I didn’t touch it.
Guayota had a distance weapon, however weirdly horrible, and that meant keeping back from him was no good. Time enough later to wonder at the finger and how he’d made it so hot it could melt the roof of the car; for now I had to concentrate on survival. Nor could I follow my sensei’s first rule of fighting—he who is smart and runs away lives to fight another day. The bay doors were closed, and I had no way to run.
Out of other options, I attacked. There had been no more than a fraction of a second between when he threw the finger and when I jumped off the car. His burning finger meant that I knew better than to touch him with my skin. The wrench I’d grabbed was a giant-sized 32mm; it weighed about three pounds and gave me almost two feet of additional reach.
I got four hits on him, three with the wrench and one with the gun, and in that time, I learned a lot about him. He wasn’t used to his prey knowing how to fight back. He had never been trained to fight hand-to-hand. He was slower than I was. Not much slower, but it was enough for me to get in four hits. He was oddly sticky, and I lost the gun to him when it sank into his flesh to be quickly consumed and absorbed.
And, finally, nothing I tried seemed to hurt him.
He continued to heat up as we fought, and before I got the next hit in, his clothes flared up in a wall of flames, then drifted to ashes. His face had melted into something with eyes and a mouth, but no other features that I could pick out in the wavy blackness of his skin.
Other than his face, his body remained in other ways humanlike, but there was nothing human about his skin. It was char black and formed into a bumpy, almost barklike surface. Fissures broke open as he moved, revealing, as I’d noticed before, something deep orange with red overtones. His outer surface reminded me of nothing so much as film I’d seen of the active lava flows in Hawaii.
He touched me, a glancing blow on my hip. I slapped my hip to put out the fire and refused to look because although my face still hurt, as did the skin across my collarbone, my hip had just gone numb.
My fifth hit landed in one of those odd fissures in his skin, this one on his left shoulder blade, or at least where a shoulder blade would have been had he been human. It knocked him forward: he wasn’t immune to the laws of physics. My arm and hand were spattered by hot chunks of liquid that burned.
Remembering the finger that sank into metal, I knocked the hot splatters off me, but the skin beneath them bubbled up into blisters that hurt. Flores reached out, a longer reach than he should have been able to manage, and grabbed hold of the end of my wrench. Where he touched, the metal glowed orange, and the glow rapidly spread toward my hand. I let go of the wrench before the glow touched my skin.
The air was smoky now—and not just with burning fabric. All sorts of flammable liquids spill on the floor of a garage; although I clean them by pouring on cat litter or HyperSorb and sweep them up, there was enough residue here and there to react as he brushed past them, so that there were several small fires burning reluctantly on the cement.
I spent an anxious and weaponless few moments just getting out of the way of his jabs and kicks before I could get close to something else I could use as a weapon. I tripped over the crowbar he’d dropped, but didn’t pick it up: it was all metal, and I’d just learned that I wanted something that didn’t transfer heat as well as metal did. But when I tripped, I knocked the big mop over on myself and grabbed it as I rolled to my feet.
The big wooden mop handle made an okay bo staff, and I used it to keep him from approaching me while occupying him seriously enough that he couldn’t rip off another finger—or other body part—to throw at me. The wood kept catching fire, but if I swung it fast enough, the air put the flames out before it could burn much away. It was getting rapidly shorter, but I was only using the very end to poke him rather than using it like a baseball bat.
I managed to lure him into leading with the top half of his body and hit him in the middle of his forehead with the end of the mop handle in a lunge that would have done a fencing master proud. The wood sank a good four inches into his forehead and stuck there. When he jerked away, he took the mop handle with him.
He wrenched it out and threw his head back and howled, a noise so high-pitched that it made my ears hurt. He bent double, and parts of his body stuck together, melting or melding. I took a chance and sprinted to one of my big toolboxes and grabbed a three-foot-long crowbar off the top. This crowbar had a big red rubber handle to protect my hands.
I was running back across the garage, crowbar held up and over my shoulder, when something really big flew past me, something large enough that the air disturbance in its wake fluttered my shirt as it passed.
It hit Guayota right in his center mass, scooped him off his feet, and carried him back five or six feet in the air before he hit the far wall and the floor at the same time. That wall was covered with a plethora of rubber hoses and belts hung in a semiorganized fashion. He set the ones he touched on fire, and a new wave of toxic smoke filled the air, as the thing that hit him fell to the ground with a dull smack that resolved itself into the motor from a ’62 Beetle that I’d had sitting in the office to be taken for scrap.
