John Levitt - Unleashed

So whatever was up there wasn’t good, but whatever danger there had been was now gone. I didn’t want to go up those stairs, but what choice did I have? I walked up the stairs, and every step was an effort, as if my feet had turned to stone. At the top of the stairs was a small landing with a bathroom directly in front and two bedrooms on either side. The door to one of them was open, possibly a guest room, with a colorful comforter on the bed and everything neat and in place. The door to the other room was closed.

I knew what I would find before I pushed it open. My hands started shaking and the walls of the room brightened and rippled, seeming to move in and out as if they were breathing. I heard with perfect clarity the faint sound of Lou quietly panting.

Morgan would be lying across her bed, clothes soaked in blood, chest torn open, eyes open and staring. Her organs would be missing and her skull cracked open, with traces of gray matter around the edges of the wound. Every detail was etched into my brain before I ever saw it. I couldn’t catch any air, and a metallic taste filled my mouth.

But I was wrong, thank God. No one lay across the bed and there was no one in the room, alive or dead. Lou started forward but I held him back. It still wasn’t all right. There was blood on the floor, quite a lot of it. Morgan might be lying crumpled in a corner, out of sight, and if so, the cops would be on this one eventually. They might not connect it with the other murders, so they would start investigating. They’d start with her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, and then expand out into her friends. Peer groups, they call it. Sooner or later the ripples would cross mine and they’d be coming to talk to me.

There were a lot of physical traces of me lying around the house. The principle of transference would make sure of that. Whenever someone enters a crime scene, they leave something of themselves-hair, skin cells, lint from their clothes-something. And they pick up and take something away as well. It doesn’t matter how careful you are; with today’s high-tech forensics there’s always some trace to be found.

But that wouldn’t be a problem for me. Morgan was a friend; I’d been there with Victor and Eli, and any traces of my presence in the house would be entirely natural. But if some of my DNA, or Lou’s for that matter, ended up mixed in with her blood, that would put an entirely different slant on things.

In the far corner an armchair was pushed against the wall, clothes strewn carelessly over it. And something behind it, barely visible. My heart stopped. It was long and thin, furry and black and tan in color and red at one end. It took me a moment to make sense of what I was seeing, then all at once I saw what it was. It was a leg, but not a human leg. The leg of a dog, separated from the rest of its body. A black-and-tan leg, like that of a Rottweiler. Poor Beulah. All her fears had come true at last.

But wait, Beulah was downstairs. It took the clicking sound of dog nails on hardwood coming up the stairs to jolt me out of my confusion. Lou got it about the same time I did and took up his guard position directly behind my knees. A shape-shifting creature doesn’t have to take on human form. An animal form could be a very useful change of pace.

The Rottweiler’s head appeared, peeking over the landing. Its head looked heavier than I’d remembered, and the teeth looked stronger and larger. It wasn’t as impressive as the shape-shifter in Glen Park had been, but a giant Rottweiler with human intelligence is frightening enough. I took a step back, almost tripping over Lou, and let loose my talent, reaching into the room behind me. This one was easy. That room was full of death, and death was what I gathered. I used poor Beulah’s leg to direct it specifically toward the Rottweiler. There was an ironic sense of justice in using it to strike down its killer.

I focused and let loose a burst of deadly energy, striking the shape-shifter square in the chest just as it leapt toward my throat. It collapsed in midflight, but as soon as it hit the floor it was up again. That blast should have killed anything, but as I’d feared all along, this thing was immune to magical energy. Or if not immune, highly resistant, like the fake Ifrit. The staff I’d constructed when I met it in Glen Park, using a water stream, had been far more effective; this shape-shifter was something that needed to be fought on a physical level. But it had teeth and I didn’t. I’d put everything I had into the strike, and now it was shaking off the effects as if it had been merely hit in the nose with a sharp blow. Painful and surprising, but not lethal, and not even that effective.

I vaulted over it before it could get its bearings and tore down the stairs toward the back door. Lou was well in front of me and was already at the back door by the time I had reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Yeah, but you can’t open the door, can you, now?” I said, sprinting over and throwing it wide. I heard the shape-shifter barreling down the stairs after us. It seemed to have recovered completely. We made it through the door, but we were never going to make it down the back steps or out of the backyard in time.

I looked around for something to use as a weapon as I reached ground level at the garden. There was a shovel leaning against the back wall, but I wasn’t going to be able to reach it quickly enough. But next to the shovel a small bit of ivy, glowing brightly in the psychic realm, clung to the back fence. That was where I’d wrapped up the energy of the wards, compacting it into that one little space. The energy I’d locked up there was concentrated, containing all the effort I’d expended in the half hour it had taken to set up the wards. As a result there was four times as much power waiting there as I could have summoned up on the spot. I reached out and unlocked the energy, and as it flowed out I redirected it toward the Rottweiler on my tail.

It sprayed out like a fire hose, and this time it had a sizable effect on the shape-shifter. Resistant is not invincible. It stumbled and went glassy-eyed, as I sprinted over to the back wall and grabbed the shovel that was leaning there. Before it could recover, I was at it, swinging the shovel like a baseball bat, hitting its skull with the sharp edge. It staggered to its feet and snarled. I hit it again. It was tough, but it was still shaken.

Lou, seeing how unsteady on its legs the shape-shifter was, took heart and darted in, trying for a hamstring. Lou’s not very big, but his jaws are twice as strong as an ordinary dog his size, and if he got in there, he could easily cripple a leg. The Rottweiler whipped around to get him, and when it did, I hit it yet again. It turned to face me and Lou was at its back legs again. Tag team.

Not surprisingly it was still confused from the effects of the two previous energy blasts. It should have been dead. Unexpectedly, it decided it had had enough for the day, turned, and bounded off toward the side fence. The fence there was a good six feet high and I didn’t think it could make it over, but as it sprang upward its body elongated and its front legs became rudimentary arms and its paws almost hands. It grabbed the top of the fence, pulled itself over, and dropped to the other side.

I waited ten minutes to make sure it was gone, peering cautiously through the gate every couple of minutes. The adrenaline surge was fading rapidly, leaving me exhausted with a headache and a dead feeling in my legs. I went back inside and sat down heavily at the table in the kitchen. I was so burned out that when I heard a noise from the front of the house, I reacted in slow motion. Fortunately, it didn’t cost me.

The front door opened, and there stood Morgan. She looked at me in puzzlement, and I looked back at her in some surprise.