Rook

in it.
Defeated, Myfanwy turned her attention back to the man with the dangerous teeth.
    “You know, I really hate being coerced by means of a cliché,” shesaid. He looked at her without comprehension. “Come with us or we’ll kill your friends? Man, you might as well have just jammed a gun in my ribs during the strobe.”
    “Would that have worked?” he asked.
    “I doubt it,” said Myfanwy. “Now, if we’re not going to make a scene, what am I going to tell my friends about why I’m leaving?” He blinked nervously.
This is clearly a person experienced in the realms of supernatural warfare but who has had practically nothing to do with normal people. Especially girls.
    “That you would like to see my car?” he asked. She restrained the urge to laugh in his face.
    “Does that mean that I will be coming back?” she asked.
    “I don’t really know,” he fumbled. Despite the seriousness of the situation, she was beginning to feel a little sorry for him.
    “I am not telling them that I want to see your car. I am not sixteen, and we are not in the musical
Grease
. I’ll tell you what. You leave. I will go back and dance for five minutes, and your goons can keep an eye on me. Then I’ll pretend to receive an urgent message from work and I’ll step out to talk to your friend.” Razormouth considered the matter and then nodded and left. His friends kept dancing badly.
    Five minutes later, Myfanwy left the club. She’d shrugged off her conversation with the toothsome bald guy and, seized with a sudden reckless fatalism, had danced briefly with one of the goons. Now outside, she looked around and saw neon light glinting off a shaved head.
    “Rook Thomas,” he said, smiling his smile.
    “Nameless Irritating Man with Aggressive Teeth,” she said, smiling hers. “So, where’s your friend?”
    “Just across the street, if you’ll follow me.” He offered her his hand, and bowed slightly in a manner that would have been normal in the Rookery but which drew whistles and cheers from the line of people waiting to go into the club.
    “Go for it, luv!” shrieked one girl. Similar (if more specific) words of encouragement filled the air, and Myfanwy felt herself blushing.They walked hurriedly across the street, and he opened the door of his car for her.
    “You’ve got a pretty shit job with this, you know,” she pointed out to him. He flushed uncomfortably, and nodded. “Still, you were very polite. Are you Belgian, by any chance?” He nodded awkwardly. “Thought so.” And she got into the car.
    M yfanwy settled back into her seat and took great care to compose herself before she raised her eyes to look at her host.
That will impress them,
she thought with satisfaction.
I am calm, cool, collected, and I have already mollified their flunky.
Then she saw what was occupying the rest of the limo.
    I am not going to scream,
she thought desperately.
I am not going to throw up. I am not going to faint. Even though these would all be exceptionally reasonable reactions to what is lounging in a tank of slime in front of me.
    The thing in front of her looked as if it had been flayed right before she got in the car. It was shiny with fluids that usually flowed exclusively beneath several layers of skin. The eyes were mismatched, one of them glinting a bright Teutonic blue that would have done Hitler proud, and the other so bloodshot that it was a stomach-turning orange.
    Chitin plates trailed delicately through the angry flesh, seemingly placed with calligraphic care. Rangy cords of muscles wrapped around limbs with alarmingly irregular ridges and spurs.
    In the mouth, there were white nubs of teeth that, although technically perfect in themselves, were just
wrong
. They jutted out, twisted in their sockets, and sometimes seemed to be in the process of migrating around the mouth. Shiny white canines snarled where incisors normally grew; a molar had been replaced with a bicuspid. The front teeth were missing, but as Myfanwy watched in horrified fascination, little white edges slid out of the gums. When the thing peeled back its lips in a horrible smile, the whole effect was jarring.
    But more than anything, it was the biological
presence
of the thing that turned Myfanwy’s stomach. She had not sought to probe it withher powers, but her senses spread out from her unconsciously and then recoiled violently when they touched the thing in the tank. In this creature, the connections that lay within every human