Adam was here.
A Beetle motor isn’t huge as motors go, but it still weighed over two hundred pounds. Even I don’t know all that many people who can fling an engine as if it were a baseball. But I didn’t look for him because—surprise, surprise—not even being hit by two hundred pounds had put Guayota out of the game.
He rose from the ground, covered in flaming belts and hoses that he shed as he moved. He was no longer even vaguely humanlike. Instead, he had the form of a huge dog shaped much like the dog I’d shot. His head was broad and short muzzled, and his ears hung down like a hunting dog’s. His mouth was open, revealing big, sharp teeth of the many, many category. The creature he’d turned into was bigger and heavier than any werewolf I’d ever seen.
This, this was the beast that had feasted on horses, dogs, and women next to that hayfield in Finley.
“Mercy is mine,” Adam said softly from somewhere just behind me. “You need to leave here, right now.”
“Yours?” The voice was still Flores’s, though liquid splattered from the doglike monster’s mouth to sizzle on the floor as he talked. “You took she who is mine. It is only meet that I take she who is yours.”
“Christy Hauptman is the mother of my daughter,” Adam said. “And I loved her once. She cared for me for years, and that gives her the right to ask me for protection from someone who frightens her. You have no right to her, no right to be here at all.”
The dog who had been Flores, who was evidently the Guayota my half brother had warned me about, stopped and tilted his head. The dog’s skin looked like it had when it was a human shape wearing it. On the dog, the charred, blackened crust resembled fur, fur that dripped molten and glowing bits of stuff onto the cement floor.
“No?” Guayota said, his voice an odd whispering hum that was almost soothing to listen to. “You are wrong. I found my love, who had been taken from me, and I celebrated the sun’s countenance, warmth, and beauty. I gave her all that I was, all that I had been, all that I could be.”
The hum rose to a hiss, and I shivered despite the heat because there was something horrible in that sound. It mutated into a howl that made my bones vibrate like wind chimes. The sound stopped abruptly, but I could feel the air pressure build up as if we were in an airplane climbing too rapidly.
“Then she left.” He sounded like the man who’d first come into the garage, almost human. Sad. But that didn’t last. “She left me, when I swore that would never happen again. Swore that never, once I finally found her, would I let her leave me.”
“That’s not a choice you get to make,” said Adam. “You are scaring her, and you need to leave her alone. I and my pack are sworn to defend her from danger. You don’t want to put yourself in my path, Flores.”
“I tremble,” Guayota said, smiling, his teeth white in the red heat of his mouth. “See?”
A low, groaning noise rumbled through the garage, and the floor rocked beneath me, making me stumble awkwardly to keep my feet. The cement floor cracked, and I could hear a crash of epic proportion as the earthquake sent one of the lighter-weight racks in the office area over in a crash of miscellaneous VW parts.
Guayota laughed and didn’t sound even vaguely human this time. “We all tremble witnessing the might of the Alpha of werewolves.” There was a popping sound, and steam escaped from one of the fissures in his back. Red glop dropped from his half-open mouth like slobber, but slobber didn’t hit cement and score it.
Adam scooped up the wasserboxer engine I’d just put together and threw it. The wasserboxer engine is a lot heavier than the old Beetle engine had been, and he threw it more at bowling-ball speed than baseball.
Guayota rose on his hind legs to meet the engine when it hit, and this time it only pushed him back two or three feet, and he stayed upright and in control of the slide. Like my gun and the mop handle, the engine sank into him and stuck there, metal glowing.
Then I felt a wave of fae magic, and the engine became a shining silver skin that flowed swiftly over whatever Flores had become and covered him entirely before he had a chance to move.
“Zee?” I asked, coughing as the acrid smoke of the garage finally became too strong to ignore. I kept my eye on Guayota, but the fae-struck aluminum of the engine block seemed to be capable of staying solid around a creature who had melted hardened steel. The metal flexed a bit before settling into a motionless shape approximately the size of the creature Guayota had become. Within the shiny skin, Guayota made no sound. My science background wasn’t all that strong, but I was pretty sure the only thing keeping the aluminum from melting was fae magic.
“Nope, just me,” Tad called, his voice a little strained. “Nice throw, Adam.”
“Thanks,” Adam said, sounding a little breathless himself.
