The door of the closet stood slightly ajar, and the gray light of early morning slipped through the narrow gap.įantastic. I lay in my closet, wrapped in a blanket and holding a butcher knife. Michelle was the only one who had escaped. I wiped those bouda bitches off the face of the planet, because the world was a better place with them gone. I still remembered the way her skull had blossomed with red when the bullets tore out the other side. I had emptied a clip into Candy’s left ear. I knew this, because ten years after my mother took eleven–year–old me and fled halfway across the country, I came back and put two bullets through Sarah’s eyes. A dream grown from my memories, but still just a dream. The three–inch claws scraped bone and it crunched inside me like a snapped chopstick. I clenched up, curling my ten–year–old self into a ball. The bouda grinned at me, her malformed mouth full of fangs. Bones grew, muscles wound around them like cotton candy over a stick, hair sprouted, sheathing the new body, half human, half animal, in a coat of pale sandy fur dappled with telltale hyena spots. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sarah take a running start like a kicker before a field goal. Things become distilled to simple concepts: I was small, they were big I was weak, they were strong. The fear was still there, that sharp, hot terror, mixed with helpless rage, the kind of fear that turns you from a human being into an animal.

I knew it was a dream, because it didn’t hurt.

“Hit her again!” Michelle squeaked, her teenage voice shrill. Candy jerked me up by my hair and slammed my face into the asphalt.

Gunmetal magic by ilona andrews