chosen one, no one else knows that.”
“Why can’t you leave me alone? Why can’t all of you leave me alone?”
Up ahead I could see someone naked, probably Benson, standing up at the reservoir. Doubtless, if anything went wrong here, he could open the floodgates and fill the spillway with a wall of water. Anyone in the path of the flood would be pulped. It wouldn’t kill us, of course, but it would be easy for Benson to follow the spillway down to the second reservoir and fish the bodies out to finish us off. A thirty-pound binturong stands little chance against a bear, but Benson’s hand on the trigger made sure even any mismatched combat that took place wouldn’t be a fair fight.
Mignon Emanuel, meanwhile, said, “You’re too special to be left alone.” She took another step forward and held out her hand, bending forward at the waist. “Your friend Arthur can leave, no harm will come to him.”
Myron was sniffling beside me. I liked the sound of some of this, but just to be safe, I had reached into my duffle bag. Assuming no one had pulled a switcheroo—assuming the maneuver I had practiced years ago I was still proficient at—I had pried off the cap at one end of the tube, and I could feel the wadded-up tinfoil inside.
“I’m not the only one who needs you, Myron,” Mignon Emanuel said. “Don’t let us all down.”
“I don’t believe you anymore,” Myron screamed, and punched her in the face.
For a moment we all stood frozen. It was not a very good punch—Myron would never have strong arms, and he didn’t really know what he was doing—but he did catch Mignon Emanuel completely by surprise. Finally, very slowly and deliberately, Mignon Emanuel said, “No one in a thousand years has struck me with impunity. I hope you will take it as a token of my esteem that I am willing to forget this has happened.”
“I hate you,” Myron screamed, and punched her again, more confidently this time, and right in the nose, from which descended a trickle of red.
Mignon Emanuel’s face darkened into something truly terrifying. Rearing up, she roared, “If you have drawn blood, the binturong will die.”
At that moment my senses became clouded—or, better, overwhelmed. I was ready for it, of course, or thought I was, but it was still a bit of a surprise, the powerful emanation from the tube. It was the emanation of death, the stench emitted from the bones of an immortal when his life has fled. I had counted on this stench, when the time came, paralyzing my opponent, but Myron and Mignon Emanuel both turned their heads immediately toward me as, in a great rustling of tinfoil, I drew out of the tube the bones of a tiger’s forearm and front paw, bleached a beautiful white and bound together with silver wire. If Mignon Emanuel, still drawn up to her full height, paused a moment there, it was not from terror or surprise at the miasma that filled the spillway; it was rather from the paralysis that accompanies a sudden realization. What she had realized just then I do not pretend to know.
And the bones were moving. Theoretically, when I had practiced this maneuver, the strike came smoothly as I drew the skeletal arm from the tube, like a samurai’s quick-draw iaijutsu strike, but the tube had been shaken around so much, things had shifted around inside, and I bobbled the draw, and even dropped the tube. But I was committed, and I swung the bones forward, holding the elbow like a club.
Mignon Emanuel murmured, out loud, “So that’s where that went,” just as the five claws struck her throat. Very few things are sharper than a tiger’s claws, and Mignon Emanuel’s neck exploded in a spray of red. Her face darkened again, just before it blanched, and I worried for a moment that she would be able to turn into a bear before she died—bears, as everyone knows, can keep fighting and killing even after they die. But her eyes rolled back, and she flopped over onto the cement ground. In death, as we always do, she assumed her true form, and her clothing exploded into scraps. From a distance, the wind brought me the sound of Benson’s startled cry.
“Listen, kid, we’re in real danger, he’s going to open the floodgates,” I said rapidly as I knelt by her corpse and set to work. Suddenly a battery of sirens began to sound,