Free Dragon Tears by Dean Koontz

paper ahead of it.
    The cop’s eyes had become so radiantly green, there seemed to be a light source behind them, a fire within his skull. And the pupils had changed, too, until they were elongated and strange like those of a cat.
    The dog’s growl became a frightened whine.
    In the nearby ravine the eucalyptus trees shook in the wind, and their soft soughing grew into a roar like that of an angry mob.
    It seemed to Janet that the creature masquerading as a cop had commanded the wind to rise to lend more drama to his threat, though surely he did not have so much power as that.
    “When I come for you at sunrise, I’ll break open your bodies, eat your hearts.”
    His voice had changed as completely as had his eyes. It was deep, gravelly, the malevolent voice of something that belonged in Hell.
    He took a step toward them.
    Janet backed up two steps, pulling Danny along. Her heart was hammering so hard, she knew her tormentor could hear it.
    The dog also retreated, alternately whining and growling, his tail tucked between his legs.
    “At dawn, you sorry bitch. You and your snot-nosed little brat. Sixteen hours. Only sixteen hours, bitch. Ticktock…ticktock…ticktock….”
    The wind died in an instant. The whole world fell silent. No rustling of trees. No distant thunder.
    A twig, bristling with half a dozen long eucalyptus leaves, hung in the air a few inches to her right and a foot in front of her face. It was motionless, abandoned by the whooping wind that had supported it, but still magically suspended like the dead scorpion in the souvenir acrylic paperweight that Vince had once bought at an Arizona truckstop.
    The cop’s freckled face stretched and bulged withamazing elasticity, like a rubber mask behind which a great pressure had been exerted. His green, catlike eyes appeared ready to pop out of his wildly deformed skull.
    Janet wanted to run for the car, her haven, home, lock the door, safe in their home, and drive like hell, but couldn’t do it, dared not turn her back on him. She knew she would be brought down and torn apart in spite of the promised sixteen-hour headstart, because he wanted her to watch his transformation, demanded it, and would be furious if ignored.
    The powerful were intensely proud of their power. The gods of fear needed to preen and to be admired, to see how their power humbled and terrified those who were powerless before them.
    The cop’s distended face melted, his features running together, eyes liquefying into red pools of hot oil, the oil soaking into his doughy cheeks until he was eyeless, nose sliding into his mouth, lips spreading out across his chin and cheeks, then no chin or cheeks any more, just an oozing mass. But his waxlike flesh didn’t steam or drip to the ground, so the presence of heat was probably an illusion.
    Maybe all of it was an illusion, hypnosis. That would explain a lot, raise new questions, yes, but explain a lot.
    His body was pulsing, writhing, changing inside his clothes. Then his clothes were dissolving into his body, as if they had never been real clothes but just another part of
him.
Briefly the new form he assumed was covered with matted black fur: an immense elongated head began taking shape on a powerful neck, hunched and gnarled shoulders, baleful yellow eyes, a ferocity of wicked teeth and two-inch claws, a movie werewolf.
    On each of the four previous occasions this thing had appeared before her, it had manifested itself differently, as if to impress her with its repertoire. But she was unprepared for what it became now. It relinquished the wolf incarnation even before that body had completely taken form, and assumed a human guise once more, thoughnot the cop. Vince. Even though the facial features were less than half developed, she believed it was going to become her dead husband. The dark hair was the same, the shape of the forehead, the color of one malevolent pale eye.
    The resurrection of Vince, buried beneath Arizona sands for the past year,