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The vampires were literally steps away from us, so Irish waded into those first, leaving me to deal with the approaching hollowman. I suppose that was a sort of compliment. I kicked at a persistent brick with teeth that kept nipping at my boot, and in the time it took for it to sail across the room, spinning end over end with little feet waggling madly, Irish beheaded two vampires. The rest cruised on past him without so much as a look, fanning out and marching into the mist.
I watched them roll forward in a silent flood, some of them trampling their now-headless companions in their haste to get to the beast stomping towards the Knights, spilling that mist everywhere as it went. Irish turned with a look of confusion that was almost comical. He probably wasn’t used to being so completely ignored. He tossed a confused shrug at me, and I shook my head and held my hands up, equally lost. As I did, the first vamp he’d beheaded shoved itself up to its feet and stumbled around in a wobbly circle, arms waving.
Okay, that was odd. Beheading should have killed it. Beheading pretty much killed everybody. The second headless undead was also climbing to its feet, though, which frankly seemed unfair. Wasn’t anything going to stay killed today?
Irish turned to see what I was staring at, lifting his sword with some hesitance as the body shook itself, like it was clearing the head it didn’t have. It lunged at him, and Irish skewered it, swinging it around and kicking it off his sword with one boot. It staggered backwards as he turned and lopped an arm off the second vamp he’d thought he’d killed, and the move brought him back around so I could see his expression again, a look of extreme annoyance and bafflement. His mouth moved. He was shouting something at me, his words swallowed up by that mind-numbing tick-tock.
Enough of that.
I flipped a carnivorous manhole cover onto its back, stepping around it as its tentacular limbs waved uselessly, leveled my gun, and waited for a clear shot. The Hollowman was too close for comfort, maybe twenty feet away from where I stood. The others were on the job, though, and it was reeling from one of Damian’s spells, staggering but remaining on several of its feet. It was also blocking my view of that damned metronome, so I shot him first.
The dragonfire rounds lost some of their impressive psychological impact with the screaming Godzilla-roar silenced, but the livid green explosive muzzle flare made up for that. It lit the room toxic green for a moment, and again when the bullet hit the hollowman somewhere in the head region, releasing a voluminous ball of dragonfire. It obligingly fell down, flailing and burning, and I shifted my aim and hit the metronome with my second shot. The explosion annihilated the little device, which was a bit of overkill, but my gods was that tick on my last nerve.
A cacophony of noise flooded back, unbelievably loud and disorienting after all that quiet ticking. Dozens if not hundreds of skittering, hissing, snarling monstrosities, the roar of flames and the sizzling crackle of spellfire, shouting as Day yelled something at Ty and Grace screamed for Leonard to duck, the hollowman’s rumbling groan as it used several limbs to tamp out the emerald flames… my shadow sighed in satisfaction, drinking in all the lovely noise and codifying and analyzing every single decibel of it.
Cat let out a strangled shout and knifed a wayward ghoul through the eye. She jerked her long knife free and in three wicked hacks, had the thing’s head off. Not that the beheading stopped it at all. I wondered if she’d noticed that this crowd of monsters didn’t seem to mind decapitation?
She juked back a few steps, slashing out at something that looked like it used to be a trashcan, knocking it aside before it could sink its metal-wire teeth into her thigh and then the headless ghoul had her by the shoulders.
Nope. She’d missed that part.
It leaned in like it was going to take a big juicy bite of her face and stopped, possibly in confusion, as it realized it had nothing to bite with. Cat raised her knees up, planting her spike heels on the ghoul’s chest and kicked herself out of its grip. She landed on her shoulder blades, rolling into a crouch in a single graceful motion even as the ghoul landed in a swarm of tiny metallic beetle-things.
“Alice!” I turned towards Irish’s shout as he cut one of the headless vampires off at the knees. He tossed his hands up at me as if to say,what the hell?
“How should I know?” I shouted, and fired again, gratified to hear that thunderous roar as my gun spit flame and bucked in my hand, and the other headless vamp, the one with one arm, was blown to smithereens.
“You bitch!” snarled a voice from the nearest van. It was a familiar voice, too. I’d last heard it asking me in increasingly desperate tones what I planned on doing with that length of pipe. “What did you do? I know it was you!”
I turned to face the van, smiling and waggling my fingers in greeting. “Hi, Carl. Welcome to the party!” Benny the vampire aka Carl the geist aka pain in my ass had just come out of the passenger seat of the van, and was glaring at me with murder in his glowing yellow eyes. His teeth were bared, revealing his dainty new baby fangs. They’d grow in some more in the months to come. I’d heard some vampires just weren’t as well-endowed as others, though, so maybe not. Anyway, it was probably a moot point. He’d have to live through tonight first. I gave him a friendly wink, and shot him.
