“Why are you doing me favours? And what do you expect in exchange?”

“For you to return the favour by influencing Scharley.”

“In what respect?”

“To reverse what happened, in order that I might return to my own form and my own world, the entire exorcism must be repeated as accurately as possible. The entire procedure—”

He was interrupted by the savage howling of a wolf in the undergrowth. And the ghastly screaming of the penitent.

They both set off at a run, and in spite of his corpulence, Samson couldn’t be overtaken. They flew into the gloomy thicket, making for the screams and the crack of breaking branches. And then they saw it.

Scharley was fighting a monster.

The huge beast—anthropoid, but covered in black fur—must have attacked him unexpectedly from behind, seizing Scharley with its shaggy, clawed paws in a terrible double nelson. With his neck bent so that his chin was sticking into his chest, the penitent had stopped screaming and was only wheezing, trying to keep his head out of range of the toothy, slavering jaws. He was fighting back, but ineffectively—the monster was holding him like a praying mantis, effectively immobilising one arm and seriously limiting the other. Despite that, Scharley was thrashing around like a weasel and elbowing the beast in its lupine face. He was also trying to land kicks, but his attempts were being thwarted by his trousers hanging down below his knees.

Reynevan stood petrified, paralysed by terror and indecision. Samson, however, entered the fray without a moment’s thought.

Once again, the giant moved with the speed of a python and the grace of a tiger. He reached the combatants in three bounds, punched the monster in its wolfish face, seized the astonished beast by its shaggy ears, wrenched it away from Scharley, twisted it around and kicked it, sending it flying towards the trunk of a pine tree, against which the creature slammed its head with a dull thud, showering needles all around. A human skull would have cracked like an egg from an impact like that, but the werewolf immediately sprang up, howled and launched itself at Samson. It didn’t attack, as one might have expected, with toothy jaws agape, but showered the giant with a hail of lightning-fast punches and kicks. Samson, unbelievably swift and agile for his size, parried and deflected them all.

“He fights…” grunted Scharley, as Reynevan tried to lift him. “He fights… like a Dominican.”