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Which is why I hit down, not on a hard concrete subfloor, but on a sea of rubbery, bouncy, inflatable somethings, most of which were still trying to spot the coins in the soot. And battering me this way and that, sending me bouncing around like a drunk chick in a ball pit. One whose boyfriend came to grab her out of the air a second later, and drag her against his chest, yelling something inaudible because the room had suddenly gone crazy.
But not because of us.
“Well, shit,” I said distinctly, staring upward.
Right before we were buried under a couple thousand pounds of falling muscle.
Damn, I knew that was going to happen, I thought.
And passed out.
Chapter Five
Not surprisingly, I dreamed of trolls.
Not big ones, but normal sized, even a little puny, watching me with tiny eyes blown wide with fear as I tore past, raking backhoe amounts of bricks out of walls and carving the old building into my personal ladder. I couldn’t see well, just smears of light that sometimes dazzled, sometimes blinded, when they shone directly into my eyes. And I could barely hear, the surrounding walls reflecting back every sound, from my hoarse breathing to the deafening cheers of the crowd.
Didn’t matter.
I could sense my prey ahead, could smell him—an oil slick of a scent, partly the result of whatever he used on his hair, partly him. A little man. A frightened man. A bully, as slavers always were.
This would be easy.
I smelled the others, as well, the ones I’d come with, racing up what remained of the stairs nearby. Because they’d spotted him, too. They were faster than I’d expected, these ponderous-looking creatures, but they had to throw the people blocking the stairs out of the way, and deal with the man’s servants, whom he’d left behind to slow their pursuit.
I didn’t. And while he might be fast enough to avoid them, he was no match for me. A fact he seemed to realize when we reached the roof, him bursting out of a stairwell and me vaulting through the tattered opening the fire had provided, at almost the same time.
He was panicked; I could smell it in his sweat, hear it in the labored breaths he was taking, glimpse it in those pale eyes. But not enough. Not like one who has seen his death and has no way to avoid it.
That look I was intimately familiar with, the pallor of the skin, the slump of shoulders, the resignation that sets in, seconds before any damage is done, because they know it’s coming.
It was absent this time.
There was something wrong.
I glanced around, but with the limitations of this borrowed body, it was difficult to tell if he had reinforcements. It was dark, with most of the light below us now
, a moving lattice etching the night that did little to dispel the gloom this far up. And there was nothing in the air that I could scent, except soot and smog and exhaust, the acrid burn of asphalt still warm from the day, and a soothing gleam of rain behind.
And his weapons, a metallic taste on my tongue that shouted a warning, not that it mattered.
His toys couldn’t hurt me.
But something else might.
I threw myself to the side, hitting concrete a second before a wall of energy spiraled out of nowhere, tearing across the roofline right where I’d been standing.
It would have been exhilarating in my old body, a roaring finger of power spearing the night, right overhead. But in this one . . . it was a problem. The electric flood from the portal had frightened my avatar as the battle had not, the strange light searing his small eyes, the strange smell filling his nostrils. It wasn’t fey, it wasn’t human, it wasn’t anything he knew, and it was everywhere, leaving him scent- as well as sight-blind, with no senses he could trust.
It made the huge body huddle and cringe, and swamped the mind with panic, always the hardest emotion to see through. He began fighting me, desperate to get away, to get anywhere that felt familiar. And in the few seconds it took for me to reassure him, the slaver—
Was gone.
The portal winked out of existence as quickly as it had come, allowing the blue-black darkness of the city to close over our head again. I pulled us back to our feet, reeling from the troll’s surging emotions, and the fury of my own. Because the slaver could be anywhere now. From another point on Earth, perhaps thousands of miles away, to another realm altogether, if this portal connected to Faerie. I had failed.
So why could I still smell him?
I growled, a low thread of anger that matched the troll’s changing feelings. His fear was receding as rage took its place, that the creature he so hated had made him cower and cringe once again—and gotten away. To a place where he’d do it to others, the way he always did, the way he always had.
