Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  He’s not human, Kat thought. He can’t be.

  Snapping out of the daze brought on by the gory scene, Kat charged at Cunningham and tackled him with all her augmented strength. It was like hitting a brick wall, and one of Kat’s shoulders popped out of its socket, her ribs cracking under the strain.

  Even so, the collision was just enough to knock Cunningham off his feet. The two of them tumbled down the hall, crashing headlong into a small wooden table piled with decorative china figurines. The figurines shattered, along with several of Kat’s bones, and she groaned as she bounced off the wall and slid to a stop half in, half out of the kitchen.

  Yun, who’d hurried in behind her, grabbed the heavily bleeding shifter man and hauled him out to the porch, where Liam was waiting to give the man first aid until the paramedics arrived. Yun then reentered the house and called out, “The rest of the family’s hiding upstairs. Hold him off until I get them out.”

  Kat hauled herself back to her feet using the doorway casing and turned to face Cunningham’s crumpled, twitching body. “Will do,” she said through gritted teeth, sharp pains lancing her all over as her nonhuman magic rapidly healed her wounds.

  Despite the fact that Luther Cunningham was supposed to be a mundane human, his body appeared to do the same. His broken limbs loudly popped and twisted back into place. His lacerations healed over, sealing pieces of china and splinters of wood underneath his skin instead of pushing them out—something that should have been excruciating.

  The man jerked back to his feet in an awkward way, almost like something was tugging on strings attached to his wrists and ankles. He whipped around to face the woman who’d dared to interrupt his murder spree.

  A chill skittered up Kat’s spine. There was no emotion in Cunningham’s brown, bloodshot eyes. Not even a hint of pain. His expression was totally blank, as if his mind and soul had been stripped away.

  That’s not Luther Cunningham. That might be his body, but he’s definitely not the one in control.

  Liam was right. Cunningham wasn’t the type to commit murder of his own accord. Someone had commandeered his body to use it as a weapon.

  But Kat didn’t understand how. Was Cunningham under the sway of a spell that had rendered him unconscious while someone remotely piloted his body? Or worse, was he awake in there, able to feel everything but do nothing while his own hands were used to brutally murder people?

  As Not-Cunningham advanced on her, holding up the bloody knife, Kat debated how to handle this. If she dealt critical damage to the body, she might wind up killing an innocent man who’d been kidnapped and turned into a murderer’s puppet. But if she went easy on him, he might escape, allowing him to attack another shifter family.

  You can’t value the health of your conscience over the well-being of others, stated the logical side of Kat’s mind. Don’t hold back. Take him down and end this murder spree. Now.

  Not-Cunningham lunged at her, knife arcing toward her neck. Kat dove out of the way, grabbed a chair someone had pulled out from the kitchen table, and swung it at the man’s head. The seat of the chair collided with his jaw and exploded into a hail of splinters that shredded his throat and face.

  Staggering into the frame of the doorway between the kitchen and hall, the man dropped the knife, and it clattered across the floor, out of reach. But the man didn’t stay down. Even though his right jaw joint hung freely from his skull. Even though he looked like he’d been struck by a porcupine, countless slivers of wood protruding from his bloody skin.

  He shook off the impact in seconds and rose to his feet once again.

  Kat groaned inwardly. I hit him hard enough to fracture his skull and snap his neck. How much damage do I have to deal him to put him down for the count?

  She broke up what was left of the chair until she’d fashioned a makeshift club. As Not-Cunningham sluggishly moved to recover his knife, Kat brought the club down against the back of his head. His skull imploded, and he fell forward, face smacking the floorboards.

  Did that do it? she wondered, stepping back.

  She got her answer five seconds later, when Yun rushed down the stairs in the hall, escorting a petrified woman and her two young children to the front door. The man, with his brain matter sloughing out of the hole Kat had bashed into his skull, heard the faint whimpering of the twin girls and lurched back to his feet so fast that Kat didn’t see his incoming fist until it was a hairsbreadth from her eye.

