With strange double pops of air, Clermont disappeared and reappeared, this time holding a sword with a slightly curved blade, not quite a broad sword, too wide and curving to be a dueling sword. The blade was black except along the honed steel edge and point. The cross-guard was a swirl that swept back, protecting the hilt and his hand, to knot around the pommel. A Civil War–era sword, old and dependable.
He rushed across the floor and cut a long slice, deep into the swamp thing. The demon screamed and black blood welled up. I had a half second to notice the dark magics within the blood, then the wound clotted over like tar cooling.
I retreated toward Lucky, which was also closer to Eli, lying unmoving against the wall. His eyes were half-open, the whites showing. His chest moved as he drew in air, and something inside me unclenched, sending relief shivering through me. He was still alive.
The demon spread a grin, half its face opening to reveal teeth no frog ever had, spiked and barbed and curved back. It should have roared, but instead it flexed its shoulders and laughed, a deep, dark reverberation. The notes made Eli’s laugh sound innocent, a schoolboy at a silly prank. This was the laughter of a devil with a torturer’s joy of blood and misery.
Clermont’s eyes continued to vamp-out, growing blacker than I had ever seen them. Gently he put Bobbie Landry behind him and said to her, “Take Shauna and Gabe and Clerjer. Door to left of stage and down, into lair. Make my fool son drink from my primo and my secundo. Tell dem all, Sacrement! Dey know what to do.”
Bobbie shot a look at Clermont, then at Lucky, her eyes wide with fear, the calculating kind of fear that can keep its head in the midst of bombs and explosions and even demons from hell. As if it wasn’t there, she reached through Shauna’s hedge ward and shoved the girl. Hard. Shock on her face, Shauna stumbled out of her ward, toward the door. “Mama? How . . .”
With one unladylike fist, Bobbie roundhoused Gabriel, catching Clerjer as he dropped the child. The baby over one shoulder, she grabbed a handful of Gabe’s long hair and tried to haul him across the stage, not bothering with gentleness. My kinda woman—take no prisoners, no back talk, and no stupidity. Shauna, seeing what her mother was doing, took her baby, laid him across her own shoulder, and added her strength to Gabe’s deadweight.
They disappeared behind the stage just as the flaming draperies lit the ceiling overhead with a wind-whipping roar. The heat flowed like a burning wave across the ceiling, seeking the air at the doorway, the flames billowing and rolling like a boiling, upside-down river, like water gone mad. The entire ceiling was afire, the heat so fierce that I crouched to get my body an inch or two lower. I smelled wood smoke and burning hair. Mine. The smoke raged down, black and suffocating.
Into the inferno Edmund raced, two long swords flashing in the red-scorched heat. He and Clermont attacked the swamp demon. If I’d had the time, if my partner weren’t down, I would have stood there slack-jawed, watching them. Edmund Hartley with swords was a thing of utter beauty. Thrust, whirl, lunge, lunge, lunge, thrust, whirl, the cage of flashing steel so fast that, even with Beast-vision, I couldn’t follow it. It was a glittering, flickering dance of death that slashed gobbets of mud off the demon and sent them flying. They hit the walls and quivered, orienting themselves back to the battle, as if the mud gobbets could see the demon, even without eyes, as if seeking a way back. Lucky tossed preprepared workings at the dismembered parts and they drooped into flaccid nothingness, sliding to the floor, where they lay inert.
Satisfied that all were safe-ish, for the moment, I raced to my partner. Kneeling, I rolled Eli up across my shoulder and back, and raced to the doorway. I dumped him there in an ungainly pile and shoved him into the street, into the rain. Freshly wet, I raced back inside, the rain so cool it felt delicious on my charred scalp.
Lucky was coughing, but he and Clermont were moving with purpose around the swamp thing, staying out of Edmund’s way, flanking the creature. The three warriors scarcely looked at one another, but seemed to read intent, matching maneuvers as though they had worked paramilitary tactics together for decades. Clermont surged forward and hit the floor, rolling under the pool table. As he ran, Lucky spun to one side and pulled something from his pants pocket; he threw it, spinning, red-hot, and smoking. It hit the thing under the arm, silent. Just like a ninja throwing star, but one that had been in a furnace all day, glowing with fiery magic.
The star disappeared inside the swamp thing with a sizzle of sound. The creature hissed and laughed again. It licked its lipless mouth with a wide, brown frog tongue. Lucky tried the preprepared working that had been successful on the dismembered body parts, but on the bigger mass of demon, the spells simply rolled off it and went out in poufs of broken energy.