Sarah looked at me, her eyes huge, and yeah. Wasn’t sure how bad this was gonna be, either. Because a bunch of faded, painted pandas on the walls had just brightened and turned their huge, fuzzy heads toward us.
They looked like a cutesy kid’s mural, with a forest of eucalyptus trees in the background, some improbably large flowers, and some happy insect friends.
They weren’t.
“No weapons,” I mouthed, and I guessed she read lips, because she nodded slightly, and slipped her .357 back into its holster.
Bear #1 regarded me curiously, with a slightly tilted head. He was still chewing on some leaves, which I took to be a good sign. But the black eyes were shiny and suspicious as he checked me over.
“Get behind me,” I told Sarah, because she was bristling with weapons and we were playing nice here. I had the arsenal with me, so I hadn’t bothered with anything but the stuff concealed by my jacket and in the outer pockets of the bag. The jacket was pretty ripped up, thanks to the Stymphalian birds out there, but it covered the hardware.
Hers didn’t.
She got behind me.
“Okay,” I said, turning my face so that she could see my lips move. “These things are popular protection wards. I saw some in a couple shops when I was here before. Play nice with them; they play nice with you.”
“What happens if we don’t play nice?” she screamed, because she couldn’t hear shit right now.
It was right in my ear, and I guessed I’d had some hearing left, after all. But probably not now. I winced, and then immediately smiled again, because the eucalyptus chewing had just stopped.
“We get our asses kicked,” I said. And since these things, like every-fucking-thing else in the dead zones, had been bathing in some high-quality magic for a while now, said ass kicking was likely to be epic.
“Okay,” she yelled. “What’s the plan?”
“We tell the guys. If they come in nice and easy, we can probably just walk on through. If not—”
And, of course, it was ‘if not’, because two first-level masters don’t take long to deal with a room full of enemies. The next moment, our little group of Rambos came rushing in, guns and swords in hand. And immediately spotted the bright-eyed pandas on the wall.
“No!” Sarah and I yelled. “Don’t—”
They did. Ev and Jason let loose and—yep. I hate being right, I thought as the walls went 3-D and in a hurry.
Black, fuzzy bodies suddenly jumped out everywhere, the size of grizzlies rather than pandas, and Sarah and I started backing up. But that was a nope as well, as the samurai weren’t dead so much as in pieces, a scattering of lethal body parts across the outer room ready to slice and dice as soon as anything got close enough. Or to kick, I thought, as the bottom half of a rider nailed me in the shin.
“Other way!” I gasped at Sarah, who shook her head violently.
“No, no, this way!” And she stepped right in front of the top half of the samurai, who almost took her leg off with a sword swipe.
I pulled her back, just in time, leaving us stuck in the doorway between two kinds of hell.
Pick the way you want to die, I thought, as another panda leapt off the wall, fluffed out from 2-D to 3-D, and immediately lunged at us. And reminded me that they are still bears when its paw tore a chunk out of Tomas, who’d dodged in between. And who was not nearly so pretty with half of his face missing.
Sarah screamed, loudly enough that I distantly heard it, a bright wave of blood spurted, and I threw a potion grenade into the middle of the room.
“What are you doing?” Louis-Cesare yelled, grabbing me. “No magic, remember?”
“I remember!” I yelled back, although I probably didn’t need to, because vamp hearing—especially first-level master vamp hearing—heals itself almost before the gunfire stops. But it was a yelling kind of moment.
“Then what are you doing?”
“That,” I said, as the potion’s vapors boiled around the room.
It was a benign one, a smoke bomb meant for camouflage, but it was powerful, being designed to cover a whole block. Only it didn’t cover this one. Billowing white clouds spread everywhere—and were immediately absorbed by the magic hungry bears.
And, oh, yeah, that made a difference.
That made a real difference, I thought, as they did the same thing that the bird had, only they had a lot more bulk to work