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Louis-Cesare started to say something, but I held up a hand and he backed off gracefully. He looked like he wanted to see this, too. I got in Tomas’s space, not abruptly, but slowly, almost sinuously. I brushed my hand down the side of his pretty hair, to turn his face toward me. It had healed, and he was back to the show-stopper I’d first encountered.
I raised up on tiptoes so I could whisper directly into his ear. “I killed Christine. I blew her into a thousand pieces. From what I understand, they never even found them all.”
Tomas stared at me, and for a moment, I thought I saw a flash of fear in his eyes. But then a wash of anger took its place. He abruptly stepped back. “You are insane!”
“Homicidal,” I agreed. “Which is why you and my husband are going to stop antagonizing each other. It’s bad enough that we’re fighting a bunch of monsters; we don’t have to fight each other, too.”
“Or leave each other,” Sarah said pointedly. “We have to find Ranbir.”
We did not find Ranbir, although that was not our choice. We suddenly didn’t have a choice. Because the whole damned street was coming alive.
The little road had a long brick wall on one side and a row of shuttered shops on the other. The one thing they had in common was graffiti: it covered the corrugated tin of the shutters, scrawled across the road, and had turned the long expanse of brick into an art gallery. One that was suddenly lighting up.
“What’s . . . going on?” Jason asked.
“They usually do that before they attack,” Ev said helpfully.
“I know that!”
“Then why did you ask?”
“It was a rhetorical question!”
“Really?” Ev looked surprised. “This does not seem to be the time.”
“Uh, retreat?” Sarah said.
“Retreat,” I agreed, and turned around, only to find that there was nowhere to go. There was graffiti in the other direction, too, and on the street behind us—
“What the hell is this?” Sarah said, catching an eyeful of the mob headed our way.
I didn’t answer, because I had no idea. For the last hour or so, we’d encountered problems, but we’d also avoided a lot of them. We’d opted for side streets and dodged anything we saw coming. I’d assumed that, once we found the mage, we’d reach our destination fairly quickly.
After all, we were learning how things worked around here.
Only apparently not. Because, suddenly, every creature in the place seemed to be focused on us. And if there were any benign ones in the crowd, I didn’t see them.
“Incoming!” Ev yelled, and fired the rocket launcher at something screaming at us from overhead.
I didn’t see what it was, but a second later, I was covered in blue goo, and so was everyone else. It wasn’t sticky like the squid’s had been, but it was gross. Not that I had time to worry about it.
A large, pink pig with anime character eyes jumped off a wall and charged, its tusks threatening to gut us before Louis-Cesare grabbed them and launched it over a nearby building. A huge graffitied statue of David swept an arm out of a wall and sent a wave of garbage crashing into us, spilling us off our feet. And an equally giant fish came alive, its tail flicking acid instead of water and setting the trash alight.
But not for long. Because a great eye, big enough to have belonged to Sauron himself, turned to look at us from the side of a nearby shop. Its pupil was as large as my whole face, and it had just pushed three-foot lashes out of the corrugated metal, which was strange enough. But then it began to cry, gushing with water like an open fire hydrant, and flooding the street a foot deep in seconds.
I stared at it, genuine panic rising in my throat. We’d stumbled into a supernatural obstacle course, filled with soldiers who couldn’t die, and I didn’t know how to fight this way! And neither did anybody else, the whole group stuck in indecision for a second, not knowing which way to turn.
Until Jason solved it for us.
“Pick a damned direction!” he screamed, and then let off a barrage at the crap headed our way down the alley, before running to the right.
“I guess we’re going right,” Louis-Cesare said dryly. But it wasn’t any better or worse than the other options.
Of course, I could have been wrong about that, I thought, a moment later.
We had started pelting ahead with the two vamps on either side, to beat off attacks from the wall and shops; the two gunslingers in the back, to slow down the army; and me and Sarah in the middle, guns out, trying to pick off what we could of whatever was coming up in front. It was going pretty well until we approached a mural of a beautiful Chinese woman, who was reclining along the whole length of a building. She didn’t bother to get up and chase us like half the city was doing, but then, she didn’t need to. She had a child’s bubble making toy, and was blowing iridescent spheres the size of beach balls that looked harmlessly ethereal until they floated into something solid.
And exploded like so many percussion grenades.
