by Layla Lawlor
As one, every Tiger turned, and leaped for me.
Chapter 28
They met Muirin instead.
She rose from the scattered remains of her magic circle, kicking aside fallen candles to leap over the charred ring on the carpet. With a hooked glass knife in each hand and the glimmer of a shield around her, she leaped ten feet in the air and came down in a wave of fireworks. Green light burst around her, a straight line of explosions in the air, stretching halfway across the room. The Tigers broke against it like a wave splintering on the shore, screaming in shock and pain.
And Muirin was still moving, slashing across the nearest Tiger's eyes. As it reeled back, blinded, she kicked herself off its staggering body and rose into the air as if she weighed nothing, letting momentum carry her knife-first to bury both her blades in the next one's eyes.
I'd never seen Muirin fight all-out before. Our previous battles had been skirmishes against single opponents. Scylla had fled when Muirin and I both attacked her outside my house, only to meet me later in her lair, after finding a way to dispose of Muirin beforehand. I'd always had the general impression that, in Muirin's partnership with Bill, he'd been the muscle and she had provided the magical backup. And maybe that was at least somewhat true.
But when Muirin went for broke, she was terrifying. Covered in Tiger blood, wreathed in green fire, she ripped through their onrushing assault like a one-woman army.
All to buy me time to—what?
I looked above me at the web of light filling the air, and I knew.
This was why Tweed feared the sword, and at the same time, wanted to possess it. Any sensible man in his position would have tried to destroy it, but Tweed would never have been in his position in the first place if he was a sensible man.
I couldn't swing the sword while treading water, so I floundered out onto the carpet. The sword lit up in a tower of heatless fire that reached ten feet above me. The usual wash of ice-water that plunged down my arm to the warm core of me was less this time, and I knew why: the sword was drinking its energy not from me, but from the web of light in the room. Though it had no intelligence of its own (at least, I hoped not), it hungered for all that energy around us.
So I let it drink.
I swung the sword and where its blade fell, the strands of energy parted without resistance. The sword sipped from each, and as each strand snapped, I cleared an open space around me.
This would take forever. And I didn't have much time. Muirin was already flagging, her bursts of green light fewer and farther between; the Tiger offensive parted to flow around her. She couldn't have a lot of magical juice left after freeing the sword, and she'd spent most of it in that first powerhouse attack. A whipping wave of shadow scattered more Tigers and let me know that St. Clair was still in the fight, but I couldn't see how she was doing.
So I abandoned my assault on the small power lines and went for the big ones, fat cables like the ones that had supported the sword. There were far fewer of these, with the little ones feeding them. The nearest I could see was an umbilical as thick as my leg that grazed the surface of the water.
I swung, and as I did it, for the first time, I deliberately ordered the sword to change shape and it obeyed.
I needed it to be long, so it telescoped to reach most of the way across the pool. With a glowing blade no wider than my finger, it sliced through the cord without a trace of resistance. The smaller lines of power had wisped away to nothing, but the thick one parted with a ripping crack like the thunderclap that had heralded the breaking of the sword's prison.
And the floor shuddered underfoot.
Problem: we were a thousand feet in the air, and the seemingly solid floor beneath us was in fact an impossible feat of architecture, magic-enhanced to stability. It was Tweed's power holding us up, Tweed's power which I was now severing strand by strand.
I didn't have a choice. I plunged toward the next thick cable that I could see, cutting small ones as I ran.
A gunshot cracked behind me. Blackness obscured my vision for an instant, and I missed a step. I didn't realize at first what had happened, but as the wave of shadow withdrew and I looked back, I saw Millie on the far side of the pool, holding a revolver in both hands. Like Lily-Bell that first day in the woods, fighting the first Tiger I'd ever seen, Millie's stance was confident, her grip rock-solid. But the gun was pointed at me, and it was St. Clair's shadow-wall that had swallowed the bullet and saved me from taking a gunshot wound between the shoulder blades.
Get her, Tweed had said, and Millie had indeed chosen a side.
