Page 85 of Throwing Shade
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Laurent pouncedand knocked her over, sending Mei Lin’s magic wild. It scorched the ceiling, raining plaster down on us. For an encore, his claws transformed as if they were made of light and he ripped out her heart.
Her body hit the ground with a wet thunk and the dybbuk burst out of her in a seething mass of crimson and gray.
Oh, okay. The heart was the release button, so to speak. Facts were good. I swallowed and turned away from Mei Lin’s vacant gaze, waiting for Laurent to spear the ghostly fucker before sending it back to Gehenna where it belonged, but no.
The wolf batted the entity at me.
I dodged and screamed as it swarmed me, singeing my skin with its touch. There was no relief from the enraged spirit, its howls echoing in my head.
“I don’t know how to kill these… motherfucker!” I curled into myself, my shoulders hunched, the dybbuk assuming a triangle shape and stabbing at me like a homicidal hummingbird. It didn’t hurt like a knife wound, but every hit it landed filled me with a revulsion that made me want to tear my skin off.
Laurent sat down, his tongue lolling out, and cocked his head to the side.
“This is not a teachable moment and you are not Mr. Miyagi.” I tried to snare the dybbuk in a shadowy net, but it slipped through, continuing its assault on me.
Laurent calmly licked blood off a paw. At least it didn’t pool under the corpse, his magic having cauterized the worst of it.
Weaving and bobbing to keep the dybbuk at bay, I almost tripped over Mei Lin’s corpse. Wait. The word dybbuk meant “one who cleaves.” As in cleaves to, clings to. But what if the other meaning was also true?
I fixed a handy cutting weapon in my mind.
My shadow snaked up my body and flowed down my left arm to become a sword. Okay, I lie. It was more of a dagger with gout, and when I slashed it through the seething crimson mass, the blade fell sideways like a flaccid penis.
I shook it. “What do you need? Mood music? Foreplay? Work already!”
My stupid team member snorted.
I narrowed my eyes at the useless magic weapon. Not a sword, then. How about a buzz saw blade? Nice simple shape, jagged edges.
The dybbuk redoubled its efforts, hammering at me.
In theory, a buzz saw was a great idea. In practice, it looked more like one of Dali’s melting clocks.
The wolf yawned.
Keep it up, Huff ’n’ Puff. You’d be next on my death list. I tilted my head. Death and darkness… could it be that obvious?
I reshaped my shadow into a scythe. Slaying vamps might not have been my forté, but I swung that curved blade with all the panache of Inigo and the Dread Pirate Roberts dueling in The Princess Bride and sliced through the dybbuk.
The weapon’s form held and the dybbuk jolted backwards, but I hadn’t destroyed it.
I blew my hair out of my eyes, readjusting my grip on the long handle. “Die, you fucker! Die!”
Mut, a voice in my head whispered.
“Mut, you fucker!” Hebrew letters appeared on the blade, and this time when I slashed the dybbuk in half, all color leached out of both parts. The spirit imploded with a sucking noise and winked out of existence.
The wolf made a strangled sound. His eyes were wide and his snout kind of wrinkled up, as if dumbfounded. What was his problem? I’d killed the malevolent spirit as directed.
I tossed my shadow scythe into my right hand, the letters on the blade fading away. “I’m not even left-handed.” The scythe vanished. “Actually, I totally am. I just love that movie too much not to quote it.”
My smirking triumph was short-lived.
“Jude!” I ran into the room, but the only thing in there was a discarded tennis racquet and a couple of blood-stained green balls, with corresponding marks on the wall Mei Lin had served them against.
“Where is she?” Shaking, I whirled on Laurent. “You killed Mei Lin before we could find Jude.”
