The giant's grip on my torso is crushing me, and I feel a warm trickle at my throat that somebody is telling me is blood. Who's there?

“Vic, fight against the shadow of the man.”

You know what's better than smelling salts to revive a woozy fighter? Setting his hand on fire. My hand “pops” on fire, illuminating me and the giant in the dim temple as we wrestle on top of the Baal statue.

“Flame on!” I gasp. I read that in a comic book.

I lay my hand on the muscled man's head. My vision is blurry, but I'm aiming for a spot right between his horns, in the exact center of his forehead, where there's a tattoo of the bull-headed man/god sitting on his throne, the very same throne where his minion is crushing me to death. Remember that gecko's can go straight up walls and crawl over ceilings upside down, so we've got one heck of a grip. When my pads latch onto his bald skull, he's locked in.

I tend to think of this monstrous man as a cos player, or an L.A. Raiders fan in makeup bringing his Chuckie doll to the game, but the horned man bellows like a bull, roaring in pain as the silver nose ring bounces on his upper lip. I am branding him, sinking my burning hand into the tattoo at the center of his head, searing him like a hot iron. I'm hurting him, but I'm also hurting myself, and I'm wide awake now, having fully recovered from the brink of unconsciousness.

“There you go, buddy, a little taste of purgatory for you.” In the back of my mind I want to look for the waitress carrying the sizzling hot plate, because this brute's forehead is cooking in my grasp. We're both burning, but I have the advantage that I don't burn up. It would be self-defeating to go to hell and burn up completely in a minute, so you've got to be able to burn long term, like buying a bag of charcoal briquettes that you can use to barbecue forever. My hand is burning, but not consuming itself while he's sizzling on the grill.

I feel like a bull rider, tossing on the behemoth man who's bucking and kicking, while I'm hanging on by one burning hand that sears him like a branding iron. I'm in the air, but am stopped from sailing into the broken pews behind us by clinging to him with a red-hot hand to his forehead. He thrashes and I bounce all over him and even bang my knees against the marble statue as he flails.

At last he screams a long, tortured wail. Demons are over dramatic, and they don't handle losing very well. He goes limp, and I drop down on top of him. With a hop I now sit on top of the Baal statue, watching him slide unconscious to the floor, where a trail of smoke rises from the raw, crimson burn mark in the center of his head.

From my perch on top of the Baal statue, where I'm sitting on the bull-headed deity, I see that the pews are in disarray, and that the temple prostitutes are gone. Any drug addict on the dram who is able to stumble out has left, but there are a few stragglers who are in another world, standing and swaying hunched over, staring in wonder at spots on the floor. I hears bells clanging, which tells me the watch has been alerted, and the cavalry is coming. Sitting on this bull god's head, I'd like to urinate on it, but in one of those unfortunate facts of biology, geckos don't urinate.

Scrambling down, I run on my two hind legs down the aisle until I reach the double ironwood doors of the temple. Looking through the open doorway I see glints of metal signifying the blades of swords and the tips of spears, glinting in the waning daylight. Horses—many horses—are clip-clopping their way to this spot. I close the doors and drop the bar. With a leap, I'm on the wall, and run along to the windows to seal them up, making certain every window is locked tight.

The sound of horseshoes clacking on the cobblestones grows closer, and the last peal of the bell has stopped, but still echoes.

I make a full circle, coming back to the altar where the giant man still lies unconscious, or dead, I hope. Slithering down the wall, I enter the sacristy behind the altar on a hunch, and sure enough, the room is packed from floor to ceiling with the dram, packed into tightly bound bales encased in rough cloth. It's the work of several minutes to drag it all out and pile it on top of the the unconscious minion of the bull god. I skitter over the backs of pews, whether upright, intact, fallen, or broken, to the nearest brazier, which I climb. I seize the flaming dish with my snout, and it burns like hell, but I'm used to it. The occasional hand on fire or mouth full of burning coals is like a vacation to me.

They are pounding on the doors of the temple. The knocks are solid, probably delivered with the butt of a sword. “Open up in the name of the king! You have defiled the temple of Baal the Possessor!”

“Mmmph pthh fffhr.” I've got a witty come back, but my snout is holding a hot bowl full of fiery coals and I can't speak. I skitter back to the bales of the dram more quickly this time, bouncing over the pew tops, perhaps because the inside of my mouth is burning and I feel like I'm swallowing fire.

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With a leap I land on the aisle in front of the piled drugs, which have got to be crushing the bull god's muscular lackey beneath them, and toss the whole dish of coals onto the piled dram. Like a float of overproof rum on a zombie cocktail, the heaped bales of the drug burst into flames. I've got to get out of here, because the dram is poisonous in the extreme, and I realize to my alarm that the drug is far more combustible, if not explosive, than I thought.

