I was almost to the ramp. Ten feet and I would be there.

A ghoul dodged the roots, sprinting forward on all fours, and lunged at me from the side. I grabbed its right forearm with my left hand, pulling the arm straight and jerking him down and forward, and slid my right arm over the back of its neck and all the way under its armpit. My forearm pressed on the back of its neck and I dropped down to one knee, bringing all of the force of my body onto my elbow, ripping the soft tissue and crushing the vertebrae. The whole thing took half a second. I released the convulsing ghoul and ran to the ramp.

Three feet from it I jumped. My fingers caught the cold metal, and I pulled myself up and dashed across the bridge. Julie spun the crank, retracting it as I ran. I leaped over the last five feet, landing next to her, and turned around. Seven ghouls howled in impotent fury by the fence, their eyes glowing, their teeth bared.

The smallest of them turned to run. Roots shot out of the ground, forming a crescent barrier about thirty yards in diameter. The ghouls whirled, realizing they were trapped.

Luther smiled. “Oh no, my pretties. This is my domain and you’ve trespassed. There is a price to pay for that.”

Luther took a deep breath, his arms rising as if he were about to take flight. Magic shuddered in front of him, like elastic rope wound too tight. The muscles of his back flexed and he snapped his arms to the side and down, palms up.

The ground under the ghouls moved as if the Earth had suddenly became liquid. They sank down, feverishly trying to free their limbs, but the soil held them fast. A green bubble formed in the center of the clearing, grew to the size of a basketball, and exploded. Bright emerald dust shot out, glowing. Spores, I realized. Millions of spores. The green spores washed over the ghouls. Their movements grew less frantic, then slow, slower still, until they were struggling in slow motion as if their very flesh had gradually petrified. The spores sprouted. A dense carpet of moss in a dozen varieties grew, sheathing the ghoul bodies like a velvet blanket. Delicate pink stalks formed over the barely recognizable bodies. Tiny white flowers opened at the ends of the stalks, releasing tiny dots glowing with gold. The air smelled sweet, like a forest just after a morning rain.

Luther inhaled and smiled.

“Very pretty,” Julie said.

“Well, we don’t just sit on our butts filling out paperwork,” Luther said. “We work for our living.”

I pulled my pants on. My feet were beat to hell from running on rocky ground. My middle left toe was probably broken.

“I thought you promised Curran nothing violent.” Julie handed me my turtleneck.

“No, I promised him I wouldn’t fight a giant.”

“So you obey the letter of the law and not the spirit,” she said.

“Yes.” My teeth finally stopped chattering. I loved my turtleneck. I loved my jacket. I loved my boots. Mmm, wonderful warm boots.

“How come when I do that, you chew me out?”

“Because you don’t do it well enough to get away with it.”

Julie blinked. “What kind of move was that, at the end?”

“It’s from Escrima, a Filipino martial art. I’ll show you when we get a minute, but you will have to practice, because it has to be done really fast for it to work.”

“Did you get anything from Mitchell?” Luther asked.

“Yes. It’s an ifrit, a very powerful one. Coal-black and red in color and very fond of fire.” If it had been a marid, folklore said it would’ve been blue, and we had to go by folklore until real life disproved it. “He has a hell of a lot of power, and for some reason he’s keeping Eduardo in a cage.”

I had seen a bowl of water in Eduardo’s cage, but no food. His shoulders had been sticking out of his T-shirt and his face was gaunt, so he was likely starving. An average human could survive roughly twenty days without food. A shapeshifter had to consume two to three times as many calories as a human of the same size. Their regeneration slowed down the starvation somewhat but not enough. If we didn’t get Eduardo out of that cage in the next three days or so, we wouldn’t need to bother looking.

A piercing shriek tore through the silence. It came from inside the building.

Chapter 15

LUTHER JERKED THE door open and sprinted down the hall. Julie and I chased him.

“What the hell is that?” I yelled over the shrieks.

“My alarm! Someone just broke into my lab.”

We rounded the corner and almost collided with four other people, one in a suit, two in scrubs, and one in a biological containment suit without helmet or gloves. Each was charged with enough magic to level a small building. Luther shoved past them and thrust the door of his lab open. The metal hood was raised, the body of the draconoid out in the open. A deep puncture wound gaped in its side.