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They echoed loudly on all that marble, making it hard to tell, but it sort of sounded like it.
Of course, I thought desperately, and stuck out my tongue.
It was the only thing I could currently move, along with my lips slightly. It wasn’t much, not even enough to keep me from drooling. More like the feeling a couple hours after visiting the dentist, when the Novocain begins to wear off and you start looking for your pain pills.
I didn’t have pain pills. But I did have a pain. In the form of a guy who crashed in my necklace when he wasn’t off ogling the casino’s hoochie-coochie dancers. Which with my luck was where he was tonight, because he was never around when I—
There.
My tongue finally managed to find something other than the fuzzies off my shirt. Namely the chain of the necklace I wore, which had slid onto my shoulder next to my chin when I fell. I grabbed it with my lips and tongue and started trying to pull the main cluster of ugly, consisting of a ruby red stone surrounded by a lot of tacky gold filigree, toward me.
But the damned thing kept sliding on its chain, and the footsteps were definitely coming closer, and when I tried to shift a little farther back into the stairwell, nothing happened.
Except that Bootheels finally came into view.
He was a war mage, all right, in black commando gear paired with steel-toed boots, and an incongruous floor-length cape. Like a soldier of fortune crossed with a medieval monk. The boots were familiar from Pritkin’s workaday wardrobe. Something else he had was familiar, too.
The elegant ballroom with its crystal chandeliers, velvet curtains, and highly polished marble floor was an incongruous backdrop for the crude creature standing beside the mage. Naked, taller than a man, and made out of dull orange earth, it looked like a piece of bad claymation that an artist needed to spend a little more time on.
It wasn’t.
When I first met him, Pritkin had had one of the creatures called golems by the medieval rabbis, who had been the first to make them. And who hadn’t bothered overmuch with looks, because that wasn’t the point. The point was to create a mobile prison for the malevolent creature inside it, one of the nastier demon species that were trapped by the crazier mages to be used as servants.
Pritkin had used his mainly as a decoy and an added layer of shielding. The clay body absorbed spells and bullets equally well, keeping them from landing on him, and was also useful as a pack mule for carrying extra hardware. But they could attack, too, with a liquid speed that I’d rarely seen outside of a vamp.
And they were virtually unstoppable, since, unlike us flesh-and-blood types, they didn’t feel pain.
I was so screwed.
Master and slave had their backs to me at the moment, staring out of the French windows. Because the only thing supposed to be over here was wall. But they’d see me as soon as they turned around, which meant that I didn’t have—
Any time.
A faint sound, like that of a door panel sliding back, drifted down to my ears from the top of the stairs. And then heavy, measured footsteps started coming this way. I couldn’t see who it was, but it didn’t matter since a determined five-year-old could kill me in my current state and—
And then a flashlight beam hit me in the face.
“What the hell?”
The voice came from behind, but the mage in front of me heard it and spun. Leaving me sandwiched between two dark magic workers with the only question being which one would curse me first. And I guess it was Flashlight, because Bootheels’ hand didn’t even twitch before the area erupted in light.
But not in the shape of a spell.
Not unless the mages had crafted one that looked a lot like a genie rising from a lamp, if the lamp was an ugly ruby necklace and the genie was a pissed-off, transparent cowboy whose evening slumber had just been ruined by two thoughtless mages. Who were now no longer staring at me, I realized. But at my ghost buddy Billy Joe, who was glowing like the Aurora Borealis, with the sickly, neon green ghost light few humans ever get a chance to see.
And then with a whiter, brighter sheen, as the long, jeans-and-ruffled-shirt-clad body collapsed into a ball of pulsing ghost energy, throwing crazy shadows on the walls. And letting off a sound that felt like a knife in the brain.
If they ever wanted a sound effect for a scary movie, I had one for them, I thought, wishing that my hands worked so I could cover my ears. Or shut my eyes, which were starting to seriously dry out, but not so much that I couldn’t see Billy Joe swoop up the stairs, with a psychic scream that sounded like a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards and sent horrible shivers running over my skin.
The mage didn’t seem fond of it, either, because he cursed and stumbled back, falling into the stairwell.
But it didn’t stop him from drawing a weapon, and when Billy swooped around him and came barreling back down the stairs, a hail of bullets followed.
That would have been very bad, except for the fact that I was lying down. So they flew over my head and hit the other mage, who had been standing there with his mouth hanging open. And his shields down, judging by the fact that he shuddered and fell over just as the other mage tore down the stairs.
And straight into Bootheels’ last spell.
It looked like the dying mage had had a split second to get off a final curse, which caught his counterpart halfway down the short flight and sent him tumbling the rest of the way. Until he kicked me in the head, tripped, and sprawled out on the shiny ballroom floor, lying still. Leaving me with two dead mages, and a golem that suddenly lost interest in the attack in favor of nudging his old master with a clay-like toe.