She fired again. Shadow slapped it aside. Millie screamed in frustration that sounded more like pain. I reached the next umbilical and slashed through it.
The floor shuddered again, and then began, slowly and inexorably, to tilt.
Ohgodohgod.
Creiddylad sprang out of nowhere, leaping past me to clash with a Tiger that had closed to within a few feet of my back. I stumbled to a halt, panting, and looked behind me.
The floor was now canted at a shallow angle. Water spilled from the swimming pool, sluiced across the carpet and cascaded over the edge in a thin waterfall. Unsecured items not yet destroyed by the fighting—expensive-looking statuary, small potted trees, chairs—tumbled freely in the same direction. The four-post bed had begun a gradual but inexorable slide as gravity fought against the drag of the carpet.
Muirin and St. Clair had shifted to a containment tactic. A large cluster of Tigers were imprisoned inside a cage with bars of restless, shifting shadow; another clump were pinned within a circle drawn in their comrades' blood. Tweed was (ominously) nowhere to be seen, but I glimpsed St. Clair at the center of a writhing mass of striped bodies. Muirin, soaked in blood and without the firefly glimmer of her shield, was doggedly headed for Millie, who had gone into evasive maneuvers. Millie's hand was bleeding and she no longer seemed to have the gun.
I couldn't understand how this had happened, but somehow it had come down to this: all my companions fighting to protect me, to give me a chance to break Tweed's grip on Shadow New York. And that was what I had to do.
The next beanstalk was the one growing out of Tweed's bed, shifting position as the bed slid around on the tilting floor. I ran for it. A Tiger came out of nowhere, snarling, and I swung and the sword glided through its body and I kept going without even knowing if I'd killed it. My muscles hurt, but I felt oddly energized, where normally I would already be feeling the drag of the sword's drain on me.
I hit the bed going full tilt and bounced onto the mattress. This power line, anchored in the center of the mattress, was twice as thick as my torso, and when I severed it the whole glowing power net flickered and faded and came back, like a magical brownout.
Someone screamed; it might have been one of the Tigers. I wasn't sure what impulse made me look up, but I discovered the dome had begun to crumble as the shadow matrix that supported it disintegrated—setting free the huge panes of glass. From here, it seemed to be happening in slow motion, the entire dome fracturing into a thousand pieces. Like leaves on the wind, each one bigger than a garage door, they began to tumble in a lethal rain.
I did the only thing I could think of, and dived under the bed, where I found myself sharing the shelter with two of Gwyn's hounds who obviously had the same idea. Both were shivering and covered with blood—theirs or the Tigers', I couldn't tell, but I probably looked just as bad.
The first pane of glass hit beside us, flinging shrapnel in every direction, and then it was like being under an avalanche the size of Niagara Falls. The noise was a physical thing, filling my world. I covered my head with my free arm and tried not to inhale glass dust. To make matters worse, each time the floor shuddered the bed would jolt another few feet and drag us bruisingly along with it. I kept hold of the sword mostly because it felt like it was welded to my hand, though I had to hold it out to the side to keep from either skewering my allies or accidentally cutting the bed in half and depriving us of the only t
hing keeping us alive.
It seemed to go on for years but was probably no more than a couple of minutes. When the noise stopped and the glass dust settled with a fairyland tinkle, I cautiously uncovered my head and looked at the dogs, who looked back at me with flat-eared canine misery. "At least we're alive," I told them in what I hoped was a reassuring the-humans-have-everything-under-control tone of voice.
The bed vanished. It was there one minute, and gone the next, hurtling across the slanting floor with such force that it skipped over the railing into freefall and was gone.
I lay on my back, staring upward, too stunned for the moment to move, and saw something even more alarming. There were cracks in the sky. Not the dome: the actual sky. Big dark ugly cracks, sawing raggedly through the aurora colors, crisscrossing each other and spiderwebbing the sky into pieces, like a broken windshield after a car crash. If those fell, no shelter was going to save any of us.
Then a rope of shadow yanked me to my feet, and I faced an incandescently furious Boss Tweed.
