Unless I’m imagining things, that sounded sarcastic. Seems like Ammit is none too happy about being used as a murder puppet.
But even so, she can’t break free of the summoning contract, can she?
And the contract terms were…
The black eyes flick back to me. “I assume you are an enemy of my summoner, young man. In which case, I’m afraid to say, you will be visiting yet another underworld all too soon.”
Fuck.
I try to move, but my body won’t budge. It’s like the Etruscan lot all over again. I’m outmatched. So outmatched I’d laugh at the absurdity of it all…if a large pair of crocodile jaws, lined with crooked teeth, weren’t aligning themselves around my neck.
A strangled groan clambers off my tongue, the only voluntary sound I can produce, and bloody tears pour down my face. God, and I thought death by werewolf in the torture shack was bad. This is—
Green lightning thunders across the room and strikes Ammit in the chest. The creature careens to my left, toppling head first into the clock debris and the half-melted remains of the candles. The instant Ammit’s face smacks the floor, her magic releases its hold on my body, and I slump sideways. Only to end up in the arms of one Ella Dean. She lifts me, effortlessly, like I weigh nothing, and retreats toward the door. While Erica the witch, bathed in a vibrant green aura, storms up to the Egyptian beast with sparks dancing across her fingers.
“Hold on, Cal,” Ella whispers hoarsely, “I’m going to get you out of here, okay?”
“But, A-Ammit…” My words run over my tongue like water, uncontrollable. “Erica?”
“She’ll hold it off until we’re clear, and then retreat—Ow!” She winces. There’s a large clock splinter sticking out of her neck, weeping blood, but she shrugs it off and presses on to the door. “We can’t beat this thing, any more than we could beat Charun. We’ll have to call in ICM reinforcements and hope to god that Ambrose isn’t in on this shit too, or—”
Ammit rears back onto her feet with an ear-piercing yowl. Coal black eyes settle on the witch who challenged her. She stomps her lion paws on the concrete, shattering the floor to dust. My eyes, half-blocked by Ella’s arm, spot the quick flash of powerful magic drilling into the exposed foundation underneath the beast.
And then it happens. The entire building rumbles, stone floor quaking violently. The walls crack. First in the corners, rustling cobwebs. Next across the entire room, trailing up and up to the ceiling and arcing across the thick wooden beams supporting the first floor above us. Finally, the basement lets out a death rattle.
And collapses.
Two tons of broken building materials drop down on top of us.
A swinging support beam catches Erica in the chest and tosses her into the corner of the room. She slams into the wall with an audible thud, and the last I hear of her is a sharp, breathy gasp of pain. I don’t see if she lives. Or if she dies.
What I do see is what happens to Ella Dean, the woman cradling me in her arms like I’m something more precious than her. (But god, I’m not.) Ella struggles to dodge the oncoming wooden beams and boards and dented metal vents. Debris strikes the concrete all around us, small, sharp pieces nicking our skin, until, three steps from safety, one of the largest support beams in the basement comes down.
I watch it fall in slow motion, my brain hyperaware that my skull is less than a second from being crushed beyond repair. My muscles tighten, and I curl inward, pressing my head against Ella’s collarbone, a silent apology to Cooper and Riker and Desmond and Amy—because I failed. We failed. We weren’t able to stop Marcus from summoning Ammit, and now…
We’re going to die. The beam draws closer.
We’re going to fall here, and Riker and Cooper, none the wiser, will be mowed down by Ammit in short order. The beam draws closer.
We’re going to end up in the Eververse, moments from now, no more tangible than the shades Ammit just ate, and realize we left our friends to face death on their own. The beam draws closer.
And Ella Dean throws me.
My body sails through the warping doorway. I hit the floor—there’s a boom behind me—bounce twice, and skid across the concrete, ramming the metal worktable in the study. My broken ribs shift out of alignment. My damaged tibia snaps. At least four lacerations rip free from their stitches and cry blood. And my head whips back into the side of the table, in the exact same place that earned me a concussion on Lombard Street.
But I don’t care about any of that.
