do you know that?” I challenged. “You just said, you’ve never been in here.”
“I haven’t. But I’ve talked to those who have, to get details to make our story believable. What they told me convinced me that I never wanted to find out for myself.”
“Yet you seem in an awfully good mood.”
“I’m just thinking about the reward Zheng is going to cough up, once we hand him Eternity’s ass. That is the plan, yes?” he tilted his head.
“That’s the plan,” I agreed.
“And if you two are who I think you are, you have no need for money, yes?”
“You can keep the reward, if there is one,” I said. “But there’s reason to think that my sister may be in there. We get her out alive. That’s job one.”
“And what does she look like?”
“Me. We’re twins.”
He nodded, as if making a mental note. He didn’t have any hair on his face, even eyebrows, but a patch of skin in the appropriate spot went up. “And since we’re helping you, I assume there’s no question of mentioning our little ruse to the senator?”
“As long as you do help.”
He smiled broadly, showing a lot of misshapen and yellowed teeth. “I believe you have a team, Miss—”
“Dory. Just Dory.”
“She does not have a team!” That, of course, was Tomas, striding back over from where he and Sarah had been talking. I was starting to find him less pretty.
Ranbir turned to look at him. “I thought you’d left.”
“You aren’t coming?” Tomas demanded.
“No, I believe I mentioned that.”
“I, too, am staying,” Ev said staunchly.
Tomas looked at him like he was crazy. “She kidnapped you, put you in chains, and dragged you into the dead zones! Why on earth would you help her?”
Ev looked at him placidly. “She gave me beer.”
Tomas threw up his hands.
“And Ranbir is right. This will make us lots of money.”
“If you survive!”
“I will survive. And I like money.”
“It’s closer than the way out,” Sarah said, biting her lip. “And we have better odds with a group—”
“Until you arrive at your destination,” Tomas snapped. “And the unknown number of triad members who await you! Has everyone suddenly gone mad?”
“Perhaps they are simply not cowards,” Louis-Cesare commented.
“Are they always like this?” Sarah asked, as Tomas launched himself at my husband, and the two rolled into the street, kicking and fighting.
I sighed.
It was starting to look like it.
“You’ve got a hell of a storehouse down there,” Jason said, emerging from the portal.
I hadn’t seen him go back inside, but he must have, and not just to look. The kid believed in being loaded for bear, and was practically bristling with weapons, most of them mine. If we had to haul ass, he was going to have a problem in all of that hardware.
“I hope this was okay,” he added, noticing my expression. “But we don’t know what we’ll find here, and I like to be prepared.”
“Doesn’t hurt,” I agreed, as a screech echoed through the air.
We looked up to see a flock of birds overhead, which I couldn’t see too well because of the fog. But their shadows rippled over the street, human-sized and oddly pointy, with strange angles. I looked for a parting of the clouds, to get a better view.
Only it seemed that something wanted a better view of me, too.
I had a split-second impression of something mottled yellow with a triangular head, appearing out of the fog, and then I was hitting the dirt. And so was everyone else—with one exception. Jason opened up with a brief explosion of machine gun fire, whether intentional or as a reflex, I didn’t know. But it was enough.
The creature cried out, a haunting, almost human sound, and the next moment, the entire flock was diving.
“Get under cover!” That was Louis-Cesare.
“No magic!” Ranbir yelled. “No magic!”
I dove behind what was left of the minibus, not understanding what he meant. But I pulled a .44 instead of anything magical, because he was a mage. He was supposed to know this kind of stuff.
But bullets simply bounced off these things, whatever they were, and that’s when you could hit one at all. I could barely track them, and my eyesight is considerably better than human average. To Jason and his sister, they must have been just orange streaks in the night, which was probably why they panicked.
It all happened in a second: one of the things dove at Louis-Cesare, who dodged with liquid speed, so the creature grabbed Jason instead. It sank talons deep in his shoulders and