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“No, I did the door,” I said, and hit Rosier over the head with one of our dwindling stash of bottles.
“That door!” Pritkin rasped, his eyeballs rolling up.
Which I took for a bad sign until I looked up, too.
And was hit in the face by something hairy.
I pulled it off and found a coil of rope in my hands. Weird, I thought. And then Rosier was somehow gone and Pritkin was looping it around my waist.
I tried to help him, because his hand didn’t seem to work right. But then, neither did mine. “Wer’ we going?”
“Out.”
“Oh, good.”
“Come on!” I heard Caleb’s voice and looked up again. And saw him hanging out of the bar’s front door, which was now opening out of the ceiling above our heads.
And then I was being hauled on a fast ride up and out, onto the roof, where I landed on some nasty shingles that bruised my butt. And then froze it, because the Shadowland was always cold. But that was okay, because it cleared my head slightly.
Enough that I realized that Pritkin and Casanova were still down there.
I scrambled back to the edge of the door, where somebody else was on the rope, somebody heavy enough to cause Caleb to strain. I grabbed for the end of it, but before I could do anything, Casanova was climbing out of the opening.
“I saved one,” he told me, looking a little disheveled.
“What?”
He hauled a bottle of hell juice out of the darkness and set it on the shingles. “Only one left.”
The building shook as some kind of serious spell went off in the room below, and I grabbed his lapels. “Where’s Pritkin?”
And then there he was, struggling to pull himself past the doorjamb with only one functional arm. But he managed, even before Caleb could help him, like he was in one hell of a damned hurry. And a second later I realized why.
When the section of roof I was kneeling on suddenly caved in.
I had a split second to see Rosier’s evil face and a forest of shiny swords and the floor all rushing up at me—
And then my arm was almost snatched out of its socket when someone caught me.
I looked up to find Casanova staring at me, as if he couldn’t believe he’d managed that, either. Especially one-handed, because the damned bottle was still clutched in the other. And then he was screaming and yanking me up and screaming again, because his feet were slipping on the widening edge.
And then Caleb jerked him back and Pritkin grabbed me. “Run!”
Which, yeah. But the cascade of old tiles and half-rotten ceiling beams and moldy plaster that had been the roof made it seem like we were running in place even as we pelted for the edge. Because the precipice was coming along with us, nipping at our heels.
And then consuming them, in a boiling mass of debris, just as Caleb grabbed me and swung me up, which seemed the wrong direction but I couldn’t scream with a throat full of plaster dust. And then we were going down again, fast, but I couldn’t figure out why until—
“Shiiiiiiit!” I screamed, finding dust no match for a zip-line ride down a sparking electric wire, dangling off the bit of rope Caleb had thrown over the top and speeding fast, fast, too damn fast toward a one-story building across the street.
Which we reached just as a bunch of indigo guards burst out of the bar behind us, and took off like bats out of hell. Or servants of one very pissed off demon lord, anyway. And then I couldn’t see them anymore because we were running up some stairs, and then pelting across the second building’s flat roof and running to the edge and no, no, no—
And then jumping across a too-wide cavern we almost didn’t make, Casanova’s feet slipping on the edge and his arms spiraling wildly, and me grabbing him and spinning around, and then Caleb grabbing me and all three of us doing a strange, death-defying dance on a two-inch ledge before Pritkin grabbed us and yanked us back.
And then we were off again.
“Where’s the council?” Caleb yelled as we pounded across the roof.
“Less than a block,” Pritkin said, which should have been good news. Only he didn’t sound like it.
