Out of other options, I attacked. There had been no more than a fraction of a second between when he threw the finger and when I jumped off the car. His burning finger meant that I knew better than to touch him with my skin. The wrench I’d grabbed was a giant‑sized 32mm; it weighed about three pounds and gave me almost two feet of additional reach.

I got four hits on him, three with the wrench and one with the gun, and in that time, I learned a lot about him. He wasn’t used to his prey knowing how to fight back. He had never been trained to fight hand‑to‑hand. He was slower than I was. Not much slower, but it was enough for me to get in four hits. He was oddly sticky, and I lost the gun to him when it sank into his flesh to be quickly consumed and absorbed.

And, finally, nothing I tried seemed to hurt him.

He continued to heat up as we fought, and before I got the next hit in, his clothes flared up in a wall of flames, then drifted to ashes. His face had melted into something with eyes and a mouth, but no other features that I could pick out in the wavy blackness of his skin.

Other than his face, his body remained in other ways humanlike, but there was nothing human about his skin. It was char black and formed into a bumpy, almost barklike surface. Fissures broke open as he moved, revealing, as I’d noticed before, something deep orange with red overtones. His outer surface reminded me of nothing so much as film I’d seen of the active lava flows in Hawaii.

He touched me, a glancing blow on my hip. I slapped my hip to put out the fire and refused to look because although my face still hurt, as did the skin across my collarbone, my hip had just gone numb.

My fifth hit landed in one of those odd fissures in his skin, this one on his left shoulder blade, or at least where a shoulder blade would have been had he been human. It knocked him forward: he wasn’t immune to the laws of physics. My arm and hand were spattered by hot chunks of liquid that burned.

Remembering the finger that sank into metal, I knocked the hot splatters off me, but the skin beneath them bubbled up into blisters that hurt. Flores reached out, a longer reach than he should have been able to manage, and grabbed hold of the end of my wrench. Where he touched, the metal glowed orange, and the glow rapidly spread toward my hand. I let go of the wrench before the glow touched my skin.

The air was smoky now–and not just with burning fabric. All sorts of flammable liquids spill on the floor of a garage; although I clean them by pouring on cat litter or HyperSorb and sweep them up, there was enough residue here and there to react as he brushed past them, so that there were several small fires burning reluctantly on the cement.

I spent an anxious and weaponless few moments just getting out of the way of his jabs and kicks before I could get close to something else I could use as a weapon. I tripped over the crowbar he’d dropped, but didn’t pick it up: it was all metal, and I’d just learned that I wanted something that didn’t transfer heat as well as metal did. But when I tripped, I knocked the big mop over on myself and grabbed it as I rolled to my feet.

The big wooden mop handle made an okay bo staff, and I used it to keep him from approaching me while occupying him seriously enough that he couldn’t rip off another finger–or other body part–to throw at me. The wood kept catching fire, but if I swung it fast enough, the air put the flames out before it could burn much away. It was getting rapidly shorter, but I was only using the very end to poke him rather than using it like a baseball bat.

I managed to lure him into leading with the top half of his body and hit him in the middle of his forehead with the end of the mop handle in a lunge that would have done a fencing master proud. The wood sank a good four inches into his forehead and stuck there. When he jerked away, he took the mop handle with him.

He wrenched it out and threw his head back and howled, a noise so high‑pitched that it made my ears hurt. He bent double, and parts of his body stuck together, melting or melding. I took a chance and sprinted to one of my big toolboxes and grabbed a three‑foot‑long crowbar off the top. This crowbar had a big red rubber handle to protect my hands.

I was running back across the garage, crowbar held up and over my shoulder, when something really big flew past me, something large enough that the air disturbance in its wake fluttered my shirt as it passed.

It hit Guayota right in his center mass, scooped him off his feet, and carried him back five or six feet in the air before he hit the far wall and the floor at the same time. That wall was covered with a plethora of rubber hoses and belts hung in a semiorganized fashion. He set the ones he touched on fire, and a new wave of toxic smoke filled the air, as the thing that hit him fell to the ground with a dull smack that resolved itself into the motor from a ’62 Beetle that I’d had sitting in the office to be taken for scrap.

Adam was here.

A Beetle motor isn’t huge as motors go, but it still weighed over two hundred pounds. Even I don’t know all that many people who can fling an engine as if it were a baseball. But I didn’t look for him because–surprise, surprise–not even being hit by two hundred pounds had put Guayota out of the game.

He rose from the ground, covered in flaming belts and hoses that he shed as he moved. He was no longer even vaguely humanlike. Instead, he had the form of a huge dog shaped much like the dog I’d shot. His head was broad and short muzzled, and his ears hung down like a hunting dog’s. His mouth was open, revealing big, sharp teeth of the many, many category. The creature he’d turned into was bigger and heavier than any werewolf I’d ever seen.

This, this was the beast that had feasted on horses, dogs, and women next to that hayfield in Finley.

“Mercy is mine,” Adam said softly from somewhere just behind me. “You need to leave here, right now.”

“Yours?” The voice was still Flores’s, though liquid splattered from the doglike monster’s mouth to sizzle on the floor as he talked. “You took she who is mine. It is only meet that I take she who is yours.”

“Christy Hauptman is the mother of my daughter,” Adam said. “And I loved her once. She cared for me for years, and that gives her the right to ask me for protection from someone who frightens her. You have no right to her, no right to be here at all.”

The dog who had been Flores, who was evidently the Guayota my half brother had warned me about, stopped and tilted his head. The dog’s skin looked like it had when it was a human shape wearing it. On the dog, the charred, blackened crust resembled fur, fur that dripped molten and glowing bits of stuff onto the cement floor.

“No?” Guayota said, his voice an odd whispering hum that was almost soothing to listen to. “You are wrong. I found my love, who had been taken from me, and I celebrated the sun’s countenance, warmth, and beauty. I gave her all that I was, all that I had been, all that I could be.”

The hum rose to a hiss, and I shivered despite the heat because there was something horrible in that sound. It mutated into a howl that made my bones vibrate like wind chimes. The sound stopped abruptly, but I could feel the air pressure build up as if we were in an airplane climbing too rapidly.

“Then she left.” He sounded like the man who’d first come into the garage, almost human. Sad. But that didn’t last. “She left me, when I swore that would never happen again. Swore that never, once I finally found her, would I let her leave me.”

“That’s not a choice you get to make,” said Adam. “You are scaring her, and you need to leave her alone. I and my pack are sworn to defend her from danger. You don’t want to put yourself in my path, Flores.”

“I tremble,” Guayota said, smiling, his teeth white in the red heat of his mouth. “See?”