Tad walked out from behind Adam—and he looked a little odd. The stick-out ears that had always given him an almost-comical appearance were now pointed, the bones of his face subtly rearranged to beauty as real and as human as Adam’s. His eyes … were not human at all: polished silver with a cat’s-eye pupil of purple. He was a little taller than usual, a little buffer, a little more graceful, and a lot scarier. I wasn’t used to thinking of Tad as being scary.
I opened my mouth to thank them both but all I did was cough. I trotted to the garage controls to raise the garage-bay doors to let the smoke out and some fresh air in. Adam grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and started putting out fires. Both Adam and I were choking on the foul smoke, but Tad seemed to be unaffected by it.
As the adrenaline faded, pain took over. I’d evidently hit my right knee on something, and my cheek felt like it was, figuratively I hoped, on fire. Despite my fears, my hip was fine, just a bit achy. There was a hole burned through my jeans and underwear, but the skin beneath looked okay. The burns on my arm, hand, and collarbone hurt like fiends.
Sirens sounded in the distance, either police summoned by Adam or the fire department summoned by someone who saw all the smoke.
I put my hands on my hips, standing just outside to stay out of the smoke. “You guys better have some explanation for coming in just when I’m about to wipe the floor with him and stealing my victory.”
Adam smiled, but his eyes were dark as he finished putting out the last fire. He set the fire extinguisher on the floor and stalked over to me. “Complain, complain, that’s all I get. Aren’t you the least bit happy to see me?”
I stepped into his arms, turning my head so the wine-dark silk shirt he wore pressed against my unhurt cheek and twisting so only the unburnt part of my collarbone touched him.
“I thought this was it,” I confessed in a whisper, and his arms tightened on me until I had to tap on his arm. “Too tight, too tight, too tight … better.”
“How long can you hold him?” Adam asked Tad, though his arms didn’t slacken.
“Longer than you can hold her,” Tad said dryly. “He quit struggling—probably lack of air. I could keep this up for an hour or two. If he fights like he was before, then a half hour, maybe a bit more. Aluminum is easier than steel. What are we going to do with him?”
“Jail’s not an option,” Adam said. “I’ll call Bran—but I expect we’re not going to have a choice but to call on the fae.”
Tad grunted unenthusiastically. “If someone told them I’m not as powerless as most of us halfies, they would want me to join them. Maybe someone can contact my dad, and he can take credit for this.” There was a metallic sound as if he’d tossed something at the metal prison he’d created from my nice wasserboxer engine.
“Hey, Mercy? Did you know there is a finger in the backseat of this Passat?” Tad asked.
I broke free of Adam and went into the garage to check out the Passat as I started to add up the damage. I’d need to get another wasserboxer engine to replace the one that melted. The Beetle engine had been no loss … but the Passat was going to need some bodywork.
The finger had melted all the way through the roof, through the lining, and dropped onto the off-white leather, where it left a small puddle of blood and black ash. It looked like anyone else’s finger.
“He pulled off his finger and threw it at me,” I told Tad. “Do you know of any fae that pull off body parts and throw them at people?”
“I think there are some German folktales about disembodied heads,” he said doubtfully. “And then there’s always Thing on The Addams Family.” He opened the back door of the car and touched the finger. “It’s not moving.”
I hugged myself and fought the urge to giggle. “Thank the good Lord for small favors.”
Adam moved Tad gently aside and used a hanky to pick up the finger and bring it to his nose.
“I don’t smell magic as well as you do, Mercy,” he said, setting it back on the seat. “But this finger smells human, not fae.”
“Human fingers don’t—”
Tad interrupted me. He jerked his head around until he faced his metal sculpture and made a pained sound. He staggered off balance, and Adam caught his elbow to steady him.
Sweat broke out on Tad’s brow, and he said, in a guttural tone, “Watch out. Something is wrong.”
The whole building shook again. There was a thunderous crash as a transmission fell off the top shelf of a Gorilla Rack. Adam grabbed my hand and held on to me. It was the hand I’d burned, but I just grabbed him back. Some things are more desperate than pain.
It lasted less than a second, and it left the cement floor of my shop buckled, car parts and boxes of car parts strewn all over. The high-pitched wail of the office smoke detector went off. It went off with some frequency when I showered too long, or someone cooked bacon in the microwave, but it had ignored all the smoke and fires in the garage. Apparently, it had decided that enough was enough.