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The sabertooth took the bait Claws outstretched, it rose up and dropped down Landed onthe breath from me with a woof of air and pain A sharp crack of broken ribs Stabbing ain Dropped Batted me over Straddled my body and dropped his head To tear out my throat

Now! Beast screamed I thrust up with the knives, deep into his chest The blades slid along his ribs, one catching and grinding to a stop But the other slipped deeply, under ribs, slicing cartilage, cutting lungs Finding heart I felt it when the blade slid into the heart cavity, a slight give in the resistance

The lion roared I rolled as he bit He caught h leather into flesh With ht Swiveling the hilt against and into his body He shook his head Rending and tearing My entire body quaked and snapped I thought my shoulder would rip free

He slowed Shuddered Gasped, his nostrils fluttering His eyesin the depths His paept h ht blazed over hi like sound waves, like the pressure of fast- water, over me The blackto throw offto stealDeep insidein rab prey

Liquid gushed out of Immanuel’s mouth, out of his nose, out of the holes in his chest, thick and viscous S like rotten rave

He backed up, droppinged to take in a breath Pulled the last of the vamp-killer blades And the last of Molly’s char beneath the sabertooth Got one foot beneath ht, the power of my whole body, into the motion Turned the blade point out as I h his eye, into his brain

He athered beneath hi control

With my burned hand, I flipped Molly’s chared chest I hadn’t wasted any of the spell’s energies this ti my own flesh None of its power had dissipated into the air in reaction to a spoken wyrd spell And the creature was too injured to take the power for himself It was all there, ready and contained

It exploded inward, into the lion It took apart every organ, the shaped concussion shredding and bursting every blood vessel, tearing his chest cavity apart A renade Flesh and bone blasted away Fluid flooded out of hirinding into a different configuration His skin split and re-for my injured aries darkened, forcing a change on hi the shift They seemed to shudder; the black ue fell to the carpet, his head in the foul ht bathed hi

And then, even that wisped away

On the carpet was a half-naked man Or mostly a man His scalp was still partly cat, his hands still paws But his torso and lih the joints were oddly turned, his knees bent the wrong way for a prier than he had been as a hu the mass of the unfinished shift Three hundred pounds of pure muscle One side of his face was Cherokee The other half was I teeth in upper and lower jaws

I toed hi No pulse beat in his throat There was no heart left to beat in the ruined chest The liver-eater was dead

I had exterminated a skinwalker Perhaps the last one besides rief Shock Sorrow But for now, all I felt was Beast’s triuether! Beast is victor! she screaue, in the ruins of the upper hallway of Leo Pellissier’s ho the hair on its scalp hadthe brown skin, slightly deeper brown than olden hue

Beast said, Escape Now Details of the next few hI needed to apply pressure to , I opened a pocket inside my jacket and pulled out my tourniquet It took a moment to reood hand, I opened the loop and applied it abovethe Velcro The strap caught on the head of ed with pain

Beast stared at the blood running down ers, onto the floor Shift