I spit swears at the floor until the pain recoils in terror, and then push myself to my knees to face the summoning room.
A pile of shifting rubble blocks the door. There is no Ella in sight.
She didn’t make it.
No. My breath hitches. No! This can’t happen again. Not to this team.
I slump against the worktable and try to stave off the gathering tears. Air clogs my throat, repelled by lungs that won’t inflate, pressed flat under the weight of Ella’s loss.
I grasp at straws: She could be alive. Trapped under the rubble, with a small air pocket to tide her over until I’m able to dig her out. She could be inches from the door, close enough for me to simply shove my hand through the dust and yank her free. She could be…could be…
Dead.
My vision wavers, spots dancing before my eyes. Pulse racing. Limbs shaking. A sob caught between my teeth. And—
Movement.
Tremors resonate through the rubble, weak at first, and then stronger and stronger, until broken bits of wood, clumps of drywall, chunks of stone topple off the pile and skitter across the floor of the study. A fist-sized hunk of concrete smeared with blood shakes free and rolls to a stop at my feet. The hole it leaves behind in the rubble heap is large enough for me to glimpse the thing tearing through the remains of the living room floor.
A sharp-clawed lion paw.
“Shit,” I mutter, and reach for the edge of the tabletop to heave myself to my feet. Ella, if you’re still alive in there, I send in prayer, please hang on. Because there’s no way I can help her right now.
Not as the lion paw breaks the surface of the pile, dust puffing up into the air, a billion ash-gray particles reflecting the dim light of the oil lamp on the table behind me. Not as Ammit suddenly thrusts her face through the hole made by her paw, those dark crocodile eyes landing on me the moment the fine debris settles again. Not as the Egyptian beast lugs the rest of her powerful body forward. Pulling once. Twice. Three times. Before the rubble gives way to an avalanche that loosens the broken beams enough to allow Ammit’s enormous form to enter the study.
Besides the prominent burn mark on her side from Erica’s lightning blast, there’s not a single significant wound on Ammit’s chimeric body. Just a layer of whitish dust and a few shallow splinters poking out of her thick hide. As she saunters into the room, she shakes off the lingering bits of rubble, opens her mouth, and…yawns. Like she’s bored. Like this whole nightmare—like dropping the goddamn ceiling on my friends—isn’t even worth her time.
My fear erodes in the face of fury. I stand up straight, numb to the pain in my leg, and search the tabletop for a weapon. (My handgun was lost in the fray, probably when I fell into the panic attack and started vomiting.) But my fingers find nothing except wrinkled, worn pages, a few short pencils, a basic blue Bic pen, and—of course—the oil lamp.
I grab the lamp by the handle and launch it at Ammit’s smug face. It shatters on impact, dousing her with what remains of the fuel, which ignites on the small flame and flares up into a brief burst of blinding fire. Ammit rears back with a surprised shriek, stumbling into one of the bookcases that line the wall. She tries to squash the flames by smacking a paw over the wisps of yellow creeping across the curves of her snout, burning the flesh from green to pink to black. But the bookcase implodes with an earsplitting crack when she flails one of her hippo feet into the center shelf, and dusty books rain down, beating against her skull. Several of the books tumble open, and
a few get too close to the wriggling flames.
The pages go up in smoke, and Ammit is instantly standing inside a ring of fire.
As the heat pricks at her feet, she trains those dark eyes on me again, and a familiar ache bores into the back of my skull. She’s trying to subdue me with the same magic as before.
“Like hell I’ll let you take me twice, you bitch!” Before my limbs lock in place, I take off for the secret door back to the main basement.
Ammit angrily snaps her burnt jaws, winding up to lope through the fire and give chase.
I emerge into the dank basement, focus on the stairs that seem much farther away than they did when I came down here minutes ago. My broken leg screams with each step. Sharp bits of my ribs bite into tender flesh. My skull throbs, dizziness pecking at my balance. Every part of my body wants to surrender, fall out onto the floor and just die already.
But I can’t give up.
For Riker, who’s already lost so much. One teammate in France. And possibly another right here in Aurora. Right here in this basement.
