track. One second it was spearing down at Louis-Cesare, and the next—
It was right in my face.
Chapter Fourteen
Dory, Cairo
It was impossible, just impossible. And this was coming from someone who had once stared down a fully grown dragon. I’d thought that was intense, but after this, I was going to have to revise my personal scale.
Holy shit just got a brand-new definition.
Of course, that depended on me surviving this at all, which . . . yeah.
Fortunately, the senate didn’t buy cheap shit, and while I wasn’t the best on a bike of anybody I’d ever seen, I was motivated. I threw a couple of magical smoke bombs, skidded around in the resulting confusion, saw that giant head strike down all of an inch away from my right leg. And knifed the bastard in the eye.
It reared back, an unholy ululation of surprise and pain coming out of its mouth, so human-sounding that it had every hair left on my body saluting the insanity. And then it was coming for me as I rocketed ahead, with a sound like all the sandpaper in the world being scraped across all of the stone. The dragging shhhhSSSSHHHSSSHHHHHSSSSSHHHHHH noise made my ears want to join my skin wherever it had fucked off to.
And damn it, I tried. I was flying, straight back the way I’d come because that was the only exit I knew, and I was getting the fuck out of here! And so was someone else.
A second earlier, Lantern Boy had been on top of the rubble heap, hiding like he maybe had some sense. Now he was sitting behind me, holding onto my waist, and screaming in my ear. “Take a left!”
“What?”
“After you leave the chamber, go left!”
I went left.
“What are you doing?” I yelled, staring at him over my shoulder as we plunged into darkness, and thus getting a perfect view of the wall behind us blowing out.
“Helping you!”
We started down a long set of narrow stairs with almost no light at all, which wasn’t the best place for a conversation. “W-w-w-w-w-why?”
“I fail you. I fail him. I not fail again!”
Well, that’s optimistic, I thought, as the stairs disintegrated beneath us. That probably had something to do with the fact that an ancient demigod was smashing through them like they were tissue paper instead of solid stone. Or maybe it was just trying to fit its bulk down a passage completely unsuited for it.
Either way, it wasn’t fun.
That wasn’t the worse part, though.
A foul, lung shriveling stench flooded the air as my tires struggled to find purchase on the disintegrating floor, while chunks of stone tumbled down the stairs from behind me. It was so bad that I almost couldn’t breathe again, not because there wasn’t air, but because my body didn’t want it. I had to force myself to take in any oxygen at all, which was probably just as well.
Imminent asphyxiation gave me something else to concentrate on other than immanent death.
But that wasn’t the worst part, either.
“Left!” Lantern Boy screamed, and I hung a left, despite not being able to see a damned thing. But I could feel, and there was suddenly solid stone under my wheels again. I tore ahead, straight into a group of—
What was this shit?
I still couldn’t see too well, although the dead blackness of a moment ago was gone, but not for any good reason. We’d just plunged into the middle of what appeared to be a glowing crowd of mummies. They weren’t glowing much, but down here, any illumination seemed bright. And they were mummies, as in the ancient Egyptian, covered in bandages, barely shuffling along variety.
They weren’t attacking us, unless you counted getting in the way, so I guessed they weren’t part of Jonathan’s forces. It looked like whatever spell he was using had had some spillover, and whoever had been buried in the temple’s crypts had gotten caught in it. As to why the hell they were glowing a faint greenish white, I had no idea.
But it was pretty damned startling, and the ancient demigod apparently thought so, too. Or maybe he just got confused. Whatever the reason, one of the creatures was snatched up from beside us, and—
“Fuck!”
“The god, he has poison,” Lantern Boy informed me.
No shit. The mummy was no sooner pierced by those fangs than it began writhing and flailing, almost like it was alive and in pain again. Only no, I realized staring over my shoulder. The reason was the same one that caused a