Master of Smoke

acrid.
    And the werewolves laughed.
    It was an ugly sound, edged in a whipping chain-saw snarl. Studying them, David realized they were much bigger than Eva, even after her magical transformation. Muscle bulked beneath thick fur, and three-inch claws tipped their big hands. Judging from the grins on their fanged faces, they smelled Eva’s terror as clearly as he did.
    And it amused them.
    “What a pussy,” a hulking ginger wolf said to their evident leader. “She’s about to piss herself.”
    The leader shrugged powerful shoulders covered in a honey brown ruff. “She’s female.” To David, he added, “Looks like she won’t be much protection, Cat. Might as well surrender now. I may not be in the mood to be so nice later.”
    Eva’s snarl broke off, and she seemed to shrink from their mocking laughter.
    Protective rage screamed over David’s mind, so hot and intense his consciousness went white. He heard a sound in his mind, a furious roar, coming closer, growing louder, until it plowed into him like a physical thing that rocked him on his feet.
    Power blazed down his arm and into the blunt sword, igniting a blaze of golden light that raced along the blade from hilt to point, sharpening the weapon to a razor edge. The roar exploded from his lips as he swung the weapon up and leaped, an impossible bound that surprised even him as he cleared the ten feet to the dark-furred werewolf with the erection.
    His sword arced downward. The werewolf threw up a hand to knock away the blade.
    The sword cleaved the clawed fingers off the werewolf’s hand and buried itself in a thick, furred shoulder. He howled, more in horrified astonishment than agony.
    David hit the ground like the cat they’d called him, ripping the blade out of the werewolf’s body as the monster staggered backward. The werewolf grabbed his maimed, bleeding hand with his whole one. “You son of a—!”
    David spun, whipping his sword around in a furious stroke that cleaved through the werewolf’s neck. The creature’s head went flying, body keeling over to land in a heap of slack, furry limbs.
    “Shit!” yelled one of the surviving werewolves, a cry as much of astonishment as of rage.
    The leader’s lips peeled back from long yellow fangs, and his eyes flashed red in the darkness. “You’re going to die for that, fucker.”
    And they charged.
    SEVEN
    Eva watched in frozen disbelief as David roared a battle cry and slammed into the werewolves, his sword carving flesh, sending one wolf reeling back with a howl of pain. But another lunged for his throat, jaws snapping in vicious, toothy clicks.
    David ducked, dropping to one knee to shove his sword right through his attacker’s black-furred belly. The monster reeled back as David jerked the blade out and attacked the leader, forcing the big werewolf into an incredible upward leap to avoid the lethal stroke.
    The one David had gutted transformed in a flash of light, becoming a four-legged wolf the size of a black bear. The gut wound disappeared with the change. Eva blinked in astonishment. Despite the dream she’d shared with David, she hadn’t known becoming a wolf-wolf was really possible. She stored the idea away to try later.
    Assuming there was a later.
    Right now, she had to get her paralyzed body moving before those bastards turned David into Puppy Chow. The shame of their laughter stung, but even that wasn’t enough to break the paralysis.
    Then the four-legged wolf lunged at David, jaws wide, obviously intending to hamstring him.
    Eva’s paralysis snapped like a guitar string, and she charged.
    David leaped away from the snapping teeth as Eva reached down, grabbed the wolf by the scruff, jerked him up, and flung him twenty feet through the air as he yipped like a puppy.
    I probably should have eaten him, she thought, watching him sail into the moonlit kudzu. Nah. I’d just get hair balls.
    “You should have stayed out of it, bitch.”
    She turned to see the leader swinging three-inch claws at her face.

    Warlock had been pacing his lab when it hit—a wave of weakness that cut his legs out from under him and knocked him to all fours.
    He blinked at a line of gleaming silver cutting across the gray stone of the floor. It took his dazed mind far too long to realize it was part of the silver spell circle inlaid on the tiles.
    Something’s wrong with me. The thought felt fuzzy, as weak as the arms and legs that shook under him in wracking shudders. Finally dazed realization slid