No bellow of rage this time: it’s hard to make with the primal screams with a five-pound toothpick lodged in your gullet. I kicked and flailed and pulled myself out from under, pulling myself off those clutching claws and trying not to think how much of my own precious skin I was leaving there.

It wouldn’t stay down: I knew damn well it wouldn’t. I’d hurt it, and I’d given it so“7;deavmething to think about besides me, but this wasn’t a fight I could win: not without my whistle and a fair bit more lead time than the couple of seconds I probably had.

My eyes were starting to adjust to the dark now, at least a little, and I could see the crazy diagonal of the unhinged door up ahead of me. I half-ran, half-staggered towards it: at the very least, if this bastard followed me I’d be leading him away from Smeet and giving her a fighting chance.

I made it out onto the landing, but my head was still reeling a little from the whack it had taken earlier, and I almost fell down the stairwell before I could skid to a halt and orient myself.

Down or up? No contest. If I went up I’d be cornered as soon as I ran out of stairs. At the bottom there was the street, and a slim but measurable chance of getting out of this.

What happened next was kind of a mixed blessing. The loup-garou came cannoning out of the door right behind me and hit me squarely in the back with its full weight, sending me tumbling down the stairwell head over heels. It meant I got to where I wanted to go a whole lot faster: unfortunately, it also meant that I reached the bottom in a sprawling heap, one arm twisted painfully under me: all breath had been slammed out of my lungs on the second or third bounce, so all I could do was lie there, sucking in air in a shuddering, drawn-out gasp.

By a happy chance I fetched up on my back, looking back the way I’d come, so I got to see the thing that was about to kill me for the first time in the light from the street outside. Despite its impressive size, the loup-garou padded down the stairs with an incongruous daintiness, slow at first but accelerating because the stairs were steep and built for two legs rather than four.

It was sleek and black – or maybe some dark shade that just looked black in the inadequate light – and it had the basic shape of a panther: more mass in the shoulders and forelegs than in the back, claws as long as the blades of Swiss Army knives, and with a tendency to carry its weight close to the ground. The head was more eclectic, though: the mouth was too wide, and studded with too many different kinds of teeth, to be convincingly cat-like. And the forehead was high, like a human forehead, like the dim memory of a human face stirring behind the bestial shape.

Just for a second, in the near-dark, it reminded me of a face I’d seen before.

When it got halfway down the flight of stairs it launched itself into the air in a graceful, almost lazy leap that would land it right on top of me. Unable to muster enough strength to move I tensed, balling my fists uselessly for a fight that wasn’t going to happen.

If the impact didn’t kill me, those claws would – and either way I wouldn’t get to express an opinion about it.

But the loup-garou’s leap ended prematurely as something came streaking in out of the night, jumped and met it in mid-air.

The new something was a whole lot smaller: the loupgarou massed around four hundred pounds and it had gravity on its side. Logically it should have kept on going, the interloper smacking uselessly into it and being brought down by its superior weight and momentum.

Instead the two of them seemed to hang impossibly in space for a moment, all that downward energy cancelled out by some arcane counter-force: then they both crashed together through the delicate balcony rails and came to the ground in a spitting, snarling heap five yards away from me.

The newcomer was a man: long-limbed, lean, cadaverous, and dressed in a full-length coat that had looked momentarily like wings as he made his jump.

The loupgarou“he mer’s claws raked him, shredding his clothes and laying bare white flesh, red meat, but he paid them no heed. His own blows fell sledgehammer-hard, sledgehammer-heavy, so that I could hear the impact, and the were-thing spat and snarled as it struggled under him.

Yeah, I said under him. He’d managed to come down on top, somehow, and he was taking full advantage of the position. A scything claw opened up his throat but he still laughed, a liquid, musical gurgle, as blood fountained from the wound. And his fists kept rising and falling like pistons, threshing the flesh of the loup-garou, smacking and splintering, breaking and entering.

Under that relentless rain, something grotesque and unexpected happened. The loup-garou started to fracture and fall apart, its flesh sagging and separating, its human form melting away.