Midnight

how you've heard about the project, but it isn't a bad thing. …"
    His voice trailed off, and he cocked his head as if to listen to the un-human cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar look of longing, visible even in the dim wash of light from the open trap, crossed Worthy's face.
    He shook himself, blinked, and remembered that he had been trying to sell his elixir to a reluctant customer. "Not a bad thing at all, Harry. Especially for you. You'll walk again, Harry, walk as well as anyone. You'll be whole again. Because after the Change, you'll be able to heal yourself. You'll be free of paralysis."
    "No, thanks. Not at that price."
    "What price, Harry?" Worthy asked, spreading his arms, palms up. "Look at me. What price have I paid?"
    "Your soul?" Harry said.
    A third man was coming up the ladder.
    The second man was listening to the ululant cries that came in through the attic vents. He gritted his teeth, ground them together forcefully, and blinked very fast. He raised his hands and covered his face with them, as if he were suddenly anguished.
    Worthy noticed his companion's situation. "Vanner, are you all right?"
    Vanner's hands … changed. His wrists swelled and grew gnarly with bone, and his fingers lengthened, all in a couple of seconds. When he took his hands from his face, his jaw was thrusting forward like that of a werewolf in midtransformation. His shirt tore at the seams as his body reconfigured itself. He snarled, and teeth flashed.
    "… need," Vanner said, "… need, need, want, need …"
    "No!" Worthy shouted.
    The third man, who had just come out of the trap, rolled onto the floor, changing as he did so, flowing into a vaguely insectile but thoroughly repulsive form.
    Before he quite knew what he was doing, Harry emptied the .38 at the insect-thing, pitched it away, snatched the .45 revolver off the board floor beside him, also fired three rounds from that, evidently striking the thing's brain at least once. It kicked, twitched, fell back down through the trap, and did not clamber upward again.
    Vanner had undergone a complete lupine metamorphosis and seemed to have patterned himself after something that he had seen in a movie, because he looked familiar to Harry, as if Harry had seen that same movie, though he could not quite remember it. Vanner shrieked in answer to the creatures whose cries pealed through the night outside.
    Tearing frantically at his clothes, as if the pressure of them against his skin was driving him mad, Worthy was changing into a beast quite different from either Vanner or the third man. Some grotesque physical incarnation of his own mad desires.
    Harry had only three rounds left, and he had to save the last one for himself.

30
    Earlier, after surviving the ordeal in the culvert, Sam had promised himself that he would learn to accept failure, which had been all well and good until now, when failure was again at hand.
    He could not fail, not with both Chrissie and Tessa depending on him. If no other opportunity presented itself, he would at least leap at Shaddack the moment before he believed the man was ready to pull the trigger.
    Judging that moment might be difficult. Shaddack looked and sounded insane. The way his mind was short-circuiting, he might pull the trigger in the middle of one of those high, quick, nervous, boyish laughs, without any indication that the moment had come.
    "Get off your stool," he said to Sam.
    "What?"
    "You heard me, dammit, get off your stool. Lay on the floor, over there, or I'll make you sorry, I sure will, I'll make you very sorry." He gestured with the muzzle of the shotgun. "Get off your stool and lay on the floor now."
    Sam didn't want to do it because he knew Shaddack was separating him from Chrissie and Tessa only to shoot him.
    He hesitated, then slid off the stool because there was nothing else he could do. He moved between two lab benches, to the open area that Shaddack had indicated.
    "Down," Shaddack said. "I want to see you down there on the floor, groveling."
    Dropping to one knee, Sam slipped a hand into an inner pocket of his leather jack, fished out the metal loid that he had used to pop the lock at the Coltranes' house, and flicked it away from himself, with the same snap of his wrist that he would have used to toss a playing card at a hat.
    The loid sailed low across the floor, toward the windows, until it clattered through the rungs of a stool and clinked off the base of a marble lab bench.
    The madman swung the