn’t move fast enough to get her within range to stab the man, to stop what she knew he was about to do.
Lashing out with lightning speed, his clawed hand raked through Isidore’s middle. Isidore’s scream turned to a grunt with the impact of the blow.
An arc of warm blood and flesh splattered across Magda and then in a diagonal line up across the wall.
Isidore’s legs began to buckle.
“Run! Now!” she cried out at Magda as she was going down.
Magda instead rammed her knife into the side of the man’s neck. She had to stop him before he did any more damage. All she could think was that she had to stop him and then get help for Isidore.
Driving the knife in deep didn’t feel like stabbing into muscle and sinew. It felt hard and leathery and dead. She tried to yank the knife back so that she could stab him again, but it was stuck fast.
She gripped the handle with both hands, trying to pull the blade back out of his neck. It was then, when she was close enough, that she saw in the dim light that the man, though he moved with impossible speed and power, didn’t look like a man.
He looked like a corpse.
His face was sunken and partially decayed. His jaw hung crooked to one side; his dark teeth were exposed behind shrunken, shriveled lips. He looked like a rotting cadaver.
But even as dead as the rest of him appeared, his eyes were something altogether different. The look in his eyes sent an icy chill through her.
It wasn’t just that they glowed with a kind of inner light. It was that the glow was fired by the gift, yet unlike any light of the gift she had ever seen before. It was at once dead and empty, but alive with menace.
Magda was so shocked by what she saw that it stopped her cold for an instant.
Then, that frozen instant shattered with a crack that made her ears ring. The room suddenly spun in her vision. Her back smacked the wall, driving the air from her lungs. Her head hit the stone so hard that it knocked her senseless. Through the pall of pain she only dimly heard the terrible roar of the thing, only dimly saw blurry movement in the swirling room.
Magda could taste dry stone dust and blood. She realized then that the man had struck her with a blow so powerful it had lifted her from her feet and thrown her back across the room.
She was distantly surprised to realize that she still had her knife gripped tightly in her fist. Isidore’s warm blood ran down Magda’s arm and over her hand, making for a slippery hold on her knife.
Magda blinked, trying to clear her vision as she struggled to get her breath back. Looking up from the floor, she saw the man in a wild fury ripping into Isidore. He tore off the side of Isidore’s face and top of her skull with one powerful blow, the rest of her head with the next.
The dark figure roared as he flailed and ripped at Isidore’s body. Blood and gore from the poor woman splattered across the floor and up against the walls as he swung both arms in mad fury.
In a strange pall of quiet shock, Magda told herself that it was too late to do anything but escape. If she didn’t get away, she would be next.
As the man bellowed in a wild frenzy of savagery, she told herself that there was nothing she could do for Isidore. This was her only chance to get away. She knew that she had only a few fleeting seconds if she was to live.
She told herself to move.
Magda scrambled to her feet and staggered toward the black entrance to the hallway out. She snatched up her lantern on the way past.
Once into the hall, she looked back over her shoulder as she ran. She was still stunned from the blow, and her wobbly legs wouldn’t move fast enough. She could see the man back through the entrance, finished ripping Isidore apart, turn toward her.
A cry of anguish for Isidore caught in Magda’s throat as she struggled to run. The cat appeared out of the dark doorway and raced after her.
Chapter 38
In a daze, Magda stumbled as she ran. Tears streamed down her face. Blood dripped from her fist holding the knife. Glancing down at her arms, she thought it looked as if she had just butchered someone.
As she ran, she struggled to comprehend what she had just seen. She knew that something only remotely human, or maybe only once human, had just slaughtered Isidore. It made no sense.
It was such a horrific sight, such a shock, that she was already questioning if she had really seen what she knew she had seen when she had looked into the man’s face. She began to wonder if it could have been a trick of the shadows.
But she knew it wasn’t.
She cried out in fright when she suddenly ran into one of the walls of hanging cloth. It caught her, flapping around her like arms grabbing for her. She slashed wildly with her knife, frantically trying to get away from what she thought for a second was the man who had killed Isidore trying to seize her.