That was the plan, anyway.
He raised his hand and caught the bullet in midair. There was a brief flare of emerald flame and a muffled roar and he snuffed the explosion, too. Nothing remained but a coil of pale smoke rising from his hand as he dropped the bullet to the floor at his feet. Irish gave a low whistle, and I had to force myself to close my open mouth. Carl held up his other hand, where a ruby pinky ring glowed in fits and starts. “I still have power, you bitch,” he hissed at me, wiping his free hand down his soiled and bloodstained shirt, as though the dragonfire had left a greasy feel on his palm. “The rings hold a charge. What, did you think I was stupid?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I nodded.
“I’ll have the rest of it back! You couldn’t have used it all, and there’s only one place you could have channeled it to!” He pointed an accusing finger at the hazy figure of the hollowman. It was almost completely obscured in mist and shadow, but it had regained its feet. To my utter shock, the bulk of the undead horde were attacking it en masse, leaping in, tearing hunks of meat and metal and glass off, and being thrown off into the mist as it struggled. It was like watching a swarm of ants attacking a grasshopper, only a lot uglier. “You fed the power to the outlander! It was part of the ritual, and everyone else is dead! It’s the only place you could have hidden all that energy from me!” Carl/Benny stood straight, all five foot six of him, puffing out his chest, sucking in his stout tummy and squaring his jaw. “It was a clever gambit, Alice. I’m almost impressed. But I was prepared. I was planning to make the creature mine anyway, and use it to harness the entire energy reserve! You actually saved me a lot of effort!”
Irish and I looked at each other. “You did that?” he asked, and I remembered he’d been unconscious when I’d tossed the rings into the abyss.
“Yeah, sure.” I gave a poker-faced shrug. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess Carl just outsmarted us.”
Carl/Benny cackled madly, and actually did a little dance then and there. “You stupid twat! My undead servants will tear that thing apart, and when it’s too weak to resist me, I’ll go in and rip my power back out of the creature’s heart with my bare hands! All of it! I’ll finish the binding ritual and tame the creature, and then I’ll use it to tear you apart!”
“Damn.” Irish planted the tip of his sword on the ground, shaking his head. “And it was such a good plan, too. Sorry, Alice. It was a good try.”
Good grief. How did a dunce like Carl even qualify as a bad guy? “I dunno, Carl. The Knights are all over that thing right now – if they kill it first, I’m pretty sure you’re shit out of luck.” I shot him again, and this time he swatted the bullet aside, where it blasted a hole high in the wall. “No fancy catch this time? I bet you’re running low on juice, aren’t you?”
With another snarl, Carl bounded away and vanished into the mist. Irish returned to my side, grinning like the cat that got the canary. “Please tell me this means the Carlgeist is about to kill the hollowman for us?” he whispered. “Because I love that plan.”
I surveyed the room. Everybody was still fighting, and some of the undead were engaging Cat and Damian, probably too caught up in the confusion to stay on-task. “That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? But no – the undead platoon will injure and weaken the hollowman, but they don’t want it dead. They want its defenses brought low. When he reaches inside and doesn’t find his magic reserves, it won’t take a genius to fall back to Plan B. And that would be for the Carlgeist to ditch Benny’s body and possess the rampaging engine of destruction. After all, he’d be right there. He might even have enough juice left to repair it.”
“Oh.” He nodded, cracking his knuckles. “Aye, that would be bad.”
“Right. He won’t find the power reserve in there, but he would be in control of a really powerful, really dangerous body.” The undead were eerily quiet, aside from the occasional grunt or hiss, as they redoubled their attack. With Carl coordinating them, they moved with renewed purpose and direction, ducking under the wildly windmilling arms and slashing and biting at the creature’s center mass. “Look,” I said to Irish, pointing out what they were doing. “They’re trying to make for the center of the creature.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where Carl is. The real Carl, not the geist. He’s alive in there, and he’s what’s protecting and anchoring the outsider in our world. He’s what the geist is after.”
“Watch out!” Tyler yelled, and I felt something pulling at me, trying to draw on my personal reserves of energy and magic. Damian’s glowballs, there were six of them now, orbiting around the room, flickered and faded briefly, and I heard Leonard swear as whatever defense he’d been sheltering behind collapsed as Tyler drew in all the magic he possibly could. The room lit up red with a wall of flame that stretched from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. I gasped, amazed as my shadow provided the math on the area Tyler had just covered. The fire blazed hotter, paling to a swirling wall of pale bluish/white plasma that Tyler sent roaring across the room, toward the skittering monsters, the hissing undead, and the hollowman.
Towards me.
