Justine staggered and let out a small cry of pain.

Lara stared at the window for a second, her eyes wide, then breathed, “Empty night.”

I turned to Anastasia but she waved me off with a grimace. It didn’t look like she was bleeding. I turned to Justine and tried to assess her injuries. There were six horizontal lines sliced into the soft flesh of her abdomen, as neatly as if with a scalpel. Blood was welling readily from them—but I didn’t think any of them had been deep enough to open the abdominal cavity or reach an artery.

I seized Lara’s discarded coat, folded it hastily, and pressed it against Justine’s belly. “Hold it here,” I snapped to Justine. “You’ve got to control the bleeding. Hold it here.”

Her teeth were bared in pain, but she nodded and grasped at the improvised pad with both hands as I helped her up.

Lara looked from Justine to the window, her eyes a little wide. “Empty night,” she said again. “I’ve never seen anything that fast.”

Given that I had once seen her cover ground in a dead sprint at maybe fifty miles an hour, I figured she knew what she was talking about. We were never going to get that thing to hold still long enough to kill it.

I went to the window, hoping to spot it, and found myself staring into an oncoming comet of purple flame, presumably courtesy of the skinwalker. I fell back, hurling my left arm and its shield bracelet in an instinctive gesture, and the fiery hammer of the explosion flung me supine to the floor.

That otherworldly shriek sounded again, mocking and full of spite, and then there was a crash from somewhere below us.

“It’s back inside the house,” I said. I offered my hand to Anastasia to help her up. She took it, but as I began to pull, she clenched her teeth over a scream, and I eased her back onto the floor at once.

“Can’t,” she panted, breathing hard. “It’s my collarbone.”

I spat out a curse. Of every kind of simple fracture there is, a fractured collarbone is one of the most agonizing and debilitating injuries you can get. She wasn’t going to be doing any more fighting today. Hell, she wasn’t going to be doing any morestanding.

The floor beneath my feet abruptly exploded. I felt a steel cable wrap my ankle and pull, and then I was falling with a hideous stench filling my nose. I crashed down onto something that slowed my fall but gave way, and I went farther down still. The noise was hideous. Then the fall stopped abruptly, though I wasn’t quite sure which way was up. About a hundred objects slammed into me all at the same time, pounding the wind out of my lungs.

I lay there stunned for a few seconds, struggling to remember how to breathe. The floor. The skinwalker had smashed its way up to me through the floor. It had pulled me down—but all the falling debris must have crashed through the floor the skinwalker had been standing on in turn.

I’d just fallen two stories amidst maybe a ton of debris, and managed to survive it. Talk about lucky.

And then, beneath my lower back, something moved.

The rubble shifted and a low growl began to reverberate up through it.

In a panic, I tried to force my dazed body to flee, but before I could figure out how it worked, a yellow-furred, too-long forearm exploded up out of the rubble. Quicker than you could say “the late Harry Dresden,” its long, clawed fingers closed with terrible strength on my throat and shut off my air.

Chapter Twenty-six

Here’s something a lot of people don’t know: being choked unconscious hurts.

There’s this horrible, crushing pain on your neck, followed by an almost instant surge of terrible pressure that feels like it’s going to blow your head to tiny pieces from the inside. That’s the blood that’s being trapped in your brain. The pain surges and ebbs in time with your heartbeat, which is probably racing.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a waifish supermodel or a steroid-popping professional wrestler, because it isn’t an issue of strength or willpower—it’s simple physiology. If you’re human and you need to breathe, you’re going down. A properly applied choke will take you from feisty to unconscious in four or five seconds.

Of course, if the choker wants to make the victim hurt more, they can be sloppy about the choke, make it take longer.

I’ll let you guess which the skinwalker preferred.

I struggled, but I might as well have saved myself the effort. I couldn’t break the grip on my neck. The pile of rubble shifted and surged, and then the skinwalker sat up out of the wreckage, sloughing it off as easily as an arctic wolf emerging from a bed beneath the snow. The skinwalker’s nightmarishly long arms hung below its knees, so as it began moving down the hallway, I was able to get my hands and knees underneath me, at least part of the time, preventing my neck from snapping under the strain of supporting my own weight.

I heard boots hitting hardwood. The skinwalker let out a chuckling little growl and casually slammed my head against the wall. Stars and fresh pain flooded my perceptions. Then I felt myself falling through the air and landing in a tumble of arms and legs that only seemed to be connected to me in the technical sense.

I lifted dazed eyes to see the security guy from the entrance hall come around the corner, that little machine gun held to his shoulder, his cheek resting against the stock so that the barrel pointed wherever his eyes were focused. When he saw the skinwalker, uncovered from its veil, he stopped in his tracks. To his credit, he couldn’t have hesitated for more than a fraction of a second before he opened fire.

Bullets zipped down the hall, so close that I could have reached out a hand and touched them. The skinwalker flung itself to one side, a golden-furred blur, and rebounded off the wall toward the gunman, its form changing. Then it leapt into the air, flipping its body as it did, and suddenly a spider the size of a subcompact car was racing along the ceiling toward the security guy.

At that point, he impressed me again. He turned and ran, sprinting around a corner with the skinwalker coming hard behind.

“Now!” someone called, as the skinwalker reached the intersection of the two hallways, and a sudden howl of thunder filled the hallways with noise and light. Bullets ripped into the floor, the wall, and the ceiling, coming from some point out of sight around the corner, filling the air with splinters of shattered hardwood.

The skinwalker let out a deafening caterwaul of pain and boundless fury. The gunfire reached a thunderous, frantic crescendo.

Then men began screaming.

I tried to push myself to my feet, but someone had set the hallway on tumble dry, and I fell down again. I kept trying. Whoever had made the hall start acting like a Laundromat dryer had to run out of quarters eventually. By using the wall, I managed to make it to my knees.

I heard a soft sound behind me. I turned my head blearily toward the source of the noise and saw three pale, lithe forms drop silently from the floors above through the hole that the skinwalker had made. The first was Lara Raith. She’d torn her skirt up one side, almost all the way to her hip, and when she landed in a silent crouch, she looked cold and feral and dangerous with her sword in one hand and her machine pistol in the other.

The other two women were vampires as well, their pale skin shining with eerie beauty, their eyes glittering like polished silver coins—the sisters Justine had mentioned, I presumed. I guess I’d arrived in the middle of the night, vampire time, and gotten some people out of bed. The first sister wore nothing but weapons and silver body piercings, which gleamed on one eyebrow, one nostril, her lower lip, and her nipples. Her dark hair had been cropped close to her head except for where her bangs fell to veil one of her eyes, and she carried a pair of wavy-bladed swords like Lara’s.