“Shit-aoww-aoww-aoww-aoww!”

Jules spent the next fifteen minutes soaking his throbbing hands in a bucket of ice water. Doodlebug was good enough to mop up the spilled coffee and sweep the broken china into a wastebasket.

“Do you want to call it a night?” Doodlebug asked.

Jules wiped his hands on his pants. “Naww. I’m sure Malice X ain’t restin‘ onhis laurels. Lemme try it a few more times.”

Doodlebug poured fresh coffee into two unbroken cup-and-saucer sets and handed them to his friend. Jules lined up back at the starting point. The big vampire took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind of all distractions. His hands still throbbed. What if he spilled steaming coffee on them again-? No; that didn’t matter. What mattered was what Doodlebug had promised him. What mattered was the fact that if he worked hard enough, his enormous bulk, the target of endless insults and humiliations over the years, could become an asset instead of a liability. Then Jules Duchon wouldreally throw his weight around.

Jules opened his eyes. “Are you ready?” Doodlebug asked.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

The train lurched into motion. But Jules didn’t lurch. He flowed along the path like a blob of mercury guided by electromagnets.No need to rush, he told himself.I know exactly how fast that train moves-I got plenty of time to make the intersection. Doodlebug’s words bathed his mind like a refreshing warm shower: Flow. Peacefulness. Connectedness. The cups and saucers he held in his hands weren’t heavy at all. There was no clatter, no nervous sloshing. They were part of his limbs, connected to him. Like the path was connected to him. And he knew the train like he knew the beating of his own heart.

He successfully passed the first intersection five full seconds before he was cognizant of having done so. The trestle bridge didn’t trip him up in the slightest. He passed over it without causing even a stirring in the coffee cups.

But then something changed. The train hit an invisible wall of rubber. Some evil outside force took control of his calm mastery and twisted it, slowing everything down.

“You-you’re changing the train’s speed! You can’t do that!”

“I most assuredlycan,” Doodlebug answered.

“No, you can’t! Notnow!”

“The bird that taps against the window, Jules. It always pops up at the worst possible time.”

“Fuckthe fuckin‘ bird!” He was losing it. The cups and saucers were cups and saucers again, not part of his hands. Their clattering sounded like the approach of an onrushing streetcar. The train sped up again. Then it slowed to a crawl.

Sweat fell into Jules’s eyes. “Take that bird and shove it up your-aoww-aoww-aoww-aoww!”

The passing train was caught in a deluge of falling coffee. The tracks sparked. The electrical discharge traveled almost instantaneously around the track to the control box, which shorted out with a sharp pop-pop-pop!

Doodlebug sat stunned for a moment. He stared at the smoking control box in his lap, then stared at Jules, who was fuming even more than the blackened, ruined wall socket.

“Well…” the somewhat embarrassed taskmaster said. “I guess we’ll be breaking for the night. No wonder my teachers had me juggling live rats instead of racing electric trains.”

“Wolfand bat. You can do it, Jules.”

Jules had hardly slept at all the previous day. He’d tossed and turned in his piano box, his mind crammed full with thoughts of Maureen(what does she know that she hasn’t told me?), Elisha Raddeaux(has Malice X found her? does he want to kill me even morenow?), the mysterious Veronika(what’s the deal with that screwy dame, anyway?), and his upcoming training session(what if I can’t hack it?). But now he was back in Maureen’s basement, naked as a jaybird, warily putting himself in Doodlebug’s manicured hands again.

“Shouldn’t we be trying this closer to where my coffin is?” Jules asked, rubbing the side of his nose. The more questions he asked, the longer he could put off having to make his first attempt. “I mean, we’re clear across town from where my slug-thingie’s gonna end up.”

Doodlebug didn’t appear to be swayed. “Think about this logically. In all your years of changing to a bat or a wolf, has itever made a difference how far you were from your coffin? Stop stalling. Let’s just give it a try, shall we?”

The little martinet was onto him. Jules sighed. Wolf and bat. Bat and wolf. He closed his eyes and concentrated. Full moon. Wings. Long nose, long fangs. Long, skinny fingers. Bushy tail. Tiny legs and itty-bitty talons. Powerful jaws. Hair. Ears like a rabbit’s, only not as fuzzy and cute…

The basement began to fill with smoke. Jules sensed his body waver and shimmer, going in and out of focus like the picture on an old vacuum-tube TV. For the briefest of instants Jules’s form was replaced by a creature from a Hieronymus Bosch phantasmagoria-a wolf’s head with a tiny rodent body, black wings sprouting from the tip of its long nose frantically flapping in a vain attempt to keep from falling over. It half yelped and half hissed before it lost its shape. Then it melted into an amorphous gray mass that splattered against the concrete floor with a resoundingshhglorp!

The floor was hidden by fleshy smoke again. When it cleared, Jules was lying on his back, gasping for breath and bathed in sweat.

“Jules!” Doodlebug rushed to his friend’s side and helped him sit up. “Are you all right?”

Jules coughed heavily, then shook his head to clear away the cobwebs. “I been-ahchem! — better. I been a wholehelluva lot better.”

“What happened? Why did you try transforming into both animals at once?”

“Ain’t that what you’ve been yammering at me to do these past two nights?”

“I’m afraid you misunderstood. You should only attempt one transformation at a time-when you have one form fully under control,then you create the other.”

Jules grabbed his shirt and mopped off his forehead. “You sayin‘ you want me to change into a wolf or a bat first, andthen pull a second animal outta that gray glop five miles away?”

Doodlebug appeared mystified. “Well…sure. I thought I was very clear on that.”

Jules dabbed off his glistening chest, then tossed the soaked shirt into a corner. “Lemme tell you somethin‘. There’s no way inhell I’m gonna be able to muster the concentration to pull a second animal outta my hat once I’m a bat or a wolf. With all those super senses rushing in on me, I got too much jumpin’ around my wolf-mind or bat-mind to pull together a second body. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

Doodlebug crouched in front of his friend, put his hand on his shoulder, and looked him directly in the eye. “I beg to disagree. Last night you achieved a special state of mind. Until I was able to distract you and shatter your concentration, you had succeeded in dividing your consciousness. You were paying equal attention to three factors at once.”

Jules’s stonewalling thawed into a wary hopefulness. “Huh. You really think so? I was doin‘ that good?”

Doodlebug smiled and patted his friend’s well-padded shoulder. “You were doingmuch better than ‘good.’ You’ll be able to reach that level again; I have no doubt. All it takes is work. Practice, practice, practice. Plus a little faith in yourself. Shall we try it again?”

Which animal was the easiest? It made sense to do the harder one first and then, when his concentration and mental faculties weren’t at their sharpest, attempt the simpler one. The wolf was a heck of a lot more similar to his normal form than the bat was. Transforming into a bat was downright alien, and more than a little creepy. Growing those long, long fingers, and then stretching his skin paper-thin between them… yuck. The bat was definitely the more difficult of the two.

Jules thought bat-thoughts. His old familiar body, with which he’d shared a decades-long love-hate relationship, melted away. Jules looked around the room, emitting his ultrasonic shriek more by instinct than by rational choice. He could sense Doodlebug’s lithe, graceful presence by the shape of the echoes that bounced off him. He tested his wings, beating them tentatively against the stubborn pull of gravity. No dice. Even with the extra vitality granted him by Doc Landrieu’s wonder pills, his bat-form was still too obese to become airborne under its own power. Why? Why couldn’t he become athin bat?