both died away. On the other side of the street, two men in long coats and big Stetson hats stood facing the alley. I felt the sudden weight of their attention, and got the impression that they had been surprised to see me.
I whirled to speak to Mab—only to find her gone. Grimalkin, too, both of them vanished without a trace or a whisper of power to betray it.
I turned back to the street in time to see the two figures step off the sidewalk and begin moving toward me with long strides. They were both tall, nearly my own height, and thickly built. The snowfall hadn’t lightened, and the street was a smooth pane of unbroken snow.
They were leaving cloven footprints on it.
“Crap,” I spat, and fled back down the narrow, featureless alley.
Chapter Seven
At this sign of retreat, the two men threw back their heads and let out shrill, bleating cries. Their hats fell off when they did, revealing the goatlike features and curling horns of gruffs. But they were bigger than the first attack team—bigger, stronger, and faster.
And as they closed the distance on me, I noticed something else.
Both of them had produced submachine guns from beneath their coats.
“Oh, come on,” I complained as I ran. “That’s just not fair.”
They started shooting at me, which was bad news. Wizard or not, a bullet through the head will splatter my brains just as randomly as the next guy’s. The really bad news was that they weren’t just spraying bullets everywhere. Even with an automatic weapon, it isn’t easy to hit a moving target, and the old “spray and pray” method of fire relied upon blind luck disguised as the law of averages: Shoot enough bullets and eventually you have to hit something. Do your shooting like that and sometimes you’ll hit the target, and sometimes you won’t.
But the gruffs shot like professionals. They fired in short, burping little bursts, aimed fire, even if it suffered from the fact that they were moving while they did it.
I felt something hit my back, just to the left of my spine, an impact that felt somewhat like getting slugged in the back by someone with a single knuckle extended. It was a sharp, unpleasant sensation, and the way my balance wavered was more due to the fact that it surprised and frightened me than to the actual force it imparted. I kept running, ducking my head down as far as I could, hunching up my shoulders. The defensive magics woven into my coat could evidently stop whatever rounds the gruffs were using, but that didn’t mean an unlucky ricochet couldn’t bounce some lead into me from the front or sides, around the coat—and getting shot in the lower legs, ankles, or feet would probably kill me as certainly as one through the head. It would just take a little more effort on the gruffs’ part to make it stick.
It’s hard to think when someone’s trying to kill you. We human beings aren’t wired to be rational and creative when we know our lives are in danger of a swift and violent end. The body has definite ideas of which survival strategies it prefers to embrace, and those are generally limited to “rip threat to pieces” or “run like hell.” No thinking need be involved, as far as our instincts are concerned.
Our instincts were a long time in the making, though, and the threats that can come after us now have outpaced them. You can’t outrun a bullet, and you don’t go hand-to-hand with a gunman unless you’re certain you are about to die anyway. Speed and mindless aggression weren’t going to keep me alive. I needed to figure a way out.
I felt another bullet hit the lower part of my coat. It caught spell-strengthened leather and tugged it forward, just the way a thrown rock might have done. Admittedly, though, the rock wouldn’t have made that angry-hornet buzzing noise as it struck. I dumped a garbage can over behind me, hoping it might trip up the gruffs for a second and buy me a little time.
Hey, you try coming up with a cogent, rational course of action when you’re running down a frozen alley with genuine fairy-tale creatures chasing you, spitting bullets at your back. It’s way harder than it looks.
I didn’t dare turn to face them. I could have raised a shield to stop the gunfire, but once I had stopped moving, I figured odds were fantastic that one of them