For Cooper, to whom I swore I wouldn’t embroil myself in the danger of this case, that I wouldn’t get myself killed. He shouldn’t have to attend to my funeral. He shouldn’t have to stand at my gravestone and ask why the hell I lied.
For those kids who suffered and died during the Etruscan case, led on by Marcus and Halliburton and their cohorts, tricked into performing such dangerous acts because the real practitioners involved were too cowardly to ever steal Vanth’s key themselves.
For Mac, whose murder still remains unsolved. Whose vampire killer is out there somewhere, prowling around. Perhaps in another city. Perhaps in another country. Waiting for the perfect time to add more kills to his bloodstained list.
No, I can’t give up now.
I sprint to the bottom of the stairs, clearing the banister as Ammit leaps through the secret door. Her broad chest skirts the narrow frame, tearing flesh from her ribs, but she doesn’t falter. She races up behind me, skin on fire, black and bleeding, scales peeling back to bone. The crocodile jaws are open wide enough to tear out my throat in a single blow, paint the room with my blood. Or simply separate my head from the rest of my body, roll my skull across the floor into one of the moldy boxes.
My hand grabs the staircase railing to swing me around without losing momentum, and I make to charge up the creaky steps toward freedom—when my busted tibia shears right through my skin.
My leg gives out.
I slip off the first step, plunging back down to the basement floor. My shoulder takes the brunt of the blow, the joint straining to stay in its socket. My jaw clips the edge of a baluster, knocking out two more teeth. I land contorted like a pretzel, vision swimming, blood pooling around my broken leg, leaking out my mouth, along with tiny bits of teeth.
Ammit scrabbles to a stop on the floor next to the staircase. Her jaw closes slowly, like she isn’t sure what to do, and she bends down, eyes blinking at me in bewilderment. The end of her snout nudges my head, but my body is so wracked with pain I barely feel it. I can’t move.
Face pressed against the floor, limbs twitching, breaths halting and shallow, all I can do is lie there and wait for Ammit to kill me.
I don’t look directly at her, but she’s so large and so close that I get a good image of her slumping body in my peripheral vision. She seems almost…disappointed? Like she wanted a good chase out of me. Like this was a game. And my fuckup cost her the opportunity to play in a way she hasn’t in years. (Or perhaps centuries.)
Scuffing her hippo feet against the floor in frustration, she turns her head toward the stairs, peering up into the darkness on the ground level. She pauses, considering what to do, then makes a motion that looks suspiciously like a shrug. Her crocodile jaws fall open again and sink toward my head. To finish me off. Before she moves on to her next target.
Tears gather in my eyes, but I don’t let them fall. I won’t give Ammit the satisfaction of watching me die in fear.
The sharp teeth come into view as her mouth surrounds my skull, the smell of decay enveloping my face.
This is it. This is really it. Where I die. How I die.
In this goddamn basement, casually butchered by an Egyptian death monster.
God, everyone, I’m so, so sorry. I couldn’t—
Blinding red light bursts into brilliance on the first-floor landing, and someone lunges down the stairs. A thin sword flickers across my field of vision and eats into Ammit’s lion leg, slicing clean through the thick muscle. The beast recoils with a scream so loud I black out for a few seconds, and when I come to again, ears ringing, a man in a DSI coat is standing between me and Ammit. In his right hand is a sword shrouded in a red aura that appears to be shaped like a much bigger sword. A phantom sword. In his left hand is the scabbard for the sword, and that too has an aura, this one in the form of a shield.
What I’m seeing doesn’t register until the man swings the sword again, nailing Ammit in the face. The blade makes contact at the edge of the aura, not the actual metal, and lobs off the end of her snout with laser-like precision. The dismembered flesh and bone lands in a squishy, gory heap next to one of the moldy boxes.
Ammit shrieks again and retreats to the corner of the room, shaking her head as blood cascades down her jaw and neck, pouring onto the floor.
The DSI man wheels around to face me, sheathing the sword in one fluid motion. The red aura dissipates as soon as the hilt of the sword touches the top of the scabbard, and the weapon is reduced to a recognizable object: a cane.
