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Jill rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen weirder things. At least it hasn’t tried to eat anyone. Yet.”
“I think we’re safe from being eaten,” I assured her.
“Can you draw on grove power now that it’s here?” Pellini asked.
“No, it won’t work quite like that,” I said, knowing without even needing to try. “This tree is just a satellite branch of the demon realm groves.” I managed an innocent look as a collective groan rose at the pun.
“So what’s our next move with the evil red magic?” Bryce asked.
“I don’t know how to stop the flow of rakkuhr,” I said, “but there has to be a way, and we’re going to damn well find it.”
“Well, duh.” Jill flexed her biceps. “Saving the world is what we do.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it kind of is.” But my good cheer quickly drained away under the weight of everything else. “Speaking of, how’s the rest of the world?” Maybe we’d be lucky and the only fallout from the worm-knot-pre-anomaly-crap would be a few minutes of oddly colored skies around the world.
Pellini’s grim expression gutted that hope. “Earthquake in Kansas. Fire rain in Buenos Aires. Tornados in Manhattan and Fairbanks. Over a dozen simultaneous rifts, including a hundred-footer down in New Orleans.” He turned the laptop so I could see the DIRT command reports updating like crazy on the screen. I’d be up to my eyeballs in calls soon. No rest for the—
A flurry of action on the TV caught my eye. “Someone unmute that!”
DNN coverage showed a jagged crevice running several hundred yards down a traffic-clogged street in India. A thick layer of ice rimmed its edges—a sure sign of a sizable interdimensional rift below. Within the fissure, garish magenta flames roiled and lit the night. The ticker at the bottom of the screen read “Hundreds feared injured and dead in Mumbai” between insets of chaos at two other sites. I watched in sick horror as a black and yellow auto-rickshaw teetered on the brink then tumbled into the abyss. I didn’t want to think how many vehicles and people had been swallowed when the thing opened.
Pellini hit the remote just as DNN anchorman Nigel Crowe turned the audio over to their man in the field. Screams, shouts, and honking horns backed the reporter’s frenzied commentary.
“That’s the biggest rift yet,” Bryce said. “It’ll be a bitch to contain.”
“No demons yet, though,” Pellini said. “Maybe we’ll luck out.”
“That’s like hoping for no mosquitos in the swamp.” I slouched into my seat but straightened again as the camera panned to the arrival of DIRT helicopters. With nowhere to land, the choppers hovered while armed team members rappelled to car roofs. Idris Palatino was the first down, expression deadly serious.
“Thank god Idris was close enough to respond,” Bryce said.
“Blind luck,” I said. “That team was on twenty-four hour R&R in Mumbai before heading to Kolkata.” With the super-fast response time and Idris’s skill, there was a slim chance he could slap an arcane Band-Aid on the rift before any demons came through and complicated matters. It wouldn’t stop them, but it would at least keep the rift from expanding long enough for the DIRT team to get into position.
“He’s looking pretty buff,” Jill said. The cameraman seemed to agree since he stayed on him. Idris swept an appraising gaze over the scene then began to dance the shikvihr atop a van while the rest of the team deployed SkeeterCheater over the far end of the rift. No way would they have enough of the graphene-composite netting to cover a fissure this big, but they might manage to tangle a few demons.
As if the bastards heard my thoughts, at least a dozen kehza swarmed from the rift, gaining altitude fast. Crocodile-like savik clung to the walls just below the lip, working their claws to weave potency in ways that could only mean bad news for Earth.
Idris sealed the second ring of his shikvihr, then scanned the area to assess the demon activity. He unslung something from a shoulder strap and fished a golf ball-sized glass sphere from a belt pouch.
Bryce leaned closer to the TV. “Is that a slingshot?”
As the world watched, Idris wiggled his fingers over the sphere, then loaded the slingshot and fired at the nearest kehza. The cameraman zoomed on the demon in time to capture the sphere bouncing off an invisible shield a few inches from the demon’s hide. Idris raised his hand to signal his team, and an instant later bullets tore into the demon’s midsection. Shrieking, it tumbled to the ground.
“Oh snap!” I cried out in delight. “He used an arcane grenade to disrupt the kehza’s shielding!” It didn’t matter that the arcane wasn’t visible on TV. I could infer what he’d done. About a year ago I’d fallen victim to an arcane “grenade.” When I told Idris about how it had dampened the arcane in its area of effect, he’d been fascinated by the concept. I wasn’t at all surprised that he’d figured out a way to replicate it. He must have made several in advance and infus
ed them with potency right before firing them.
For the next minute or so Idris “charged” and shot more spheres. To my surprise, he had a Glock and was helping take down the demons as soon as they lost their shielding.
His gun jammed, and we all held our breaths as a kehza wheeled toward him. But without an instant of hesitation, Idris went straight into the slap-rack-ready procedure to clear the jam then fired on the kehza, taking the demon out before it could dive.
Pellini let out a whoop. “I taught him that! Did you see how smoothly he cleared that jam? And look at that perfect shooting form.”
“Your training just saved his life,” I said with a warm smile. “You have a right to be proud.”
I looked back at the TV in time to see a kehza with a wingspan of at least twenty feet swoop toward the camera, a single gold loop glinting in the demon’s ear. The jaws of its Chinese dragon-like head stretched wide in an all too familiar ululating war cry. The camera swung away and tumbled before it cut out, but the audio continued for another disturbing second.
Pellini jumped to his feet. “Jesus fuck!”
