"Raphael!"
Evelyn's thorns lurched toward the incoming tendril, and stopped. The tangle above had done its work too well.
Her bramble was knotted into the mass of flesh-ropes so completely that pulling one direction only tightened everything else, the whole system locked against itself like headphone cables that had been in a pocket too long.
The hunter had become the caught.
Raphael's legs were half-dissolved and he could barely feel them, which was its own kind of wrong.
No pain, no alarm from his body, the damage processed as a natural state of affairs rather than an injury.
His regeneration hadn't fired. Whatever Jason was doing to his legs, his body didn't recognize it as being hurt.
He planted both hands and threw himself sideways down the slope.
CRACK.
The tendril hit the ground where he'd been and kept coming, pulling free, raising itself, driving down again, and again, pocking a line of craters into the road surface as it chased him down the incline.
Several of the strikes clipped him. His arm. His side. Cuts that went deep enough to show what was underneath, the kind of damage that registered as color and sensation without quite arriving as pain.
"*Son of a—*"
He was still rolling, the slope feeding momentum into his body whether he wanted it or not, the road surface stripping skin from every part of him it touched.
The acceleration built. He hit the curve at the bottom with no remaining ability to direct himself and went through the guardrail, stopping only when the metal caught him.
A horn. Tires. The specific sustained scream of a heavy vehicle trying to shed speed faster than physics wanted to allow.
The sound dragged him back from the edge of unconscious.
His vision was a smear. Through it, a large truck, two black skid marks already burning into the road surface, shuddered to a stop not far from where he'd landed.
The driver's door opened. Boots on asphalt. An approaching voice that was running through several registers of anger simultaneously, finger pointed, inventory of grievances in progress—
The voice stopped.
Closer now, the driver could see the wounds.
A long pause.
"...You okay? No, you're obviously not okay. I'll call an ambulance, just stay there."
"Don't." Raphael got one arm under himself and pushed up to sitting.
His back made a series of opinions known. "I just need a minute."
He looked around. A crossroads. The city side on the other end, which explained the truck. He looked at the driver.
"Get out of here. This area is genuinely dangerous. The life-threatening kind."
He did a quick inventory of his body.
The rolling hadn't helped the existing damage, but nothing new had been added that was catastrophic.
The blood reserves he'd built up during the fight were still doing work, the surface wounds were already beginning to close as he sat there, the process slow but steady.
His legs.
He looked down at them with the specific wariness of someone expecting bad news, and was surprised.
They were moving. Slow, wrong, the muscle underneath the skin rippling in a way that wasn't normal, but moving.
Either he'd rolled outside whatever radius Jason's ability required to maintain the dissolution, or the external damage had triggered a different self-repair response, or both.
"...I can at least walk."
He grabbed the guardrail and pulled himself upright.
The truck driver stared at his legs. The phone dropped out of his hand. His mouth was doing something complicated.
"You, what are you—"
Raphael wasn't listening. He was looking back up the slope toward the house.
The thorns had gone berserk.
That was the only word for it.
They covered everything visible, the fence, the road surface, the walls of the building.
Moving with a violence that bore no resemblance to anything he'd seen from Evelyn in their two-plus years working together.
They were slick with blood, decorated with fragments that used to be part of the undead, whipping in every direction with the controlled fury of something that had stopped being careful.
Evelyn's silhouette was barely visible at this distance. But her hair was loose and flying, and that alone told him something.
This kind of output wasn't free. It was never free.
He started up the slope. Uneven, one leg dragging slightly, working harder than it should have had to.
She doesn't know if I'm alive.
The thought landed with the weight of something obvious that had taken too long to arrive.
In the middle of a fight at that intensity, with no line of sight to where he'd gone, from her side of the arena, he'd simply disappeared.
The thorns were frantic because *she* was frantic.
He pushed harder.
Above him, the battle had settled into attrition.
Evelyn's razor-edged bramble was cutting through the flesh tendrils continuously, sawing them apart, shredding the tangled mass, reclaiming ground.
But every section that fell was absorbed back into the earth within seconds, and something new would push up to replace it.
Jason himself stayed mobile, retreating whenever the pressure built too high, never committing to a position long enough for anything to connect.
He was waiting her out.
A severed section of tendril rolled down the slope and stopped at Raphael's feet.
He looked at it. The surface was hot, radiating heat he could feel from standing height.
And it was evaporating as he watched, the mass reducing itself to almost nothing. What remained when the process finished was a piece about the size of a finger joint.
"Some kind of ability..." He watched the last of it disappear. "Or a mutation."
He'd accumulated enough field experience in the past several hours to form a basic read. And the read he was forming wasn't good.
"She can't win this on output alone. He'll outlast her."
She was spending everything. Jason was spending nothing. The math only went one direction.
Raphael stood at the bottom of the slope with his damaged legs and his partially-reloaded revolver and thought about the problem.
*She can't hurt him on her own. I can hurt him but I can't reach him. Stalemate.*
*Break the stalemate. How.*
His eyes moved sideways.
The truck. Sitting exactly where it had stopped, engine still running, the driver a few meters away looking like he was reconsidering several of his life choices.
Raphael's expression changed.
He reached into his coat, found his identification, held it out.
"Federal agent. I'm requisitioning your vehicle. Any damages will be compensated at double value by the Federation."
The driver took the card. Stood there holding it while Raphael was already walking toward the cab.
"Oh, one thing." He paused with one hand on the door. "What are you hauling?"
The driver blinked.
"...Four rolls of steel coil."
Raphael's eyes lit up.
"Damn, you're overweight, buddy, ha! Just this once. Well done."
Raphael said it to the truck like it could hear him, already moving to the cargo section to check.
The thin metal walls of the cargo bay enclosed exactly what the driver had said.
Four massive steel coils, each one seated in a curved wooden cradle.
The wood had cracked badly from the emergency braking, stress fractures running along the grain, the structural integrity somewhere between compromised and done.
One more sudden deceleration and the cradles would fail entirely.
Which was precisely what he needed.
He went back to the driver.
"Get away from this area. Go to the nearest police station and show them my credentials, they'll know the procedure."
Two-plus years in the Black Gloves had given him a thorough understanding of how the administrative machinery handled requisitions.
The driver would be compensated. The paperwork would be filed.
Everything would be fine, in the particular way that fine meant someone else's problem now.
He climbed into the cab, found the gear, and put his foot down.
The weight fought him. Forty tons of steel coil didn't accelerate the way a car did—
The engine built to it slowly, laboring, the whole frame shuddering with the effort. But it got there.
And ahead of him, getting closer by the second, was Jason.
The corner of Raphael's mouth turned up.
He found the horn and held it down.
*WHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAA—*