Blue Dogs—their own squad. Jess recognized the Englishman with the beard and a few of the others, and it hit him like a sick jolt.
Someone shouted, and the Blue Dog soldiers all turned to face them. One of them fired, but it was a wild shot and dug gouges from the stone above and behind them. Santi and Glain fired back, and Jess managed to get his own weapon up, too. Two of the soldiers dropped immediately, and another one followed in the next second, but the two on the left abandoned the open hallway and took cover. “Glain, Jess, with me!” Santi shouted, and they pelted forward. Another shot came their way, and this one wasn’t wild at all; it was well-placed, accurate, and hit Glain in the meaty part of her thigh. She cried out and went down, and Jess blinked at the splash of bright red blood left on the wall where she’d been. He dragged her up and pressed her behind the statue of Juno, then ran after Santi, who’d activated the secret entrance behind Pluto. He skidded to a halt and aimed at the soldiers who had already lined up on Santi’s back.
One shot, and missed, but Jess didn’t. He placed his shots carefully, and both men dropped.
Santi looked angry and ill with it. “Get them in,” he said. “Look after Glain. We still have to take the Translation Chamber, and there may be more guarding it . . .” His voice trailed off, and his eyes fixed somewhere beyond Jess, toward the other end of the tunnel.
Jess heard a ringing, echoing roar.
He turned his head to see the Roman lion—the one he’d turned off on their way to rescue Thomas—racing toward them in a flat-out run, claws digging into the stone floor of the hallway as it ran, and flinging up chips behind it. His weapon wouldn’t matter to it, not at all, and from the tenor of the roar and the red shine of its eyes, it didn’t intend to take them prisoner. It would crush them, rip them, leave them bloody rags on the stones.
He heard Santi’s quiet sigh behind him and recognized the resignation in it. Santi was giving up.
Jess damn well wasn’t.
He dropped his gun and, as Morgan and Khalila ducked through the opening, with Glain held up between them, he went straight at the lion at a run. Not this time, he thought. This time I won’t miss. He couldn’t. They were in the path now, and the lion would crush them all, Scholars and Obscurists and High Garda alike. They were now enemies, and enemies had no safety.
Now.
He flung himself forward into a tight ball and rolled, slammed his legs down flat to stop himself as the lion passed over him, and then he was up, behind it, as it passed him.
“Jess!” Morgan screamed. She thought it had trampled him, and, near enough, he’d felt one paw graze his shoulder and leave a massive bruise, but he was alive. And now he grabbed hold of the automaton’s whipping tail, careful of the barb at the end, and swung himself up on the broad, muscular back.
It was like riding a storm. The lion reacted instantly to the pressure, twisting and writhing, slamming against the wall; he dodged the barbed tail that tried to spear him from behind and locked his arms around the massive neck before he swung his legs off and let momentum throw him forward. For a second he was dangling from the lion, and his head wedged in under the lion’s jaw, preventing it from biting.
Now.
He let go, and as he fell, he stabbed his fingertips up onto the switch. It gave with a sharp click, and then he hit the floor and scrambled backward as the lion lunged at him, snapping its jaws.
It came to a frozen halt a handbreadth from his face.
“Dio mio!” Santi said, lapsing just for a moment into his native Italian, and then recovered a second later to lunge forward, grab Jess, and drag him backward to his feet. For just a moment, the captain looked at him with silent approval, and then he turned and said, “We have to get to the Translation Chamber. Move.” As the others began to go, he said to Jess, “I thought we were dead.”
“So did I,” Jess admitted. “I just thought I’d rather go out fighting.”
Santi slapped him on the same shoulder the lion had bruised. “I’ve decided I like you, boy.”
Jess somehow found himself grinning. “Everybody likes me. I’m charming.”
“Shut up and move.”
Morgan embraced him with wild strength when he reached her, but it was only a moment’s pause before they began running down the corridor after Wolfe and Khalila. “Where’s Glain?” he asked, and looked back. Thomas was helping Glain limp along; he’d ripped a strip from the black Scholar’s robe to bind the hole in her leg, but she was still leaving a bloody trail of footprints behind.
“We need to get her help,” Morgan said. “She’s losing too much blood.”
“Glain’s too damned tough to die,” he said, but Morgan didn’t smile. She looked grim and scared, and he thought she ought to be. Their chances of surviving this day were looking smaller and smaller. They’d lost Dario; Glain was badly hurt. It had been a matter of seconds between his neck and a lion’s jaws.