The hag screeched like a giant gull, spat at me, and kept going. It didn’t work.
I grabbed a new paper, wrote another curse, and threw it at her. The curse of twenty-seven binding scrolls had worked for me before. The hag clawed at the paper. It pulsed with green. Strips of paper shot out and fell harmlessly to the floor. They should’ve tied her in knots. Damn it!
The car was feet behind Jim. Please make it! Please!
The hag clawed at Mr. Dobrev’s neck.
I grabbed a pickle jar and hurled it at her head. It bounced off her skull with a meaty whack. She howled.
“Get off him!” I snarled.
Jim leaped through the broken window. The Charger rammed the opening, right behind him, and stopped, its engine roaring, wedged between the wall and the wooden frame. Stuck!
I grabbed another jar and jumped on the counter. The hag screeched in my face and I pounded her with the jar. “Get off him, you bitch!”
The Charger snarled. The metal of its doors bent under pressure. The car was forcing its way in.
The jar broke in my hand. The pickle juice washed over the hag. She clawed me, too fast to dodge. Her talons raked my arms, searing me like red-hot knives. I screamed. She let go and I saw the bones of my arms through the bloody gashes.
Jim released the boy. The child scrambled to the back of the store. Jim leaped to the Charger and hammered on the car’s hood, trying to knock the vehicle back. The Charger roared. Jim planted his feet, gripped the hood, and strained. The muscles on his arms bulged. I’d seen Jim lift a normal car before, but the Charger didn’t move.
I punched the hag in the head, putting all my shapeshifter strength into it. She wasn’t getting Mr. Dobrev as long as I breathed. The hag clawed at me again, screaming, slicing my shoulders, her hands like blades. I kept punching her, but it wasn’t doing me any good.
Jim’s feet slid back. A moment and the car would be through.
It was a car. I knew cars and Jim knew hand-to-hand combat. “Switch!” I screamed.
Jim glanced at me, let go of the car’s hood and leaped onto the counter. His knife flashed and the hag’s right hand fell off.
I dashed out of the store, jerked a mirror off Pooki’s driver side, and ran back in. The Charger was halfway in, its wheels spinning. I wrote the curse, slapped the paper onto the hood, and planted Pooki’s mirror on it.
Magic crackled like fireworks.
The car’s hood buckled, as if an invisible giant punched it with a fist. Its left front wheel fell off. Its hood bubbled up, as if another punch had landed. The windshield cracked. Something inside the car crunched with a sickening metallic snap. Water shot out through the hole in the hood. The roof of the car caved in. Both passenger and driver doors fell off. The headlights exploded. With another crunch, the entire vehicle shuddered and collapsed into a heap, looking like something with colossal teeth had chewed it for a while and spat it out.
Jim stopped next to me. He was carrying the hag’s head by her hair. We looked at each other, both bloody and cut up, and looked back at the car. Jim raised his eyebrows.
“The curse of transference,” I said. “This is everything I’ve ever done to Pooki. Except all at the same time.”
Jim looked at the ruined car. His eyes widened. He struggled to say something.
“Jim?”
He unhinged his jaw. “No more racing.”
• • •
BEING a shapeshifter had its disadvantages. For one, smells ordinary to normal people drove you nuts. If you burned something in the kitchen, you didn’t just open the windows, you had to open the entire house and go outside. It meant the dynamics within the shapeshifter packs and clans were unlike those of a human society. And by the way, most of those dynamics were bullshit. Yes, we did take some of the traits of our animal counterparts: cats had a strong independent streak, bouda—the werehyena—females tended to be dominant, and wolves exhibited a strong OCD tendency, which helped them survive in the wild by tracking and then running game over long distances. But the entire pack hierarchy was actually much closer to the dominance hierarchy of wild primate groups, which made sense considering that the human part of us was in control. And of course, the most important disadvantage was loupism. In moments of extreme stress, Lyc-V, the virus responsible for our powers, “bloomed” within our bodies in great numbers. Sometimes the bloom triggered a catastrophic response and drove a shapeshifter into insanity. An insane shapeshifter was called loup and there was no coming back from that road. Loupism was a constant specter hanging over us.
But right now, as I poured water over my arms to wash away the blood, I was grateful for every single cell of Lyc-V in my body. My gashes were knitting themselves closed. If you watched close enough, you would see muscle fibers slide in the wounds. It was incredibly gross.
Amanda was sitting on the floor, holding her son and rocking back and forth. The boy looked like he wanted to escape, but he must’ve sensed that his mother was deeply upset and so he sat quietly and let her clench him to her. Cole hovered over them, holding a baseball bat and wearing that tense, keyed-up expression on his face men sometimes get when they are terrified for their families and not sure where the danger was coming from. Right now if a butterfly happened to float past Cole on fuzzy wings, he would probably pound it into dust with his bat.
Mr. Dobrev was staring at the hag’s head Jim left sitting on the counter. He’d walked around the store for a minute or two, surveying the damage, and then come back to the head and stared.