He wasn't shouting or ranting; that was, in a way, the worst part. His face was as red as his beard, his eyes a searing blue, hot enough to scald.
At some point during the glassalanche I'd let go of my second sight, which was something of a disaster since it meant I couldn't see the beanstalks to cut them anymore. But it also meant I couldn't see what Tweed's aura was doing, and this was probably for the best. I could actually feel it—a pressure in the air, a great flattening weight pushing us down. It was like the heaviness that comes before a thunderstorm breaks, only more so. I could all but smell the ozone.
"Do you know why I haven't killed you?" he asked me in a voice of shuddering calm.
I didn't answer; nothing I could say was going to improve things, and I didn't trust my voice anyway. Bonds of shadow held my feet together and pinioned my sword arm.
"Because of that." He pointed to the sword. Its flame had faded to a wan flicker like a dying fluorescent light bulb, although perhaps it was just that I couldn't see the full strength of it without my second sight. The Tigers prowling around us cringed away from it.
"You still want it," I said.
"It's powerful enough to hurt me. Of course I do."
The floor shuddered again, tilting more steeply. Glass shards tinkled gently around us. Tweed's face twisted. He was helping hold us up, I realized. The only reason why the dome hadn't plunged over the edge already was because he was throwing most of his concentration into keeping it in place.
Did he feel it, when I cut the power lines? Did it hurt him? I hoped it had.
Above us, the largest crack in the sky had spread from horizon to horizon. The seething, absolute darkness of the between space flickered within. It seemed to be watching us.
Millie stumbled up to us, forcing Muirin along at gunpoint. Muirin was tapped out, barely able to walk, her hands dangling limply at her sides. And Millie, I saw to my dismay, had gone more Tigerish during the fight. Her hair was striped now, strawberry blonde and deep russet. Nascent stripes streaked her face, resembling healing bruises except for the geometric precision and regularity of them. The backs of her hands were patterned the same way.
"Queenie's gone," Tweed said. He stepped into my personal space, near enough I could have easily cut him down with the sword, but I couldn't move my arm and it didn't respond to my urgent mental commands to do its telescoping trick again. "She's run off to lick her wounds, with my Tigers on her heels. I'll deal with her in a moment. You're alone and without friends. I don't suppose you have a price, do you, my dear?"
I wet my dry lips. Now that I was no longer fighting, my body was a mass of pain and exhaustion. "I might," I said. I glanced at Muirin. Her head was down, her face obscured. "What will you give me to work for you?"
Tweed smiled, though it was more of a grimace as he continued to divide his attention to keep us from sliding into the void. "You may stand at my right hand, at the head of my army. I am a very wealthy man, and also a generous man. Those who stand with me will share in that wealth. This I've always done."
"Okay," I said. "Sign me up."
I didn't see the blow coming. He struck me across the face, snapping my head to the side. "You must think me stupid, little girl." I blinked, trying to resolve my double vision. His smile was not a pleasant thing. "But very well. If you want to work for me, why don't you begin by killing her."
The shadows wrapping my arms and legs rotated me to face Muirin, then loosed my arms.
I could cut myself free with the sword—and then what? I was surrounded by dozens of Tigers. I had no idea what had happened to the dogs. I couldn't fight them all; I couldn't get even get off the tower on my own, and Tweed knew it.
Muirin raised her head. She was drenched in blood, most of it Tiger blood, but the ragged parallel slashes in her clothing let me know that some of it was her own. She smiled a faint, sideways smile. Then she lunged at me. Muirin was, had always been, faster than the human eye could follow. One of her loosely cupped hands smacked me in the forehead, hard enough to hurt, and I felt a quick glissade of magic—it had to be the last drop she had left, carefully marshaled in reserve.
I was shielded—probably not well, probably not for long, but for the moment—and she'd opened my second sight, more vividly and thoroughly than we'd ever done before. The world sprang into full blazing color, colors beyond colors. I could see the damage now to Tweed's power web, the places we'd wounded it, the way it was unraveling in front of me. Tweed must have his hands full just keeping everything from falling apart. It might already be past the point of no return.
