As Syd could not move, could not speak, could only watch in paralyzed terror as the two creatures hurtled forward on a killing collision course. They were inverse manifestations of the same primal power: one grotesque, the other divine. It was the very same power that raged inside him.

He watched, sickly wondering which side was the stronger.

In the very last moments before Nora was upon them . . .

. . . and she would pay, yes she would pay, the b.i.t.c.h who'd snuck in and torpedoed her plans, laid waste to her hopes and left her with nothing but bloodthirsty Vic on her tail. She would pay, and then he would pay, for abandoning her when she needed him most. These meat-visions burned in her hindbrain, already telegraphing the taste to her tongue and her teeth . . .

. . . and then there was only the blood and momentum, the moment of collision, the tangle of limbs. Then there was only that deathrush sensation of wading in, face-first, muzzle lunging for flesh. Nora used the sharp claws of her malformed paws to tear holes in the wolf-b.i.t.c.h's back as they snarled and snapped and rolled. She smelled blood, felt soft pelt and dermis tear.

The next blood she smelled was her own.

NO! A gushing divot, torn raw from her breast. Nora yowled, lashed out, took flesh in kind. They rolled again, locked on each other: jaws snapping as they slashed b.l.o.o.d.y ribbons from each other's flailing limbs.

And there was no thought, no time for thought, no percentage in thought at all. Just the purity of instinct and unmitigated rage. The deafening bloodthunder and the roaring in her ears. The enormous satisfaction of inflicting mortal damage. The excruciating payback of her own flesh, giving way. They rolled, and Nora felt herself under, then over. She lashed out at Jane's throat, missed, went under again.

And the b.i.t.c.h was strong, there was no doubt about it, the b.i.t.c.h was much stronger than Nora 'd believed. But the truth of that didn't entirely come home until she felt those jaws lock on the flesh of her cheek. She howled, tissue shredding, the meat peeling back, muscles slicing like cheese as fangs raked over bone, sending hot grinding sparks of anguish to brightly ignite in her horrified brain.

NO! screamed the dim voice of her human side, NOT MY FACE! NOT MY FACE! But before she could stop it, her left eye was gone: impaled and then squeezed till it squirted vitreous fluid and gore.

And then Nora went utterly, terminally mad; hind legs coming up beneath Jane's unprotected belly, razored claws tearing at the vulnerable flesh. She felt the abdominal walls give way, felt the agonizing tremors wrack the core of her rival. She didn't stop until the b.i.t.c.h was. .h.i.tting the high notes and the stink of open bowels was everywhere.

Then she rolled again, over ignoring the pain, wanting only to feast on the vitals she'd bared. Her adversary writhed in the red mud beneath her, thrashing and flailing.

Nora's half-face showed teeth all the way to the roots, the ragged lips pulled back in a sneer. She lunged for Jane's windpipe and almost nailed it, opening a bone-deep gash that ran the length of the jaw.

It was, in retrospect, a very stupid move.

But by the time she understood, it was already too late.

The pain didn't come for a full second, clearly separating itself from the rest of all creation. It came with a blast of hot breath on the hole where a very large piece of her throat used to be. Nora let out an agonized shriek, full of odd harmonics that whistled and sprayed. She screamed again, and the full pressure of the wolf's jaws came to bear on her trachea, punching down hard.

And then the world was shaking, shaking, a blur of motion and growling sound that burbled and roared and overwhelmed her battered to silence the thoughts in her head as the killing jaws clamped down on her neckbone: sawing it back and forth, snapping the nerves running up through its core, bursting the arteries and veins that supplied the brain with blood and drainage.

And she knew she could have won, but then the thought just went away; gone, along with all the pretty pictures she'd been saving for just this occasion. There was no cosmic film projector, replaying her personal highlights and lowlights. No award ceremony. No burning h.e.l.l. No G.o.dly affirmation of glory or shame. No Syd, no Michael, no Vic, no Nora. No pups of her own, and no childhood memories.

She'd always believed that, at the end of your life, G.o.d owed you a chance at understanding.

That chance disappeared, with her last dying brain cell.

And then, just like that, she was gone. . . .

36.

