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He was off the rug with a hand over my mouth before I could blink. “Shhhh! I don’t know what kinda hearing those things have, all right?”
“Whhmpphwhhmmmmhhh?”
“What?”
I removed his hand. “Then why did we stop?”
“Why did we—” he looked at me incredulously. “I don’t know how to drive that thing!”
He gestured back at the rug, which was levitating a couple feet above the roof and looking pathetic. Like, really pathetic. For one thing, it wasn’t even close to being a rectangle, which was one reason I’d had so much trouble holding on. For another, it had a “pattern” that would have embarrassed a cross eyed two-year-old, with nothing repeating or making sense. It looked like somebody had scribbled a picture . . . in a hurry . . . in the dark . . .
I glared at Ray. “Son of a bitch!”
“Shh! Shhhhhh!”
“Where is it?”
The blue eyes shifted. “Where is what?”
“You know damned well!”
“All right, all right! Keep your voice down—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish pulling an object out of an inside pocket of his tux, and instead jerked it out myself. And then shook it under his nose. “You said it wasn’t finished yet! You said—”
“I say a lotta things,” Ray hissed. “Cause I got a master with a death wish! I wanted to test it out first—”
“Well, it obviously works!”
“Yeah.” He glanced back at the lopsided rug. “You know. Kinda.”
“Close enough.”
I stood up and looked around, but as I’d feared, there was no Louis-Cesare. There were no jackal-headed thugs, either, including the ones that had been after me. And there’d been at least a dozen, as more had zeroed in on my location from surrounding buildings.
What the hell was going on?
“How does this thing work?” I asked Ray, returning to the business at hand.
He shrugged. “Same as the other, more or less.”
I examined it. It resembled a child’s toy pistol, but with an extra-large barrel. But what it shot out wasn’t water.
Ray and I had gotten the idea for a new weapon from a recent adventure in supernatural Hong Kong. A hidden city that existed out of phase with the normal world, it didn’t have to hide its weirder elements like most enclaves did. That had allowed some . . . peculiarities . . . to become every day sights, including magical ads that could jump off their billboards and follow you down the street.
They were “drawn” onto the side of a building by a gun-like object that contained a reservoir of magic and a spell to animate it. You sketched whatever you wanted on a little screen, pointed the gun, and presto! An instantly mobile, and occasionally vocal, advertisement.
Thanks to a buttload of magic supplied by a crazy war mage we’d met, Ray and I had managed to use the gun to animate ourselves a little help. Giant ads had become warriors in a very strange battle, and while their fighting ability had been debatable, they’d served admirably as a distraction for our attackers. But a distraction wasn’t what I needed right now.
I drew a figure, aimed the gun at a wall, and pulled the trigger.
A second later, what had been bare bricks had a glowing, golden stick figure on them, the size of a six-year-old child. I waited, biting my lip and hoping this would work. Ray and I had taken the idea of the makeshift weapon we’d put together on the fly in Hong Kong to a master wardsmith—the father of a friend—who liked to tinker with crazy magic. He’d refined it, upgraded it, and added some special features.
Including that one, I thought, as the “child” started spilling off the wall like an accordion, not one figure anymore but dozens.
“Thought you were an artist,” Ray said, checking out the toons’ oversized, lopsided heads and mismatched eyes.
I ignored that. The dial control on the device was as hard to use as an Etch-a-Sketch, which probably explained the rug. I pawed through my oversized purse, which Ray had slung over his back, pulled a picture of Louis-Cesare out of my wallet and held it up in front of the nearest little glowing stick figure. It had been toddling around aimlessly along with the rest, having received no instructions yet.
