9

FOUR-LIMBED IS FORE-ARMED

The guard Emil left behind didn’t talk to me, though I tried a variety of strategies to engage him in conversation. He just stood there with a transparent round shield made of some space-age bulletproof plastic strapped on his back and an AN-94 rifle loosely pointed in my direction. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the damn thing hadn’t had a grenade launcher attachment. There wasn’t much time, so I didn’t take too long to decide that I wasn’t going to get anything useful out of him.

“I’m ready now,” I said.

I wasn’t talking to the guard.

The sprite from the overpass began putting on a light show, changing colors and smacking straight into the guard’s face and bouncing off, sprinkling disruptive magical energy around like fairy dust. The lights in the room flickered, and the guard automatically took one hand off of his rifle and drew a silver steel knife from a forearm sheath, slashing outward and narrowly missing the sprite. It took him precious extra seconds to realize that if the lights were experiencing weird power fluctuations, the collar monitoring and inhibiting my body’s changes might be malfunctioning too.

I was already changing into a wolf by then.

Look, when I made an agreement with the sprite in the overpass, I didn’t just ask it to witness my contract with Emil. The sprite was my Plan B, and as soon as I’d knocked Emil unconscious, I ate it.

Well, okay, I swallowed it. Sprites aren’t human. They don’t need to breathe, because they’re mostly condensed air molecules, and they don’t think like humans, either. Whatever dimension they’re from, they don’t experience Time and Space the same way we do—if they thought of small enclosed places and the passage of time as a form of torture, they’d go insane from confinement when bound into witch bottles.

Believe me, I didn’t enjoy putting that sprite in my stomach, but I knew it was the only way to get the sprite past the protective wards and sigils and magical detection devices that were sure to be layered around whatever location the knights took me to.

When I threw up the first time in the interrogation room? I was releasing the sprite.

And now I was releasing the wolf.

I remember knowing, absolutely knowing with every cell in my body, that the only way the geas would allow me to change to a wolf would be if I resolved not to kill the guard.

I remember thrashing around violently in my manacles, scraping skin off of limbs that healed as fast as they peeled, gagging and choking as the collar slid about. I remember feeling like my entire body had a migraine, my eyes getting hot as my vision went red, thousands of coarse hairs poking needlelike through my skin. I remember howling while I dropped to four feet and scrambled at speeds that no human could attain. I remember lunging upward awkwardly from a strange angle with my neck muscles and biting the guard’s hand while he was trying to drive his silver steel knife through my eye and into my brain.

The first time I changed, I didn’t remember anything afterward. Maybe I was making progress. Maybe I was one step closer to hell.

My next memory is of crouching over the guard’s unconscious body, his right arm ending in a bleeding stump where fangs had peeled back the end sleeve of his armor and bitten through his wrist.

I removed his armor as fast as I could, then drove his knife into his elbow joint several times, pulling and sawing tendons until I’d amputated his lower arm. There were bandages and cords in some of the armor pouches, and I managed a tourniquet and a field dressing fairly quickly. There was a chance I’d kept whatever was in my bite from spreading up his bloodstream, and a chance that he wouldn’t die from shock or blood loss.

I would have done the same even without the geas. It wasn’t logical. I was ready to kill anyone I had to, but not if I didn’t have to.

Mercy is a luxury. And I take my luxuries where I can find them.