The Trauma Ward at Huntington Memorial Hospital was a state-of-the-art high-octane offshoot of Emergency Services, where pandemonium was the rule rather than the exception, and battle lines between life and death were drawn in deepest red.

Weeknights were slow, the vast bulk of public mayhem saving itself for the weekends, when a Friday or Sat.u.r.day night would routinely see the carnage from upward of a half-dozen shootings, stabbings, drug overdoses, and D.U.I. traffic victims side by side with asthma attacks, burn victims, and the periodic full cardiac arrest as some hapless senior's b.u.m ticker gave out.

Still, experience had taught that even on the deadest nights things could go from zero to one hundred in the time it took for the big gla.s.s doors to hiss open, the next gurney full of mangled humanity to roll in. And the men and women who staffed the ward-from the techs to the nurses, the interns and resident surgeons to the battery of on-call specialists-were battle-hardened adrenaline junkies, accustomed to fighting 'round the clock for their patients' lives.

They had seen a thousand forms of damage, faced death head-on hundreds of times.

But they had never seen anything like this.

She's not dead yet, was the thought that kept echoing through Tanya Martin's head, quickly changing to I can't believe she's not dead yet.

It was two thirty-seven when they brought the Jane Doe in. Tanya was the head ER nurse on the night shift, an attractive and intelligent five-year veteran of the Trauma team. She was twenty-nine, with a ready, easy smile and strong youthful features offset by a cascade of copper-colored hair and the clearest gray eyes. Only her eyes belied her age, bore witness to how much suffering she'd seen.

Tanya was by the front desk when the panicked, staggering man came stumbling through the door. He was soaking wet, semi-coherent and frantic, bearing a muddy, blood-soaked bundle in his arms. Tanya raced to him and grabbed a hold of the bundle, eased it down. She peeled back the folds of cloth, bit back a gasp.

It was a woman, or used to be. She was nude, semiconscious, and she looked like she'd been through a threshing machine. Tanya reacted instantly, calling a code yellow full alert and scrambling the team, then tried to keep her cool as she sussed out her condition.

It was beyond severe: a half-dozen lacerations of the face and torso, any one of which should have killed her outright. A deep cut along her chin, that hooked down and missed the carotid artery by millimeters. The jawbone gleamed, visible through a frothing sheen of b.l.o.o.d.y saliva. An eight-inch gash across her lower abdomen had eviscerated the bowel. Pink intestine looped and bulged from the hole. The blood loss could only be described as ma.s.sive.

Strangest of all were the deep puncture wounds that spanned her arms and legs and back. They were huge, ugly, brutal. Tanya recognized them instantly, though she had never seen anything this bad before. Bite marks. All over her body. Animal bite marks. Like a dog, but bigger.

Much bigger.

There was no time to waste. Diaph.o.r.etic shock had already set in: sweating tremors, heartbeat racing, body temperature and blood pressure perilously low. They got her onto a gurney and barreled down the hall, got her triaged before they even got her name, tagged her Jane Doe 114. They took X-rays and abdomen film and started IVs running even as they drew blood and sent it to the lab for blood-gas a.n.a.lysis, typing, and tox screens. The team worked frantically, creating a blood-spattered hornet's nest of activity around the dying woman. Heart monitors were set up, beeping out the ragged tempo of life; catheters and nasal-gastric tubes were run, draining off blood and waste fluid.

Trauma transformed into a hive-mind, a single cacophonous interlocking organism in blue scrubs and surgical gowns. Their mission was to get her stable: stop the bleeding, keep her breathing, suture the smaller lacerations, and pack the bigger stuff until they got her into surgery. There was blood in her mouth, fluid in her lungs. They suctioned and intubated her, running tubes down her throat to clear the pa.s.sage.

And that was when she went altered.

And started to fight.

Jane rolled her eyes, slipping in and out of oblivion.

Fear raced through her, tearing her mind in two. There was light and noise and yelling voices. There were hands all over her, doing things. Her human side dimly sensed that they were friendly, that they were only trying to help. But the other side of her was animal, and it was wounded. It wanted them to stop.

It would hurt them if they didn't.

Jane gasped, tried to warn them. Her mouth wouldn't work right. Something was in her mouth. The room fragmented, went black, came back again, bringing with it pain. So much pain. Molten agony blossomed in her belly, spread through her limbs and reverberated back, telegraphing torment. There were tubes in her mouth, tubes in her arms, tubes in her groin.

