21

YOU SPIN MY HEAD RIGHT ROUND, RIGHT ROUND

Voicing our suspicions out loud turned out to be a bad idea, although to be fair, they were more like suspicions-to-be. The dog out in the community area who had sniffed us might have been a very questionable dog, but its hearing was still way beyond human. And it not only heard us, it understood us. It may have looked like a dog, but there was a human intelligence guiding it. There was a yell somewhere beyond the door to the office, noises made by frantically moving bodies, tearing flesh, something metal clattering to the floor.

Kasia and Sig and I were already scrambling for the door by that point, and I was wishing I hadn’t left my weapons in Choo’s van. Little fragments of thought were assembling in my head while I rushed. A dog spy. A dog that was smarter than a dog. A dog that smelled something like the original it was impersonating but not quite. A human intelligence duplicating the form of a real dog while it infiltrated a Templar facility for the School of Night. Add all that up and it didn’t equal werewolf or nix or ghost. Unless this was some other homemade monster cobbled together from God knows what, we were probably dealing with a skinwalker.

The human guard who had overseen the inspection of our pizza boxes was lying facedown on the floor of the meeting room at the center of the basement, and if he wasn’t dead, he would be soon. His throat had been torn out. There were sounds upstairs where Father Mendez was apparently wrestling with something and yelling for help, but the dog, or rather the thing pretending to be a dog, wasn’t growling or barking at all.

Kasia ran straight up the stairs without pausing, but I told Sig to hold on a second and headed for the half-submerged basement window covered in heavy curtains.

“What?”

I ripped one of the curtains off its hanger violently. “If it’s a skinwalker, we’ll have to restrain it.”

A skinwalker’s magical skin suit takes energy and distributes it down its body like the chassis of an automobile, dispersing the energy somewhere into the fourth dimension where the skin suit is anchored. Not just heat or electricity, but kinetic impact, too. In other words, a skinwalker is effectively invulnerable. The only way to hurt one is through cold, poison, or oxygen deprivation. They can be contained, though.

“I’ll try to slow it down for you.” Sig took off while I was still bundling the curtain into something manageable. By the time I made it to the entry hall, Father Mendez was sitting against a wall with a lot of small surface wounds, clamping a handkerchief down on a particularly nasty one on his right thigh and yelling at anyone and everyone not to shoot at anything but the dog. Kasia was rolling and scrambling to her feet in the middle of a small cloud of floating dog hair, her forearms bleeding from trying to put an indestructible mutt into a choke hold.

And Sig? There was a broken window where the skinwalker had hurled its invulnerable body through the glass, and Sig was rushing out the front door after it. Me, Kasia, and two guards dressed like parishioners followed her out into the night in an uneven parade. None of us were shouting or firing guns; what would have been the point? There wasn’t much activity on the street—it wasn’t a residential area, and the scattered businesses weren’t the kind that stayed open past six—but there was a woman walking some kind of lapdog down the sidewalk.

“Hypnotize the civilian,” I told Kasia, and surprisingly, she didn’t question me. Hell, I didn’t even question me, and I have some real problems with supes trancing people. But if the choice was between making a woman forget the last two minutes, doping her with a drug that would mess with her brain chemistry and make her lose days, or killing her … well, hypnosis seemed like the lesser evil.

Kasia veered off while I ran after Sig. Normally, I would have overtaken her—Sig can out-arm-wrestle me every time, but I usually beat her in any kind of footrace—but the bundled curtain was throwing me off my stride. The skinwalker AKA Fido was on four legs and running close to the ground, moving over the paved street fast, but not faster than a normal dog. Sig and I were keeping pace with it as we followed it around a corner and down a side street, but then a dark green pickup truck that had parked on the curb ahead of us pulled out and slowly began driving away.

A tarp rose up out of the bed of the pickup truck, and the two men who had been hiding beneath it shrugged the thick rainproof covering off, although they obviously hadn’t practiced the maneuver. Instead of watching two men working together like a well-oiled machine, it was more like seeing two cats scrabbling in a burlap sack. The tarp got caught on the barrel of one man’s submachine gun, which was a very good thing, and his partner was preoccupied with fiddling with the pickup truck’s tailgate. The one with the gun finally freed his weapon, but by that time, Sig had dropped into a firing position. She got off four shots fast. Normally, the shots would have had a tighter grouping, but all four bullets still hit the truck, and one of them hit the man with the submachine gun.

