Melli Dorn didn’t wait for the brass whistle to touch the creature’s lips.
The salt-glass forewoman had spent twenty-five winters in the reverberatory kiln sheds of the Salt Ward. There, a split-second pause. Just then, a heat baffle cracked meant forty gallons of molten glass splashing across the annealing floor. In the kilns, men who paused to drop a damping gate ended up as charcoal on the lehr cars. She didn’t debate town law, she didn’t appeal to the memory of dead friends, and she didn’t wait for an enemy to establish a sound line of sight.
Before the double’s chest could reach full spreading, Melli threw her entire muscular weight forward across the corner of the carpenter’s workbench.
Her five-foot steel pinch bar—an eight-sided shaft of cold-rolled tool steel, an inch and a quarter thick, weighing eighteen pounds—swept through the damp air in a vicious, level arc. The flat chisel edge of the bar whistled as it cut the drafts. It caught the yellow lamplight in a clean streak of gray iron.
The steel struck the double square across the right collar bone.
The impact sounded like a sledgehammer striking an oak baulk. A dense, bone-shaking THWACK that sent a spray of lime dust puffing from the shoulder seam of the dark woolen sweater. The bone-shaking driving force tore the blackened iron clipboard from the creature’s left hand. It sent the metal frame clattering across the stone floor. Meanwhile, the brass signal whistle flew from its fingers and bounced…
