Mahlia threw up the stump of her arm. A coywolv bit deep. She screamed. Suddenly, a roaring filled the air. The coywolv was jerked off her and blood rained down. Howling and yelping. A hurricane of movement. The coywolv that had been attacking her legs evaporated into a whirl of fur and showering blood. Mahlia curled into a ball as the roaring increased, shaking the world, louder then war.

Suddenly everything went silent. Mahlia scrambled to her feet. All around, torn and twisted coywolv bodies lay scattered.

Amid the carnage, Tool stood tall. Battered but vital, covered in blood. His machete dripped with gore. Mahlia clutched at her wounded arm, staring at the transformed battleground. All the coywolv were torn apart. One of them lay against a tree, broken and whimpering. One was ripped in half. Another had its head cleaved open.

Tool knelt down over the carcass of the last.

With his machete, he pried into its body, then set the blade aside and punched his fist through the coywolv’s ribcage. A second later, his hand emerged gripping the heart of the beast, and Tool bent his head to feed.

Mahlia felt a chill. As quickly as the place had become a battlefield, now it was nothing but a slaughterhouse. They were all dead. Every single one of them. In seconds, Tool had torn them all apart. The carnage was astounding. Worse than what soldier boys did, and a thousand times as fast. She’d never seen anything like it.

She must have made a sound, for Tool looked up at her, blood dripping from his muzzle. He eyed her wounds. She could see him evaluating her.

Doctor Mahfouz would have rushed to her and clucked and worried after every scratch and bit of blood. Tool simply glanced at her shredded arm, scraped face, and clawed body, and dismissed it all.

“You truly believe you can reenter the city?” he asked.

It took a second for the half-man’s words to sink in, and then Mahlia got it. She wasn’t alone. This warrior monster was with her. Her heart leaped. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t powerless. She had a chance.

“Can you do it?” the half-man asked again.

Mahlia hesitated, remembering the terrors of her previous escape, the panic, the huddled hiding places, the nights spent in murky drowned buildings, then nodded. “I got out, didn’t I?”

“It will have changed.”

“I can get us back in. My mother, she had places where she hid her antiques, before she sold them. There’s places we can hide. And there’s ways through the buildings, if you can swim.”

Tool nodded. “So.”

He straightened and went over to the coywolv Mahlia had chopped with her machete. It still writhed on the ground, whimpering and baring its teeth. With a swift motion, Tool snapped its neck, then set his grip on the animal’s body. His muscles bulged.

The coywolv’s ribcage shattered like matchsticks.