The smell of her blood was everywhere. It made her animal side crazy. Voices filled her head, strange frantic buzzings tortured her ears. Blood glued her skin to the sheet, dripped from the tips of her fingers and the corners of her mouth. Blood was leaking out of her at an alarming rate. She took another ragged gasp, tasted Nora on her breath.

"Look out!"

Tanya ducked as Jane's right arm came up, a wild roundhouse slash at the tubes anch.o.r.ed to her left elbow. It missed her head by inches, caught the rigging leading to the IV stand instead. The needle ripped out; the resulting tangle sent saline bags and stainless steel crashing to the floor. Her arm continued on its arc, as her hand grabbed the intubation tube and pulled it out. Brinks, the intern surgeon, looked up from packing the abdominal laceration.

"G.o.ddammit, keep her down!"

Simmons, the surgical resident, gestured to Tanya. "Hit her up! Secs-and-Pav, two hundred ceecees!"

Tanya nodded. Seconal choline and Pavulon, enough to paralyze a p.i.s.sed-off rhino for a good thirty minutes. She ran to the cabinet, pulled out a hypo, tore the bag open.

Back on the table, all h.e.l.l broke loose as Jane stiffened, back arching off the table and slamming down hard, her legs kicking and spasming. Four more orderlies came barreling in, grabbed on to her limbs, tried to pin her down.

"Jesus Christ, she's strong!"

"Is she f.u.c.king dusted, or what?"

"What does the tox screen say? Parker!!"

Parker, the lab tech, came running in. "Blood tox says negative, she's clean," he reported, "but that's not the bad news." He waved a chart in their direction. "We can't match her type."

"What?!"

"Just what I said, the lab can't match it! Her blood type is weird; I've never seen values like this!"

"f.u.c.k," hissed Simmons. "How's her bleeding?"

"Bad," Brinks said. "We're gonna need more units in here."

"Put her on the infuser, recycle her blood, and keep running saline until we get her matched." Jane's left leg kicked, catching the orderly square in the chest and knocking him back three feet. "And get some G.o.ddam restraints in here!" Simmons ordered, then shook his head. "She keeps thrashing like this, her guts are gonna be all over the floor!"

The orderlies grabbed the leather cuffs, began strapping her arms and legs to the operating table. Jane writhed in their grasp, and a low growling sound issued from deep inside her chest.

"What the f.u.c.k is that?"

"WHERE'S THAT G.o.dd.a.m.nED HYPO?".

"ON ITS WAY!" Tanya came back, swabbing the s.p.a.ce below Jane's collarbone. The needle punched home, deep into the subclavian artery. The drugs took effect almost instantly: Jane's limbs went limp, slacked off. Her head dropped and lolled to the side. The orderlies finished strapping her and looked up, out of breath.

"Okay, she's down."

"Get her on oxygen," Brinks told Tanya, "and talk to her. She's gonna be freaked."

Tanya grabbed the oxygen mask and positioned it over Jane's face. As she did, she checked her eyes. Jane's pupils were completely dilated, her gaze erratic, unable to lock. Fight-or-flight syndrome; Tanya sympathized. Secs-and-Pav was scary stuff; non-narcotic and incredibly potent, it paralyzed the body but left the mind completely conscious. It allowed them to work undisturbed, but for the patient the feeling was rather like being imprisoned inside his or her own skin.

"I know you can hear me," Tanya said softly but urgently, directly to Jane's ear. "We're trying to help you. You're gonna be okay, but you've gotta stop fighting us."

Jane's eyes spun, made momentary, fleeting contact. Tanya's words seemed to register, but the terror there was immeasurable. Tanya grabbed a sponge, gently dabbed Jane's forehead. All around her, the team labored madly.

The X-rays came back from the lab; Brinks took one look and flipped. "These can't be right," he said, pointing to the shadowy ma.s.s on the film. "Look at the shape of her heart."

Simmons looked up, scanned them. "Jesus," he said. "What the f.u.c.k is that?"

"I don't know, some kind of growth or something."

"What are her vital signs?" he asked.

