Between the back exit and me was a four-by-four, armored, golf cart–sized vehicle, loaded with a blocky device about the size of a traditional house stove-oven unit. It had a gray matte finish with a door on top and two buttons on the side, one red, one green. It was the biggest containment vessel I had ever heard of.
At the sight of it, the futures unknotted, like watching a mixer in reverse as strands of possibilities decreased and redefined themselves. Unfortunately, all of them contained elements of everything bloody and bad.
I nodded at the guard standing beside the ATV. Peg was the only person with enough strength in his cyborg leg to shove the vehicle through the drifted snow to maybe get it close enough to catch the demons that were coming.
Walking toward the futures, I sidled around the armored ATV to the back exit. Pushed open the door. Stepped into a veil of swirling, falling, white. I caught a glimpse, a bloody vision, of a headless guard.
Time was out, but I turned back inside and said, “Let’s get that baby outside and then you get behind it.” I held the door while he maneuvered the four-by-four through the openingand into the whiteout. Immediately, the four-by-four was confronted by a three-foot drift, so I climbed into the driver’s seat and touched the ignition, driving while Peg pushed. We made it about six feet from the building before the thick tires were in snow that came halfway up the body of the vehicle.
Hoping I was right, I said, “Good enough,” and clambered off the front seat, through the snow, to the part-cyborg man at the rear. “When instructed, you duck and press this.” I gave Peg my last portablehedge of thorns. I had a small blade for myself. Mygauntlet hedgewould have to do.
He tried to hand it back. “I’ll be okay.”
Heat flashed through me, the heat ofknowinga death that was preventable. “You listen to me, you stupid man,” I hissed, pinning him with my eyes. “They don’t make cyborg heads and you’re gonna need one if you don’t take this and use it like I told you.”
Over my ear-patch comms, EJ’s voice barked, “Take the amulet, Meadows.”
“Yes, sir,” Peg snapped back.
Over comms, Villetti said, “Peg. From this distance, the containment vessel won’t be able to seize all the demons that are released. You’ll only be able to capture ones that make it within fifty feet.”
“Roger that. Fifty feet,” Peg said, his voice grim.
Fifty feet.The futures swirled like the snow, just as blinding in the night.
A delicate quiver in my hands, I pulled my hood up and made sure the cloak was sealed. I walked through the streetlight illumination and deep shadows toward a fight I didn’t want and might lose. To save Walter. They wanted Walter. If they got Walter, they would change the world. The containment vessel at fifty feet wasn’t enough. I knew that.
It’s just me and my magic staff. I remembered the little girl saved by a witch in a blue cloak.Not enough this time.
Lumbering through the drifts, around mounded cars, through the swirling snow, I searched the darkness for a camouflaged military bot that would be visible only by a really goodseeingworking, or by someone like me who could see raw magical signatures. My hands ached, the left one feeling as if I gripped dry ice, burning cold even through the gloves where I touched the staff.
Across the street, down the block and to my right, approached a green-orange-red-black magic. The demon signatures were twisted through with black motes. The invisible bot moved toward a mound where a neighbor’s red car usually parked. Twenty feet behind it swirled brighter green magics, clear as if the snow weren’t falling in a whiteout.
I now knew one other thing for certain, and tapped my ear-patch.
“The bot isn’t alone. We have two fangheads approaching across the street on the sidewalk, hidden by the cars and snow, and one…one something else.” I recognized the magics and the presence of demon energies. I blew out a pained breath. “The bot is being trailed by Nyoka.”
Chapter Nineteen
EJ
EJ was leaning over the low brick wall separating the edge of the flat roof and a long fall down nine stories. The wall’s cement cap pressed into his middle, cold even through his layers and armored jacket. Snow blew into his eyes until he activated an armored telescoping helmet up and over his head and pulled his face shield down. The temps had plunged, and his gloves weren’t heated. Already he was frozen half through, but he had a reasonably good vista of the street below and the back of the building, where Angie said the trouble would come.
His sister was plowing through the snowdrifts in the parking lot toward the street. Hidden beneath anobfuscationworking and the dark of night, the only evidence of her passing were glimpses of a blue cloak and the snow moving to the sides. The city had plowed a single lane through the middle of the street. When she passed between the parked cars and the mounded snow on this side of the road, she would make a mess that the enemy would see, and they would know someone was there, regardless of theobfuscationworking—a working not nearly so effective as theshadowworking Nyoka had used at the queen’s reception.
He wanted that working, but it would take careful study and a lot of time to break it down to musical notes and replicate it, time he didn’t have.
He closed his eyes and concentrated for sounds of magic, muted and damped by the snow. He adjusted the mics on his helmet to pick up faint frequencies.
He said, “Sis. I’m on the roof with Grizz. I hear two vampires, Nyoka, and something broken that sounds like the screams of hell. Are the vamps and the witch with the bot? Can you pinpoint?”
“You know that little red car that parks on the street?” she asked, heaving deep breaths as she pushed through the snow.
He’d like to know the tall, slender dance instructor who drove it, but his sister didn’t need to know that. “I’m having to guess where it is from this angle,” he said. “Why?”
“Right where it usually parks, one vamp is hidden behind the car and its four-foot snowdrift.”
Listening, turning his head this way and that, he tried to pinpoint where the magic originated, through the muffling and sound dispersion of falling snow and swirling wind. The vamps were too indistinct, their undead magic uncertain, but— There. Yes. He said, “Got it. Nyoka is at the rear, from where you’re walking.”
