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  I heard my ribs crack. Felt my flesh rip. A flare of unnatural light in the twitcher’s eye told me he’d wired the others. In a minute a swarm of them would be here and I’d be dead.

  I twisted harder until bones cracked and he flopped unconscious.

  I knew it wouldn’t last long. His recovery time would be quick.

  So what? I’d had enough.

  Roo deserves more than that, I quarrelled with myself. That single thought got me up.

  I hobbled towards a villa. Punters that witnessed the event helped me, running interference as more Twitchers arrived.

  I struggled up two flights of stairs, into an attic and across a cut-thru. A rust stain seeped through the walls of the attic. I touched my headband on so I could see, and kept away from it. I wasn’t sure what contact with it would do and I wasn’t willing to find out. The memory of the body fixed to the fibre optics tower having its life sucked away was still fresh.

  Like Roo . . .

  I took a second to strap my half-melted boots a bit tighter. With a conscious effort I sank deep into myself, giving over more to the Eskaalim. I needed the extra adrenalin to keep the pain at bay.

  It flooded through me with a welcome numbness.

  I knew if I could live long enough to get near Tulu, I had a payback need that’d see me through hell.

  But the closer I got to the maelstrom the harder it got to move. My legs felt like they were bogged in crawl. I saw dead Kadai in alleys.

  The idea that they were mortal distracted and frightened me.

  I veered away from the canal to where Tulu hid herself. Her salvos drew me to her, a barrage of twisted spirit juice spewing out to challenge the Cabal. All the worst stuff she’d harvested from the minds of The Tert shaman and me.

  You didn’t get it all, bitch. I shouted the thought over the cacophony in my head.

  My insides felt crowded to bursting. The Eskaalim, the spirit guides, and now a link with Mei and the shaman. I made multiple-personality disorder look lonesome. If I wasn’t already crazy, then I was definitely on the low road.

  I grabbed at one notion to keep me afloat and wrapped myself around it.

  Stop Leesa Tulu!

  Single-minded revenge charged with the unholiest of blood lusts kept me moving past a swell of Mo-Vay punters, freaked and milling like animals, and skirting round a knot of Twitchers.

  I located the maelstrom at the top of a villa set, half a click back from the canal. Tulu wasn’t getting too close to the action.

  More Twitchers circled her building at a frenzied pace. If Ike was calling their moves, he had a major hard on.

  I ran scenes in my mind. Frontal assault? Subterfuge? Distraction? Decoy? None of them seemed right and I could die waiting to find the correct way. If only I had a decent weapon. A firestormer. A semi. If only I had the damn Cabal knife!

  I thought about trying to ambush Tulu using my mental links, but passed on the idea immediately. Whatever small talents I possessed were trivial and untried next to hers.

  Besides, she’d harvested spirit sap from a shed full of shamans. Who knows how juiced she’d got on that cocktail? Or how strong it had made Marinette.

  I shuddered at the memory of the evil loa. Marinette had an acute case of total vice.

  No, I needed to stay with what I did best. Rash and reckless.

  Make that rash, reckless and vengeful! Ike would find out just what it felt like to have his flesh liquefied.

  As I crouched, watching for an opportunity, the Twitchers guarding the doorway suddenly deserted their post and ran towards the back of the villa.

  Unable to believe my fortune I loped awkwardly across the alley, flinging myself in through the open door. Stairs - straight ahead, living room - to the right.

  I took the stairs.

  A quick recce at the top revealed rust pus seeping through walls. Otherwise the place was empty aside from some unhappy vermin. Murmurs, though, drew me out toward an enclosed balcony. These villas must have been top of the range in their day. Balconies, en suite sans and auto-dim on the windows. The window dim had failed years ago leaving the glass door with a kind of smoky smudge.

  I tugged at the slider and felt the suck of the pressure change. Crouching down, I peered cautiously around the sliding door. Through the crack I saw Tulu outlined, staring north to the canal. I could practically feel the chi-stream launching from her towards the water. She had two Twitchers guarding either end of the balcony to deter climbers.

