Supernatural--Cold Fire Read Free Page B

Knocking?
Doesn’t get much more direct than that
, he thought, with another shake of his head.
    Distracted, Sam almost missed the growing shadow—or rather something dark rising from within the shadows. With a loud, brutish snort, the creature lumbered toward him, gathering momentum. In the fading light, Sam glimpsed the black bear’s head, and the fur pelt covering the shoulders in an uneven line above a man’s torso, with human arms terminating in clawed bear paws. Eerily the eyes and ears appeared to be human, the right one milky, as if it hadn’t adapted well to hybridization. The same creature that had tossed the police officer off the overpass, now on guard duty.
    Assuming—and hoping—the bear–human hybrid was blind in its right eye, Sam darted to his left. While the hybrid was fast, it relied on one bear leg and one human leg for movement and its gait included a lot of dipping and swaying, especially on turns. Sam imagined he could hear the mismatched bones in its legs and spine grinding together with each ungainly step.
    He moved beyond its blind spot to its rear and drove his right foot into the creature’s lower back, shoving it toward the fence and letting its own momentum work against it. With a grunt, the hybrid reached up with both arms to catch itself against the fencing, bear claws scraping against metal, seeking purchase. Approaching from the creature’s blind side, Sam raised the cleaver and brought it down in a two-handed grip. The blow jarred him momentarily before the blade severed the creature’s forearm above the bear portion of the limb. The key was to attack the unnatural joins. The fresher the hybridization, the weaker the connections between one species and the other.
    Briefly, the severed forearm dangled from the fence, claws snared in the gaps, before slipping free. The creature’s stump dripped blood, much less than expected for such a grievous wound. Which helped explain why bullet and knife wounds were ineffective. Whatever preternatural energy allowed the hybrids to live in the first place, it kept them ticking even after they suffered what should have been mortal wounds. A dozen Detroit cops had learned that lesson the hard way. Their instincts and logic had failed them. And yet, the key to destroying the hybrids was logical after all. The trick to their undoing was to, literally, undo the hybridization itself. In layman’s terms—or rather, hunter’s terms—that meant strategic dismemberment.
    Seemingly unperturbed by the loss of its right arm, the hybrid spun around and swiped at Sam’s face with its remaining bear paw. Sam ducked beneath the formidable set of claws, but the bear limb passed so close to his head that ursine musk filled his nostrils.
    Before the hybrid could recover its balance from the missed blow, Sam propped himself on his left palm and drove his right foot into the kneecap of the creature’s human right leg. The joint buckled the wrong way and, with an animal roar, the man-bear fell on its left side, mangled right leg high and dangling unnaturally—even for a hybrid.
    But the shattered right leg was not Sam’s target. He planted his foot just below the human elbow of the left arm and hacked off the bear paw, the tip of the cleaver sparking as it struck the busted concrete below.
    Undeterred, the man-bear curled its body upward, attempting to lash out with the claws on its one bear leg. With a backhand blow, Sam drove the butt of the cleaver’s handle into the temple of the bear head, just above and in front of a human ear. The one functioning eye rolled upward. The deep-throated bear growl turned into a groggy grumble of pain and confusion. Long enough for Sam to remove the head of the creature. Although the body continued to twitch with preternatural life and the bear’s jaws worked as if attempting human speech, Sam hacked the bear leg free of the human torso. Seconds later, the disparate pieces of flesh sagged and decayed eerily fast as the