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Dekka stepped through the door.
Two people stood there. A pretty girl with wildly excited eyes, dressed expensively and with way too much jewelry around her wrists and neck, and what looked like the Geico gecko wearing an actual tuxedo. Like he thought he was James Bond.
The snake-man spoke. Dekka pointed at her ear coverings and saw a slight recoil.
“You are either going to come willingly and be muzzled, or I’m going to have to hurt you.”
He seemed to shout something, but again, she could not hear.
Unfortunately, in the melee in the hall, Armo had lost his earmuffs. Dekka had a split second to see a great beast hurling itself at her. She spun but hesitated and was bowled over by Armo.
Bowled over by Armo going straight at the reptile in the tuxedo, who he hit so hard that the boy flew half the length of the room, smashed into the floor-to-ceiling plate glass, and fell to the carpet, stunned.
Dekka seized the moment and delivered a straight-up sucker punch that caught the girl under her chin, snapped her head back, buckled her knees, and dropped her to the floor as limp as a wet towel.
Armo had the reptilian young man pushed up against a wall, with his long claws poking hard against the creature’s throat.
But then, luck intervened. A policeman, bruised, bloodied, his uniform shredded, leveled his service revolver and fired once. Dekka did not know whether he was shooting at Armo or at Dillon, but the result was to shatter the floor-to-ceiling window.
Sudden wind pushed at them, then sucked them toward the opening, toward a fall that not even Armo could hope to survive.
Armo staggered, caught himself, released his hold on Dillon just long enough for Dillon to scream out of the window.
“Kill! Everyone, kill!”
Some of the people below heard it. And one radio reporter had a hot microphone so that Dillon’s voice went out over the airwaves to thousands of Las Vegas residents in their cars with the radio on.
Armo scrambled back, tripped, fell on his back and stabbed his claws into the carpet, teetered on the edge with his body from the waist down hanging out of the window. Then he rolled over, got to one knee, and from that position punched Dillon so hard in the stomach Dekka thought it might kill him. She tore off a length of bedspread and wrapped it tightly around Dillon’s mouth. Then she used his belt and a bathrobe cord to truss him like a pig, hands and feet behind his back, hands then tied to feet.
Dekka pushed her ear covering back so it rested on her neck.
“Well,” she said. “You really, really don’t take orders, do you?” she asked Armo.
“See? Oppositional Defiant Disorder: it’s useful sometimes.”
Armo lifted the squirming, furious Dillon by his hair, and Dekka dragged Saffron by one arm down the hallway, kicking and shoving and punching their way through the voice-controlled lunatics in the hallway; they threw the pair into the elevator like two sacks of manure.
“Thank God,” Dekka said, relieved. “This guy’s power is nuts.”
Armo nodded warily. “You ever have that in Perdido Beach?”
“No, thankfully,” Dekka said. “Though Penny was close in some ways. We were lucky to stop her.”
They emerged from the elevator to a scene of renewed frenzy. Police and EMTs had barricaded the street doors against a dozen or so tourists who beat on the door before turning to attack each other. Gunshots could be heard from the street outside. Dillon’s last shout through the broken window had had an effect. Sirens and flashing lights were everywhere, every Las Vegas cop, every casino security team, the local office of the US Marshals, the local FBI, and forces
from adjoining towns had all come rushing to help control what was now thousands of Vegas residents and tourists engaged in open-ended mass slaughter.
“Freeze!”
Dekka blinked at a man wearing a suit, who had a 9-millimeter automatic pointed at her. Beside him stood a female version, also with gun leveled.
“Seriously?” Dekka said.
“Dekka Talent and Aristotle Adamo, I’m arresting you under the emergency decree.”
Dekka, never the most patient of people, leaped with the liquid grace and deceptive speed that was part of the gift of cat DNA. She knocked the man’s gun aside like it was a child’s toy, pushed him roughly into the woman, and Armo was on the two of them like a brick dropped on a daisy.
“What are you idiots doing?” Dekka demanded.
