It was beautiful.
“Fuck me,” Billy whispered, back in ghostly form at my side.
“Get back to your body, small one,” the first golem told me, still in its clay form. “And get your friends far from this place. Or the scouring may take them as well.”
“What? No! Not them!” Billy said, because I was still staring stupidly upward. “And not the hotel! Just the bad guys!”
“We will contain it as well as may be,” the golem told him. “But this space you call the drag is not safe. Get them out.”
“But we can’t get them out,” Billy said furiously. “You don’t understand! We need—”
But we didn’t have a chance to say what we needed. Because one of the jellyfish tentacles reached out and brushed us—
And the next second, we were flying.
Billy caught me; I felt his arm go around me in a warm embrace, felt him pull me close, felt his anger when he said: “Demons! I really hope you know what you’re doing, Cass. You just made a deal with the devil!”
Three of them, I thought, staring down at the drag as it blurred beneath us: dark and neon bright, spells flying, fires burning, artificial rain pelting down onto the black-coated half circle surging at Augustine’s tiny shop. It was strangely beautiful, too.
I closed my eyes, just for a moment, so tired. . . .
“Cass! Don’t you do this to me! Don’t you fucking do this!”
I heard Billy’s voice, but it was so far away, so far. And this darkness wasn’t like the other. It was warm, and welcoming, and peaceful. . . .
“Goddamn it, I said no!” Billy said, and the next moment, I felt him everywhere, all around me, all through me. He engulfed the rapidly dissipating strands of whatever part of me was still left, merging it with the more solid brilliance of his own spirit.
And then we moved, like we’d been shot out of a cannon. Rocketing back down to ground level, zooming past and then through the bodies of the jostling, straining men, sizzling along with the overstrained ward, while blast after blast of spell power buffeted us, strong enough collectively to be felt even in the spirit world. And then we were through, bursting into the middle of the ruined little shop—
And the next second, I was choking to death on the messy, bloody, trash-strewn floor of Augustine’s.
Everything slammed into me at once: pain—God, so much pain—almost indescribable exhaustion, shock and the confusion of crashing into yet another body, and the fact that it was my own didn’t seem to make that much difference.
Realizing that I couldn’t breathe.
After a second it dawned on me that the sprinkler system was still going off, resulting in pools of stagnant water everywhere—including the one I was facedown in. It looked like I’d been propped up against the back wall of the shop, but I’d fallen over, probably after Billy left. And of course I’d fallen facedown.
I rolled over, gasping and choking, and finally heaving up a bunch of nasty-tasting water while trying to roll to my hands and knees—
And ended up retching and almost blacking out instead.
I lay there, pale and cold and trembling, taking heaving breaths while the room around me shook like an earthquake had hit it. Drifts of dust and plaster were raining down, along with what looked like half the ceiling; people were running everywhere. I didn’t know why, because there was nowhere to go. And everyone was screaming, although I couldn’t hear them even though my ears had just popped.
Because the barrage was deafening.
And then the screaming suddenly got louder, loud enough that I could hear it. And the ward started shivering, like it was caught in a high wind. And the latest raft of spells didn’t stop at the surface, but stretched inward, heads forming as power piled up behind them, looking for all the world like the elongated blobs out of old lava lamps.
Until they broke through, the ward evaporating in an instant, with spells exploding and people screaming and diving for the floor, and the rest of the roof caving in.
A war mage jumped for me, his cape billowing out like a piece of the night, throwing some kind of spell I didn’t know. But it was pretty strange, because suddenly, there were two of him. The original and a second like a shadow . . .
A red shadow.
I stared at the man’s doppelganger as it hung in the air for an instant, only feet away from me, wondering what this new hell was, but unable to run or even move—
And then it collapsed, hitting the floor and splattering everywhere, like a bucket of warm red paint. Or a bucket of blood, I thought, blinking suddenly sticky eyelashes. Because that’s what it was: all the blood in the man’s body, which had been ripped out of him in a split second, leaving his exsanguinated corpse to tumble lifelessly to the floor.
And the torrent of blood to splash all over me.
I was still almost completely immobile, but I didn’t need to turn around. I didn’t need to see the next group of mages, who had been heading into the shop at a run, suddenly also preceded by leaping shadows. Didn’t need to watch them tumble to the floor as their friends stumbled into and over them, as both living and dead hit down, sliding on a sea of red.
I didn’t need any of it.
Because there was only one thing on earth that could do something like that.
“Shield!” one of the mages yelled. “Shield, you idiots! They’ve got—”
“Vampires,” I whispered along with him, finally turning my head.
And saw a war mage jump for the six-foot-five-inch hulk of my chief bodyguard, Marco. He hadn’t even made it all the way through the back wall yet, a fact that didn’t stop him from plucking the guy out of the air halfway through the motion and ripping him in two. And then throwing the halves aside with a roar, all in one fluid movement so fast I could barely track it with my eyes.
And then he was through, bursting out of the wall that contained the impossible-to-break-into main safe of the casino.
Which I guess hadn’t been so impossible after all, because he wasn’t alone.
There was the redheaded southern charmer, Roy, who wasn’t looking so charming as he leapt through the hole and plowed into a bunch of mages, who foolishly thought their shields would save them. And they did—for a couple seconds. But these guys had been at the front of the battle, and their shields were wrecked.
And a second later, so were they.