  A noise from below drew me back to the top of the stairs. I stuck my nose around the balustrade expecting a Twitcher. But it was Ike, fully kitted in exoskel and combat hood and wedged into a mobile command plinth. The skel rippled on him, wheezing and murmuring. The hood had to be running the Twitcher command.

  Roo’s killer.

  He lifted the hood to get a proper look at me.

  I wanted to rush down to him and pulverise the puny body under the skel. As if guessing my intention, he murmured something into his pickup.

  Pain jarred my mind.

  Where the hell . . . I glanced back. The balcony door was open. The two Twitchers had pierced my shoulders with large, spiked clamps.

  I gasped for breath as they jerked me off my feet, and a second inferno of pain lit through me.

  Parrish on a spit!

  More like Parrish spitting!

  Following on the heels of the second pain came a second wind of animal hate and fury - a rush of numbing endorphins. It sent my senses into hyper-reality.

  ‘Bring her here,’ ordered Ike coolly, patting the base of the plinth.

  They stepped down in unison, with me strung between them. At the bottom they dangled me like a crucified puppet in front of him.

  I could see it in his face. Ike wanted to chat.

  I tried to think across the top of the pain.

  What was his weakness? The skel shielded him from any bodily attack. That left his neural webbings and face, and only while the hood was up.

  One chance.

  I gave him my best high kick, my sprained foot catching underneath the side of the helmet, knocking it askew. I didn’t even wince.

  The Twitchers jerked me backwards but I kicked again, just connecting, booting the hood clean off his head.

  He screamed and spasmed as the neural sponges tore free of his neck and skull.

  I screamed as the Twitchers dumped me.

  They both fell to the floor, writhing and frothing with seizures brought on by the withdrawal of Ike’s neuro-ghost.

  I rolled clumsily away from their feet and squeezed the clamps off. Then I crawled over to the sponges, renting the filaments.

  GET UP! the Eskaalim urged.

  Ike was already moving, up out of his plinth and running on skel-fed legs.

  I chased. Damaged foot, bleeding shoulders, dizzy.

  Stay with him. Stay with him. A mantra.

  I did at first. But eventually my injuries slowed me to a weaving hobble. I staggered from one alley to another not even sure that I was still going in the right direction. Like it always had, only sheer stubbornness kept me upright and moving.

  Overhead the thrum of low ’copter noise filled my senses. I gazed upward. Two Priers playing chicken.

  What the fok were the bastards doing?

  I wanted to spit at them but my tongue wouldn’t coordinate. Couldn’t they see what was happening down here? Where were the rescue crafts?

  I hunched my shoulders against their inhumanity and stepped doggedly on.

  In the end, I didn’t have to find Ike. He jumped me as I skirted the base of a fibre optic tower and slipped in a large puddle of blood dripping from a body suspended above. We rolled together in it.

  He got his arm around my neck and with the added strength of the skel began to crush my windpipe. It should have broken my neck. It should have ripped my head right off. But I caught the glint of the fibre optics thrusting up behind us as he squeezed and I forced us into another roll.

  We s
lammed together into the tower and he screamed as the wet, freshly torn back of his head and neck adhered to the glass. He tried to kick me away but I flung myself straight back digging my feet into the ground, forcing him against it. The skel began to contort as it made contact with the tower, strangling him alive.

  BONUS!

  I wedged him fast as he kicked and gasped.

  It was quicker than I hoped.

  Then the kicking stopped and I collapsed against him, breathing heavily.

  When I was recovered enough to right myself, I tore his glasses off, compelled to see into the face of the man who had made the Pets and the ma’soops, as if it might somehow explain what he had done.

  His corpse stared, unblinking. Literally. The guy had no eyelids. Underneath the line of his eyebrow ran a blurred arc of incomplete symbols.

  A cold, altogether unhealthy tremor ran the length of my overheated body. I suddenly knew where the two little flaps of flesh sitting in a box in my gun safe belonged. I now also had a pretty good idea who Ike was working for.

