He was far above the car now, towering over it so that Drake might as well have been a pedestrian passing on the sidewalk beneath a five-story building.

  And that was when Peaks made a mistake he would not have made had he had more time to test out this morph. He glared down at Drake and the rage took control. Peaks roared down at Drake, roared in a voice that shattered the windshield and set off the car alarm. And as he opened his mouth and roared, a wave of liquid fire vomited forth.

  It was napalm, some rational corner of Peaks’s mind observed, like jellied gasoline, and it did not burn like a flame or even a blowtorch, it stuck and burned. Gallons of it sprayed across the vehicle, instantly peeling paint, dripping down into the car through the sunroof, melting seats and dashboard controls, wilting the steering wheel, sending up a cloud of stinking, oily black smoke.

  And Drake, too, burned. He burned and his flesh melted from his face, so that Peaks saw a flame-wreathed skeleton with blue eyes sizzling like frying eggs in their bone sockets.

  Drake calmly opened the door of the car, rolled out onto the grass of the baseball diamond, and kept rolling as the napalm clung to him, burning, peeling skin away, frying the meager fat, boiling his blood. Drake rolled, keeping his whip hand tightly coiled around him, then jumped up to run across the grassy field, dropping flaming gobbets of melting flesh as he ran. A long, narrow gap separated the land from the dock, a gap forming a sort of freshwater ditch between dock and land. Drake leaped and disappeared from sight.

  For a terribly long time, Peaks stared in furious horror, dimly aware that he had gone to great trouble to recruit a henchman and had now killed him.

  But then . . . a whip snapped up from the water and the end wrapped around a tall, lithe palm tree, and with a single, powerful yank, a dripping-wet Drake landed nimbly back on the grass.

  He was more skeleton than flesh, white bone clearly visible, his skull, his ribs, one entire shoulder. What flesh remained was the color of a steak left to burn on a too-hot grill. And yet, from the upper part of Drake’s chest, a tangle of chrome wires protruded. But perhaps most terrifying of all, Drake’s whip hand was now a snake’s skeleton, a long, flexible vertebral column and hundreds of circular ribs.

  “You’re alive?” Peaks roared, meaning to whisper.

  “You’ll have to give me a few minutes,” Drake said, sauntering quite nonchalantly back across the grass from third base, not even seeming resentful. “It takes me a while to regrow.”

Monster, Chapter 21