  The fist rammed into the right side of her face like a cannon ball, shattering her orbital cavity and her nose in one fell swoop. The blow sent Kat reeling into the kitchen table, which broke under her weight, and she collapsed atop a pile of pointy wood.

  Stars danced across her vision, and her head swam, thoughts lost in a deep, churning sea. Until a high-pitched shriek of terror broke through the muddle in her brain. It reminded her that there was something important she was supposed to be doing: protecting innocent people from a homicidal maniac.

  Kat rolled over and dragged herself to her feet with the aid of the kitchen counter, blood and other fluids dripping off her chin onto the white countertop. She couldn’t see out of her left eye—the punch had driven it back into her skull—and she could barely breathe through her crushed nose.

  Nonetheless, she unsteadily turned toward the hallway. Just in time to see Yun throw a crackling bolt of lightning at the bloody mess that was the murderous man.

  The bolt struck the man dead center in the chest. It scorched his skin black, and steam rose from deep cracks. But though he jerked wildly, like he was having a seizure, he didn’t fall. And once the electrical shock dispersed into the floor, he kept on trudging, knife in hand, toward Yun.

  Thankfully, the woman and her twins had reached the front door, where Liam was waiting to escort them to safety. If Kat and Yun didn’t stop the man from leaving the house, however, he would pursue the poor shifter family through the neighborhood, destroying anything that got in his way.

  If Liam got in his way, then he’d end up like Kat—with the caveat that Liam had no nonhuman healing factor.

  Kat pushed off from the counter and shambled toward the man, funneling so much energy into her fists that her skin glowed bright green and her bangle gave off a warning ping. Kat ignored the ping and pressed on, coming up behind Not-Cunningham, who was focused on hacking and slashing his knife at the young thunder god.

  Yun was expertly dancing around the knife, another electrical charge building in her arms, golden sparks arcing across her skin. But each swipe of the knife got a little closer to its mark, and if the next bolt didn’t floor him, Yun was going to wind up with a knife in her chest.

  If I have to tear him apart, Kat thought darkly, then so be it. I’ll deal with the guilt when people’s lives aren’t at stake.

  Kat reached out with both hands, intending to use her superstrength to rip his head off and thoroughly end this fight. The moment her hands brushed his ears though, the shrill whine of a police siren broke the quiet of the night outside, and the sound set off something inside the man.

  He reeled back, slamming his head into Kat’s already injured nose and stunning her again. Then he took off down the hall, heading for the back door.

  “Oh no. You’re not getting away that easily,” Yun spit and gave chase.

  Kat took a moment to regain her balance before she set off after Yun.

  Not-Cunningham plowed through the back door, splitting the panel in half, and dashed across the yard. His sights were set on the low fence that separated the property from the woods behind it. He was planning to jump the fence—or just break it down—and flee into the night.

  The woods were pitch black, the ambient light of the winter moon swallowed by the evergreen canopy. If they lost sight of the man in those trees, they’d never find him again.

  They couldn’t let him get past that fence.

  Kat pushed her legs harder and flew past Yun, r
apidly closing the distance to Not-Cunningham. When she was five steps behind him, he glanced over his shoulder—and Kat nearly tripped over her own two feet at the sight of his eyes.

  In place of the bloodshot whites and brown irises that the man had been sporting just seconds before were two black, oily pools that filled the whole sockets. No speck of humanity remained in those eyes. Nor did one remain in the vicious sneer that stretched the man’s lips past their limits, tearing the skin at the corners.

  Not-Cunningham made a shooing gesture toward Kat and Yun, and the reek of foul magic billowed through the air ahead of what felt like an invisible wall moving at the speed of sound. Only it wasn’t a physical wall. It was a mental wall. A psychic wall.

  Memories of pain and suffering broke free from the prisons in which Kat had locked them months before. She staggered back as if she’d been struck by another fist. She grasped her head with both hands and fell to her knees, a scream caught in her throat as years’ worth of torture assaulted her. She felt every ounce of pain A9’s scientists had inflicted upon her, all in the same moment, and she nearly passed out from the shock.

