I underestimated Vera. I had expected her to be surprised to see me, or at least to weep and shriek at me before she attacked. Instead she came after me immediately and without a word, arms spread wide. She swung her hands toward me as if trying to claw my eyes; I wondered why, because she was too far away for that to make any sense. Then about three thousandths of a second later those horrible little fingernail-filaments of hers snapped past me like taser wires, just missing my face.

Her toxin-tubes obviously weren’t just for close-up work.

So, I had a fireplace poker; she had, whipping from the fingers of either hand, six-foot jellyfish tendrils that could poison me. Vera lashed out again. I threw myself down as her stingers swept a jar off the shelf behind me. It crashed to the floor, belching broken glass and foul liquids, ejecting body parts in all directions. I had to jump over the corpse-hands, which immediately began crawling toward Vera. She snapped out both her arms at once. I dove under the nearly invisible strands and rolled, then jabbed with the poker when I was close enough, ramming it into her gut as hard as I could. It doubled her over but that seemed to be all: I was still staring at her when she yanked her hands back and tried to catch me in the trailing strands again. One of them got me, wrapping around my neck like a thread of burning napalm. As it tightened on my throat I could feel the ability to think running out of me like sand, the pain getting stronger, darker, like a powerful electric charge, no, like an entire eel, wrapped around my neck and squeezing the life out of me.

The surge of agony lessened. From the corner of my eye I saw Vera kicking at something. One of the hands from the broken jar was clinging to her ankle. She finally managed to shake it loose and turned her attention back to me, but by then I had my idea.