I let out a squeak of panic and did a duck-and-cover, much to the shadow’s amusement as she rolled up to cover me. The wall of fire hit, and it was a lot thicker than I’d thought. For five long seconds I knelt down as the flames crawled over my skin. The shadow was there, though, and it was all food to her. Still, I had long enough to wonder about how much air I had left before the flames passed.
The firewall hit the wall behind me and guttered out, leaving half the room scorched black and dotted in pyres where the flames had found something that would burn. Immediately after the flames died, a torrent of wind barreled in through the shattered doors. Fresh air, cool with the scent of November rain filled the room again, replacing the oxygen-depleted haze the flames had left in their wake. It had burned off much of the mist, too, but whole clouds of the stuff were billowing out as the undead continued to harry the rumbling hollowman.
They were all burned, but not a one of them was falling down dead. Charred and blackened, some of them still wearing scraps of burning fabric, the eyeless husks fought on. Unreal. What had Carl done to supercharge them like this?
They shouldn’t even be up and moving this soon. It took longer than that to raise someone as an undead, and Carl had only made them a few hours ago, at most. Even if he had found some way to get them on their feet early, and with the power he’d had before I flushed his reserve out of this world, that was a possibility… they still sure as hell shouldn’t be surviving flames and beheadings! Speaking of Carl, where was he? I didn’t see him anywhere, but I supposed it was possible he was one of the smoldering skeletons.
I straightened up and looked back at the sound of Tyler falling down. He had dropped to his knees, holding his head. Even from across the room, I could see the blood on his face. It was leaking from his ears, eyes, and nose, and when he coughed he left a red smear on the tile floor. That was a real bad sign, and it meant he was just about out of this fight. If he hadn’t already burned himself out, forever destroying his ability to harness magic, he was dangerously close to it. Magicians aren’t machines, and we can only push ourselves so far.
“Alice.” Irish reached my side, still slapping a few embers off his coat. He was sooty, but not burned. Grace did good work, apparently. “Ye all right?”
“Peachy.” I glanced around. Cat hadn’t bothered to notice the wall of flame, and it certainly hadn’t slowed her down any. She was grappling with three beheaded, blackened half-skeletons with barely enough meat left to hold their bones together. Her face was etched in lines of profound irritation as she took the undead apart bit by bit in a dance of knives.
“Irish followed my gaze, eyes widening. “Is that…?”
“Cat. Yep.”
“Is she wearing…?”
“A leather catsuit with spike heels? Yes, she is.”
“She looks…”
“Like a slut, yeah.” I patted his arm. “Don’t worry, it’s probably just a phase. I went through a thing when I was her age where it was all little tartan school-girl skirts and pigtails. They grow out of it.” His face as he immediately visualized me in a school-girl outfit was positively sublime. I nodded as he reddened, and added, “With the white knee socks and patent-leather heels. The works.”
Leonard came jogging up right then, half a dozen small gemstones orbiting his upraised fist. He slid to a stop at my side and flicked a finger at one of the crispy vampires, one that had been shambling about, apparently lost. One of the stones shot out like a bullet, and the corpse crumbled to dust. He glared at us with narrowed eyes and hissed.
“It’s wonderful that you two have managed to preserve your amicable repartee, but if it isn’t too much to ask, could we just kill these things now and save the flirting for later?”
“D’ye still have ‘em?” Irish asked me over Leonard’s head, ignoring him.
“The outfit? You know, I just might. Now if you’ll excuse me, the boss says I have to go kill something.” I grinned and strode into the knee-deep mists, firing a volley of careful shots into the melee.
The hollowman let out a guttural roar, something rustier and deeper than that awful shriek from before and nowhere near as painful, although it could compete with the dragonfire for sheer deafening power. I hit it eight times, sending up great blistering gouts of green fire. The explosions knocked several of the undead off, flash-frying them and sending bones flying in all directions. I managed to blacken the hollowman’s hide and even blew one leg clean off, but other than causing it to belch forth still more of that mist from the wounds, the dragonfire didn’t seem to accomplish much.
Worse, the wounds were leaking a thick, oily black tar. I’d seen that before, too. Where the tar landed, glistening white tendrils and bulbous eyestalks were growing. On the creature itself, even, as well as on the floor. The cur-ruptions had manifested that effect earlier, too, but not until after Irish had ‘killed’ them. I wondered if it was a good sign – like something that happened with the creature was badly hurt or dying? There was no way to tell, of course. Hell, as alien as this thing was, that could actually be its form of language. It was an interesting thought, but it didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot – I was going to see it dead, tonight. One way or another.
The shadow swirled up and froze the mist again and I faltered, pausing in my advance as my stomach clenched and threatened to empty itself. The taste of it was getting worse… how was that even possible? A sparkling flutter of frost pattered to the floor all around me. While I was busy trying not to barf up my shoes, Irish passed me and went after the hollowman.
