This was a bad part of town to be trapped in. But if I cut across the old highway and ran for a bit, I would be at the edge of the barrio’s dark, night-pulsing adobe warren. I knew that warren, knew some good hiding spots and shortcuts.

Going into the barrio was a good way to end up dead. But still, given the choice between killing me and killing what was chasing me, I was comfortably sure self-interest might strike the deciding blow in my favor.

It was getting close. Very close. Night wind brought the first threads of its scent, a noxious stink that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Gooseflesh prickled up under my skin.

That thing almost fucking killed you. You have no staff now, goddammit, and it’s fast. It’s too goddamn fast. Oh, God. Oh, God.

I told the rabbit-panicking part of myself to shut up, reached the street, and picked up the pace, my coat flapping and the sour taste of fear on my tongue.

Chapter Twenty-three

I don’t mind being shot at. I don’t like it, mind you, and I don’t seek out flying lead. But I don’t mind it. I don’t mind knives, I don’t mind a bit of fisticuffs. I don’t even mind it when someone springs a trap on me and does their best to kill me.

I am a hunter; it comes with the job.

But Lord God on high, I hate to be chased. I hate to run with no other thought but the rabbit’s thought of finding a way to escape certain death.

It was too fast. I paced myself, and drew on the cold, pulsing scar on my wrist as hard as I could. But even though I had the benefit of hellbreed-bargained strength, I was seriously flagging by the time I reached Merced Street and the Plaza Centro.

The PC isn’t really a plaza. It’s a gutted five-story building full of tiny shops, botanicas, and bodegas, with a vast central well thronged with people at any time of the day or night. It takes up a whole city block and was once a train station before the barrio reached in from the slum edge of town and took it captive.

It also has the biggest concentration of Weres in the city. Something that smelled this bad and was obviously intent on mayhem was likely to attract some notice. And while I didn’t like the thought of luring the wendigo right through a heavily populated area and risking some casualties, I also didn’t like the thought of meeting my death on a lonely street where there was no bloody cover. Weres mean smell, and smell was likely how this thing was tracking me. If I could confuse it, maybe I could escape.

These considerations flashed through my mind as I turned down Merced and saw the lights of the Plaza Centro in the distance, glimmering like fool’s gold. My boots pounded the pavement, the scar no longer cold on my wrist but hot, so hot I expected it to steam in the chill night air. It poured pure etheric force into me, and I spent it recklessly—speed was imperative, since I could hear the thing behind me, and whenever the wind shifted I could smell it too. How it was tracking me through windshift I didn’t want to know.

I didn’t even want to guess.

At this point, I would settle for just keeping my miserable life. My breath rattled in my chest, my ribs heaving, it had almost caught me once on the top of a tenement on Colvert and Tenth. I knew my city, knew every dip in the streets, knew every shortcut and back alley, and it was only knowledge that kept me one scant sliver ahead of it, this thing—wendigo, whatever it was—that roared its glassine screech behind me doing its own personal imitation of a Wild Hunt.

Christ I’m glad it’s not smart, if it was smart I couldn’t have fooled it and it would have me by now. I pounded up the slight slope, flagging badly now, headlights blurring past. If the normal humans sensed me at all it was only as a cold draft, a flash out of the corner of the eye, something not-quite-right but gone before they could take a second look.

A ghost.

Grant me strength in battle, honor in living, and a quick clean death when my time comes—The prayer trembled just at the edge of my exhausted mind. But don’t let it come yet. Please, God. I have served well; help me out a little here. God? Anyone?

Then, the impossible, the smell of the thing gaggingly close, I had slowed too much, no alley in sight, no way to jag left or right, I was running for the PC and maybe an escape in the tunnels underneath but oh God, I was tired. So tired. And I was hit from behind, a massive impact that smashed through me as the thing collided with its prey and sent me flying.

I heard the scrabble of claws and the screams as I flew, trying vainly to twist in midair, get my feet under me, something, anything, and heard the snarling crash into a wall behind me.

Hit. Hard. Snapping and shattering glass, I’d gone through a window and fetched up against shelving that fell over, bottles breaking, glass whickering through the air and the sudden smell of smashed vegetables all around me.

Lay for a moment, lungs burning and heaving, legs and arms too drained to move, scar a burning cicatrice on my wrist. Oh God oh God, let it be quick, if it has to take me let it be quick, Saul, oh God Saul. Saul—

Then, as if a gift from heaven, something familiar. “Get up. Jesus Christ, Jill, get up!”

A familiar voice, a prayer answered. I levered myself up just at the thing smashed through the glass searching for me, a massive ball of hunger and gagging stench suddenly freezing the air. It moved too fast and I was tired, so tired, arms and legs weighted with lead.

Crash. He hit the thing from the side, screaming his warcry, a roar halfway between man and cougar. Flame suddenly belched out, garish in the darkness and the fluorescent light of the grocery store, I heard screams and popping sounds as the fire, bright crimson-orange, speared through the night. More vital, more impossibly real than regular fire or hellfire, heat scorched the air so badly it stripped the hair back from my face, a holocaust of flame.

More screaming, and the barking, coughing growl of more Weres. I heard chanting—a shaman’s voice lifted in the high keening screech of Were magicks, those bloody, animalistic, and strangely pure works of sorcery that are their peculiar heritage.

Saul yelled his warcry again, moving with fluid grace as the shining thing he held glittered with heat. More glass smashed, the smell of mashed vegetables and fruit suddenly turning caramel-brown shot through with the disgusting stink of the cancerous thing that screeched and tried to bat Saul away.

Seeing a Were fight in midform, dancing between human and animal, is… We never really think of how they shift to animal forms, forms that are precise and graceful. In most cases, far more graceful than human beings ever manage to be. And in their human forms they’re graceful too, blessed with quick reflexes, regular features, an uncanny ability to move economically and efficiently through space.

Midform, they have the best of both worlds, a beauty that is so weird and alien it catches at the throat and dries the mouth. The movies don’t do them justice at all. And midform is not somewhere they linger, unless they are rogue—or unless there is no other way to fight.

Saul was somehow not there as the creature swiped with its bloody claws, and seeing its speed and power up close I slumped to my knees, jaw hanging open in wonder and my breath rasping in my throat. It wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair, that I had to bargain with a hellbreed to get even a fraction of his grace and still I was so much less.

So acutely aware of being so much less.

Steam billowed. The thing Saul held, its flame liquid and hissing, broke the soul-devouring cold of the creature. Another scream from the shaman, and a massed snarling tide of power rode through the air. Were magic, tasting of nights out under open skies, black air against the back of the throat like champagne, hard crusted snow under feet no longer human, and the joy of running on four legs, the air alive with scent and the hard cold points of the stars overhead singing their ancient songs of lust and slow fire to those of us on the ground who had ears to hear.