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“What if people are...”
“You can’t just.”
“Hey, wait...”
But the twins were inside. A howling ensued. No doubt an inaudible one to plain humans, but it said bad things certainly inhabited the house. Then guns were firing.
That was my home they were blowing holes in. Ex-home. And that was when I realized it no longer had the same hold on me.
This was just a house.
“Val? We can’t just let them? By themselves? They’re like babies...babies with big guns.”
They might die. I didn’t like watching while someone died because of something I’d sort of done. I didn’t like dying either.
“Stay here.” He yanked out his Taurus. “Pee, huh? Pee-shooters? Maybe next time.”
I chased after him, pulling the Ruger from my handbag as I came abreast. I dropped my handbag onto the porch. Later. It’d be there later,ifI lived.
How could he joke, now? Val was a pro, maybe this was a distraction meant for me?
Gird your loins, prepare to do battle, and make fun of dire situations, etcetera?
“I’m groaning here, at the pee-shooter pun. I figured semen not pee, was more your style.”
“Tsk. Be practical, Zara. I’m not cleaning that out of my weapons.”
Heart pounding, hand trembling from the adrenalin rush, or so I told myself, I followed him through the door—knife in one hand, Ruger in the other.I’m not afraid.
Not afraid.
The first creature I saw was long and wriggly and already dissipating into mist. I stepped over it and kept going toward the living room. It sounded as if Samuel and Rose were perforating every bit of the house. I prayed ricocheted rounds wouldn’t hit me and Val.
Val held up his palm in the halt gesture. “Best if you wait for my signal. We’re coming in!” he shouted, as he went through the doorway.
I’d bet a million that signal was never coming.
After one last and very deep breath, I followed, spinning around the doorjamb as if my back were glued to it then plastering myself to the wall beside the door on the other side.
Living room?
Things in here were dying.
The creature beside my boot was a six-inch-high faery, gasping out its last, and already fading, with sparkly wings and all. If it’d had a head, now it didn’t.
“Shit. I didn’t sign up to kill faeries? Did I?”
I gulped.
This was incoherent violence.
Most of the creatures weren’t large; they were baseball-sized imps and owned little black legs and arms like the ones that’d sprouted under the toilet door. Generic creatures of nightmare. Ten or fifteen swarmed the room but were being cut down by Rose and Samuel’s flashing blades and barking guns. The sofas were being used as launching platforms as Rose took to the air, slicing the imps that leaped at her. Puffs of evaporating black showed where imps were expiring.
Val had the only large creature pinned to a coffee table with his knife. His Taurus and much of his hand were thrust down the creature’s rat-toothed Jabberwocky mouth. Its mini-dragon-wings flapped, battering Val’s head. The gun went off and coughed half the thing’s head onto magazines and the Cousteau-blue wall paint.
I grimaced. Sacrilege. I’d used the same color in my apartment.
Shooting anything seemed superfluous. The last five imps, a flying skull, and what was possibly a dwarf cannibal were being dispatched with efficiency by the red-haired, twirling pair.