A third van backed through the wall, blowing out a shower of chunky debris, and I whirled to aim at that, one hand on my knee as I swallowed hard and my eyes watered. The back doors flew open, and another group of undead came clambering out, fanning out and scanning the room.
“Seriously?” I growled. “How many of you could he possibly have made in one freaking day?” and I blinked the tears away. I squeezed off a quick shot, sending a gape-jawed ghoul up in flames. “I mean, it’s Carl! Geomancers are supposed to be slow!”
The van suddenly shifted, and I blinked in astonishment as it surged backward, sending a few of the undead sprawling. The back end of the van lifted, and the van came down like a hammer, smashing a pair of young-looking black vampires in torn and bloody work overalls into paste and sending the rear wheels of the fan flying as the axle shattered.
A bulky ten-foot behemoth stomped into the station, shouldering the wrecked van out of its way as it passed. My shadow washed up around it, feeding me the feel and flavor of metal, oil, and exhausts fumes, and the contours of coils of wire and spirals of hose arcing up from piston-like joints.
Leonard laughed in delight, clapping his hands. “Alice, my god! I take it all back! Did you seriously bring a robot?”
The big metal man paused in the entry, looking around with eyes that glowed like dull red coals. They were tail lights, I realized. It had fins on its shoulders, probably from a classic Plymouth. There was a grill on its chest, with a Packard logo front and center. It clenched huge metal fists, and my shadow and I took note of the Chevy insignias adorning its knuckles and the battered fenders it wore like armor. But what really caught my attention was the writing on the thing’s forehead. A single word in Hebrew, the letters glowing like liquid gold.
“That’s not a robot!” I called, taking Leonard by the arm and backing us away until the wall stopped us. “That’s a golem, and it’s not mine!”
Leonard scowled, and raised his fist again, but I stopped him before he could launch one of the deadly little missiles at it. The metal golem’s gaze settled on the nearby group of undead, and it swiveled that way with gusts of steam blowing out of its joints, and exhaust fumes venting from its mouth. It marched in big clanking steps that made the floor tremble into the milling group and proceeded to seize a vampire in each of its rusted metal claws. It smashed them together and tore them limb from limb, wet meaty chunks flying in every direction as cold dead blood ran down its body.
“Easy, there, bossman,” I said, guiding Leonard’s fist back down. “Just because it’s not mine doesn’t mean it’s not on our side.”
I felt the flickering currents of magic racing through its limbs, and knew it was an artifact. True enough, I’d never heard of a golem built from anything but mud, but that’s what it was. I was shocked. I’d had no idea we had anyone in Detroit who still knew how to build and animate a golem, let alone put together a whole new breed. Did golems have breeds? Templates? This one seemed entirely made of auto parts, so maybe make and model would be better terms? Instead of a Prague Mud 1790, this would be a Detroit Steel 2011.
While we watched, it opened a panel on one arm, and pulled out a heavy steel hook on a length of cable. There was a whirring sound as it unspooled – a winch? Seriously? And then it was swinging that hook like a wrecking ball, bowling over one of the undead and hooking another by sinking the hook deep into the poor bitch’s hip. She screamed and clawed at the hook, but she was already being reeled in toward those open hands be torn into small pieces.
It was beautiful.
While I was staring – and making a note to find out who made that thing and what it would take for them to show me how it was done – the shadow alerted me to yet more new arrivals, only some of which she recognized. Pardell ran in the doors first followed by a small mob of thirty or forty big, fat wharf rats. Thirty-eight, the shadow informed me, and moved to freeze the mist again before it could get to Pardell’s little army. The rats washed out in a skittering, squeaking mass, going after the remaining hollowspawn. Most of what was left was made of metal or stone, but that didn’t seem to bother the rats any. The smallest of them was still the size of a small cat, and rat teeth are wicked sharp. Rats gnaw through metal and concrete, and these were being guided to go for weak points like legs or eyes. Pardell stood well back with his harmonica, although he did pause long enough in playing to wave at me with a big, stupid grin on his face.
While I was smiling at him – look at him go, like a proper Pied Piper! – six more people stepped in around him. The only two the shadow could identify were Mikey and Larry, which told me that we had even more backup on the way, if they weren’t here already. If Mikey was here, then the other deAngelo goons wouldn’t be far behind. Larry still wore his silly sci-fi sunglasses, and brandished his smartphone, ready and poised to photograph as much blogfodder as he could.
The other newcomers included a stoop-backed old man and a bespectacled younger fellow at his side, both dressed in black and wearing yarmulke. The older one had the beard and ringlets of an Orthodox Jew, and I was willing to bet he was the Rabbi Larry had mentioned earlier.
