Read Masked (2010) for Free Online Page B

this body moves. That sense of total invulnerability rises up in me again, and I remind myself that this very feeling is probably what got Verlaine killed in the first place. If I have any advantage over my old friend, it’s that I understand the concept of limitations.
    I’ve got two good fists, so I go in swinging, pounding at the Ghoul King with everything I’ve got. He’s covered with stinking fur, but the skin beneath the fur is unlike other Ghoul skin. It’s like shale, sharp and grating. I can feel my knuckles scraping against it.
    The King’s still got one good hand, and when he gut-punches me with it, I am forcefully hurtled backward like a cartoon character. I arc over the bloody beach, remembering just before I slam against the sand that I can fly. Instead of slamming into the beach, I sort of skim across it, creating a rill of glass from the heat of the friction of the sand. I’m down again.
    Clarity again, like pure water, overcomes me. I can hear the waves and the Ghouls rampaging down State Street. I can hear the whipping of the news helicopters’ rotors and I can see and hear their newsfeeds, translating the satellite transmissions into sight and sound in my mind. Everyone is watching me. All eyes are on David Caulfield. The Wildcard.
    I sing to gravity and I’m buoyed up and again I rush the Ghoul King, looking for a vulnerability that neither Verlaine nor Captain Salem was able to find. Somewhere to the left of me I can hear the Captain’s ragged breathing; he’s still alive.
    I strike over and over, pounding the monster with fists made of pure momentum, and if he slows at all I can’t sense it. He’s swiping at me with those black claws but I’m able to stay just ahead of him. I’m learning his rhythms. I can see him as a collection of atoms, as a coherent energy system, as an expression of artificial DNA. All kinds of stuff. These perceptions keep me alive, but don’t give meany more advantage than that.
    We slug it out for long minutes; I can count the exact ticks of a watch on the wrist of a dead soldier. I hit the beach thirty-seven minutes and nine, ten, eleven seconds ago. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate—the everythingness of Verlaine is draining me.
    No, wait. It’s something else. I’m scanning my own body chemistry and I don’t like what I see. The RNA in my cells is beginning to revert to David Caulfield standard. Any minute now, Verlaine’s power will start to drain from me, and I’ll be dead. I’ll be a sidebar in a magazine article about the Milwaukee Massacre, which is what CNN is apparently already calling it.
    Move, dodge, punch, retreat. We’ve fallen into a rhythm. We’re up in the air now, I realize, a hundred feet above the beach. The Ghoul King flies with dire purpose, pushing off hard against air. I can’t keep this up. Gravity is tickling at my body now. I pull back and lurch downward, losing my grip on the sky for a moment. He kicks me in the face and I feel my occipital bone crack. Verlaine’s now-sluggish healing factor grudgingly repairs it.
    I am going to fall.
    The Ghoul King grabs me by the neck and squeezes. I manage to wrench my fingers beneath his, just enough strength remaining in me to keep my head from popping off, but I can no longer breathe and the world is going black. The Universe in all its manifold glory recedes and regular reality returns in muddled sounds, the smell of blood, and pain, pain, pain.
    The Ghoul King smells victory. He lifts me up to stare directly into my eyes, to show me the bleak, relentless intelligence behind his own. He opens his mouth and shrieks in victory.
    I stretch out my neck and bite off his tongue.
    In wild rage, he flings me away. I’m sailing through the air, swallowing living meat that tastes like rubber and acid. I’m a slave to physics now; with the last shreds of Verlaine’s clarity of thought, I plot the parabolic trajectory of my fall to earth. I tumble over and I can see the sand rushing