"Evelyn. Are you sure about this?"
Eva swallowed. The thorns were already moving around her, alive in the way Evelyn's thorns always seemed to be alive, threading across her skin with a slow, exploratory patience.
The tips dragged light lines across the surface, not quite breaking through, the contact somewhere between pain and itch. Her skin rose in a dense pattern of goosebumps along every path they traced.
Evelyn's green eyes looked back at her with complete seriousness. She nodded once.
"It'll be over quickly. The pain won't last."
Eva's expression did several things. She closed her eyes, squared her shoulders, and assumed the posture of someone who has made peace with something and is waiting for it to arrive.
The thorns climbed slowly. They found her neck, circled it, settled into position.
Crack.
The vines contracted all at once. Every spine drove inward simultaneously, and then there was the sensation of something closing around the throat that had nothing to do with the spines.
The absence of air, the absence of everything that required air, and it lasted approximately two seconds before her consciousness let go.
The last image she carried out of the mirror world was her own back, from behind, the neck above the shoulders completely empty.
At least pain-overload protection kicks in first, she thought.
That was the last thought.
---
At the Red Gloves base, in the A-9 unit's conference room, Eva sat bolt upright.
She sat there for a moment breathing, the way you breathe after a dream that felt too real to leave immediately. When the room had finished being the room, she got up and moved.
The emergency operations desk had someone on duty, a helicopter pilot, mid-rotation, doing paperwork.
"Emergency deployment." Eva set the last projection device on the desk along with a marked map. "Get this to this coordinate. Don't drop it on the way. Open it before you release it."
The pilot picked up the device and studied the map.
"Manageable. Forty minutes, guaranteed delivery."
Eva looked at the map. At the distance. At the timeline of what was currently happening in Keynes without backup.
"Forty minutes." She said it quietly. "Let's hope nothing goes wrong in forty minutes."
---
"Worffff—"
The howl went up and the clouds answered it, gathering overhead in a way that clouds didn't naturally gather, the mass of them moving with intention.
The moon came through a gap in the cover, full and white, the light of it hitting the street in a clean sheet.
Raphael held Lyndon's sword in both hands and watched the shadows.
The street looked empty. It wasn't. A dark shape moved through it in irregular flashes, the edge of a building, then the gap between two hedges, then gone, then somewhere else.
He caught fragments of it. Even at Lv6 with Blood Frenzy fully active, the complete picture kept escaping him.
Then every hair on his body stood up.
Something old and biological, bypassing the cognitive layer entirely. The specific alarm that living things carry for moments when they are about to stop being living things.
He spun and brought the sword across his body.
The claws hit the flat of the blade with a force that traveled all the way to his shoulder socket and nearly took the grip out of his hands.
"Hell—"
He hadn't recovered before the second hit came from the other side. The claws caught him in the midsection and he left the ground.
CRACK.
He hit the wall of the old building beside him, the brick absorbing his momentum over a short and unpleasant distance, the wall caving inward around the impact point.
He got his feet against the surface and pushed sideways before the follow-up arrived, rolling clear, and the shadow came down on the wall where he'd been with enough force to blow the brick apart entirely, the cloud of fragments and dust expanding outward in a burst.
If that had landed on me...
He didn't finish the thought. His physical resistance was Lv1. The wall had handled that hit about as well as he would have.
The dust settled.
The thing standing in the debris was close to three meters tall, its spine arched outward in a pronounced curve, four limbs heavy and overdeveloped, the claws at the ends of them short and dense.
The fur covering it was grey, each strand rigid and pointed, the face between animal and human in a way that resolved into neither. It breathed in long pulls, its chest expanding beyond what the proportions should have allowed.
The system report arrived with the contact hit.
*[Analyzing... Complete.]*
*[Lv4: Werewolf.]*
*[Cardinal Sin: Ira.]*
*[Classification: Demon.]*
"Lv4."
He felt it differently than he'd felt the Inquisitor's level.
She had been dangerous through the medium of magic, lethal output that could be interrupted, that required casting time, that had visible weaknesses once you got inside her range.
What was in front of him was dangerous the way a collapsing building was dangerous. Force that didn't require a decision to be made. Speed that existed independent of intention.
This was what a Lv4 Demon actually felt like.
On its forehead, a symbol was glowing, pale blue, the shape of a moon with a section missing, the gap closing incrementally as the full moon above climbed higher.
The werewolf turned its head and found him.
The rage in its eyes wasn't the strategic fury of something that had decided to attack. It was older than that, unstructured, total, the kind of anger that doesn't distinguish between targets because it isn't looking for a specific one.
Every piece of that gaze landed on Raphael and stayed there with the weight of something very large that has made its only decision for the evening.
It was gone from where it stood before he'd finished reading the expression.
A residual shape hung in the air where it had been. The claws came in toward his neck with a sound like a blade through canvas.
But Raphael had been watching its head.
The moment it turned, he moved, not to evade, because evading something he couldn't fully track was a losing proposition, but forward, dropping his center and sweeping the blade up in a half-circle that intercepted the attack's line of travel.
Hiss.
Blood. A real cut, he'd connected across the torso. But the werewolf hit him anyway, the mass and momentum of the charge continuing straight through the wound without the body registering it as a reason to stop.
The impact sent him in a diagonal line across the street, through the second-floor railing of the teaching building, the metal bars snapping cleanly, and into the classroom on the other side.
He hit the bookshelf.
The shelf held for approximately one second before the structural integrity it had been saving up gave out all at once.
Books came down in a cascade, dozens of them, the weight and frequency of it suggesting that the shelf had been significantly overloaded before his arrival. He was buried before the sound had finished.
He dug himself out with his hands and knees, found air, and stayed low.
His head was doing something unpleasant. There'd been a few seconds of actual unconsciousness in there, he could feel the gap, the missing time, the way the room had changed between one moment and the next. He gave himself the seconds it took to confirm he was functional and moved on.
"Pure brute force," he said quietly, listening.
The werewolf below was moving through the first floor. Fast and heavy, crossing from one side to the other in seconds, but the pattern of it was wrong.
Things were falling. Collisions with walls and furniture, the sounds of a large body making contact with obstacles that it hadn't anticipated or hadn't processed quickly enough to avoid.
He listened to it searching.
"No reasoning. Stimulus and response." He settled his back against the wall. "No map of the building in its head. It's looking for the stairwell and treating every door the same."
The stairwell door had a sign on it. Identical in construction to the classroom doors, differentiated by a small placard. For a mind running on pure predatory instinct, a sign was information it wasn't equipped to process.
The sounds below continued their erratic circuit.
His life band lit up. A message from Eva, sent in the past few minutes.
He read it.
"Forty minutes."
He let out a slow breath and looked at the ceiling.
Forty minutes, alone in a building with a Lv4 werewolf.
He set the sword across his knees and started thinking.