Berserker.
The word whispered through the air in Ruthie’s voice. I was so surprised I almost didn’t duck when he swung a hamlike fist at my head.
I’d been a state champion in high school gymnastics, and a few times a month I still practiced at the Y. I was nimble and quick. I did all sorts of cool things.
Back flips, kips, round off after round off. I could swing on a parallel bar and walk across a very thin balance beam. Sadly, none of that was going to do me much good here, so I snatched up the lamp.
Yanking the cord out of the wall, I smashed it into his face. He bled, but he didn’t go down. He did let me go, and the horrible images stopped.
Then he rose. And rose, and rose. Yep, naked all the way from his head down to his toes—a particularly long distance since I put him in the vicinity of six seven. And that adage about big feet, big—well, you know the one—this guy appeared to have invented it.
He started toward me. I backed away. He didn’t have a weapon, but then a guy his size had a pretty good weapon in his fists.
I bumped against the nightstand, set my hand down, and felt something sharp and cool and foreign. A knife when I was a gun kind of girl.
“Jimmy,” I whispered, and the mammoth tilted his head like a dog that had heard a word it recognized amid so many it did not.
“Sanducci,” he snarled, then threw back his head and roared. The sound was so loud, so feral, it made me cringe. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but then I’d have to drop the knife, and that wasn’t happening.
But something else was. The man in front of me had begun to change.
The first indication was the shift in the tenor of his voice, lowering from a man’s wordless anger to a beast’s primal growl.
He dropped onto all fours, hunched, shook his huge head, and fur sprang out everywhere.
I blinked, and when my eyes opened a man no longer stood in front of me but a bear.
He opened his mouth and emitted a bellow that should have shattered my window, maybe my eardrums. Then he rose onto his hind legs and swiped at me with one massive paw.
He wasn’t as quick in this form as he’d been as a human and I jerked out of the way of his sharp claws. Of course if he caught me with one of those blows I’d be dead, so I couldn’t take the time to pat myself on the back for my agile avoidance. Instead, I scurried away, clutching the knife. He lumbered after.
As I watched him waddle, I got a sense of deja vu so strong I wavered with it. I’d seen this very thing in the dream I’d had at the hospital. This man-bear had been at Ruthie’s.
Of course she had said they were coming.
They? Hell. I hoped there weren’t more of these hanging around.
He swiped at me again, and I realized it didn’t matter how many there might be. This one was going to kill me if I didn’t do something.
All I had was the knife, so I gripped it tightly, waited until he took another swing, and after I ducked, I came back up knife first.
The instant the tip entered his body he erupted outward, covering me with a fine layer of ash, the rest floating in the gray-tinged darkness like dust motes in the sun, then cascading downward to coat the floor.
I stood covered in fine gray powder, uncertain what to do. No reason to call the cops. There was nothing left to arrest, and I really didn’t want to talk about how the big, naked man had turned into a huge, snarling bear.
Something weird was going on—something much weirder than anything that had ever gone on in my life before, and that was saying a lot.
I threw on my clothes, grimacing at the feel of ash on my body. To be on the safe side, I removed my gun from the safe and then, keeping tight hold on both it and the knife, I crept downstairs and took a tour of the area surrounding my building. Neither man nor beast lurked about. Apparently “they” had only sent one assassin after me tonight.
Back inside, I locked up and went directly to my laptop, connected to the Internet, typed in berserker.
“Old Norse for bear shirt,” I read. Got that right. “Germanic warriors who, in the frenzy of battle, literally became an animal, usually a wolf or a bear.”
I paused, trying to take this all in, but I was still having a hard time believing what my eyes had clearly seen. A man turning into a bear—then disintegrating into ash. I forced myself to read on.
“Since the only way to kill a berserker was with pure silver, and silver was a rarity at that time, these warriors understandably gained the reputation of being indestructible.”
I picked up the knife. Must be silver, which meant it was Jimmy’s.
I needed to find him. He had a few questions to answer.
For instance, why had the man-bear known his name and really seemed to hate it?
Why had Jimmy thought I might need a solid silver knife?