  The tattoo was a quod mark for a life sentence. You only got that for crimes against the media. You only got bailed out from that when the media decided you’d be more useful working for them.

  I’d assumed Ike’s backers were privateers. Other gang lords doing their dirty stuff in someone else’s backyard, maybe even planning a coup. I knew that the Twitchers were black-market meat. Stolen. Hijacked. Whatever. Even the presence of an operational ’Terro could have meant more stolen goods anything.

  But this . . . there was no doubting the connection. No wonder Ike’d been able to maintain a power step-down large enough to run the veiling device.

  He had media cooperation. Which meant . . . the media and the Militia were propping up an entire operation based on totally immoral genetic experiments, i.e. murder.

  Now there was a headline.

  I was no saint but I believed and tried to uphold basic human dignity. I’d left Vivacity and come to The Tert to escape the media’s intrusions and controls over people like Irene. I figured that even the bent and broken, the down and dirty, got one small kickback for living their miserable lives in their own stink hole - the media and their Militia buds couldn’t touch them.

  The worst they could do was voyeur from above.

  Well crush my delusions!

  I slumped backward. From my blood-occluded horizontal view I watched the glass tower tractor Ike’s body upwards, stripping pieces off the skel as it went, then flesh. The whole process was like an animal being skinned and deboned.

  I stayed there as long as I could stand it.

  His death wouldn’t bring Roo back. Or change what I’d just learned about my world. It sure did nothing to ease my guilt or my anger or my grief. But at least I knew Ike wouldn’t be engineering any more freaks. For himself or anyone else.

  Most of me wanted to stop then. I think I could have even died - given a moment’s peace.

  But a stubborn, determined sliver wouldn’t let me off the hook. I hadn’t finished what I set out to do, and finishing had somehow become more important than anything else.

  Later, my compass implant and sheer bloody-minded endurance got me back to the door of Tulu’ s villa. I was nauseous with pain and fluid loss but crazy to stop the voodoo witch. She was still up there. I knew because I could feel Marinette’s power.

  Driven by the thought of the loa, I crawled up the stairs and peered clumsily through the smoky glass of the sliding door. When it opened of its own accord, I sprawled inward like a kid caught eavesdropping.

  Tulu’s eyes flickered in my direction, but her look was distant, inhuman. Marinette was riding her and the loa was pissed off.

  Blood pooled beneath me. My blood. It wet my face. I wanted to lie down and drown in it but the stubbornness wouldn’t let me.

  Not yet!

  Tulu stalked over, her fingers twitching, her arms flapping again. She made eerie owl sounds and garbled a sermon of utter filth.

  When she got close enough I tried to kick her feet from under her. But my legs flailed weakly, as if they belonged to someone else. She seized the baton hanging from her waist and began to beat me across the hands and face - strong, hard whacks that cracked my finger and face bones.

  I moaned aloud, unable to do anything to stop her. As consciousness slipped, a blurred object leapt from near the doorway and clawed her face. She flung it away with irritation, anaesthetised to the pain of its scratches by the energy of her loa.

  The object landed awkwardly on the floor near my face.

  Loser!

  Tulu jumped on him, crushing his head hard into the floor. Loser went limp.

  I felt his presence leave me like someone had stripped off a layer of my skin. Mental and physical pain went beyond. It left me with the insane clarity of near death.

  I wasn’t going to survive this - I knew - but I could still make it hard for her.

  My mind fired off instructions.

  Distraction! If her attention stayed on me, not the Cabal, it might help them get more Cabal across and do what they needed to do.

  I just need to live a bit longer. There was only one way I could do that.

  With every last cell I embraced the Eskaalim.

  Keep me alive, I beseeched it. Keep me alive so she has to use her power to kill me! Keep me alive so they have time . . .

  Things grew grainy like I might faint.

  Please . . .

  The Angel reared before my eyes, triumphant, blood spilling in rivulets from its gold-red wings.

  Finally, human. The change will come immediately.