  But Kat’s body was a great deal hardier than it had been during her captivity—and so was her mind. She fought against the deluge of agony, bit down on her tongue until it bled, allowing her to differentiate the real pain from the imaginary pain her brain was producing. She forced her attention away from the brutal images of her past and back to the present.

  Through a blur of tears, Kat located Not-Cunningham again. He was clambering over the fence, about to get away.

  Kat scrabbled to her feet, fingers ripping up clumps of half-frozen soil. As she righted herself, she caught a glimpse of Yun on the ground in the fetal position, and realized the mental strike had affected her as well. Yun’s hands were tangled in her dark hair, and a faint whimper emanated from her throat.

  “Bastard,” Kat gurgled out, bloody spittle flying, as she launched herself toward the man. She powered her leap with magic. So much magic that her bangle pulsed yet again and grew warm against her wrist. So much magic that she careened through the air like a heavy object riding the cusp of a mighty shockwave.

  Arms raised in front of her like a shield, she collided with Not-Cunningham and obliterated the fence. The two of them sailed over a steep drop-off that bottomed out at a small stream meandering through the woods.

  Kat braced for impact by curling up into a ball, but she still hit the ground so hard that it jarred all her bones and dislocated multiple joints. She bounced twice and rolled to a stop at the edge of the stream. One of her feet plunged into the icy water, shooting a shiver up her spine.

  Not-Cunningham splashed to a halt in the middle of the stream, his body contorted into an unnatural shape. The clear water of the stream turned red and brown around him, where blood and dirt washed off his battered skin.

  Yet despite all that damage, the man still untangled his busted limbs and tried to get up.

  Is he alive, or am I fighting a reanimated corpse? Kat wondered as she attempted to make her body stand up for another round of this terrible battle.

  A human would have died five times over already from the catastrophic damage she and Yun had inflicted on the man. It seemed more likely that she was fighting some sort of zombie made out of Cunningham’s body.

  But something was controlling that body. Something with eyes like tar. Something nasty. Something wrong.

  “What are you?” she ground out as Not-Cunningham rose again.

  The man, his head sitting at an impossible angle atop his broken neck, turned to look at her. One of his eyes had been gouged out, a broken stick protruding from the socket, but the other was still black as night.

  The man parted his lips, showcasing blood-streaked teeth as red saliva dribbled down his chin. A sound like an oncoming train rumbled up his throat, yellow sparks bouncing between his teeth, smoke pouring out of his mouth.

  It looked like he was about to breathe fire.

  Kat made to flee, but her wet shoe slipped on the icy soil, and she fell back on her ass. In the half second it took her to correct herself, the man vomited up a ball of red-hot fire and held it between his teeth, adjusting the angle of his skewed head so he could shoot it straight at Kat.

  A panicked shriek evacuated Kat’s lungs, and she shielded her face with her arms, anticipating the mind-numbing pain of high heat melting the flesh off her bones.

  It didn’t come. Instead of the snap and crackle of her own skin burning, Kat heard the deafening report of a gunshot. She dropped her arms at the perfect moment—to get showered in hot blood and gooey hunks of brain tissue.

  Not-Cunningham’s now headless body collapsed into the stream, and in so doing, revealed another man. A tall, older, grizzled man in a long gray coat, who stood on the opposite side of the stream.

  Biting back nausea as hunks of gore sloughed off her face, Kat braced herself against a tree and called up her magic again, prepared for another fight. The newcomer, however, didn’t fire his glowing shotgun at Kat. He lowered it and used the end of the barrel to poke Not-Cunningham’s body, which, to Kat’s immense relief, didn’t so much as twitch.

  Relaxing slightly, Kat took a better look at the newcomer. And was surprised to find that she recognized him.

  It was the man from the hardware store.

