Dead Men's s Boots

If I went up I’d be cornered as soon as I ran out of stairs. At the bottom there was the street, and a slim but measurable chance of getting out of this.

What happened next was kind of a mixed blessing. The loup-garou came cannoning out of the door right behind me and hit me squarely in the back with its full weight, sending me tumbling down the stairwell head over heels. It meant I got to where I wanted to go a whole lot faster: unfortunately, it also meant that I reached the bottom in a sprawling heap, one arm twisted painfully under me: all breath had been slammed out of my lungs on the second or third bounce, so all I could do was lie there, sucking in air in a shuddering, drawn-out gasp.

By a happy chance I fetched up on my back, looking back the way I’d come, so I got to see the thing that was about to kill me for the first time in the light from the street outside. Despite its impressive size, the loup-garou padded down the stairs with an incongruous daintiness, slow at first but accelerating because the stairs were steep and built for two legs rather than four.

It was sleek and black – or maybe some dark shade that just looked black in the inadequate light – and it had the basic shape of a panther: more mass in the shoulders and forelegs than in the back, claws as long as the blades of Swiss Army knives, and with a tendency to carry its weight close to the ground. The head was more eclectic, though: the mouth was too wide, and studded with too many different kinds of teeth, to be convincingly cat-like. And the forehead was high, like a human forehead, like the dim memory of a human face stirring behind the bestial shape.

Just for a second, in the near-dark, it reminded me of a face I’d seen before.

When it got halfway down the flight of stairs it launched itself into the air in a graceful, almost lazy leap that would land it right on top of me. Unable to muster enough strength to move I tensed, balling my fists uselessly for a fight that wasn’t going to happen.

If the impact didn’t kill me, those claws would – and either way I wouldn’t get to express an opinion about it.

But the loup-garou’s leap ended prematurely as something came streaking in out of the night, jumped and met it in mid-air.

The new something was a whole lot smaller: the loupgarou massed around four hundred pounds and it had gravity on its side.