"A mirror that captures people. A mirror world. A perfect copy with nothing alive in it."
Raphael pressed his back against the classroom door and turned the problem over, the information from Eva's message sitting in his head like a stone.
He listened to the corridor. It had been quiet for a while, long enough that he was starting to question where the werewolf had gone.
But outside the window, the moon was climbing higher and filling out, the disc of it more complete than it had been an hour ago, the white light of it falling across the classroom floor and across his face.
Even if Eva's support arrived in forty minutes, he had no confidence that a direct fight against the werewolf ended well.
And the mirror made everything worse, Evelyn was inside it, a portable hostage, and he had to account for that before making any move.
God only knew where the werewolf had stashed it.
Did it leave?
The corridor had stayed silent long enough to feel like an answer. Raphael's frown deepened.
He eased the handle down and opened the door a crack, looked through.
Empty. Dark. The lack of ambient noise in the hallway made the dark feel thicker than it should have.
The gap widened. His hand lowered. His shoulders came down a fraction.
A massive claw shot from the other side and seized the handle.
The metal tore free of the door entirely. The wood split down the center, splinters erupting inward, and the werewolf's silhouette filled the frame, too large for the doorway, too large for the corridor, forced to bow its spine and compress its mass to move through a space built for humans.
The footsteps had stopped because the weight distribution had changed. It had been crouching. Waiting.
It looked at him with eyes that held no anger, no vendetta. Just the clean, uncomplicated appetite of something that had located food and was prepared to collect it.
The teeth visible in its open mouth could have accommodated half a person. Between them, caught in the gaps, something that had recently been part of something else.
"Worff!"
Short, low. Satisfied.
It came up to the second floor without making a sound. It was waiting in the corridor. It knew exactly which room.
"Damn—"
The door frame came apart. The claw came through the gap and closed around him before the word had finished leaving his mouth.
Raphael activated Rick's contract ability.
Too late to avoid the contact entirely. The claws had already landed, four lines across his abdomen, deep enough to expose bone, the internal architecture of his torso suddenly visible in a way that internal architecture was not supposed to be visible.
The organs behind the muscle wall shifted against each other with the wrongness of things displaced from their correct positions. Almost all of them had taken some degree of damage.
The Wraith Form completed in the same moment the wounds opened.
The damage froze at that instant, every torn edge, every exposed surface, suspended in the state it had reached when the transition hit.
The ribs showed through broken skin. The muscle wall was shredded. But it wasn't getting worse.
The black fluid that had gathered on the werewolf's claws lost its host the moment he went incorporeal and fell to the floor, where it began eating quietly into the wood.
He threw himself outward through the wall, moving in the wraith state through the solid partition, putting distance between himself and the corridor while the werewolf was still processing the disappearance.
He covered the length of the building's other wing in seconds, wall to wall through the interior, and dropped into a storage room full of gym equipment before allowing the transformation to end.
The physical world came back with everything it had been saving.
"Hss— —hh— —"
Every muscle in his body contracted simultaneously. He got himself horizontal on a stacked yoga mat before the organs currently arguing about their positions could lose the argument entirely.
He lay there and breathed through it, controlled and deliberate, while his body catalogued what had been done to it.
He activated the soul domination. Jason's scream arrived from wherever Jason was kept, and the skill transferred.
*Flesh Bishop — Corporeal Reformation.*
His body let go of its shape.
What was left of Raphael dissolved into itself, a dense, motile mass of muscle tissue, blood, viscera, and connective material, unified by the rhythm of his heart which continued, faintly, at the center of it.
The wolf toxin that had entered through the wounds separated from the tissue and was expelled. The grit and debris that had worked into the torn surfaces followed.
And then the mass began to rebuild, reorganizing with the Bishop's capacity for structural precision, the organs finding their correct positions and staying there, the muscle wall resealing, the skin closing over it.
He lay on the mat afterward and breathed.
*[Jason Lance — Soul Integrity: 88%.]*
More than a tenth of Jason's soul, burned through a combat that wasn't finished yet. One percent for the Reformation just now. Two percent for the covert Inertia application during the Inquisitor encounter.
He'd nearly become the prey.
He reviewed the ambush. The werewolf had no real cognitive architecture, its behavior in the first-floor corridors had confirmed that, the random contact with walls, the inability to read signage.
But it had found him anyway. Not through reasoning.
Scent tracking. Canine baseline. It had followed his trail through the building the same way a dog follows a trail, no map required, no intelligence necessary.
That was how it had been outside the door before he'd opened it. Patient, position-held, waiting for the moment.
Can't stay here.
He pushed himself upright.
Just then, a sudden change occurred!
Heavy footsteps came from upstairs, followed by a loud bang. The ceiling came down on him.
The floor above had provided less resistance than the werewolf had apparently expected, because it came through with its full weight and landed squarely on him, the impact driving him flat before he'd completed the first step.
The jaws followed immediately, angling for the waist, the bite that would have separated him at the midpoint already closing—
The teeth met air.
The werewolf's mouth snapped shut on nothing, the momentum of the bite carrying its head forward until its chin nearly touched the floor. A faint draft passed through the gap between its teeth.
Raphael, incorporeal again, drifted to one side and looked at the werewolf's midsection.
The wound from Lyndon's blade, the real cut he'd landed on the first pass outside, the one that had drawn blood, was gone.
The skin was smooth. As though the sword had never touched it.
He stood in the Wraith Form and looked at this fact for a moment.
Regeneration. Not slower than his own, not meaningfully different, the kind of passive healing rate that made sustained damage accumulation essentially impossible.
The creature was physically overwhelming, toxin-capable, possessed of a predatory tracking sense that negated stealth, and had a recovery factor that matched what vampiric constitution provided.
He was still working out what that left him with when the symbol on the werewolf's forehead blazed.
Blue-white, vivid, the moon shape in it now fully complete, the gap that had been missing when the fight started had closed entirely, the disc whole and glowing.
Something shifted in the animal's eyes.
The claw came up.
A crescent of pale blue light traced its arc through the air.