There was a whip-thin old lady with her silver-gray hair in a bun on top of her head. She wore a crimson mandarin coat and black slacks, and smoke curled from her nostrils and mouth as she stepped around the two Jews to get a look at the room. I recognized her, even if I didn’t know her, and it took me a second to place from where – if I’d seen her but the shadow hadn’t, that meant it had been a picture… the shadow didn’t do two-dimensional imagery very well. It came to me pretty quickly. Irish’s sketchbook. This was the old lady with the pipe. She didn’t seem to have it with her now, though, which raised the question of where the smoke she was exhaling came from.
The last guy was tall and willowy and too pretty to be real, with big, almond shaped eyes in a face carved from ivory, thick auburn hair curling down around his ears. He was barefoot, wearing skin-tight faded jeans that rode enticingly low on his hips. A black leather vest failed to cover his tight, well-muscled body, pale skin adorned with tastefully badass tattoos and an assortment of silver piercings. He looked like something Byron or Shelly would have made up, if they had been on the Abercrombie and Fitch mailing list.
Half-fae, unless I missed my guess. He wasn’t shining at all, and there was no afterimage when he moved, so I doubted he could be a fullblood. He carried a long, thin stick in one hand, maybe two and a half feet long, with the bark removed and the wood oiled to a beautiful shine. I made a note to stay out of its way. A fae with a wand is someone to avoid, and even if he were only a halfbreed, that’s no reason to take chances. He moved into the room and proved me right almost immediately by whipping a vampire in half with a slash of that stick. The wand left a pulsing afterimage in its wake, that faded well after the halves of the vampire had fallen to the ground.
Interestingly, the two halves just lay there. Whatever faery magics were in that wand were enough to put these things down permanently.
The hollowman let out another guttural roar, and I shifted my attention to the fight there through my shadow’s senses, not wanting to look away from the handsome newcomer with the interesting wand. We felt Cat on one side of the hollowman and Irish on the other. There were only four undead left on the thing, clinging like barnacles as they bit and tore at it. The rest of them had scattered, apparently starting to lose track of their orders as they got knocked around and hurt. I felt Grace dismembering two of the stragglers with snake-strike speed off to my left, swiping them to little bits with those razor claws. The bits flopped and writhed where they fell, and Grace moved on to two more of them, carving them to ribbons. Behind the hollowman, Damian spun streamers of white floss off his orbs, wrapping vampires up in streamers of white that sizzled what flesh remained and carved into bone.
The B-List Brigade advanced into the room, the Asian woman proving her dragon ancestry as she blew hot yellow flames into the face of a vampire, sending it off into panicked circles as it burned. The two Jews remained by Pardell, letting their golem take care of their share of the light work. Pardell’s rats converged on metallic beetle-like things and bit living floor tiles in half as he played a brisk bluesy riff on his harmonica. It was a catchy tune.
The fae-boy, whose good looks were somehow squarely in the uncanny valley – they just didn’t seem real, somehow – lingered near to Pardell and the other two non-combatants. He armed sweat off his brow, and that cinched his mortal ancestry. Faeries don’t sweat. He slashed the wand back and forth, making it hum as it cut the air, but it wasn’t doing that afterimage effect just now. I guessed that whatever that was, it took a lot out of him. My guess was confirmed when Carl/Benny suddenly popped out of the ticket booths where he had sheltered from the wall of fire. He raised his ring, readying a shot at Cat, and the fae-boy raised the wand to shoulder height and held it at full extension. For a split-second, the wand seemed twenty yards long, lancing out and touching Benny’s bare chest where his torn shirt gaped open. Just that fast, and Carl/Benny was flopping on his back, frothing at the mouth and spasming. Elf-shot. A seizure. My eyes never left the fae, though, and he was already sagging, gasping for breath and sweating like a whore in church.
I turned and lined up a shot at the Carlgiest, wishing Mikey weren’t watching this. My gun clicked empty, and I swore, fumbling for a new ammo clip even as he shakily regained his feet and dove back through the ticket window out of sight.
Mikey reached my side, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder. He had Larry in tow, mostly, I think, to keep an eye on the kid. “Hey, Alice. Mama’s on her way,” Mikey shouted at me, somehow managing to sound conversational as he squinted through the smoke to watch the fights. He whistled, watching Irish and Cat as they danced around the flailing Hollowman. “Hey, they’re pretty good!”
Benny’s here, too,” I said, slamming home a clip of my Medusa rounds. Not my first choice, since this ammo was still a little buggy, but I was fresh out of Dragonfire. Maybe I could get Soo Lin to refresh my supply? Whatever she charged, it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper than the rates Leonard had been charging me in his Randall persona. I looked up, to see Mikey scanning the room for his brother. “I saw him get out of that last van, there, but I didn’t see where he went,” I lied.
