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“Same reason most shops don’t carry fireworks,” he squeaked. “Some moron’s gonna misuse ’em. Had a couple guys playing chicken with one of the acid bombs, and it ate a chunk out of the polyurethane on the bar. Had to get the whole thing redone—”
“Listen, Fin—”
“—and then these two losers got in a fight,” he said, his voice reaching levels usually reserved for twelve-year-old girls and dog whistles. “And knocked the box over, sending all these things bouncing around the bar, some of them ricocheting off walls and breaking stuff, others setting fires. Weak don’t mean dead, not when fifty of ’em get set off all at once. I had to shut down for the whole night—”
The war mage clicked his case closed and walked off, and Fin jerked on my arm, bringing me as close to his face as the nose would allow.
“We got trouble!” he whispered.
“What kind?”
“The big blue kind!”
I looked at him and frowned. And then I looked where he deliberately wasn’t: at the pile of selkies. All heaped up in one spot, even though there was no reason for them to be, and squirming, squirming, squirming . . .
And hiding, hiding, hiding, I realized, an additional couple people in the crowd.
Well, shit.
Chapter Thirty-six
I joined Fin in staring blankly at the crate, and tried to think.
Blue was massive—like, “I’ve lived in smaller apartments” massive—so he must be under the floor. No way were the selkies’ emaciated bodies concealing him and Granny any other way. But they could cover any light the reveal spell might have tried to shine up through the floorboards.
Like around a trapdoor?
Seemed like the kind of thing smugglers might build, if it hadn’t been there already. Concealment charms worked better on enclosed areas, like a closet or a small room. Leaving them to float around nebulously tended to disperse them and use up power faster, and then your talisman putzed out or the spell became too thin to actually conceal anything, and why was I thinking about this right now?
Maybe because I didn’t want to think about how we were going to get them out.
“We gotta get gone,” Fin said softly. “They’re gonna move those selkies in a minute, and then—”
“People die.”
Because no way was Blue going down easy.
And no way were a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth war mages, with macho meters set on overdrive, going to play nice with an illegal, homicidal, massive battle troll, and his gun-toting sidekick.
This . . . could be bad.
Apparently, Fin thought so, too, because he started pulling on me. “Yeah, like us if we don’t get out of here!”
I looked at him. “So that’s your solution? We just leave him to be slaughtered, or to slaughter somebody else?”
He nodded vigorously. “Now you’re getting it.”
He got up.
I pulled him back down.
“You could live with yourself?”
Tiny, furious eyes met mine. “Better than I could as a greasy spot on the floor! I’m not a dhampir. You wanna play hero, fine. Just don’t expect me—”
“Pity about those profits, though.”
“—to be Rambo Jr. because I ain’t—” He stopped. “What profits?”