  It wasn’t a noble choice - noble didn’t have a place in my erratic last thoughts. Just stubborn perversity. Tulu and Ike and their media benefactors weren’t taking over my world, even if I had to turn werewolf to stop them. I’d set off down one path a long time ago and I saw no reason to turn back.

  ‘Take me!’ I whispered aloud, and waited.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘How could I resist an invitation like that, Parrish?’

  An amused and familiar voice seared a path to my scrambled brain. My eyes flew open.

  ‘You!’

  Daac had the Cabal knife pressed to Tulu’s throat, and a sardonic smile just for me. Relief didn’t even begin to describe how I felt. I opened my mouth again but the words stuck. My throat closed over and my skin itched.

  Convulsions started. The change had begun.

  Stop. I don’t need you now-

  Too late!

  I fought to keep it at bay, but the Eskaalim swarmed along a bargain struck a heartbeat too soon.

  I was drawn down a funnel of darkness blacker than charred remains.

  Parrish?

  The thought accompanied tiny, rough licks on my face, and an awful stench. Loser! I knew the smell even on my way to death. Mangy canrat fur.

  Parrish, I can’t help you any more. But another one who can is close by.

  His thoughts became faint. The tongue licking got weaker. A weight lifted. The smell went with it and sadness enveloped me.

  I opened my mind eyes and gazed along the ruby sand of an endless beach. Shadowy dunes hunkered behind me. I got to thinking about life.

  Did I want it? Would I still be human? Did it matter?

  Blood waves lapped at my feet. Behind me the dunes were fading.

  Large, warm hands touched me.

  Tug?

  Hi, boss!

  Don’t call me that! Roo called me that.

  I’d gotten Roo killed. He should have been with me, not left in charge. That was my job. What sort of a person was I?

  I took a step back toward the oblivion of the dunes.

  Fingers closed on my wrist. You can stop them. But you must want to.

  I snivelled a bit and sulked. Of course I frigging want to.

  A smile. Come on then, the healing will be the worst.

  Trusting the smile, I stepped forward into the sea of blood.

  The ba
ttleground that was my body twitched and trembled as if being kick-started. My system pulsed with an upheaval of electrical messengers telling my cells to transmute and heal. Then the pain took me somewhere else.

  ‘Parrish, wake up!’ A voice as hoarse and insistent as my body was sore and resistant.

  ‘Don’t nag, Irene,’ I croaked.

  I unstuck my lids and blinked my eyes clear. It wasn’t mum. We were on a balcony in Mo-Vay and Tulu and the Twitchers were gone.

  So was Loser’s body.

  Daac helped me sit up, leaning me back against the wall, dripping water into my mouth. His skin was warm and mine felt like scale.

  ‘Where’s Tulu?’

  ‘Got away in a Prier. But not without a reminder,’ he said grimly and showed me the bloodied blade of the dagger. He had claw marks down his arm.

  I sighed shakily. ‘Looks like she left you one as well. What about Tug?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shaman with big hands?’

  Daac shook his head. ‘No one here but you and me, Parrish.’

  ‘But he healed me.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re healed, yes. But not by any shaman.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded.

  He touched my scaled cheek - gently. I didn’t like it when Daac did gentle. I usually forgot all my reasons for not trusting him. His finger dropped to my chest and traced the line of my collarbone.

  Nice. But not really the time . . .

  He cleared his throat as though something had got caught in it. ‘Y-you changed. I saw it, a . . . shape-change. When you changed back you were healed.’

  That got my attention.

  ‘Crap I did!’ I sat up straighter, running my hands over my body. I felt like my skin had been removed and pegged on drying racks. Inside, though, was another matter. Inside I felt like I’d been chopped, minced, rolled and tossed many times over.

  His hand strayed to my stiff, dirty hair. ‘No one needs to know,’ he murmured. ‘We can keep it between us while we find out if we can reverse it.’

  My heart hammered a bit.

  He slipped his arm under my shoulder and squeezed some water into my mouth from a tube. His breath fanned my face. Before I knew it he had wrapped both his arms around me and leant his head on my shoulder. ‘I’m just glad you’re alive,’ he said.