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The woman was already changing: had already changed, more like a stiletto blade snicking out of its sheath than like the slow, camera-friendly metamorphoses of horror movies. She seemed to stand up taller as her torso narrowed and elongated: at the same time her elbows and her knees bent and locked into a new configuration that a human being wouldn’t have been able to achieve without ripping a dozen bones out of their sockets. Hairs as thick as porcupine spines bristled on her flesh, like a cat’s hairs standing up when it’s making a squalling, spitting last stand.

Juliet struck out at the loup-garou but she was blinded by her own blood and the sleek, monstrous thing leaped over the wildly hazarded punch to land on Juliet’s shoulders. Its hands, long and slender now and ending in two bristling thickets of unfeasibly long claws, flashed in and out, raking at Juliet’s face. Another jump and it was away before her opponent could get a proper grip on it. Juliet staggered like a drunk as the loup-garou landed four-square in the dust and turned for another pass.

By now I was racing hell for leather towards them. There was no time to think it through. I stuck out my hand, grabbed a handful of something from the bushes to my left and tore it free as I ran. ‘Benedicite, domine meus,’ I panted under my breath, ‘hunc florem, et noli oblivisci –’ Coming from me it was bullshit, but it would have to do.

The loup-garou went low this time, diving«is ci under Juliet’s flailing guard and laying open her stomach with a scything kick from one backward-slashing foot.

But I was almost there now, and all I had to do was to lay my loaded foliage on the creature before she turned and saw me coming.

The surviving guy still on his feet, whose existence I’d completely forgotten, tackled me from the side and sent me sprawling, coming down on top of me. The force of the impact knocked a lot of the wind out of me, and before I could get it back I felt his fingers closing on my windpipe. His flushed, sweating face glared down into mine, his lips drawn back from clenched teeth.

I couldn’t get my right hand up to prise his fingers loose: the injury to my shoulder had left the entire arm too weak and too stiff to give me any purchase. But my left hand – the one that was full of greenery – was still in full working order, and since he obligingly came in so close, I threw it around his neck, hugged him closer still and butted him in the face with nose-flattening force.