Swift as thought, the beast straightened and with a sweep of an arm batted away a flung spear. There was shouting and the uncertain light of torches. It paused, the black lips pulling back from its fangs. Another spear went wide. A man came up close with a short stabbing assegai, and the wyrwulf moved.
It poured forward and knocked the stab of the man's weapon to one side, jarring it out of his grasp. He stumbled backwards, hand going to his hip for a knife, but the beast caught him by one arm, whipped him to its chest and then bit.
The crunch and pop was loud in the night. The man was dropped, his neck bitten almost in half. A shout of grief and fury went up from the other fox men. They darted in and ringed the beast, jabbing with long flint-tipped spears. The wyrwulf snapped at one and champed off the blade. It grabbed at another, pulling its owner forward and severing his spine with another crushing bite. The body was thrown at his comrades, knocking one off his feet. The circle was broken. The beast thrust forward, tearing the face off a third man with one swift rake of its claws, and then it was running free. More spears were flung at its back but in the dark it was impossible to tell if they went home. It crashed into the trees and was gone.
HE SAT UP in bed, shuddering and slick with sweat. The face—dear God!—that face inches from his own, the awful reeking breath in his lungs.
The room was quiet, the luminous digits of the clock telling him it was three-thirty. Even the traffic had calmed. The city was sleeping. He reached for his cigarettes, fumbling them off the night table, and then flicked on the lamp so there was a corner of brightness in the room, an oasis in the night.
Smooth smoke eased the catch of his lungs, slowed his battering heart. Werewolves. Bloody hell.
He was afraid, more afraid than he had been since travelling a wolf-haunted wood long ago. Because that wood, that world, was reaching out here for him. He was sure of it. Too many things—the growl of the unknown animal in the alleyway that night, these dreams, reliving all kinds of things he had forgotten—were reminding him of what it had been like, almost as though he were being prepared.
For what? Going back? God forbid!
Imagination, perhaps. His sense of paranoia playing tricks on him. Everyone had nightmares, and the thing in the alley might have been a dog. He had never even seen it.
He had taken a taxi home though. He had found it impossible to face the thought of that measly halfmile in the dark. And not true dark, either, with street lamps and cars. More like an urban twilight, a half-world. Mad. Harder to believe in it over here. Easier back in Ireland, with the silent woods and the tiny fields, the empty roads. He had not thought the city had enough soul about it to shake him. And here he was, lighting his third cigarette in a row at nearly four in the morning, his hands trembling ash on the bedclothes and his eyes flitting fearfully to the window.
Those eyes. He could almost see them now, hovering out of the lamplight's circle. Strange how he had unlearned so much over the years until he could hardly remember Ringbone or Mirkady or Brother Nennian. Cat and Rose he had never forgotten. They had cut too deeply for healing; but everything else had become a haze, a childhood thing of dreams and imaginings and half-remembered stories. Until recently. Waking and sleeping, he was remembering more and more every day. And then there were these sightings... Last week at the station, in the scrum for the tube.
They had been packed like canned beans in the train, breathing in each other's faces and jutting elbows into other ribs. It had been hot in there, and still some damn fools were struggling to read the Financial Times. It had been fun watching them trying to fold the broadsheets in the midst of cramped, swaying humanity. He had switched off, as he always did, and had been staring out of the grimy window. Black tunnels, dim stations, black tunnels, dim stations, and the tidal ebb and flow of people leaving and entering.
Then a wedge-shaped face on the other side of the glass, the eyes blazing slits and the mouth grinning redly...
The blood seeped from his face and his throat tightened unbearably. One of the Wyrim, here in the city.
Two, three feet away.
The door. With a snarl he pushed those beside him out of the way, toppled a trio of commuters like briefcase-wielding dominoes, dug his elbows in.
The doors were closing.
He rammed himself through them to cries of alarm and anger, levered them apart with the veins pulsing in his thick neck, and fell rather than stepped to the hard concrete of the platform, glaring about like a maniac. People backed away. The train began to pull out. It wasn't here! Where was it?
And the face had sailed past him, laughing, the white teeth bared. On a tube train, disappearing down the dark of a tunnel. He could hear it hooting and giggling with glee.