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And then it did, because a bunch of soldiers decided to take a shortcut, tearing open a tarp rather than finding a door. I saw Mircea curse, and he must have sent a mental command—a harsh one, judging by how fast they tried to correct their mistake. But it was too late.
The creature turned, and for a second, I could see it clearly as it paused in shock at the sight of the flapping tarp and open air. And all those tents, arrayed in neat, orderly rows, just outside. Rows where an army of mostly non-masters were sleeping or playing cards, huddled out of the sun, groggy during the day, if they were conscious at all.
They wouldn’t even know what hit them.
I got up and started wading through the carnage for the hall.
Mircea had stopped yelling and was standing instead, his eyes glowing amber bright and focused on the creature. He was trying to get a mental lock, I realized, because Mircea’s master powers were of the mind. And he must have done something, because a huge tentacle suddenly speared out and slammed him in the chest, knocking him back down the corridor by what had to be a hundred yards.
I screamed, because that blow would have killed a mortal man, and for a terrible second, I thought it had killed him.
But a moment later, he was back on his feet, shaking it off. And then running back this way, yelling something I couldn’t hear. It was probably a call for the demon-possessed, elite troops, if he hadn’t done that already, but I didn’t know where they were, and all this was happening at vampire speed or faster. The cavalry might be coming over the hill, but they wouldn’t be in time.
Not unless time got an assist.
I’d hit the waiting room, which was a mess of rubble-strewn floors, squirming body parts, and fallen walls, with rebar twisting upward out of some of the latter, in strange, modern art–style flourishes. I used the wreckage for cover, getting as close to the hall as I dared. I wouldn’t get another shot at this, so I couldn’t miss. I looked up through the plaster dust swirling around the great hall and put out a hand, feeling like an idiot, because that was almost the same pose as on that stupid statue.
Only I wasn’t reaching for a bow.
Time slid across my fingers like silk, as slippery and as hard to hold. But unlike the weapons I’d never been comfortable with, the guns and knives that had always felt alien in my hands no matter how much I practiced with them, this was different. It was familiar, comforting, known. It flowed and embraced, soothed and calmed, like a mother’s touch, like Billy’s ghostly caress, like the Pythian power sparkling around me, whispering a strange language in my ear that I didn’t understand.
But I understood this, I thought, and closed my fist. And felt the flow of time slow down, down, down around the creature. It wasn’t a time stoppage; not even close. A human observer wouldn’t have thought I’d done anything at all.
But there weren’t a lot of humans around here.
And the vampires sure as hell knew what had just happened—and so did the creature.
It didn’t roar again—I wasn’t sure it could in this form—but it twisted the huge, bulbous head around to stare at me instead of the tents. Because I guess with me, it was personal. And then the vamps jumped it—not some of them, but all of them—as it lunged for me. But it was still lightning fast, barely visible to my human eyes, until I pulled, tightening my grip on time around it, almost screaming in effort.
And watched the creature slow to the speed of a human run.
But that only helped so much. The vampires were savaging it, but it didn’t seem to care. It just kept coming, and I knew I should shift away, that I had to. But if I did, it would just go back for the tents again, and I couldn’t let it go for the tents!
So I threw everything I had left into slowing it as much as I could, to the point that the room started to spin around me, that my legs felt like jelly, that my vision narrowed and darkened worryingly at the corners.
Yet it hardly seemed to matter. Mircea was yelling something from the other side of the creature, his horrified face visible through that terrible, gelatinous body. Marlowe was running for me, only to get slammed aside again, beyond my field of vision. And while the consul was still holding on, she was just getting carried along for the ride at this point, because I’d accidentally slowed her down, too.
I might have just made a mistake, I thought.
And then it was there, right there, close enough that I could feel the rush of strangely cold air in front of it, could smell the rotten fish stench coming off it, could see myself in the huge, glistening eyes—
Before I was knocked aside, my spell shattering, as a bunch of new arrivals surged all around me.
I was thrown to the ground, dizzy and exhausted and scared half out of my mind. But I landed on my back in time to see fifty or sixty vampires leaping on the thing all at once, like a hurricane. I didn’t have to ask who they were; I knew.
They tore into it as it loomed above me, literally right over top. I stared up at the massive body, rising three, four, maybe five stories high, becau
se there was nothing constraining it now, and watched as our best troops carved huge pieces off of it even as it tried to fall on me. Even as it writhed and twisted and did its best to take me with it. Even as it was dissected where it stood, carved up and separated out so it couldn’t form back up.
Because if our guys couldn’t kill it outright, they’d take it in pieces.
And then it morphed again, but this time, I wasn’t sure it had been on purpose. The thing was suddenly going through a series of changes, almost too fast to see. The body changed and twisted, bulged and shrank and then bulged again, as I scrambled back, trying to get out of the way. I hit what remained of the wall between the waiting room and the office just as it settled into a massive, full-on fish thing with a protruding eye—
Which the consul put out with fangs longer than my arms.
And, finally, finally, that turned the tide. The whole concourse of us watched in total silence as she savaged the thing that had assaulted her army and killed her men. Blood splattered the crowd, thick and black and steaming. And burning, containing flecks of that pale, poisonous fat, which seemed to have aerosolized, because I could feel it burning in my lungs. But nobody moved until the thing lay dead on the ground, the consul’s fangs buried deep in its throat, a huge pool of ugly blood spreading over and staining the pretty new mosaic.
For a second, there was only more stunned, echoing silence.
