As it hit, the energies of the skinwalker's veil came into conflict with those in my shield, each canceling out the other, and for a second the creature was visible as an immensely tall, lean, shaggy, vaguely humanoid thing with matted yellow hair and overlong forelimbs tipped in long, almost delicate claws.
As the shield fell, Anastasia pointed a finger at the thing and hissed a word, and a blindingly bright beam of light no thicker than a hair flashed out from her finger. It was fire magic not unlike my own, but infinitely more intense and focused and far more energy efficient. The beam swept past the skinwalker, intersecting with its upper left arm, and where it touched fur burned away and flesh boiled and bubbled and blackened.
The skinwalker flashed to one side of the doorway and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a view of the smoking pinprick hole in the expensive paneling of the outer office.
I pointed my staff at the door and Lara did the same thing with the gun.
For maybe ten seconds, everything was silent.
"Where is it?" Lara hissed.
"Gone?" Justine suggested. "Maybe it got scared when Warden Luccio hurt it."
"No, it didn't," I said. "It's smart. Right now it's looking for a better way to get to us."
I looked around the office, trying to think like the enemy. "Let's see," I said. "If I was a shapeshifting killing machine, how would I get in here?"
The options were limited. There was the door in front of us and the window behind us. I turned to face the window, still looking. Silence reigned, except for the sigh of the air-conditioning, billowing steadily into the office from the-
From the vents.
I turned and thrust my staff toward a large air vent, covered with the usual slatted steel contraption, drew forth my will, and screamed, "Fulminos!"
Blue-white lightning suddenly filled the air with flickering fire, while a spear of blinding heat and force crackled forth from my staff and slammed into the metal vent. The metal absorbed the electricity, and I knew it would carry it back through the vent itself-and into anything inside.
There was a weird, chirping scream and then the vent cover flew outward, followed by a python-shaped blur in the air. Even as it arced toward us, that shape flowed and changed into that of something low-slung, stocky, and viciously powerful, like maybe a badger or a wolverine.
It hit Anastasia high on the chest and slammed her to the floor.
And on the way down, I caught a flash of golden-yellow eyes dancing with sadistic glee.
I turned to kick the thing off of Anastasia, but Lara beat me to the metaphorical punch. She slammed the barrel of her machine pistol into its flank as if driving a beer tap into a wooden keg with her bare hands, and pulled the trigger on the way.
Fire and noise filled the room, and the skinwalker went bouncing to one side. It hit the ground once, twisted itself in midair and raked its claws across Justine's midsection. Using the reaction to control its momentum, it landed on its feet and hurled itself out of the room by way of the window behind Lara's desk.
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 more standing.
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.