Thirty-six
Tessa’s wings blurred and she came at me, scythe-hook arms raised to strike.
The voice inside my head was screaming a high-pitched, girly scream of terror, and for a second I thought I was going to wet my pants. There wasn’t any time to get cute, there wasn’t any space to run, and without the superstrength of the Winter mantle, I was as good as dead.
Unless . . .
If Butters was right, then the strength I’d gained as the Winter Knight was something I’d had all along—latent and ready for an emergency. The only thing that had been holding me back was the natural inhibitors built into my body. Not only that, but I had another advantage—during the past year and a half or so, since I’d been dead and got better, I’d been training furiously. First, to get myself back on my feet and into shape to fight if I had to, and then because it had provided a necessary physical outlet for the pressures I was under.
The thing about training of any kind is that you get held back by an absolute limit—it freaking hurts. Little injuries mount up, robbing you of your drive, degrading the efficiency of whatever training you’re into, creating imbalances and points of relative weakness.
But not me.
For the duration of my training, I’d been shielded from pain by the aegis of the Winter mantle. It wasn’t just that it made me physically stronger—it also allowed me to train longer and harder and more thoroughly than I could possibly have done without it. I wasn’t faster and stronger than I’d been before solely because I wore the Winter Knight’s mantle—I’d also worked my ass off to do it.
I didn’t have to beat Tessa. I just had to survive her. Anna Valmont would already be on the vault door, finessing it open again, and now that she’d done it once, I was pretty sure that her repeat performance would be even faster. How long had it taken her to take the door the first time? Four minutes? Five? I figured she’d do it in three. And then Michael would be through the door and this situation would change.
Three minutes. That was one round in a prizefighting ring. I just had to last one round.
Time to make something awesome happen, sans magic, all by myself.
As Tessa closed in, I flung my mostly empty duffel bag at her, faked to my right, and then darted to my left. Tessa bought the fake and committed, sliding past me on the smooth floor. I jumped up on top of a money cube and, without stopping my motion, bounded up again to the top shelf of a storage rack of artwork, got my feet planted, and turned with my staff raised over my head as she came blurring through the air toward me.
I let out a shout as I swung the heavy quarterstaff, giving it everything I had. I tagged her on the triangular head, hammering her hard enough to send the shock of the blow rattling through my shoulders. She might have been fast and psycho-angel strong, but she was also a bitty thing and even in her demonform she didn’t have much mass. The blow killed her momentum completely and she plunged toward the floor.
But instead of dropping, she slammed her hooks into the metal shelf, their points piercing steel as if it had been cardboard, and she let out a shriek of fury as she started hauling herself up toward me.
I didn’t like that idea. So I jumped on her face with both of my big stompy boots.
The impact tore the hooks free of the shelf and we both plunged to the floor. I came down on top, and the landing made my ankles scream with pain, and drove a gasping shriek from Tessa. I tried to convert the downward momentum into a roll and was only partly successful. I scrambled away on my hands and knees about a quarter of an instant before Tessa slammed a scythe down right where my groin had been. She’d landed on her back, and for an instant her limbs flailed in a very buglike fashion.
So I dropped my staff, grabbed one supporting strut of the steel shelving, and heaved.
The whole heavy storage rack and all its art came crashing down onto her head with a tremendous crash and a deafening sound of shattering statuary. I grabbed my staff and started backpedaling toward the entrance to Hades’ strong room.
Tessa stayed down for maybe a second and a half. Then the shelves heaved and she threw them bodily away from her and scrambled back to her feet with another shriek of anger. She turned toward me and came leaping my way.
I stopped in my tracks, drew the big .500 out of my duster pocket, took careful aim, and waited until Tessa was too close to miss. I pulled the trigger when she was about six feet away.
The gun, in the confined space of the vault, sounded like a cannon, and the big bullet crashed into her thorax, smashing through her exoskeleton in a splash of ichor, and staggering her in her tracks. Behind her, a money cube suddenly exploded into flying Benjamins.
I took two or three steps back before she got moving again, and then I stopped and aimed once more, slamming another round into her. I stepped back and then fired a third round. Back again, and a fourth. After the fifth, my gun was empty and Tessa was still coming.
The bullets hadn’t been enough to do more than slow her down, but they’d bought me what I needed most—time.
I stepped back into Hades’ strong room and slammed the barred door closed just as Tessa came at me again. She hit the far side of the door with a violent impact and wrenched at it with her scythes but it had locked when it closed, and it held fast. She shrieked again and her scythes darted through the bars toward me. I reeled back in time to avoid perforation, and my shoulders hit the wall behind me.
“Hell’s bells!” I blurted. “At least tell me why!”
The mantis’s scythe-hooks latched onto two of the bars and began straining to tear them apart. Metal groaned and began to bend, and I suddenly felt one hell of a lot less clever. Tessa wasn’t all that big, and it wouldn’t take much of a bend in the bars to allow her into the strong room with me, without leaving an opening big enough for me to use to escape. If she opened them enough to come in, I was going to die a savagely messy death. Seconds ticked by in slow motion as the demon mantis quivered with physical strain and pure hatred.
“Why?” I demanded. My voice might have come out a little bit high-pitched. “What the hell are you doing screwing around with this mission?”
She didn’t answer me. The bars groaned and slowly, slowly bent maybe an inch, but they’d been built extra thick, as if they’d been precisely intended to resist superhuman strength, which in all probability was exactly the case. Tessa threw back her insect’s head and let out a screech that pressed viciously on my ears.
Halfway through, the mantis’s head and face just boiled away, and the screech turned into a very human, utterly furious scream as Tessa’s head appeared, both sets of her eyes wide and wild.
“I have not invested fifteen centuries to see it thrown away!” she shrieked.
I stared at her helplessly, my heart pounding furiously in my chest. I tried to think of something clever or engaging or disarming to say, but what came out was a helpless flick of my hands and the words “Psycho much?”
She focused on me, utterly furious and she spat several words that might have been an incantation of some kind, but her fury was too great to allow her to focus it into a spell. Instead, she just opened her mouth and screamed again, a scream that could never have come from a simple set of human lungs, one that went on and on and on, billowing out of her mouth along with particles of spittle, and then clots of something darker, and then of larger bits of matter that I realized, after a few seconds, had legs and were wriggling.
And then her scream turned into a gargle and she began vomiting a cloud, a swarm of flying insects that poured through the bars of the cage and came at me in an almost solid stream, slamming into me like water issuing from a high-pressure hose.