Will I go to hell?
And then silence. A flash of ruddy light beneath me. Tame, then not. Beyond the perimeter of the blue-green sanctuary, everything blurred, vibrated. The cocoon dissolved, and with it my arcane sense. Surroundings snapped into sharp focus. Sound crashed in. Screams. The crack of concrete. The shriek of twisting steel. The crash of glass. Horror clawed within me as a portion of the station collapsed in upon itself. The entire front half of City Hall disintegrated into rubble. And then buildings beyond it. Trembling, crumbling. And more beyond those. Like a five minute earthquake compressed into the span of a heartbeat. Nightmare. Impossible. And real.
Chapter 38
Smoke and gas and blood. Shouts and orders and screams. Panic and fear and determination.
Dust choked the air, and water fountained from a broken hydrant. Concrete and rebar groaned and creaked as it settled into ungainly piles. The entire front of the three-story City Hall lay in the street. More than two thirds of the PD had collapsed, and tears sprang to my eyes as I took in the sight. Surely everyone had made it out? They were still my people even if I didn’t work there anymore. The station would always be special to me—a place I’d called home.
I tore my eyes away from the ruin. “How is it?” I asked Idris.
“Don’t know yet,” he said, hands shaking as he worked them over the valve.
I didn’t want to think about the number of casualties in the blast radius—couldn’t think about it if I wanted to keep going. But without the bean’s intervention it would have been much worse.
She scuttled around to cling to my chest, her back claws hooked on the waistband of my jeans. She spread her wings and brought her scaly snout to within an inch of my nose, her eyes fixed on mine. I steeled myself for a baby dragon-demon surprise of who-knew-what instructions, but instead she stretched her fanged jaws wide in an almighty yawn. Aww, she was a tired baby.
I cradled her close in an awkward wingy sort of way. “You did damn good, kiddo,” I murmured, then sighed. Crap. Not half an hour old, and she’d heard me curse. Oh, well, best for her to get used to it. “Y’think you can give your poor mama a break and look human when she first sees you?” I said with a soft smile. “She’s been through a lot for you.”
She let out an adorable little burble and made an unsettling shift that left me feeling as if I held a bag full of wiggly kittens. White scales transformed to soft skin, and her tail shrank to a stub. She waved her wings once before they quivered and morphed into smooth skin on her back. The dragon face shifted into something humanish—except it swiveled on the end of a disturbingly long neck. I stooped and picked up the red silk that had wrapped Katashi’s arm and tucked it around her.
“C’mon, sweetie, all the way human,” I urged. “Do it for your mommy.” I glanced at said mommy. Bedraggled and dazed, Jill slid down from the backseat, staggered a few steps then collapsed to sit against the rear wheel of the truck with one hand on her belly. “She deserves a break,” I went on, “and she needs your help right now.”
The bean tick-growled, but she adjusted her neck to a reasonable human baby length and shrank the stub of her tail away. She was still a lot bigger than a typical newborn, but at least she looked like a baby now—mostly. She yawned, a bit too wide, revealing several rows of pointy teeth. And the blink of her inner eyelids was way weirder on a baby than a dragon. I tried to wrap her in a Kara version of a swaddle but, when claws emerged from her fingertips, I got the message and left the cloth loose around her. “Put the claws away,” I murmured as I held her close and hurried over to Jill.
“Hey, chick,” I said with a smile. “Got someone who wants to say Hi.”
Jill lifted her head as I crouched. The distress vanished from her face at the sight of the bundle in my arms, and she took the bean from me with a choked gasp.
“She’s pretty kickass,” I said with a warm smile as Jill made cooing noises at her baby. “Just like her mom.”