John Levitt - Unleashed

She finally reached her destination, a lavender house at the tip of a cul-de-sac, set up high on a hillside. Below, a terraced area spread out, an urban garden filled with squash and tomatoes and herbs. A long stretch of rickety wooden stairs wound up the slope, and she climbed them and disappeared into the house at the top.

Decision time. Did I go back to Victor’s? Did I go up there and deal with her myself? The obvious choice was to play it safe and get help. But the whole business bothered me. It didn’t add up, and I wanted answers. Victor makes a great backup, but he’s also prone to shoot first and ask questions later. Then again, if I wandered up to the house alone to politely ask questions, I might just as easily end up as tonight’s dinner menu.

What I needed was an edge. The shape-shifter had shown a resistance to attacks using talent, so relying on my talent wasn’t going to cut it. But what if it wasn’t precisely an attack? That gunk-on-the-face trick up by Coit Tower had worked pretty well. Some kind of holding spell? I began to get the germ of an idea.

Something that wasn’t designed to attack or overpower. Instead, maybe something that would interfere with the shape-shifter’s ability to change-sand in the gears of the mechanism. If it was unable to change, it wouldn’t pose much of a threat-the Morgan persona had puny human teeth and delicate nails instead of long sharp canines and rending claws. As long as it had to remain Morgan, it wouldn’t matter whether I could use talent or not.

I moved up to the edge of one of the terraces. The soil there was moist, fed by a makeshift drip irrigation system. I scooped up a good-sized handful of dirt and worked it into a ball.

The next thing I needed was some DNA. However the shape-shifter managed its transformations, it had to involve DNA on some level. Even if the transformation were accomplished by purely magical means, DNA still had to be the basis of the change. And if I could interrupt the DNA process, it would stay frozen in whatever form it had already taken.

The best source for the DNA I needed would be blood-not only did it contain the necessary DNA but blood also makes a spell more potent. Black practitioners use blood the most often, naturally; they can hardly cast a spell to make water wet without some. Personally, I don’t care to use it myself. Whenever I do it always seems like I’m tiptoeing along the line close to the dark side. But I have used it.

Using my own blood and DNA wasn’t the best option, though. The same principles that make self-healing so difficult also come into play whenever you try to use your own blood. It works for some things-in fact, it’s vital for certain types of spells, but this wasn’t one of those. I could use it and it would work, but it wasn’t ideal.

I took out the Buck knife I still was carrying and looked over at Lou. He stared at me with suspicion and took two quick steps backward.

“Come on,” I said. “I just need a drop. You won’t even feel it.” He retreated two more steps, putting more distance between us.

So it was my own blood or none at all. I pricked my forearm with the tip of the blade and got a respectable bead, then smeared it off into dirt and worked it in thoroughly until it was a neat ball the size of an orange. I sealed it with a pulse of energy, set it down on the ground, let some talent flow into the knife blade, and carefully sliced the ball of dirt in half. I took one of the halves, added another drop of blood, and repeated the process. A good-sized portion of earth still remained, and that quarter now had a history. It had been cut, then cut again. It was divided, interrupted, and incomplete. If I now smeared it on the shape-shifter, it would interfere with the other DNA and block any transformation. It wouldn’t be able to effect a change until the dirt was cleaned off.

A useful trick, but to use it you have to know who the shape-shifter is ahead of time and then get close enough to apply it. That can be a tricky proposition, but this time it wouldn’t be a problem.

I climbed the stairs to the door up above. No wards, but that was no surprise. It was a shape-shifter, not a practitioner. The door was slightly ajar, so Morgan hadn’t quite latched it when she came in. Or maybe she had realized she was being followed and was making it too easy for me. When you’re hunting monsters, there’s a fine line between being careful and giving in to rampant paranoia.

I pushed the door gently and it swung silently inward. Lou eased in ahead of me, alert but apparently not too worried. The inside was one long room, a straight shot from the door through a front section and into a kitchen area.

Morgan was sitting on a stool at a counter that divided the room part of the kitchen from the stove and fridge and sink. Her back was toward me and she was eating whatever she’d bought at the grocery.

I squeezed the earth in my hand, taking comfort in my weapon. It was my ace in the hole-if it worked, that was. There was no reason it shouldn’t; I’d thought it out clearly and constructed it well, but you never really know for sure if something will do the job until you try it out in real life.

“Hello, Morgan,” I said.

She jumped and knocked over whatever she’d been eating onto the floor. It looked like yogurt. She spun around on the stool and I got a clear view of her face. Surprise, almost shock, and some fear as well. Interesting.

We all like to think we can read faces, that we can tell when someone’s being evasive, or is angry, or fearful. But in truth, we can’t. Sure, some people are an open book, but most of us become quite adept at masking our emotions.

But if you startle someone, you can sometimes get a true reading. There’s still a problem, though-how to interpret what you see. Was Morgan the shape-shifter afraid because she knew I’d come for her? Or was it the real Morgan, afraid because she feared I was the shape-shifter myself?

“I thought you were out of town,” I said, keeping alert for the slightest hint of a change in her appearance.

“I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I was all set to go, and then I thought what if that thing followed me, tracked me down, and killed my parents, too? I couldn’t do that to them.” I nodded and looked around the room.

“Nice place,” I said. She glanced around abstractedly.

“It’s my friend Missy’s. She’s out of town.” She focused on me again. “How did you find me?”

I shrugged. I was more concerned with finding out for sure who she was than making small talk.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Why didn’t you answer your cell?”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to; it was obvious. She hadn’t trusted me. Fair enough-I wasn’t in a trusting mood myself.

I looked closely at her, hoping irrationally for some clue. My gut told me she was really Morgan, but the gut can be mistaken. If it couldn’t, there wouldn’t be so many failed love affairs. But my head also weighed in. I’d seen those tears by the pet store, when she thought no one was watching. They could have been faked, but for what reason? She’d thought she was alone.

But the Wendigo had fingered her. That should be proof enough right there-what possible reason would he have to lie about such a thing? Unless… More thoughts raced through my head. What if he weren’t the Wendigo at all? Shape-shifters weren’t restricted to human form, as I’d seen. Could the shape-shifter have killed him?

Maybe not-the Wendigo was quite capable of taking care of himself. But she wouldn’t have needed to. A perfect imitation wasn’t necessary-the Wendigo was so odd that I wouldn’t be able to tell what was normal for him and what wasn’t anyway. And Lou wouldn’t necessarily have caught on, either-since both the Wendigo and the shape-shifter weren’t quite of our world.