That state had always been a rarity for me, and only in extremis. Probably wasn’t a good thing that my brain already thought I needed it, huh? Or the fact that it didn’t seem to be working right.
The hallway was fine, having taken on the familiar underwater feel of slo-mo: I saw Gessa through the door to the living room, looking up in concern, her brown curls bouncing slowly around her head; I saw a piece of the railing I’d hit on my way to destroy my rib cage flipping leisurely through the air; I saw little siftings of dust raining gently down from where the force of my impact had shaken them loose from the ceiling. Everything was exactly as I’d have expected.
Except for the fist slamming into the stairs, right by my head, still fast, still deadly, and still looking like it was in real time, to the point that I barely managed to dodge it.
Which meant that whatever was assaulting me was fast—very fast. Faster than me, I thought dizzily, trying to assess the situation while scrambling backward up the stairs. And attempting to avoid a second blow while still reeling from the first.
That wasn’t working so great, and wouldn’t have worked at all, except for the house. Because the latest massive hole that the Hulk-like fist had left in the stairs had just closed up around it, like a wooden maw clamping down—and clamping hard. That left me half a second to focus my bleary eyes on my attacker, only that didn’t help much.
Because I’d never seen anything like it.
It was roughly the size and shape of a large troll, only it wasn’t one. Not unless there was some kind I didn’t know about, made out of lava right before it hardens, with a cracked, reddish crust on top and fiery-looking stuff inside. Which would have been worth a double take or maybe two, but I didn’t have time.
Because the damned thing had two fists, didn’t it?
The second crashed into the wall beside me, because I’d dodged at the last second, sending shards of hardwood into the skin of my cheek and neck. I stumbled backward, halfway up the stairs now and still dizzy—because it had been all of a couple seconds since this whole thing started. And because we had wards, damn it! About a thousand of the things, many of which weren’t legal anymore, if they’d ever been, and all of them on steroids from sucking on an energy teat for much of the last century.
So how did the damned thing get in?
Make that damned things, I thought, looking past the huge, thrashing, rocklike beast, which now had both fists trapped by a pissed-off house.
And saw its backup—like it needed any—spiraling up from the floor.
That’s the best way I can describe it, although it doesn’t do it justice. More of the small things I’d mistaken for toys were running at me, a whole line of them from the direction of the door, and getting bigger and meaner with every step. And more like Pig-Pen, because it looked like all the dust in the house, even that sifting down from the ceiling, was curving, was flowing out, was joining up with the rock-hard bodies they were forming like little stairsteps—and forming them fast.
They were cleaning the house for maybe the first time ever, which unfortunately I wasn’t going to live to see because I couldn’t take this many.
But something else could.
Suddenly, out of every room along the hallway—the kitchen, the dining room, the guest bath, even the living room, prompting a startled “Eep!” from Gessa—came the cavalry. I was busy trying to get back to my feet while a roaring rock monster thrashed in my face, and my ankle, which had gotten injured along with everything else, kept trying to give way on me. So for a second, I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
And then I did, and I still didn’t believe it.
Because the huge bodies suddenly flinging themselves at our attackers looked a lot like—
The missing chess pieces.
They had the same mottled brown or dirty green skin tones. They had the same patched leather armor and dull iron and steel weapons. They had the same little tusks on the ogres and the same beady little eyes on the trolls, although “little” really didn’t work as a descriptor anymore.
Because they were huge.
For a moment, I thought I must have hit my head too hard, but then I saw it.
Or, rather, I saw him, a troll different from all the rest, darker of color and wilder of eye, because he’d seen some shit in his short life. And I’m afraid I mean that literally. Because Stinky, who eats everything that doesn’t try to eat him first, had accidentally swallowed him along with some animated circus cookies that Olga had brought over from a troll bakery. They’d been galloping and neighing and generally stampeding around the kitchen table, and Stinky, never one to miss an opportunity, had opened his mouth and let them just fall in.
Only something else had fallen in as well, and gone for the ride of its life.
We’d managed to retrieve the little troll after his journey, but he’d never been quite the same again. Including his hardened leather battle gear, which was sadly acid eaten and useless by the time he, uh, popped up. So Stinky, who had been made to understand that you don’t eat little sort-of-sentient creatures even if they only got that way because of a spell, had made him a new set.
Which was why one of the suddenly massive former chess pieces was wearing soda can armor.
Only the house, which I guessed was what was doing this, had fiddled with that, too. The familiar red background and white curly letters of one can were now a thick, molded breastplate that Batman would have been proud of; the formerly flimsy red, white, and blue logo of another was a shield Captain America might have envied; and the bright blue and green pauldrons and orange and white shin guards could have been borrowed directly from Iron Man.
Who I really wished would show up right about now, because we were still getting hammered.
Maybe because our attackers didn’t feel anything. Or if they did, they gave no sign. Even when I got my shit together, grabbed a jagged piece of wood that the trapped monster was shredding as fast as the house could regrow it, and started trying my best to shove it through its eye.
Only it didn’t have eyes, although it could obviously see. But there was nothing inside the vague indentations in the skull but darkness and more rock. And when I did finally manage to break off a chunk, it didn’t seem to care. Just kept coming at me, only now with the added horror of doing it sans a third of its face.
I turned around and ran.
“What is it?”
That was Claire, pulling on a dressing gown and coming out of her room as I half ran, half limped into mine.
“You know that learning curve you’ve been on?” I said, throwing open my closet door. “It’s been accelerated.”
“What?” She’d come in behind me. “Dory—”
I grabbed a duffle bag in one hand and her arm in the other. “Get to the kids. You’re the last line of defense. Anything gets past me, burn it to the ground.”
I didn’t wait to see if she got it or not. Because, in the short time I’d been away—and it had been fucking short—the lead creature had broken loose from the house and leapt up the stairs—
Only to be blown all the way back down, into the line of backup headed this way. And with a new, basketball-sized burning hole in its torso, the blackened edges still on fire when it landed. And sent the others falling into what had become a battle of epic proportions and was about to get more so, because the duffle I’d grabbed wasn’t black.
There was nothing in my usual stash that would work on these things; I wasn’t even going to try. So I’d gone straight for the red sack of special-occasion toys I rarely use since none of them are legal and all of them would normally be massive overkill. But it always helps to be prepared, I thought, ratcheting the special shotgun again.
And cutting loose.