by Karen Chance
“Fine what?”
“Fine, we’ll do it your way.” Like I had a choice.
Whatever his faults, Pritkin didn’t gloat. “Wait for my signal,” he reminded me. And then he was off, running hard for the tree line. Where, a second later, he disappeared.
And the minute he did, I was sure I’d made a mistake. It would be totally my luck to get the man killed while trying to save him. I peered around the trunk, my hands eating into the rough bark hard enough to send splinters under my fingernails.
Come on, I thought desperately, as the minutes clicked by. Come on, come on, come on.
But nothing happened. There was no sound, no movement, no anything. Just a soft breeze bringing the scent of rain and resin, and a hushed quiet making a mockery of my fears.
Until somebody started screaming.
I was running before I remembered the signal and then fuck the signal, because I’d never heard Pritkin scream. And I was desperately hoping I wasn’t hearing it now. But it sounded human—if a human was being eaten by a bear or roasted over a fire or torn limb from limb or—
I shut my brain down before it shut me down, and put on an extra burst of speed. I should have just shifted, but I couldn’t see clearly and anyway, it was too late now. The ground was growing uneven underfoot, the trees were closing in overhead, and I was slipping and sliding on a bunch of black-rotten leaves down an incline and through a wall of scratchy limbs. Before bursting out the other side and into—
What the fuck?
What looked like jerking red afterimages filled my vision, half blinding me, even though I hadn’t been staring at any bright lights. Just like I wasn’t out of breath, but the whole area pulsed in and out, like a marathoner’s vision. It looked like a demon disco and felt like standing in the middle of a tumbling kaleidoscope, while that unearthly scream went on and on and—
Stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
It took the lights along with it, which would have been great. If it hadn’t left me reeling in utter darkness, my heart pounding, my pulse racing, and my mind gibbering somewhere in terror. But as usual, my mouth was doing okay.
“Pritkin!” I called thickly. “Goddamnit, where—”
“Over here.”
The voice was surprisingly calm. Or maybe my ears, which were still ringing from the howling, weren’t able to discern subtleties. Like my legs didn’t seem to be able to walk a straight line anymore. Not that they could have anyway with the slip-’n-slide going on under my feet. And my knees. And my butt as I stumbled and fell and recovered and then hit a particularly nasty patch of leaves and slid the rest of the way to the bottom.
Where Pritkin was kneeling in the muck, in the middle of a space with slightly fewer trees. The thicker cover around the sides formed a natural wall, which the misty drizzle would have faded to the same wet gray as everything else, if not for the otherworldly light show going on. But he seemed perfectly whole and unbothered.
At least he did until he looked up at me. And frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . what?” I asked unevenly, because the clearing was still spinning. And because that had been a damned stupid question.
“You were told to wait for the signal.”
“You were screaming!”
“Which is usually a sign to stay away,” he said, frown intensifying. “It also wasn’t me.”
“Then who—”
“Not who. What,” he said, and tried to hand me something.
Since it strongly resembled a slime-covered snake, I shied back. “What the—”
“Didn’t that vampire you lived with ever take you to a toy store?”
I stared. “What?”
“For a special occasion, a birthday . . . ?”
“Tony believed in getting presents, not giving them,” I said, bending to peer at the creepy thing he held. It was long and black and lifeless, and still looked like either a short snake or a long slug. “Are you telling me that’s a toy?”
“Was. The enchantment’s played out.”
Thank God.
“You mean that wasn’t some kind of battle spell?” I demanded, gesturing around indignantly, and almost falling over in the process. Okay, that was getting old. “And what the hell’s wrong with me?”
“A prank,” Pritkin said, lips quirking in his version of a smile. “The magical equivalent of a whoopee cushion. But instead of embarrassment, the visual component of the spell causes havoc with the optic nerves. It’s best not to look at it.”
Now he told me.
“Careful. There’s likely more of them,” he said as I started to take a step.
“How do you know?”
“They wouldn’t be much use as an alarm, otherwise.” He held up a finger with a slender cord draped over the top. He gave a gentle tug, and a long line of it rose from the muck, with a “snake” dangling down every six feet. It looked like a banner for an Addams Family birthday, with all the balloons predeflated.
“An alarm—okay, that’s just stupid,” I pointed out.
A blond eyebrow rose. “If it looks stupid but it works . . . then it’s not stupid.” He indicated a small silver thing near the top of the nearest snake. “Removing the cap sets them off. Luckily, I stepped on this one instead of tripping over the line and pulling out all the caps at once. That much noise would wake the dead.”
“Wake the—oh, crap,” I said, staring around.
“It’s not a bad system,” he commented, carefully laying the slimy thing back in the gunk. “Crude, but effective, and uses too little magic to be easily detectable. Of course, it presupposes an intruder would come through here. But given the thickness of the trees on either side, that’s not too much of a stretch.” He looked at me with narrowed green eyes. “The question is, why does someone with a demon army need a child’s plaything for security?”
“That’s a good question,” I agreed, and tried to grab him.