That didn’t stop the skinwalker from jumping its dog form into the pickup truck’s bed, and as soon as that happened, the truck began to accelerate. I veered to the side while I ran so that Sig would have a clear shot at the driver, but while I was doing that, the driver of the truck dropped something out of the front window. I heard pottery shattering, then the sound of compressed air being released. It was like the muffled noise an air rifle makes, only times a hundred. My ears popped and trash and dust began sifting and lifting off the pavement, but I didn’t see anything when I ran into a wind that came out of nowhere and hit me like a linebacker. The curtain I was still carrying billowed up behind me like a parachute and then went flying out of my hands. I was picked up and hurled around and around and around and around and around, a roaring in my ears that was the sound of waves crashing without the wet. There was nothing to grab onto, nothing to hit.

Finally, I was released and hurled over a car, bouncing off its roof and into the brick side of some kind of bank. Seconds later, I heard Sig shrieking. Maybe she retained enough presence of mind to try to trace a rune or sigil in the air while she was inside that thing’s area of effect, but if she did, she didn’t have time to finish. There was a sound of breaking glass as Sig’s body smashed against a car across the street. I staggered to my feet, lurching side to side while my equilibrium tried to get its composure back, and a line of white-hot pain with no clear beginning or end went off in my back. My spine was a piano key that had just been struck very hard, and it was badly out of tune. In the street was some kind of miniature whirlwind, not the grey mass that looks like a compressed slinky in movies and cartoons—the thing’s radius was only visible by the dust and trash spiraling around in fast circles. The circular path they made was maybe six feet wide and eight feet tall.

Some asshat had bound a funnel ghost into a spirit jar. The biggest funnel ghost I’d ever heard of, what professional ghost hunters call a vortex phenomenon and Aussies call a whirly-whirly. The spirit wasn’t intelligent enough to train, but it was seriously pissed off, and it didn’t much care who it took its rage out on. Kasia came tearing around the corner at full speed and tried to dart past the funnel ghost by staying on the opposite sidewalk, but it veered to the right and swooped her up into a cursing whirl of arms and legs. It looked like a cartoon fight, only it was one-sided, and then the twister spit Kasia out as if she were a watermelon seed.

The pickup truck was almost gone from sight, but there wasn’t anything I could do except count how many times Kasia’s body skipped over the concrete. I had hit the brick wall wrong and pulled something serious in my back, or more likely several connected somethings, and my fast healing wasn’t going to help me until I’d straightened and stretched and realigned whatever intact but twisted muscles were pinching my spine.

One of the knights who’d come running out of the church had apparently headed straight for his car. He came around the corner and tried to drive down the street after the van, but the funnel ghost veered again and caught the car under its right front side. The vehicle tilted sharply, continued forward on only its left tires, then went into a grinding skid on its side before flipping over on its roof in slow motion.

Momentarily bereft of moving targets, the funnel ghost continued down the street, and Molly, Choo, and another knight came around the corner. The knight was no dummy. He took in the apparition at a glance and ran back for the church. I don’t know if he wanted to get holy water or Father Mendez or if he just figured the funnel ghost wouldn’t be able to cross over onto sanctified ground. Choo stopped uncertainly, and Molly kept moving forward, though she slowed down to a walk.

At some point in the last two years, Molly had begun making up her own banishing rituals on the spot. I don’t know how she does it. Exorcism rites are important; they give people something tangible to hang their faith on, and saying a memorized prayer connects priests to whatever power resides in the echoes of all the exact same prayers said the exact same way by people of the same faith over the millennia. I like to think that all of those prayers are floating around in a place without time and building up a kind of spiritual static charge. But even then, rites aren’t powerful in themselves; they help open up a channel to something I don’t understand. Whatever that something is, Molly is on more familiar terms with it than I am. Or at least, she’s dispensed with the formal introductions.

Molly took a deep breath as the funnel ghost approached her—so deep that I could tell that’s what Molly was doing from the way she bent back and threw her arms out. And the wind effect came closer to Molly and simply … dispersed. As if Molly were in a Superman movie from the ’80s, inhaling the whole damn mess. She stayed there, lips pressed together, cheeks puffed out, holding her breath until her body gradually relaxed. I don’t know if she was having some kind of internal dialogue with the funnel ghost or not. All I know is that when Molly finally released her breath, it was a slow exhalation that took way longer than any breath should, and the funnel ghost was gone.

Of course, so was the pickup truck.