the middle, and wildly hairy in places. The glow of the streetlights reflected in its red eyes, and showed its hide to be a mottled gray-green that seemed to draw in the darkness. When it crept closer, she smelled it, reeking of mold and spoiled things, the odor so strong Teri gagged as she tried to jam the wrong key in the lock.
“Diseased dog. Open damn damn damn. Please open.” The paper had just run a story about a delivery man attacked by a group of big mongrels on the city’s north side.
The creature scuttled to the middle of the street, cocking its head to watch as she dropped her keys and uttered a string of curses. It raised a bulbous lip, revealing a double row of jagged teeth covered with yellowish slime. Drool spilled down, sizzling like acid on the pavement in front of its clawed feet.
Teri crouched, feeling for her keys, looking over her shoulder at the thing, which she decided wasn’t a dog after all. Then she screamed as it threw back its head, howled shrilly, and sprang toward her.
Her fingers closed on the keys and she stood, tingling all over—from fear, and more than that.
The beast’s leg muscles bunched and it leaped—and in that instant, when Teri was so close to death, she came truly alive.
The car key extended, the head becoming a hilt that fit snugly in her hand, the ridges, teeth, and notches melting and stretching as the shaft turned into an elegant saber. Without even thinking, Teri performed a perfect advance-lunge, the point of the sword stabbing into the monster’s belly. It jumped back in surprise and growled, more acidic spittle dripping onto the pavement. There was a pattern to its growling as it paced furiously in front of her, scratching furrows in the concrete . . . Wait, was that—language! She could understand it?
“Curse upon you, World Guardian! You cannot keep my kind from overrunning this realm! I shall tear you apart, drink your blood, pick my teeth with your sword, and send your pieces to the Seven Hells!”
“This is insane. I must be on America’s Funniest Videos.” But Teri knew otherwise. She performed a balestra, a fencing maneuver she previously hadn’t known even existed. Jumping forward, she lunged, changed the rhythm of her footwork and slashed down, biting deep into what amounted to the creature’s sloping shoulder.
It howled again, the sound so shrill it cracked the glass of the streetlights and shattered her car windows.
“Oh, hell! Now how much is that repair bill gonna run?” Fuming, Teri employed a composed attack, incorporating a feint while the beast swept in with its claws, slicing through her blue silk peasant dress. The dress fell in tatters, revealing the chainmail bikini. “I shop at thrift stores, for the love of God! I can’t afford any more car repairs!”
The beast slashed again, and this time she was certain its claws had connected, but her skin was somehow unmarked.
“Curse on you, World Guardian!” the monster raged. It belched a cloud of noxious gas at her, the hot steam doing nothing more than making her curls go limp against her forehead. The beast’s breath had, however, melted some of the paint on her car’s rear fender.
“Curse on me? On me? I’m a friggin’ food reporter! I’m no World Guardian!” Well, she wouldn’t be a World Guardian any longer when she got home and took off the magic chainmail bikini. “And I’m not made of money, either! Stop wrecking my car!”
The beast’s claws dug a deeper rut in the pavement as it opened its maw wide and leaped again. She chose a compound-riposte maneuver, two feints this time, a disengage, a variety of clear tempo beats, and found that she was quite effectively slicing tic tack toe grids on its warty hide. Deep purple blood bubbled and hissed and added to the creature’s already awful stench.
“You may defeat me, World Guardian, but others of my kind will come.” The beast belched again, its horrid breath curling the back bumper and disintegrating a rear tire with a pop! “Destined to fight you, they will crawl up from the darkest depths and—”
“Leave. My. Car. Alone!” Teri wasn’t sure she’d ever felt such righteous anger before; it dwarfed her ire at Bob calling her Sugar Cookie, and Lang grabbing her knee. It fueled her swings as she came full-bore at the creature. The tact was called a forward recovery—somehow