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“What’s going on is that we’re about to have company!” The demons around here might be deaf, but I knew some people who damned well weren’t.
“Try again,” Pritkin said. “I doubt there ever were any demons here.”
“Screw demons!” I said, grabbing for him again. And again getting dodged. “Damn it, Pritkin! Tony’s guys could have heard that from across the state—”
“Tony’s?”
Shit.
Blond eyebrows came together. “The house we’re looking for belongs to your old guardian?”
Shit, shit.
“I—no,” I said lamely, trying to think up the lie I hadn’t bothered with before. Which would have been easier if the damned forest wasn’t still doing the cha-cha. I gave up. “Tony’s place is over there.” I gestured back toward the way we’d come. “But it’s close enough to have heard all that, so we need to go!”
“Agreed,” he said grimly, reaching for my hand. “And then we need to talk.”
Only it didn’t look like we were going to be doing either. His hand closed over mine, warm and real and steadying. But apparently not enough.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, after a few seconds, when I just continued to stand there and look at him.
“It isn’t working.”
“You mean your Pythian power?”
“No, my singing ability,” I snapped, trying again. And again went nowhere. Maybe because I couldn’t concentrate with my brain sloshing around in my skull like this. “How long did you say these effects last?” I asked desperately.
“I didn’t. And it depends on the person. Perhaps half an hour—”
“Half an hour?” I looked at him in horror. It might as well be the end of time.
And for us, it probably would be.
“I can only tell you what some of my colleagues said, after a visiting toddler turned one of these loose at Central. No one had shields up, and a few people were seen stumbling about for approximately that long—”
“Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” I said, trying for calm when I knew, I knew, we were screwed. Pritkin was good, but he was only one man and Tony could send dozens, many of them masters. And while they might not have magical party favors, they did have lots of things that went bang and crash and blew people’s heads off. And we couldn’t even shoot back, because we might get unlucky and kill one of them, and that would alter time and then—
“Perhaps no one heard,” Pritkin said, not looking nearly concerned enough. “This many trees have a sound-deadening effect, and we are in a depression—”
“Yes, Pritkin! Because that’s the kind of luck we get!” I said shrilly, because the calming thing wasn’t working.
And that was before something started crashing through the trees across the clearing.
Chapter Eight
It wasn’t a vampire. Not unless I was seriously misremembering, and Tony’s stable had included someone the size of Sasquatch. But judging by Pritkin’s expression, which had shifted over to his what-the-hell face, it also wasn’t a demon.
It looked like maybe I’d been right at the start, I thought wildly. I should have brought Scully. Although I wasn’t sure even she’d have been able to categorize that.
It emerged from the mist between the trunks and paused, as if looking for something. Maybe its head, because it didn’t appear to have one. Unless you counted what looked like part of a croaker sack that somebody had stuffed and then crammed into the neck hole. Where it sat, wobbling around like a bobblehead under a floppy hat, staring at nothing because the eyes looked like they’d been Sharpie’d on.
It didn’t make any more sense from the neck down. It was roughly the size and shape of a person, if the person was a barrel-chested linebacker on stilts. A lot of it was mismatched metal, and a lot of it was glass, the latter mostly a bunch of round containers set into indentations in what I guess was its armor. Most of those were sloshing with some silvery-blue substance, blending in with the mist, but a row of little gold ones crossed the front on a diagonal, like the potion bandolier Pritkin sometimes wore. But if they were potions, I didn’t know how it was supposed to grab one.
Since it had what looked like gardening shears for hands.
For a moment, I just stared.
I knew I should probably be terrified, but I was having a hard time with it. Maybe because I was looking at something that any good horror movie producer would have fired his art department for. It looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and Edward Scissorhands had had a baby. It looked like somebody had gone Dumpster-diving and built a robot out of the trash. It looked . . . well, it looked stupid.
