Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(49)

“Your children are immortal?” I asked, repeating the important part of his words for the camera to catch. The first security system had had sound, but when Adam had updated, he’d traded sound for better video. “Tied to mortal flesh. Who are you?”

“Guayota,” he said.

“Coyote?” I asked, and I know my eyes widened. He wasn’t Coyote.

“Guayota,” he said again, and I heard once more the odd pronunciation that Gary Laughingdog had used in the middle of his vision. Not Coyote with a weird accent but another name altogether.

“With a ‘g,’” I said.

But Flores, who called himself Guayota, was done listening to me. “Your husband thinks to keep the sun from me,” he said. “He will regret it.”

Something happened, something that smelled of scorched fabric and magic. I cried out as that heat seared my cheek. But even as the pain made my eyes water, I shot.

I aimed at Flores’s face, and I kept firing until the bullets were gone. Holes appeared in his face as I shot, two side by side in the middle of his forehead, one in his cheekbone. Then I switched targets and two more holes opened up around his heart, the final one a little low and right.

Out of bullets, I grabbed a big wrench and made a backward hop onto the hood of the Passat. It rocked a little under my weight, and I thought that I’d have to remember to tell the owner that it needed work on the shocks, too. Another hop put me on the roof of the car and gave me a little space.

The bullets had knocked Flores back. He hit a rack of miscellaneous parts and sent it crashing to the floor. Flores bounced off the rack, almost followed it to the ground, but caught his balance at the last instant. I felt a cold chill because with three bullets in his face and two in the chest, he caught his balance and stayed on his feet.

A funny sound filled the garage; it made my throat hurt and buzzed my ears. He was laughing. A cold, hard knot in my belly told me that probably someone else was going to have to deal with the shocks on the Passat.

My shoes were soft-soled and so had no trouble sticking to the top of the Passat. The gun was of no more use except as a club, but I kept it in my left hand and kept the wrench in my right.

I didn’t have much of a chance, but that didn’t mean I was going to roll over and give the thing my throat. Adam was coming, and the camera was rolling. Even assuming he killed me, the longer I held out, the more information they’d glean from the recording.

Flores’s face changed as he laughed, flowing and darkening, but beneath the darkness, visible in cracks in his skin, was a sullen red light. My changes are almost instantaneous, the werewolves take a lot longer than that with the exception of Charles. But none of us glowed.

Flores … Guayota moved his hand, still laughing, and something flew at me. I dodged, but it slid over my shirt, which caught fire, and landed on top of the Passat.

A quick brush of my hands put my shirt out, leaving me with blisters on the skin along my collarbone and a hole in my bra strap. I slid back one step to see what he’d thrown at me without having to look away from him.

It was about the size of a finger, blackened and oozing on one end. I chanced a quick glance and realized that not only was it the size of a finger, it had a fingernail. I almost nudged it with my foot to be sure, but the paint was blackening and bubbling up around it, and directly underneath it, the metal was sagging.

I’d read an account written by a Civil War commander about how he’d seen the cannonball coming toward one of his men who was wounded and down. It had been coming so slowly, and he’d just reached down to deflect it—and had lost his arm.

I didn’t touch it.

Guayota had a distance weapon, however weirdly horrible, and that meant keeping back from him was no good. Time enough later to wonder at the finger and how he’d made it so hot it could melt the roof of the car; for now I had to concentrate on survival. Nor could I follow my sensei’s first rule of fighting—he who is smart and runs away lives to fight another day. The bay doors were closed, and I had no way to run.

Out of other options, I attacked. There had been no more than a fraction of a second between when he threw the finger and when I jumped off the car. His burning finger meant that I knew better than to touch him with my skin. The wrench I’d grabbed was a giant-sized 32mm; it weighed about three pounds and gave me almost two feet of additional reach.

I got four hits on him, three with the wrench and one with the gun, and in that time, I learned a lot about him. He wasn’t used to his prey knowing how to fight back. He had never been trained to fight hand-to-hand. He was slower than I was. Not much slower, but it was enough for me to get in four hits. He was oddly sticky, and I lost the gun to him when it sank into his flesh to be quickly consumed and absorbed.

And, finally, nothing I tried seemed to hurt him.

He continued to heat up as we fought, and before I got the next hit in, his clothes flared up in a wall of flames, then drifted to ashes. His face had melted into something with eyes and a mouth, but no other features that I could pick out in the wavy blackness of his skin.

Other than his face, his body remained in other ways humanlike, but there was nothing human about his skin. It was char black and formed into a bumpy, almost barklike surface. Fissures broke open as he moved, revealing, as I’d noticed before, something deep orange with red overtones. His outer surface reminded me of nothing so much as film I’d seen of the active lava flows in Hawaii.