Other than his face, his body remained in other ways humanlike, but there was nothing human about his skin. It was char black and formed into a bumpy, almost barklike surface. Fissures broke open as he moved, revealing, as I’d noticed before, something deep orange with red overtones. His outer surface reminded me of nothing so much as film I’d seen of the active lava flows in Hawaii.

He touched me, a glancing blow on my hip. I slapped my hip to put out the fire and refused to look because although my face still hurt, as did the skin across my collarbone, my hip had just gone numb.

My fifth hit landed in one of those odd fissures in his skin, this one on his left shoulder blade, or at least where a shoulder blade would have been had he been human. It knocked him forward: he wasn’t immune to the laws of physics. My arm and hand were spattered by hot chunks of liquid that burned.

Remembering the finger that sank into metal, I knocked the hot splatters off me, but the skin beneath them bubbled up into blisters that hurt. Flores reached out, a longer reach than he should have been able to manage, and grabbed hold of the end of my wrench. Where he touched, the metal glowed orange, and the glow rapidly spread toward my hand. I let go of the wrench before the glow touched my skin.

The air was smoky now—and not just with burning fabric. All sorts of flammable liquids spill on the floor of a garage; although I clean them by pouring on cat litter or HyperSorb and sweep them up, there was enough residue here and there to react as he brushed past them, so that there were several small fires burning reluctantly on the cement.

I spent an anxious and weaponless few moments just getting out of the way of his jabs and kicks before I could get close to something else I could use as a weapon. I tripped over the crowbar he’d dropped, but didn’t pick it up: it was all metal, and I’d just learned that I wanted something that didn’t transfer heat as well as metal did. But when I tripped, I knocked the big mop over on myself and grabbed it as I rolled to my feet.

The big wooden mop handle made an okay bo staff, and I used it to keep him from approaching me while occupying him seriously enough that he couldn’t rip off another finger—or other body part—to throw at me. The wood kept catching fire, but if I swung it fast enough, the air put the flames out before it could burn much away. It was getting rapidly shorter, but I was only using the very end to poke him rather than using it like a baseball bat.