He ducked my wild swing, caught me by the arm on my way past, swung me around and let me go. I flailed backwards across the terrace and slammed up against the wall of the house. He came after me, pulled back a fist easy as that and jabbed me in the nose.
Something burst; for a moment I was blind, blood poured down into my mouth. I inhaled it, choked, and then he was on me. He grabbed me in a headlock and started punching me in the ribs.
I stamped down on his instep and heard his bark of pain. In the second he was off balance I got my foot up against the wall behind me and shoved myself off it.
The pair of us shot staggering across the terrace, still clasped together. We went down the steps to the garden tangling in each other’s feet, overbalancing, and fell full length. Before I could get my bearings he was on top of me and shoving my face down into the dirt.
He was bigger and ten times stronger than me. Earth pressed on my eyelids, earth filled my mouth. I couldn’t breathe.
I almost went with it. I almost relaxed all my aching muscles and let him guide me down, among last year’s leaves and small winter-dreaming creatures, between long-lost treasures and tiny curled bones, into the dark earth. But the wild heat of him pressing against me, his breath harsh in my ear: that night in my apartment surged up inside me and all I could think was, with a roaring fury that ignited every cell in my body, Not this time.
I got my knees under me, heaved myself up and over onto my back, and spat a burst of blood and dirt into his face. He jerked backwards and I got a foot in his stomach, shoved him off me, scrabbled away and up. He twisted to his feet like a cat and came charging at me, but I dug my heels into the ground and somehow this time I stayed standing. I grabbed hold of him and clung on.
We lurched in circles in the near-darkness like some grotesque monster, many-limbed and grunting, fumbling blind. There was a nightmare slowness to it all, feet sinking and sticking in mud, hands clawing at hair and cloth and skin. My breath was bubbling and rasping; his was harsh as an animal’s, I felt his teeth press against my cheek, and even through the blood clogging my nose I would have sworn I smelled his wild pine scent. He was trying to knee me in the balls and I was bashing uselessly at the back of his head but neither of us could get enough distance, or enough purchase on the shifting ground, for a proper blow.
He changed grip, grabbed me by the thigh and lifted me right off my feet. But I had an elbow around his neck, and when he slammed me down on my back I took him with me. In the same second that the wind was knocked out of me I heard his skull hit a rock, right beside my ear, with a terrible squelchy crack.
I lay still, fighting for breath. He felt like a sack of wet cement holding me down. High above me misshapen gray birds flickered against the black sky and I thought they were the last thing I would ever see, but at last I managed to gasp in a great whoosh of air. I flailed at him, scrabbling and shoving, till I heaved him off me and dragged myself onto my knees.
Slowly, inch by inch, he pulled himself up onto his hands and knees and turned his head to look at me. His eyes were huge and solid black, alien, and there was blood running down his face from a big gash in his forehead, spreading rivers of it, dark and glossy in the dim blue-white light. He made a deep snarling noise, lip lifting, and clamped one hand around my wrist.
I punched him in the face. His hand fell away from my wrist and I went at him with both fists, swinging with all my weight behind it, hammering at his head, grabbing his hair to slam his face into the ground. I didn’t even feel my knuckles splitting; I could smash through living rock, I was strong as a god and inexhaustible. He was still making the snarling noise and I was going to make it stop, he was never going