Nothing against Mikey, but he’d want to save his brother. And as far as I was concerned, that ship had already sailed.
There was a sibilant roar, and an elderly-looking ghoul came charging from behind us. A late-comer, maybe, or it had wandered outside and circled around to the front of the building. “Get down!” I yelled, bringing the Baby Eagle up in a firing stance.
Nobody got down. Instead, Mikey just laughed as the creature lunged at Larry, who… did something. I didn’t quite make out how he did it, but he didn’t even drop his phone as he pivoted, turned, and stepped to one side, his free hand touching the ghoul on the hip? Shoulder? Both?
Whatever he did, the ghoul was suddenly on its back on the floor. It had hit the stone floor tiles with enough force to crack the back of its head open, and it stared glassy-eyed at the ceiling, those elongated jaws working weakly, as though it were trying to remember how to say ‘ow.’ Mikey brought his Italian leather shoe down in a single stomp, and finished the job of smashing the creature’s head into pulp. Another quick kick, and he sent it flying out into the room to land in one of the little fires guttering amidst the fighting.
“What the hell?” I gasped, replaying the memory of what had just happened. “Did Larry just…? How the hell did…?”
Larry shrugged. “Systema. It’s this really fascinating martial art out of Russia? I took a correspondence course.”
“You learned a martial art from a book you got in the mail?”
Larry stepped away from the smear of ghoul brains on the floor. “Well, YouTube helped. Really, it’s just leverage. Just physics, when you get right down to it.”
“Yeah.” Mikey chimed in, beaming at his little buddy and looking proud enough to burst. “My alien pal kicks ass with math. It’s because of his enhanced extraterrestrial intellect.”
“Fantastic.” I ran a hand through my hair, and tried to decide where to aim my next few rounds. The Medusa rounds were supposed to petrify whatever they hit, but sometimes the spell triggered too early and the target was just hit by a stone bullet. Still, that’d hurt whatever I hit, and I might get lucky and actually make a statue out of something. The available targets were pretty slim, though. The B-List Brigade seemed to have the last dozen or so revenants and ghouls in hand – the golem, literally, as it shredded one more, tossing twitchy limbs everywhere. There was a backwash of bright light as the Dragon Lady incinerated something.
“Duane’s here,” Mikey said, following my lead and dropping to a crouch. He pulled Larry down as a meaty chunk whipped over our heads. Not far away, Soo Lin was doubled over in a coughing jag, and I wondered if she’d accidentally inhaled some of her own fire after that last blast of hers.
“Great!” I glanced over at the hollowman. Irish and Cat were working from opposite sides, hacking through the undead to get to the hollowman. The scorched vamps didn’t seem to want to share, and Irish didn’t want to let Carl get at the beast’s heart before he did.
“He’s setting up a trap for Mama,” Mikey continued. “I called to warn her, so she’s bringing all the boys.”
“What?” That got my attention. I turned to stared at Mikey, who shrugged an apology as the hollowman roared and batted two undead across the room, narrowly missing Irish with the move.
“Yeah. He’s outside with eight or ten of his guys. Heavy hitters, too. Guys with reputations.”
“Well, go stop him! Jesus, we don’t need a fucking vampire war, too!” I shoved Mikey to get him going.
“Oh, no, I can’t. Mama wants me to wait for her. She says she’s dealing with this shit once and for all.” He gave me a big, happy grin. “She’s gonna let me beat up Duane’s guys. He’s got a few out there I can’t wait to tackle. Momma didn’t want me getting a reputation, but I’m pretty sure I can take ‘em.”
I facepalmed and turned, sending the shadow to find Leonard again. Maybe he could do something about this. While she oozed over the floor, inspecting any of two or three dozen interesting things as she went, heading for Leonard, the fight between the B-List Brigade and the undead staggered our way. I caught site of the tall fae eye-candy thrusting the willow wand through a revenant’s chest, causing it to positively vibrate in place, looking like there were ten of it overlapping each other. It gagged and fell, and the fae twirled my way, pausing to tip me a quick salute before lopping the head off a pesky ghoul that had been dogging his steps. His hair was darker, dripping with sweat, but he managed to make the wet look sexy. Of course.
I dodged back out of the way as the remaining undead tried to make for the hollowman, despite missing heads, limps, being cut in half, being scorched to the bone. How in the hell were they staying on their feet? It boggled the mind.
Behind me, the hollowman roared again as Cat dispatched the last two hangers-on of the minor undead army that had besieged it before, and set to severing tendons and carving chunks off the hollowman. She posted off one of its knees, flipping over and landing on her feet again to dodge a tentacular strike from a long, armored arm.
