Page 77 of The Shade of Things
I lugged Teresa over to the slide’s ladder.
“Ow!” Emmett shook out his hand.
A ball of fur and rage, white foam flecking off his fangs, barreled toward me. At the last second, the wolf sailed over my head, landing at the top of the slide, his flanks heaving like he was desperate to escape.
His paws scrabbled on the smooth plastic then down he slid into the chute, lost to view.
“Laurent!” Hauling Teresa with me, I dove after him.
The distance was deceiving. On the playground the twisty slide was fairly short, but we traveled for much longer, coming out in an unfamiliar room.
I’d barely gotten to my feet when something blurred past me, and flinching, I manifested my shadow scythe, but I wasn’t fast enough.
A dybbuk had flown out of nowhere to inhabit the wolf.
He roared, his body trembling and his eyes wide and mad, scratching and biting himself so furiously that he drew blood.
I cried, “Mut!” The instant the Hebrew letters for “die” appeared on the scythe’s blade, I attempted to get close enough to deal with the malevolent spirit but in Laurent’s frenzy, couldn’t.
“Why is he like that?” Teresa cried. She pressed closer to me, her supposed abductor with a scythe appearing the safer option.
Given Laurent’s hatred of dybbuks, this was his worst nightmare.
Before I could answer Teresa, a second pulsing crimson specter with sickly white streaks whooshed past me and bounced off the Sapien. Cursing, I swung my scythe, but the dybbuk veered sideways and slipped away, bouncing off Okeyo, who’d just arrived.
“What’s happening?” Eli said, jumping off the slide. Even with his broken perception filter he didn’t see dybbuks. Only those with Banim Shovavim magic could.
“Dybbuk.”
Eli swore loudly.
Emmett crashed off the slide and Daw landed on top of him, still cackling with that deranged laugh, her eyes vacant.
The dybbuk whipped around, reformed into a narrow triangular wedge with a needle-sharp point, and attacked Daw like a tattoo gun set to warp speed.
Shoving Teresa down, I pushed past Eli to get to the Thai woman.
The dybbuk’s point dipped inside her, but it couldn’t gain any more of a grip on her than that.
My mouth fell open, my scythe frozen above my head, because it shouldn’t have even been able to do that. Daw was a Sapien. If she had any Ohrist blood, even a recessive gene, the dybbuk would have just cruised on in and enthralled her, so she clearly wasn’t magic.
Suddenly, the final piece of this sadistic game fell into place for me.
The game demanded terror. It wasn’t some psychopathic thrill: it was because the Consortium sought the conditions under which a dybbuk could possess a nonmagic host. That’s why the Sapiens were victims of the terror campaign. It was a sick and twisted means to lower their inhibitions and prime them for enthrallment.
The dybbuk dropped another precious half inch into Daw.
I rushed that spirit and cleaved it in half. It leeched of all color and imploded, dead.
Lost as she was, Daw had no idea how close she’d come to being patient zero in a catastrophe of epic proportions.
“Mir!” Eli had his gun trained on Laurent, while Emmett and the others stayed behind my ex. “You’ve got to get through to him.”
The wolf stalked them, forcing them backward, no trace of humanity in those eyes that were as cold, beautiful, and hard as a glacier. He made no sound other than the soft plop of blood from his self-inflicted wounds. Was the dybbuk in charge right now?
A burst of rotting onion smell made my eyes water, and I spun, fearing an even worse complication to our situation, because that putridity was Gehenna’s signature perfume.
“I have to deal with this. Shoot him in the leg if he attacks,” I told Eli.