Hines, the pulmonary tech, looked up from the charts. "Pulse one-fifty, blood pressure ninety-five over palp, oxygen saturation eighty-five," he replied. "She's slipping."

"Body temperature ninety-two and falling," Hillary, the OR nurse, reported. She looked at Jane. "s.h.i.t, she's going dusky."

This was seriously bad news. In the s.p.a.ce of a second Jane's skin changed color, drained from a pallid chalky-white to slate-blue as her circulation turned sluggish, unable to oxygenate.

The electrocardiogram started flipping out: the signal turning m.u.f.fled, arrhythmic, unsteady. The waveform on the screen was a ragged, asymmetrical horizon line.

"We're getting preventricular beats," Hines warned. "She's losing compression."

"Dammit!" Simmons hissed. "She's hemorrhaging. Do a pericardiocentesis. Drain her off."

The team switched gears. A large-bore needle was inserted into the chest cavity to drain the heart, restore compression. It didn't work. Jane's blood pressure kept dropping even as her heart sped up, desperately pumping. Lividity from stagnating blood mottled her flesh. Her breath was forced, irregular. The monitor continued to broadcast disaster.

Jane's neck veins began to bulge ominously.

"The bleeding's entered the heart sac," Hines said. "Must have lacerated the aorta."

"s.h.i.t!!" Simmons cursed. "All right, prep for direct cardiac ma.s.sage. We gotta crack her chest."

"With an eviscerated bowel?" Brinks said incredulously. "It'll kill her!"

"She'll drown in her own blood if we don't," Simmons countered, gesturing to the monitor. "It's my call. Do it!"

The rest of the team obeyed, shifting positions as suddenly extraneous members fell back and a tray of instruments was wheeled forth and readied. Cardiac ma.s.sage was exactly that: a last-ditch effort to save a life. Open the chest, reach in, and manually grasp the heart. Squeeze until the blood emptied from the sac. Release, let fill, squeeze again. Repeat until the heart took over or they pulled a sheet over the patient's head.

Tanya loaded another syringe, injected ten milligrams of morphine into the IV feed. Jane's eyes fluttered, rolled back in her head. Her left arm was unstrapped, pulled up over her head to expose the rib cage. "Bag her," Brinks told Tanya. "Regulate her breathing."

Tanya nodded, took hold of the bubble-like attachment beneath the face mask. She began counting and squeezing, forcing air into the lungs as Hillary moved in, swabbed the incision area with Betadine solution.

Simmons stepped over, took a scalpel in one hand, and with one fluid motion made a ten-inch-long incision between the fourth and fifth ribs, just beneath her left breast. Epidermis, membrane, and muscle tissue yawned wide, exposing the glistening slats of bone.

"Suction," he said. Suction was applied, sluicing away more blood. Simmons picked up the rib spreader, a device resembling a large stainless-steel set of salad tongs with the tines pointing out. Working quickly, he hooked them into the s.p.a.ce between the ribs and applied pressure, forcing them apart.

There was a hideous cracking noise as the ribs snapped and separated completely, creating a red, raw, fist-sized gap. The surgeon took a deep breath, then began working his hand into the breach-first his fingers to the knuckles, then the knuckles themselves. His hand disappeared to the wrist, blindly pressing into the cavity. Pushing the lung aside.

Reaching for the heart.

Deep in the darkness, Jane stirred, fought her way up from drug-induced oblivion. Something was moving inside her, violating her own healing process, weakening her grip on the animal.

Jane focused, piecing together the scattered remnants of awareness. Feeling returned, a billion needles thrusting through her deadened nerve endings. She hovered in the blackness, hesitating. To fully awaken was to fully experience the pain, and the pain was astonishing: a white-hot veil on the border of consciousness, like an aurora borealis of agony.

Jane was afraid. Her heart felt distant, leaden, slowing. Her thoughts skittered, refused to gel. Her b.e.s.t.i.a.l core howled in her head: maddened, writhing, tormented. If they didn't stop it would break free and kill them, kill all of them and herself in the bargain, like a dog with its leg caught in a steel trap biting the hand of its master. And there wouldn't be a thing she could do about it.

She had to break through and warn them, make them go away, make them stop, or they were all dead.

She had to cross over the line. . . .

"Dammit! I can't find her f.u.c.king heart!"