Nick Riker stands above me, face flushed, breathing hard. “Cal,” he murmurs in shock. “My god, are you okay?”
Holy crap, I think in my pain-induced haze, my captain has an enchanted fucking cane sword!
I try to make a coherent response, but all that emerges from my bleeding mouth is a gurgle. My captain sweeps me up with a powerful arm and settles me gently over his shoulder. Riker’s not the largest man in the world, but he’s bigger and broader than me, and he has the strength to show for it. Even with his injured leg, he manages to carry me up the stairs swiftly enough to escape from Ammit before she attacks again.
We reach the entry hall, and Riker strides out the open door, across the front porch, down the steps, and into the freezing night.
“Cal,” Riker gasps out, a hint of pain in his voice, “what happened to Ella? To Erica?”
I can’t bring myself to say I think they’re dead. “Trapped,” I manage to slur out. “Ceiling collapsed. Have to rescue them.”
Riker stiffens. Even without seeing his face, I know that visions of Norman Bishop’s death flicker through his haunted eyes. “Right. We’ll go back to save them as soon as we get this monster contained.”
“Ella said we n-need m-more ICM support.” Blood drips out of my mouth and streaks across my overturned face as I speak. “Need to hurry. Powerful. Auxiliaries here yet?”
Riker reaches the sidewalk and takes a sharp turn in the direction where the SUV is parked. “The auxiliaries are two minutes out. We can fall back the second they arrive and get the wounded, including you, to the office. I’ll stay here and coordinate the containment effort for this creature. I’m loath to call in the ICM at this point, but I don’t see what other choice we have. We need to send this thing back where it belongs.”
A slinking shadow near the front door of the house catches my eye.
“Captain, she’s coming,” I say. “You have to hurry.”
Riker glances over his shoulder as Ammit’s hulking form lumbers through the open door and out onto the porch. “Damn, this thing doesn’t give up, does it?”
“Erica blasted it in the side, and it s-shrugged the blow off in seconds.” I’m beginning to feel lightheaded, blood running into my eyes. “Strong. T-Too strong, Captain. For you. Even with the s-sword. Be c-careful.”
“Understood, Cal. I’ll—”
“Riker!” The scream slips off my tongue and is swallowed by the wind.
<
br /> Ammit takes a running leap off the front steps, shattering the wood underneath her weight. She soars ten, fifteen, twenty feet into the air, covering the whole distance across the yard and to the sidewalk. Riker spots her coming, but there’s no time for evasive action. He spins around and throws me—just like Ella did—and I glide through the haze before I thump to a stop in a deep snowdrift ten feet away. I land face up, which gives me the full horrifying view of Ammit tackling my captain to the ground.
Riker manages to pull his cane sword again, and the red aura flares up as Ammit’s claws swipe at his face. He blocks the deadly blows with the magic shield, but there’s nothing he can do to stop the creature’s bulk from colliding with his chest and sending him sprawling back into the dense snow cover. Ammit is heavier than a werewolf, and Riker sinks, slowly, surely, into the white, his arms straining to hold the sword and shield up against the monster’s weight.
I try to move, but my body doesn’t respond. I’m out of energy.
Fuck, I have to get up! I have to save him.
My fingers finally twitch at my insistence, but my legs don’t budge, and my torso only replies with a deep, aching shudder from chest to abdomen.
Riker groans in pain as Ammit reels up and slams her paws against the shield, driving him deeper into the snow.
Come on, Cal. Do something. Anything.
My eyes flick left and right, searching for something I can use to distract Ammit. I find a gun, the grip sticking out of the snow. One of my teammates must have dropped it during the fight with the wizards earlier. It’s roughly two feet away from me. I can reach it. I must reach it.
I focus on moving my right arm only, inching it toward the gun, until my fingers brush the grip. Almost there.
Riker screams, and I yank my gaze back to my captain to see Ammit stomping on his injured leg with her hippo foot.
That bitch.
My hand wraps around the grip, and I force my elbow to bend inward, lifting the gun into the air. A little more. Just a little more, and I can—
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