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The street ahead was suddenly filled with explosions, which didn’t rain shrapnel, but which did flash so brightly as to white out the landscape, and bang so loudly as to finish deafening us. They also played havoc with my sense of balance, sending me stumbling around like an old drunk, lurching from one explosion to the other. I ran into the side of the wall, almost broke my nose, staggered back and vaguely realized that . . .
It was coming with me.
I couldn’t see shit, but I could feel, and that . . . wasn’t brick. What felt like massive scales slid under my hands, thick and hard and smooth. A running river of them, but not snake-like. I’d felt something like them before, and the sensation was as visceral as it was memorable, chilling the blood in my veins and freezing my limbs, just when I needed them to move, damn it! Because that wasn’t a snake, that was a—
“Dragon!” Tomas bellowed, right in my face, his vampire eyesight faring
better than mine.
Along with his vampire reflexes. I was suddenly flying down the street, his arm around my waist and my feet barely touching the road. While, just behind us, something hit the ground, something like a giant foot followed by a colossal body, heavy enough to threaten to crack the road bed—
And, okay, I decided.
It was officially fuck it time.
“Get them to me,” I told Tomas breathlessly. “Get the team!”
I couldn’t even hear the words I was speaking, but he obviously could. Because a moment later, I felt bodies crowding me close, and while I couldn’t see them or hear their breathing, the motion around me was indicative of panting or fear. Or, you know, both.
My hand found my bag, and the device holding pride of place in the biggest pocket of them all. I grabbed it, activating a personal shield worth the price of a house, and not a small one. I could never have afforded the Cadillac of shields, but then, I hadn’t bought it.
I’d stolen it, from the consul’s personal stash.
Here’s hoping she spent more on herself than she did on others, I thought, right before a burst of fire blasted us like we’d been caught in a volcanic eruption.
Or by an angry dragon.
“Auggghhhh!” Somebody screamed, as the transparent bubble of the shield showed a rain of flame that just kept coming and coming, even while the grenades’ after effects jumped across my vision, leaving me half blind. But I had just enough eyesight left to read the shield’s indicator bracelet wrapped around my wrist, and—
Shit.
“How much time do we have?” Louis-Cesare yelled.
“It was supposed to be half an hour,” I babbled, thumping the thing because it had to be faulty. “But that was based on protecting twelve. With only six of us, it should last longer, although it depends on the level of power that it has to expend—”
“Damn it, how much?”
“Two minutes—”
“Two minutes? We have two minutes before we die?”
“One minute fifty seconds.”
Louis-Cesare said a bad word in French, and looked at Tomas.
He didn’t say anything out loud, but then, master vamps didn’t have to. They were probably speaking mind to mind, and for once, they seemed to be in agreement. Because the next moment—
“I don’t think it’s supposed to be portable,” I said breathlessly, as they picked up the shield and started to take off with it.
Only me, I thought, shell shocked. Only I could get stuck in a failing shield while being chased by a dragon. It . . . boggled the mind.
And it wasn’t even a good chase, because the shield wasn’t designed to be used while in motion. But when you pay the kind of money that the consul probably had, you get added features. Instead of staying put, and causing all of us to slam into it when we tried to run, it recalibrated as we moved, the way it had probably been designed to do in case somebody crashed into the thing and made it wobble.
But it didn’t recalibrate fast. So, I had another odd experience to add to my collection: slowly shambling down a street from inside what felt like a giant balloon, while being whacked on by a pack of modern day Chinese soldiers, who might have looked real if they weren’t twelve feet tall; by a group of abstract, Dali-esque monsters in neon colors; by a very un-pacifistic Buddha; by some video game characters I didn’t recognize; by a couple of massive sumo wrestlers who kept trying to crush us with their huge bellies; and by a dragon. And a rainbow-colored rooster the size of a bus, who showed up out of nowhere and tried to peck our heads, only to have its beak slide off the shield and stab the dragon instead.
That did not please the dragon, who I could now tell was blue and snake-like, with a head that looked more like a lion than the typical western depiction. But the fire breathing attributes were right on point, and were abruptly turned on its attacker. Which took the heat off of us—literally—for a moment.
And that was enough.
