across her armour without drawing blood. He tried stabbing at her again, but she was much too fast. She gripped his wrist and twisted. The knife fell and she hit him twice and he wobbled, and she took hold of the back of his head and sent him sprawling across the floor.
“Told you you should have walked away,” she said, and her fingers grew to claws.
Mauk groaned, turned over, and looked at her. He was still smiling. She didn’t like that. She was used to people dismissing her when she was herself, when she was ordinary old human Amber, but not when she was like this. When she was like this, she demanded respect.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Mauk, “you think you’re winning this little exchange? There’s a lot more to beating me than hitting me a coupla times.” He got to his feet. “See, when I kill, I like to … play. And my playmates, well … they just do whatever I tell ’em. Ain’t that right, my friends?”
The corpses stirred, and all the dead people in the rest stop slid out of their booths and stood, and Amber heard some distant part of herself scream.
ALL HEADS TURNED and dead eyes opened. Amber backed off as the patrons came at her, their faces blank and splattered with their own blood.
“Stay back,” Amber warned, shoving the waitress. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare—”
They grabbed her and she cursed, struggled. She didn’t want to hit them, didn’t want to hurt them, but they were dead, they were already dead, and it was too late for them so she started slashing with her claws, punching, headbutting, and they kept coming, and now her arms were pinned and one of them had her by the throat and they pushed her back, this solid mass of corpses working as one, and they forced her into a booth and started crawling on top of her until she could barely breathe.
“Get them off me!” she screamed. “Get them off!”
Through the tangle of limbs, she watched as Mauk put the claw hammer on the table. Then he stepped back, taking a small pouch from inside his boiler suit. He dipped his fingers in, drew out a handful of black powder, and crouched. Amber lost sight of him, but she knew what he was doing. He was making a circle.
“We’re gonna be taking a trip,” he said.
“I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
He stuck his head up into her line of sight. “Hey, you be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you. The Shining Demon only told me to bring you to him alive. Now there’s alive, and there’s barely alive – I don’t much care which one it ends up being.” Then he ducked down again.
She listened to the soft hiss of the powder. There were six or seven people lying on top of her, but they were still. They didn’t even breathe. Her eyes settled on the claw hammer. She tried to reach for it.
Mauk stood, put the pouch back into his boiler suit, and slid into the seat opposite. He pulled the hammer a little closer to him.
“Your parents were after you, ain’t that right?” he asked. “Yeah, I heard all about your folks and their friends. They actually wanted to eat you? That’s messed up – and I should know. But you evaded them – you, a sixteen-year-old kid, evaded a bunch of demons a hundred and something years old. Not only that, you killed the representative, smushed that overrated pile of crap Shanks, and you’ve managed to stay ahead of the Hounds of Hell.”
He whistled in admiration. “I mean, they’d have caught you eventually. It’s what they do. Astaroth sets the Hounds on you, they don’t give up till you’re caught, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You don’t fight the Hounds. You can’t beat ’em. Never heard of anyone managing that. You can’t hide from ’em, neither. They got your scent. But look at you. You’re still running. That says something about you, little demon. Says you are not to be underestimated. Under different circumstances, I would have been honoured to have stalked and killed you.”
He put a pair of handcuffs on the table. “But, seeing as how I’m gonna be delivering you to the Shining Demon, I gotta take precautions.”
The corpses moved on top of Amber, and they stretched out her right arm, pinning it to the tabletop.
“You’ll be wearing these,” said Mauk. “I don’t like to do it. I was in chains when they caught me and I didn’t much like it, and putting shackles on such a beautiful beast as yourself seems to me a crime of some magnitude. But I ain’t gonna underestimate you.” He opened the cuffs, then laid them to one side. “And with that in mind I gotta think about those claws of yours. No telling what manner of mischief you could get up to with those things. So we’re gonna have to do something about them, too.”
He picked up the hammer as the corpses flattened her hand fully against the table.
Amber started to panic. “What are you doing? What are you going to do? Tell them to let go of me. Tell them!”
Mauk’s free hand pinned her thumb. She turned it into a claw, tried to slash at him, but he laughed, and raised the hammer.
“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t. I swear I—”
“This little piggy,” said Mauk, and brought the hammer down.
Pain rocketed through her and Amber screamed, tried to kick and flail, but the weight of all those bodies on top of her made that impossible. Tears came to her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. The pain was so immense that she almost didn’t feel him singling out her next finger.
“No!” she cried. “Please!”
He didn’t bother saying anything this time. With a happy smile on his face, he smashed the bones in that finger, too.
“You bastard!” Amber howled. She was sobbing. She was actually sobbing. “You bastard, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll rip your—”
The third finger was smashed and Amber lost her words to the screams that were being ripped from her throat. The fourth followed. Then the fifth. Finally, the corpses released their hold on her. She tried to retract her arm, tried to clutch it close to her, but to do so it’d have had to pass through the tangle of corpses. She held it in mid-air while she cried and struggled to breathe.
Then the corpses moved again. They had her left hand in their grip.
“No!” she screamed, trying to keep it underneath her, jammed between her chest and the cheap upholstery. But now they were turning her, turning her on to her back, and as her left arm was being pulled out of the tangle her right arm was being pulled in, and her broken fingers jolted and sent fresh waves of pain straight into her thoughts, blinding them, freezing them, slicing through them and leaving them in tatters. When the wave crested and her thoughts became her own once more, her face was pressed tight into someone’s torso, and she could feel the surface of the table beneath her left palm and Mauk’s grip on her thumb, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
The hammer found its target and she gasped.
It found its next target. And the next one. And now she was screaming once more, but it didn’t change anything, because she only had two fingers that weren’t broken and Mauk quickly reduced that to one. Amber fought the urge to puke. If she puked, she’d choke on her own vomit.
“And this little piggy went wee, wee, wee, all the way home,” said Mauk, and smashed her little finger.
While she screamed, the corpses climbed off her. One by one, the weight lessened, and she could turn her head now, and breathe in lungfuls of air to help her cry. Someone – Mauk, probably – had her hands in his. His skin was rough. Calloused. She barely felt the handcuffs slide around her wrists. The last corpse climbed off her and she sat up.
“There,”