Machairi leapt over the coffee table, flinging himself at the snarling wolf. The wolf leapt to meet him, and the pair of them crashed together midair and dropped in a tangle of shadowy tendrils, flashing teeth and glinting knives.

Adrenaline flooded Dania's body, galvanizing her into action. She grabbed her backpack and jumped to her feet as the next figure in the doorway resolved into a male human. He grinned at her with yellowing teeth as a tawny-brown light flowed from the cards in front of his chest. The light formed into a cat the size of the wolf. The cat snarled, revealing a pair of canine teeth longer than Dania's thumbs. Acting on pure instinct, Dania flung her half-eaten bowl of ice cream into the cat's face.

The bowl hit the cat's head and clattered to the floor. The cat's long tongue swept out, licking the chocolate-and-caramel from its muzzle. Dania took the opportunity to sprint over to where Jake stood in the kitchen.

"Play your mantle!" she yelled. She didn't know exactly what that meant, since they hadn't had a chance to see the cards, but she knew from her time in the military that every god-gifted deck included a mantle designed to make the deckbearer harder to kill.

"Got it!" Jake called back, and the overhead fluorescents dimmed as shadows coalesced into tentacles that wrapped around Jake's body. His eyes disappeared into darkness and his cheekbones stood out in stark relief. Despite everything, Dania gaped as her teenage nephew suddenly appeared older, ageless, even.

Behind her, a canine growl faded into a yelp and a whimper, and Dania spun just in time to see the corpse of the oversized wolf dissolve into tawny-tan light that flowed back to the enemy deckbearer. The deckbearer merely smirked, and another stream of light flowed from his chest to swirl into a massive bear. The creature reared back up on two legs and let out a deafening roar. It was so tall, its head hit the light fixture, sending a shower of sparks cascading down around it and plunging most of the living room space into shadow.

Machairi hurdled himself into an aerial somersault and landed atop the bear's massive shoulders. His night-dark knives flashed in rapid fire sequence as he stabbed the bear around the face and neck. The bear roared and clawed at its attacker.

Something hit Dania like a freight train. She went down, hard, her shoulder and hip slamming into the thinly carpeted floor. A yowling snarl triggered some instinct and she managed—just barely—to get her forearm up to protect her face.

The cat. She'd forgotten about the big cat.

Enormous teeth sliced into her skin a heartbeat before she heard and felt the sickening crunch of her radius and ulna both breaking. A scream ripped from her throat, and her vision went white with pain and rage as she fought to remain conscious.

Can't give up! Can't panic! Protect Jake!

That thought—protect Jake!—galvanized Dania's system. Adrenaline surged through her as she reached into her pants pocket for the folding knife she always carried. While the huge cat raked razor claws down her sides, she flipped the knife open and reached up to ram it deeply into the creature's eye.

The cat jerked, and then collapsed onto her, its dead weight pinning her to the floor for a second before its corpse dissolved and flowed back to the deckbearer. He barely seemed to notice, as his eyes stayed locked on the epic battle between the giant bear and Machairi that raged a few feet away.

Fuck. This hurts. I gotta do something…

Dania's eyes fell on her backpack, lying a few feet away. She swallowed hard and reached her uninjured arm, snagging one of the straps and pulling the backpack close. Her hand shook as she set the knife down, and then used her teeth to hold the backpack while she unzipped it with one hand. Machairi's scream rent the air, but she didn't dare look up to see what was happening. She dug inside until her fingers closed about a small plastic case secured shut with a breakaway seal.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Her narcotics kit.

It wasn't, strictly speaking, legal for her to leave the hospital with the kit, but Noimoire City was what it was, and medical personnel often found themselves having to provide emergency lifesaving care in the worst of circumstances. Whether because of morality, or just a sense of apathetic corruption, hospital admin tended to look the other way when nurses and medics "accidentally" took home their narc kits…so long as they showed up to work clean.

Dania used her teeth to break the seal and popped the kit open. A cascade of syringes slid to the floor, all of them labeled with colored rings. She grabbed one of the morphine syringes and jabbed it into her arm, praying that the pain relief would hit her before she lost consciousness. At least her arm wasn't spurting. The cat must have missed her brachial artery.

Machairi screamed again, and Dania looked up to see an arc of black, glowing light arrow across the living room and drive into the shadow-filled kitchen. The bear roared its victory, and began stalking in that direction. The enemy deckbearer threw back his greasy-haired head and laughed.

Jake!

Without thinking too hard about it, Dania grabbed her two remaining morphine doses and used her teeth to uncap them. She pushed up to her feet, careful to make as little noise as possible. The deckbearer had his attention fully locked in on the bear, so she stepped closer, easing into the shadows left behind from the loss of the overhead light.

Nyx, if you're listening, you seem to like my kid. A little help would be great.

Dania tasted the edge of hysteria in her thoughts, but it was a distant sensation, like the pain in her arm and sides. The morphine must have started to kick in. She took another step toward the deckbearer, hugging the wall, where the darkness gathered. One step…another.

The bear let out a bellow and Dania struck. With a stuttering leap, she surged forward and threw herself at the enemy deckbearer's back. She stabbed frantically at the side of the man's neck and somehow, she managed to get one of her syringes into its target. She slammed the flat of her hand against the plunger, sending a full dose of morphine directly into the deckbearer's carotid.

He stumbled forward, then turned to look at her with wide eyes. Tawny light flowed from his chest to the ground beside her, but before it could fully coalesce into another creature, the deckbearer stumbled and sank to the ground.

The bear winked out of existence, and Dania looked across the kitchen island to see an unmantled Jake staring at her with wide, terrified eyes.

"Dani?"

"Pull your mantle back!" Her voice was little more than a croak. "He's not dead!"

"I can't," Jake said. "Not for thirty minutes!"

One corner of her mind, detached by morphine from the horror of the moment, wondered why. Everything she'd ever heard said that cards could be replayed quickly, so long as they came back up in the deckbearer's hand.

"Switch your hand, then," Dani said. "Find Machairi again. Something else if you can't!"

Jake made a gesture, moving the cards to the side. He touched one and Machairi reappeared, his knives glinting in the dim light from the kitchen.

"Dead?" he asked, and Dani shook her head.

"Not yet," she said. "I hit him with a dose of morphine, but I don't know how long he'll be down." As she said it, she looked around until she spied the bloody handle of her folding knife lying in a red smear on the carpet. It took a bit of concentration, but she very carefully walked over and bent to retrieve it, and then returned to kneel next to the collapsed deckbearer.

With a shove, she rolled him over on his back, and then without any fanfare, slashed her knife across his carotid, windpipe, and jugular. Blood fountained up, spraying her right in the face. A morphine-detached corner of her mind remarked that she should probably get checked for infectious diseases, but the rest of her didn't care.

It didn't matter if she got sick.

What mattered was that Jake was safe.

"I thought we didn't just kill people," Machairi said into the silence that followed the slowing of the deceased deckbearer's lifeblood.

"We don't," Dania said. Her voice sounded dreamy and exhausted, even to herself.

"What was that, then?"

"I didn't just kill him. I killed him to protect Jake. I killed him for my family."

Red-tinged darkness rose up from the edges of her vision, threatening to swamp her. Dani swayed, and did her best to carefully set down the knife before she fell on it.

"Dani!"

"Jake…call Berto…" Dania managed, or thought she managed to say. It was hard to tell. Oblivion swept over her like a wave and pulled her under.