But he was already on his feet and backing out of range. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that we’re about to have company!” The demons around here might be deaf, but I knew some people who damned well weren’t.
“Try again,” Pritkin said. “I doubt there ever were any demons here.”
“Screw demons!” I said, grabbing for him again. And again getting dodged. “Damn it, Pritkin! Tony’s guys could have heard that from across the state—”
“Tony’s?”
Shit.
Blond eyebrows came together. “The house we’re looking for belongs to your old guardian?”
Shit, shit.
“I—no,” I said lamely, trying to think up the lie I hadn’t bothered with before. Which would have been easier if the damned forest wasn’t still doing the cha-cha. I gave up. “Tony’s place is over there.” I gestured back toward the way we’d come. “But it’s close enough to have heard all that, so we need to go!”
“Agreed,” he said grimly, reaching for my hand. “And then we need to talk.”
Only it didn’t look like we were going to be doing either. His hand closed over mine, warm and real and steadying. But apparently not enough.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, after a few seconds, when I just continued to stand there and look at him.
“It isn’t working.”
“You mean your Pythian power?”
“No, my singing ability,” I snapped, trying again. And again went nowhere. Maybe because I couldn’t concentrate with my brain sloshing around in my skull like this. “How long did you say these effects last?” I asked desperately.
“I didn’t. And it depends on the person. Perhaps half an hour—”
“Half an hour?” I looked at him in horror. It might as well be the end of time.
And for us, it probably would be.
“I can only tell you what some of my colleagues said, after a visiting toddler turned one of these loose at Central. No one had shields up, and a few p
eople were seen stumbling about for approximately that long—”
“Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” I said, trying for calm when I knew, I knew, we were screwed. Pritkin was good, but he was only one man and Tony could send dozens, many of them masters. And while they might not have magical party favors, they did have lots of things that went bang and crash and blew people’s heads off. And we couldn’t even shoot back, because we might get unlucky and kill one of them, and that would alter time and then—
“Perhaps no one heard,” Pritkin said, not looking nearly concerned enough. “This many trees have a sound-deadening effect, and we are in a depression—”
“Yes, Pritkin! Because that’s the kind of luck we get!” I said shrilly, because the calming thing wasn’t working.
And that was before something started crashing through the trees across the clearing.
Chapter Eight
It wasn’t a vampire. Not unless I was seriously misremembering, and Tony’s stable had included someone the size of Sasquatch. But judging by Pritkin’s expression, which had shifted over to his what-the-hell face, it also wasn’t a demon.
It looked like maybe I’d been right at the start, I thought wildly. I should have brought Scully. Although I wasn’t sure even she’d have been able to categorize that.
It emerged from the mist between the trunks and paused, as if looking for something. Maybe its head, because it didn’t appear to have one. Unless you counted what looked like part of a croaker sack that somebody had stuffed and then crammed into the neck hole. Where it sat, wobbling around like a bobblehead under a floppy hat, staring at nothing because the eyes looked like they’d been Sharpie’d on.
It didn’t make any more sense from the neck down. It was roughly the size and shape of a person, if the person was a barrel-chested linebacker on stilts. A lot of it was mismatched metal, and a lot of it was glass, the latter mostly a bunch of round containers set into indentations in what I guess was its armor. Most of those were sloshing with some silvery-blue substance, blending in with the mist, but a row of little gold ones crossed the front on a diagonal, like the potion bandolier Pritkin sometimes wore. But if they were potions, I didn’t know how it was supposed to grab one.
Since it had what looked like gardening shears for hands.
For a moment, I just stared.
I knew I should probably be terrified, but I was having a hard time with it. Maybe because I was looking at something that any good horror movie producer would have fired his art department for. It looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and Edward Scissorhands had had a baby. It looked like somebody had gone Dumpster-diving and built a robot out of the trash. It looked . . . well, it looked stupid.
“Homunculus,” Pritkin breathed, without my having to ask.
Not that it helped.
“What?” I demanded, suddenly more angry than anything else. Because no, just no. The universe kept throwing these curveballs at me, and I was mostly going with it, but not when it came down to decapitated robots. I had principles. I had standards. I had—
A face full of muck when Pritkin suddenly shoved me back down.
Something flashed and something sizzled. And it looked like the Tin Man managed just fine with those shears of his, after all. Because when I looked up, I was seeing the world through more than a veil of mud. A bunch of glowing, golden strands had woven themselves around us, hovering maybe an arm’s length away in a nice, neat circle. Like we were the catch of the day.
Which, okay, yeah.
“Pritkin . . ”
“When I tell you to run,” he said calmly, never taking his eyes off the creature, “go for the trees. Don’t stop and don’t look back.”
I didn’t bother arguing, since I didn’t see a way for either of us to go anywhere. “And how do we lose the net?”
“Like this!” he said, and gave me a shove.
And suddenly, the net looked like another balloon, one that had just been pricked with a pin. I had maybe a second to realize that it had been caught on the outside of Pritkin’s shields, and that by popping them, he’d bought us a couple of seconds to slide underneath the floaty wisps that were falling down on every side like a spiderweb. And then I was scrambling on my belly through the mud, and lurching to my feet and starting to run—
And realizing that he wasn’t behind me.
