The Crawling Runes

Belle tries to shoot out the tires of the Model T. It goes into a skid, turns sideways, and plows into a board fence. Terrified cattle force past it and run down the street.

A terrible scream echoes from across the hall. In another hotel room on the third floor, behind a closed door, a woman seems to be undergoing the tortures of the damned.

Richter snaps away from the window at the noise.

"Hell's teeth!" he says, and rushes over to the door. It is locked, so he shoots the lock apart with his Tommy gun.

Unless Belle and Sonny-boy are resolutely looking in the other direction, here's what they see:

A man in a white suit holds Shara, the winged girl, by the shoulders. The man is covered over his face and hands with dozens of tattoos; they look like Japanese writing. So thickly tattooed is he that his surface is more blue-black ink than skin.

Shara screams one more time, then withers, as though her flesh were draining from within. Her skin rapidly stretches over taut bones, turning a ghastly ashen gray at the same time.

New tattoos appear on the Tattooed Man's hands. These new symbols burn red-hot, lighting the dim room and filling it with writhing shadows. Writhing, because the symbols move, crawling like fire-heated spiders up into his sleeves, where their furious heat burns the cloth away. They settle around his shoulders, overlapping already existing tattooes, then give one final writhe to wriggle in, packed as tightly as sardines, between the symbols covering every inch of the man's flesh.

The man's eyes smolder with the dying glow of Shara's runes. As he turns to face Richter, fresh new black-feathered wings grow out of his back and unfold ...