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“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I’m from the Chicago Ombudsman’s office, but I can’t get to my badge right now. She’s the one who’s caused all this damage. And I’m going to take her into custody.” Or, god help me, I was going to try.
The humans looked between us, from the woman in leather with a weapon to the woman in feathers and heels and spot-on lipstick. And they chose to glower at me.
“What’s with the sword?” one of them said. “You some kind of samurai?”
Monster wanted to show them exactly what kind of Sup she was. But this was not the best time for paranormal show-and-tell.
“I’m a vampire,” I said flatly. “She’s a demon, and she’s wanted for the destruction at South Gate.”
“Doubtful,” said the guy closest to me. Average height, stocky of build, square of jaw. He didn’t believe me, and there was a glint in his eyes that I didn’t much like. Why the hell was he targeting me?
“She’s a demon,” I said again, pouring as much soothing glamour into the sentence as I could, until my skin fairly rippled with magic.
But instead of soothing him, his lip curled and his gaze went hotter. He looked even angrier, which wasn’t how glamour was supposed to work.
Chaos, came monster’s explanation.
The demon is doing this?I asked, trying to calculate how that could have happened.Did she make them angry?
“You think you’re better than me because you have that sword?” the human asked and, without waiting for a reply, started forward. I held out a hand to him so I could keep my sword pointed at Rose, but he slapped my hand away.
My anger was rising, too, so I let him see the silvering of my eyes—the sign of a vampire in high emotion. Maybe he’d get the warning, and that would be enough to work through whatever magic Rose was using.
“Back off,” I demanded, but he roared his apparently endless fury and swung out. The shot glanced off my arm, and would have done a lot of damage if not for my late pivot. But I’d focused on him, not the second guy, who managed to grab my arm.
The first guy came in again. I jerked my arm away, and before I could give him a shot of my own, he was flying through the air. He hit the sidewalk with a thud, looked up once, and then his eyes rolled back.
I looked back, found Black shaking his fisted hand.
“Thanks,” I said, still trying to understand what the fuck had just happened.
“Is she—” he began to ask, but someone revved a vehicle behind us, loud and insistent, and the sound drowned out the rest.
And then it was barreling toward us. I pushed the other human out of the way, landed hard on the sidewalk, which wasn’t any better than the asphalt. Black dragged the unconscious one out of the way just as the car struck a gleaming yellow hydrant on the driver’s side at just the right angle to send it into the air.
“What the fuck?” the human I’d saved murmured, staring as we all did as the car rammed into the scaffolding and then through it, burying itself in the corner of the building. Bricks toppled, and the scaffolding’s supports began to buckle at the point of impact, and the metal began to whine as physics and gravity worked their particular magic.
There was a tremendousgroanof failing steel, along withcracksas loud as gunshots as the brackets that temporarily tied scaffolding to building began to burst, sending bolts through the air like bullets. They smashed car windows, plate glass in buildings across the street. Humans screamed, began running.
“It’s going!” someone shouted. “Get out of the way!”
The scaffolding’s lower level began to fall like dominos, bringing the upper floors of metal with it.
Someone else screamed, and I looked down, saw the vehicle’s passenger-side door open a foot. A woman reached out. “Please!” she yelled.
I didn’t have a choice.
I ran away from Rose, whom I could still feel behind me, and wrenched open the door, pulled the woman bodily out of the car—ignoring her screams and the screech of falling metal—and heaved us both to the sidewalk.
I was making a career of falling down. And that shit was beginning to hurt.
I covered her head with my torso, covered my head with an arm, and nearly lost my breath when something hit the back of my hip in the cascade of falling brick and steel. Glass added a high note, probably the building’s first-floor windows.
The crash and vibration unsettled more of the building, which was apparently in need of rehab anyway, given the scaffolding, and slabs of brick began falling, tossed down into the pile like boulders in an avalanche.
The sound was tremendous, and it was followed by a moment of equally stunning silence and thick dust that scattered the streetlights and covered everything. And then the shouting began again in earnest.
I heard a sob and pushed up—and was nearly sent to the ground again by the bolt of pain through my hip. A rod of scaffolding lay nearby, the apparent perpetrator. Tears flooded my eyes, but I sucked it in. Pain and feelings later. For now, survival.