On its opposite side, Irish waded in, removing entire arms with great heavy swipes of his blade. Cat was all speed and surgical slashes, bouncing around like a goddamn rubber ball made of razors, never holding still long enough to let it get a bead on her position. Irish favored a frontal attack, barging in and attacking, and avoiding being hit by the simple expedient of just not being where the attack was. Most of the creature’s strikes simply missed him, striking where he’d been just a heartbeat earlier, or Irish managed to shrug them off, turning to make a killing blow into a glancing strike or a graze, all the while hacking away. It was a little off-putting, the way he grinned when the thing hit him, showing his teeth like even he wasn’t quite sure if he was smiling or snarling.
The shadow located Leonard as the hollowman let out yet another roof-shaking roar. Irish had carved enough arms out of his way to drive his blade right through the creature’s still smoldering center mass, causing a veritable geyser of the pale greasy mist to fountain forth. The creature flailed out with its remaining arms and legs, catching Cat with a lucky swat that sent her tumbling ass over elbows. She shoved herself up, shaking her head, and was sailing back into the melee before the echoes of that roar had died out. Irish heaved the sword up and out through one of the hollowman’s shoulders, sending a rain of glass and meat debris sailing into the air. The mist was so thick around them that most of the pieces grew wings and started buzzing around before they even hit the floor. The hollowman reared back on three legs and howled, slamming Irish aside with two of its remaining arms. He staggered two steps, dodged a kick, and lunged back in.
Right. Enough loitering, it was time I made sure the Knights noticed me being useful and vital to the success of this whole operation. I needed to be on their good side when this was all said and done, and the way Irish was laying in to that monster, I didn’t have a lot of time.
I dodged around the fight, stuffing my gun up under the ribs of a ghoul, well into its chest cavity, and fired. The spell took, saving me from looking like some kind of amateur, and the creature stiffened and petrified even as it reached for me. I swatted at a winged eyeball, probably part of the hollowman at one point, and when that didn’t work I reached out and crushed it in my fist. A pair of rats skittered between my legs, wrestling with a long serpent that resembled an electrical cord. My shadow crystalized the mist yet again, just before the cloud reached the more vulnerable human types. It meant I reached them striding purposefully out of a settling cloud of sparkling motes, and a good entrance is worth its weight in gold. I met up with them just as Grace was helping Tyler to his feet. His face was streaked with sweat and soot, and he looked exhausted, but he had a tight smile on his face.
“Nice wall of flame!” I shouted.
“Thanks!” He tossed a look around the room. “Jesus, what a mess!”
“Right?” I darted between him and Damian, chanting under his breath and readying another strike from his glowball. He was eying up the tussle of undead and B-Listers, hopefully trying for a shot that didn’t cook one of the good guys.
“Why aren’t the vamps dying?” Ty shouted at him.
“Geists,” Day shouted back. “They’ve got geists in them!”
“What?” I stopped dead and turned around. “Did you say geists?”
Day glanced at me. “Yes.”
“Well, sonuvabitch. Fool me twice.” I shoved my gun in my holster and glanced around, tugging at the shadow’s attention and directing her towards the undead. “I got that. Duane’s outside, setting up a trap for Gianna and the deAngelos!”
“Duane? As in, the Eldest?” Grace asked. She looked tired, with bags under those messed-up eyes of hers. “Here?”
“So what?” Tyler grumbled, wiping at the blood drying on his face. “The deAngelos go, that’s a few less vampires in this town. Sounds good to me.”
“The deAngelos have a squadron of trained soldiers, and more than a few vampires. Gianna’s making a play for the leadership, and Duane brought the big guns to put them down. Even a short skirmish between those two factions is going to result in a lot of injured vampires.”
“So?” Tyler repeated.
“So,” Leonard replied, appearing out of nowhere with a rippling shimmer that indicated an invisibility effect, “injured vampires are hungry vampires. They’ll seek to feed, to replenish their reserves and heal their wounds. And there’s a residential district right across the park from here. No matter who wins the fight, those people lose.”
“What?” Day turned on Leonard, tone dripping outrage. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Tyler flipped his dreads out of his face, growling under his breath. “Fuck Duane anyway, that redneck asswipe. Opportunistic little shitstain… I said we should fry his ass, didn’t I? Why do we even keep him around?” His fists began to glow, and smoke rose from between his fingers, until Damian leaned in and slapped him.