It was up to me to make sure it got there.
Shielded, I slithered out of my shadow restraints, cutting through the ones that I couldn't slip. The Tigers hesitated, afraid of the sword—not for long, but long enough for me to scramble and slide down the tilting floor towards the nearest umbilical, stumbling across a tilting floor covered with broken glass. I couldn't think about what was happening to Muirin; I just had to concentrate on my footing. Losing my balance and falling would mean shredding myself on the fallen pieces of the dome.
Tweed appeared in front of me in a whirl of shadow. I swung the sword at him. He dodged away and shadow flowed over me in a liquid wave, frigid with the chill of the in-between. I cut through it and kept going.
A bullet caromed off my shield. I had no idea how much of that sort of thing it could take, but I felt it splinter so I guessed not much.
The next umbilical stood directly in the flow of water from the swimming pool. I skidded into the water, throwing up a small bow wave in front of me, sliced through the power line and kept going—I didn't have a choice. Momentum carried me helplessly into the railing. For a dizzying instant I almost went over. The checkerboard floor seemed very far beneath me, and below that, the panorama of New York tilted and skewed as we danced with gravity.
Shadow hooked my legs and yanked me into the air. I dangled upside-down, wildly slicing at the shadow-bonds around my ankles—which I stopped doing as soon as Tweed dangled me over the railing. Mercifully, I couldn't see the drop from this angle, but I was terribly aware of all that open space under me.
I twisted my head around, craning my neck until I located Tweed. From my upside-down vantage, he appeared to be suspended in midair. No—he really was. He stood on a platform made of shadow.
"Miss Darrow, you are more trouble than you're worth," Tweed snapped, and dropped me.
I fell.
I missed splattering on the black-and-white floor by no more than the length of my arm. But I missed it, saved by the now-steep tilt of the platform—and went over the edge, into a void with nothing below me now but Fifth Avenue, a thousand feet down.
There was an instant of bitter cold—but not dark, not dark at all; it was a blast of light and sound and sensory input that left me half-deaf, half-blind, as I staggered and tried to cope with the fact that there was now solid ground under my feet. I dropped the sword. Firm, ungentle hands let me go,
the person who had caught me stepping back.
Momentum is not conserved when teleporting, thought the science part of my brain. How interesting.
Then I blinked my vision clear again—well, clearish, because whatever Muirin had done had opened my third eye but good; even through all of that, the effects hadn't gone away. It was St. Clair who'd caught me in shadow and transported me to safety. She looked—strange. Where my second sight had shown me a ghostly Tiger surrounding Millie, St. Clair had something else entirely. A sinuous, draconic shadow-shape reared above her. I glimpsed the faint outline of wings, visible only from the corner of my eye.
"You ... left," I panted.
"I was losing," St. Clair said without rancor.
"So you let us fight him on our own."
"There is no profit in dying like a fool in a hopeless last stand."
I let it go. She was right, anyway.
"Where did you take me?" But I answered my own question by looking up. We were across the street from the Empire State Building. From down here, the tilting platform that had once been enclosed in a dome was even more unstable-looking and terrifying. It listed at a steep angle, and shadow boiled around the base of it.
I noticed irrelevantly that the top part of the actual building, with the spire and antenna, had been whacked off to accommodate Tweed's little improvement.
And the cracks in the sky were widening. Through my second sight, the black wasn't black; it was all the colors, it was no colors, it was a vibrating ultraviolet just outside the range of human perception. It made my eyes water and sting.
The ground trembled underfoot, and I realized that not all of the shaking on top of the building had been from the platform tipping.
"What's happening?" I asked.
"Shadow New York is breaking up." St. Clair's lips curved in her dragon smile. "Tweed's power has been holding it together. It was never meant to be like this; it has been warping this whole corner of the world, putting a terrible strain on everything. Now the neighborhoods are doing as they should have done all along, and drifting off into their own little corners of reality. Shadow New York is not a single huge place; it's many smaller places."