But Ray never got a chance to finish his sentence. Because we had finally said a word that the old man knew. He scrunched up his face and spat on the sand, while thrusting the spear at us menacingly. “Svarestri!”
Ray and I looked at each other.
Then Ray did something that validated Dory’s belief in him. He horked up a huge wad of spit, blood and phlegm, and spat it on the ground with enough force to make a divot in the sand. “Svarestri!”
The old man blinked, and regarded us narrowly for a moment. “Svarestri?”
Ray spat again. “Fuck the Svarestri!”
The old man thought some more, and eyed the large stain on my tunic again.
“Fuck the Svarestri,” he finally agreed, pronouncing the words carefully, as if he liked the sound of them. “Fuck the Svarestri!”
He looked at me.
“Fuck the Svarestri,” I agreed, and for the first time, he smiled.
He put his spear over his shoulder and clapped me on the shoulder. Then he decided it deserved more and grinned at me with a mouthful of gray and broken teeth. It appeared that we had made a friend.
“Fuck the Svarestri,” he repeated, and led the way into the forest, beckoning us to follow.
Ray and I looked at each other again. “What the hell,” Ray said.
I nodded.
We followed the old man and boy into the trees.
Chapter Forty-Three
Dory, Hong Kong
My new team raided my stash, and then took off through the streets, Ranbir in the lead with the activated charm in his hand. The hologram-type map glowed redly in the darkness, and it was dark. Magic and electricity don’t play well together, so the street lights were out, and not a single lamp or lighted sign could be seen anywhere.
To make matters worse, there were plenty of reminders of the recent battle to get in our way and slow down progress. It had taken a week for anybody to notice that magic was going haywire in parts of the city, and not much clean-up had happened by then. And nothing had been done since.
That left piles of debris everywhere, high enough to fill whole alleyways in places and to spill out into the streets. There was also an ocean of shattered glass glinting in the occasional beam of moonlight, like new fallen snow. But that wasn’t a frequent thing, as the cloud cover was thick overhead and completely opaque in the distance. Even up close, a thin mist hung in the air, silvering everything and reducing visibility to maybe a block.
The charmed map threw a red haze over Ranbir’s face, which wasn’t looking happy. He was trying to chart a path past the groups of moving dots, which none of us were enthusiastic about meeting. We couldn’t use magical weapons against these things, but regular old bullets didn’t do a lot, either.
What did work was vampire strength, but the vamps kept getting piled on, so evasion was definitely the way to go. Only with blocked off alleys, trash-filled streets, and destroyed buildings, that often wasn’t so easy. It felt like an obstacle course where one wrong move could get us killed.
No wonder Ranbir was sweating.
And then an ominous rumble came from further down our street, and everybody was.
“What was that?” Sarah asked shrilly. She’d followed her brother’s example and loaded up on weapons, but it didn’t look like they had made her feel any better. Her dark hair was up in a no-nonsense bun, to keep it out of her way in a fight, but her eyes were too-wide and her movements were jumpy.
Zheng had seemed to think that she and her team would be an asset, but he’d had false information. I honestly didn’t know if it had been a good idea to sign these guys on or not, but what choice did we have? Nobody else was crazy enough to try this.
Of course, maybe that should have told me something.
“Fast moving bogeys, coming this way,” Ranbir said, watching the map. And using the term we’d decided on for moving obstacles, because ‘monster’ made everybody nervous.
We dodged out of the street and into an alley—which turned out to be a dead end. It wasn’t supposed to be, but it had been blocked by a mountain of bricks from a destroyed building. And the lane across from it was no better, leading to what the map showed as a massive battle going on between bogies on one of the main avenues. I could hear the screeching and caterwauling from here; I