I spun to see him fighting with the net, part of which had caught the back of his shirt. That wouldn’t have been a big deal, but the other half had adhered to the ground, and it must have found a better hold than the slimy leaves. Because his best efforts were only stretching it, like bubble gum between a sidewalk and a shoe, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Go!” he told me, furious, when I turned to help, maybe because the Tin Man had started lumbering down the slope, with the clumsy-cute gate of a toddler just learning to walk. A manic toddler armed with deadly blades and potion bombs.
Or maybe there was another reason, I thought, as the air rippled by my left ear. Something hit the muck in front of me, and something else failed to hit me between the eyes. Because I’d already rediscovered the ground.
I might not know how to deal with magic robots, but I understood bullet etiquette just fine.
Pritkin cursed and dove down beside me. “Now what?”
“I told you,” I hissed, grabbing his lapel. “Tony’s boys. Now lose the damned shirt!”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” he snarled. And then “Don’t touch it!” as I recognized the problem. A filmy strand had wrapped its way across the front of his clothes, as well. Which wouldn’t have been an issue except for all the guns and belts and holsters he had holding said clothes to his body. And the fact that the strand appeared to have the tensile strength of solid steel.
“Take them off!” I told him, grabbing the front of his jeans. “Take everything off!”
“I’m trying!”
“Try harder!” I said as he jerked to the left, sliding us around in a half circle on the slimy ground, just before another potion bomb exploded where we’d been sitting. Fortunately, it hit a rock and flowed the other way, trapping maybe three yards’ worth of leaves and making it look like a giant spider had been nesting in the area. And it was only going to get worse.
Pritkin must have thought the same, because he grabbed my hands, which had somehow gotten his belt off and were working on the bandolier, and shook me hard enough to rattle my teeth. “Get out of here!”
“Make me!” I snarled, and ripped the bandolier off, roughly enough to make him curse.
Too bad; he’d recover from some bruises. Unlike other things, I thought, glancing up to see that the toddler two-step covered ground pretty damned fast. And worse, the creature was rearing back to throw again, and we were running out of places to go.
I did what I should have done before and snatched one of the guns from Pritkin’s belt. It looked like a .22, little and silver colored and unremarkable. It didn’t look like it had any business fighting anything, much less demons. But maybe it would slow that thing down.
Only not if it was slammed to the ground first.
“What are you doing?” I demanded as Pritkin glared at me. “Shoot the damned thing!”
“Yes, shooting something made out of battle potions is a good plan,” he snarled.
Only it looked like somebody else thought so. The words had barely left his mouth when something pinged off the Tin Man’s shiny chest plate. And then something else ripped off its hat. And then Pritkin cursed and grabbed me.
“Run!”
“Where?”
“Anywhere!”
And I tried. But before I could move, three things happened at once. A bunch of dark silhouettes shot out of the tree line, the creature lobbed its potion, and Pritkin gave a massive jerk on what turned out to be the end of the line of party favors.
And oh, shit.
If I’d thought the last trip to childhood bliss had been hell, it was nothing compared to this one. I kind of
wondered about magical parents who thought that giving their kids an acid trip as a toy was a fun idea. But then, I guess you weren’t supposed to set off a case all at once.
It felt like my body was trying to turn inside out. It felt like all my internal organs had turned to mush. It felt like a fun-house mirror looks, with everything pulling into weird, distorted shapes and patterns. I’d have been sick if I still had a working stomach; I’d have screamed if I could have remembered how.
As it was, I just lay in the muck and watched the vamps stumble around, because it seemed to work on them, too.
The elegant, deadly horde had fallen out of stealth mode like they’d hit a wall. And were currently in wobbly-legged party mode, which was a lot less impressive. It would have been good times if the creature had been stumbling around, too.
Unfortunately, the toys didn’t seem to bother it at all. Pritkin noticed, and slurred something drunkenly, but I didn’t hear most of it over the screaming toys and the yelling vamps. But the next second he was free, and naked except for the ass-kicking boots. Which I hoped were about to live up to their name. Because the latest potion bomb hit down as he reached for the weapons he’d shucked off, forcing him to jerk back empty-handed.
He didn’t try again.
He snatched me up, got an arm around my waist, and we stumbled for the tree line.
And weirdly enough, the fact that neither of us could manage to walk in a straight line actually helped. Nets hit down in front of us, in back of us, and to either side, but not on us. Like maybe the creature couldn’t figure out where we were going, either.
But while we might be drunkenly reeling all over the place, we were reeling fast. Pritkin put on an extra burst of speed as we approached the trees, and I was right there with him. We were almost to the thicker part of the woods now, where any net would tangle in the branches before it could land on us. Things were looking up—
Or they would have been. Except that this Tin Man must already have been to see the wizard. Because brainless he wasn’t. Either that or his aim was suddenly terrible, spraying potion bombs in a rapid-fire line—at the trees right in front of us.