“Knock it off! Did you not notice the hemorrhaging after your last stunt? You are benched, Tyler!” The Knight of Swords scowled fiercely at his commander, but the smoke subsided. “Thank you,” Damian groused. “If you really want to go for a drawer in the morgue or a pension when you join the muggles, feel free to disobey that order. Grace, keep an eye on him. If you get a chance, take Leonard and Tyler upstairs, away from the fighting. It’s too dangerous to go outside just now. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go deal with with the goddamn bloodsuckers.”
“Hey!” I grabbed his arm as he strode past. “Try not to kill Gianna! She owes me money!”
Damian shot me an angry glare before shaking me off. “The geists are all yours. Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast. If I have to deal with them when I get back…” I raised an eyebrow at his unspoken threat, and waited for him to finish that thought. Instead, he just leveled a finger at me and gave me what he probably thought was a menacing look before he whistled, calling four glowballs to attend him, and strode into the sooty smoke, disappearing from sight, though the shadow tracked his steps. I was actually impressed. Damian had always been a powerful thaumaturge, but he’d been a shitty leader. I’d appreciated that in the days when I was living under the radar. Apparently the threat to the civilians nearby was enough to motivate him to put on his big boy pants and take charge. Good to know.
Ty shook his head at me. “He’s really mad. What are you going to do about the geists? Lure them into a bottle or something? Have you got a geist-magnet handy?”
“Geists,” I snorted. It was really kind of embarrassing. I should have thought of that, particularly after my last encounter with Carl and his ghostly minions.
It was clever of Carl, I had to admit. The undead wouldn’t have woken up for at least a day, but Carl had already shown a propensity for geists. Fill up the undead shells with ghostly echos, and let them pilot the revenants and ghouls around. The extra energy would accelerate their metamorphosis, and so long as the geists were driving, you didn’t have to worry about any lingering personalities or uncontrollable revenants. All the physical damage in the world wouldn’t stop them, unless you managed to carve them into teeny little bits.
My shadow swelled, a faint, barely-visible dimming of the ambient light. With most of Damian’s glowballs having followed him out front, there wasn’t a lot of light to start with. We found the remaining undead – nine of them intact enough to move on their own power, and a couple dozen of them nothing but twitching husks or scraps. The shadow reached into them, flowing down their throats, soaking into their pores, creeping behind the eyes of those few fortunate enough to still have them. She reached deep into the putrid, rotting, burnt flesh, and inside the tissue, at the core of their bones, she found the geists.
“The geists are dealt with,” I said, lighting a cigarette. The geists felt like hot, electric wisps of cobweb. There was a mind there, of a sorts. An echo of a personality in extremis, clinging to those violent emotions that had imprinted on the power that sustained it. I didn’t care about the echo. But the power? That was food. The shadow inhaled, and as one, the undead fell like marionettes with their strings cut. Even the severed bits, quivering on the ground in scattered pieces, went still. “They’re gone,” I added, exhaling a plume and offering Tyler a cigarette.
“What, just like that?”
“Just like that. Oh, wait.” I cocked my head to one side, as the shadow found Carl/Benny. “We missed one.” He’d worked his way up through the ceiling of the ticket booth, and was one floor above us, peering through a hole in the ceiling and cursing me under his breath. He’d felt his minions die, and he was livid about it. Directly below, the two former Inquisitors were still harrying the hollowman. Cat would disable as many limbs as she could, and Irish would move in and stab, his longer blade reaching deep into the core of it, cutting into the real Carl with every attack. The Carlgeist was waiting for the beast to falter. Waiting to jump bodies. His timing had to be perfect, though, and even then he’d have to run like hell to escape the father/daughter hit team. He was screwed, and he knew it… he just didn’t know how screwed.
“The shadow felt him there, just more dead flesh with a juicy, tasty geist inside, and he didn’t have any magic left to keep her away. He’d used whatever he’d had left in that ring to keep his soldiers going as long as they’d lasted. The shadow surged down his throat, seeking that guttering, flickering ghostly trace of energy. She crawled all over his body, sinking into him from every direction, leaving the geist no escape route.
He kicked, and clawed at his throat. He tried to scream, but the shadow was too thick. He struggled to his feet, panicking, trying to run from the all-encompassing darkness… and it was futile. The shadow found the geist inside, the scrap of magic and false memory that thought it was Carl Meiter, and she ate it. I felt it, thin and cold and gone in an instant, and that was the end of the Carlgeist.
“Got him. Just like that.”
Benny’s body toppled and fell, falling through the hole and crashing to the floor just behind Cat.
She didn’t even need to think about it. She spun and crouched, and two blades entered his neck. “Where am I?” Benny wheezed, just before she twisted and heaved and his head came off his shoulders. She was back fighting the hollowman with her father a second after that, without even a backward glance.
Hmmm. Benny had still been in there. Hopefully Gianna didn’t ever find out about that.