Morgan started forward, his face swimming and rippling as if made of limp plastic, and Jack had time to see there was something clutched in his hand, something hung around his neck, something small and silvery.
Jack stood, paralyzed, as Sloat bulled his way through the hole between the two universes. As he came he did his own werewolf number, changing from Morgan Sloat, investor, land speculator, and sometime Hollywood agent, into Morgan of Orris, pretender to the throne of a dying Queen. His flushed, hanging jowls thinned. The color faded out of them. His hair renewed itself, growing forward, first tinting the rondure of his skull, as if some invisible being were coloring Uncle Morgan's head, then covering it. The hair of Sloat's Twinner was long, black, flapping, somehow dead-looking. It had been tied at the nape of his neck, Jack saw, but most of it had come loose.
The parka wavered, disappeared for a moment, then came back as a cloak and hood.
Morgan Sloat's suede boots became dark leather knee-boots, their tops turned down, what might have been the hilt of a knife poking out of one.
And the small silver thing in his hand had turned to a small rod tipped with crawling blue fire.
It's a lightning-rod. Oh Jesus, it's a -
'Jack!'
The cry was low, gargling, full of water.
Jack whirled clumsily around in the stream, barely avoiding another cow-sheep, this one floating on its side, dead in the water. He saw Wolf's head going down again, both hands waving. Jack fought his way toward those hands, still dodging the cattle as best he could. One of them bunted his hip hard and Jack went over, inhaling water. He got up again quick, coughing and choking, one hand feeling inside his jerkin for the bottle, afraid it might have washed away. It was still there.
'Boy! Turn around and look at me, boy!'
No time just now, Morgan. Sorry, but I've got to see if I can avoid getting drowned by Wolf's herd before I see if I can avoid getting fried by your doomstick there. I -
Blue fire arched over Jack's shoulder, sizzling - it was like a deadly electric rainbow. It struck one of the cow-sheep caught in the reedy muck on the other side of the stream and the unfortunate beast simply exploded, as if it had swallowed dy***ite. Blood flew in a needle-spray of droplets. Gobbets of flesh began to rain down around Jack.
'Turn and look at me, boy!'
He could feel the force of that command, gripping his face with invisible hands, trying to turn it.
Wolf struggled up again, his hair plastered against his face, his dazed eyes peering through a curtain of it like the eyes of an English sheepdog. He was coughing and staggering, seemingly no longer aware of where he was.
'Wolf!' Jack screamed, but thunder exploded across the blue sky again, drowning him out.
Wolf bent over and retched up a great muddy sheet of water. A moment later another of the terrified cow-sheep struck him and bore him under again.
That's it, Jack thought despairingly. That's it, he's gone, must be, let him go, get out of here -
But he struggled on toward Wolf, pushing a dying, weakly convulsing cow-sheep out of his way to get there.
'Jason!' Morgan of Orris screamed, and Jack realized that Morgan was not cursing in the Territories argot; he was calling his, Jack's, name. Only here he was not Jack. Here he was Jason.
But the Queen's son died an infant, died, he -
The wet, sizzling zap of electricity again, seeming almost to part his hair. Again it struck the other bank, this time vaporizing one of Wolf's cattle. No, Jack saw, at least not utterly. The animal's legs were still there, mired in the mud like shake-poles. As he watched, they began to sag tiredly outward in four different directions.
'TURN AND LOOK AT ME, GOD POUND YOU!' The water, why doesn't he throw it at the water, fry me, Wolf, all these animals at the same time?
Then his fifth-grade science came back to him. Once electricity went to water, it could go anywhere . . . including back to the generator of the current.
Wolf's dazed face, floating underwater, drove these thoughts from Jack's flying mind. Wolf was still alive, but partially pinned under a cow-sheep, which, although apparently unhurt, had frozen in panic. Wolf's hands waved with pathetic, flagging energy. As Jack closed the last of the distance, one of those hands dropped and simply floated, limp as a water-lily.
Without slowing, Jack lowered his left shoulder and hit the cow-sheep like Jack Armstrong in a boy's sports story.
If it had been a full-sized cow instead of a Territories compact model, Jack would probably not have budged it, not with the stream's fairly stiff current working against him. But it was smaller than a cow, and Jack was pumped up. It bawled when Jack hit it, floundered backward, sat briefly on its haunches, and then lunged for the far bank. Jack grabbed Wolf's hands and pulled with all of his might.