The pounding on the door grows louder, more insistent, but I am pawing over the floor rugs madly, leap onto the wall, and start climbing sidewinder fashion to get as high as possible as quickly as possible. I crawl across the wall over to the central spire, the tallest of the three, and am moving as quickly as I can. It's always thrilling to walk on walls, to be able to travel perpendicular to the ground, and I've found that walls are always cleaner than floors, and when I'm crawling upside down on the ceiling, it's almost hospital-level clean. But it's like I'm a fumigator who's set off a roach bomb, and I've got to get out of the building before the toxic gases of the burning dram fill the temple.

Higher and higher I go, sticking and peeling off the pads on my hands and feet. It's a giddy feeling to be up so high, but the pads on my feet and hands grip the smooth marble so fiercely that I'm supremely confident. To get to the bell, humans have to climb the spiral staircase, and I'm thinking that climbing hundreds of steps in a winding spiral to get to the bell tower would be brutal on a guy's calves, but geckos are tough, and I can leap from the balustrade to the wall and back again, skittering over the wall as necessary and skipping the steps completely.

I see the bell above me, with the clapper missing. I pop out through the opening in the tower and am awed by the sight of the entire city, the white salt flat beyond the city walls, the lined sandstone mountains beyond the gypsum lake, and the sea even farther out. Facing the temple lie the reflective pools of the royal palace, and its walls surmounted by parapets all covered in blinding white plaster. The brass bull of Baal stands near the steps of the temple pointing its horns up at me. Looking down, I am a long way up. For a gecko, scaling heights is as ordinary as breathing, but the human part of me is exulting. The soldiers are massed far below me, banging and hacking at the doors, and I can smell the smoke from the burning dram rising.

“Hey!” I yell, but no one hears me.

“Tuk-ur, tuk-ur,” I begin croaking, and the assembled soldiers beneath me stop as the sound carries over the city. “Tuk-urrrr, urrrrr,”

Now they are looking up at me, pointing with their swords and spears. They are massed around the bronze bull that stands at the top of the stairs leading into the temple.

“This is the temple of God the Empowerer,” I shout, “of Lord Riyel, and Saint Janith! Baal the false god will fall, and all those who worship him!”

I turn and my ringed tail hangs over the void, then slowly curves upward. A black, ashen ball emerges from my ventral slit and falls through the air, hurtling downward nearly two hundred feet. There are shouts far below as men scramble to get out of the way, and I turn and peer down from the bell tower to see the black orb the size of a cannonball hit the bronze bull statue in the head and splatter, sending a thick black spray over the soldiers massed at the doorway.

Geckos don't urinate, but we do defecate. Frankly, I don't even know how I was able to crap because I haven't eaten anything, not even a single moth.

I clamber over to the rope holding up a big red flag beneath the belfry, seize it with my mouth and use my small, sharp teeth to saw through it. Holding onto the rope with my jaws, I swing across the spire Douglas Fairbanks style, peeling away the banner, until I hang from the rope on the opposite end of the bell tower. The red banner of Baal the Possessor, emblazoned with the bull's head has been stripped away, revealing the emblem of God the Empowerer, a lightning bolt carved into the marble.

Shouts of outrage erupt from the soldiers at the temple doorway. With a yank, I tear the rope from its anchor and let the crimson flag of Baal tumble and sail downward like a plastic bag carried by the wind. Stepping hand, foot, hand, foot, and hugging the corner of the tower, I travel to the back of the spire, where unseen by the soldiers on the street or the growing crowd in the plaza, I make the leap straight across the gap to the mountain behind the temple—the two are that close. I scramble down the rock face in the shadow of the temple, and am gone before the soldiers breach the temple doors, unleashing clouds of toxic gas.

* * *

Someone knocks at the door. I am high above the warehouse floor, resting comfortably among the rafters. The interior of the warehouse is dark, but I'm nocturnal, so my night vision is very good.

“It's me. I know you're there.” The voice behind the door is a girl's voice.

Despite the temptation, I haven't been croaking the distinctive “tuk-urr,” which would be a dead give-away. How does she know I'm here? It's dark, and I've been slinking. Believe me, geckos are experts at slinking.

I listen for signs of others accompanying her, maybe using her as bait to draw me out, and look through the windows, but it seems that she's alone. I tread the rafter, walking the beam like a gymnast, but with a more secure grip, until I reach the wall. I'm still amazed at how flexible my spine is, so that my body can bend at a right angle to cling to both the rafter and the wall as I transition. I walk down the wall and across the floor, staying on my belly to remain low until I reach the door, where I rise up onto my hind legs to grasp the doorknob. What I lack in digital dexterity I make up for with grip strength, and easily open the knob.

When I see who is standing in front of me, I am stunned.