  8

  Liam

  The crack of a gunshot sent a bolt of panic through Liam’s bones.

  He took off, leaving the paramedics to tend to the injured shifter man whose blood now drenched Liam’s clothes. He’d done his best to staunch the hemorrhaging from the numerous stab wounds and give the shifter’s natural healing factor a chance to catch up. But now it was up to fate and modern medicine to decide if the man would live.

  Liam was damn well set, however, on making sure Kat and Yun survived this encounter with whatever the hell was pretending to be Luther Cunningham. So he left the scene of heartbreak behind—a wife and two children cowering next to an ambulance as medics tried to stabilize a loving husband and father—and made a mad dash for the back yard, where the fight had moved while he’d been busy ferrying the family a safe distance from the house.

  A few cops and shifters who’d arrived at the same time as the ambulance followed him, but he didn’t attempt to give them orders. He had no authority with the police anymore, and shifters listened to no one but their community leaders. He’d just have to hope that they all acted rationally when they came face to face with whatever was waiting in the back yard.

  Liam skidded around the corner of the house, his gaze scouring the yard. The first thing he saw was Yun, lying flat on her back, one arm slung over her eyes, one hand digging deep into the grass.

  “Yun!” he called out, rushing toward her.

  Groaning, she peeked out from under her arm, then tugged her fingers free from the earth and pointed a dirty fingernail at the second thing Liam had noticed: a large hole in the fence that bordered the yard. “I’m fine,” Yun said, her ragged tone implying she was most definitely not. “Go find Kat. She tackled the guy down the hill a minute ago.”

  Liam veered to the left—Yun wasn’t fine, but she also wasn’t dying—and vaulted through the hole in the fence, nearly losing his footing when he immediately encountered a steep drop-off. He grabbed hold of a skinny tree to steady himself and scrutinized the woodland below.

  Kat was leaning against a tree near a small stream, breathing hard. A copious amount of blood, and what seemed to be brain tissue, caked her head and neck. Across the stream stood a man Liam had never seen before, an older man with gray hair and a shotgun perched on his shoulder.

  Between the two of them, in the stream, lay what remained of Luther Cunningham’s body. That body had no head.

  Liam quickly made his way down the slope, his loud footsteps alerting Kat and the man to his approach.

  “Ah, Mr. Crown,” said the man. “So this young lad
y is staying with you then?”

  Liam stopped short, fingers creeping toward the charmed knife clipped to his belt. “Who wants to know?”

  “Just a curious old man who likes to keep up with what’s happening in his town.”

  “He’s a magician.” Kat paused to peel a glob of brain matter off her cheek. “His gun was glowing when he shot, uh, that thing.”

  Liam narrowed his eyes but spoke quietly, aware that a gaggle of cops and shifters were watching from the top of the hill. “You with the Circle?”

  The man smiled wryly. “Not anymore. I’m retired.”

  People didn’t retire from the Circle. Membership was for life. Unless you were kicked out…or left due to ideological differences.

  “He runs that hardware store on Reddington Street,” Kat said. “Hunt’s Hardware. I saw him in there earlier when I…” She bit her lip, realizing she’d given her goof-up away. “When I bought a new ceiling fixture to replace the one I broke today.”

  “I already knew about that.” He didn’t take his eyes off the former Circle magician as he spoke. “I saw the box behind the counter.”

  Kat grimaced. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m not mad.”

  The magician glanced up the hill, at their rapt audience. “So, are we going to stand here and banter till the sun comes up, or are we going to do something about this demon problem?”

  Liam froze. “Did you say demon?”

  The man pointed the toe of his boot at Cunningham’s body. “That man was possessed by a powerful demon. I would’ve attempted an exorcism instead of blasting him to bits with spelled salt”—he tapped his shotgun with a finger—“but after all the damage his body took in that fight just now, he wouldn’t have survived the exorcism process.”

  “Sounds like you have ample experience dispatching demons,” Liam said, suspicion rising. “You weren’t a regular Circle member, were you?”