side. The things behind us were still coming, crawling clumsily up the stairs; not enough had been blasted by the light.
“The locks are still open but the door’s barred! Can you get it open?”
“Maybe,” she said faintly. “Hold my bag.”
“Can I help?”
“Behind you!”
Something yanked at my leg again—not the wolf-things, but something else, a whirling mass of tentacles and claws of a dark, burnt red, with a single huge baleful green eye in the centre. I lost my grip on the stairs and went bumping down towards the opening mouth, no teeth but a ring of grinding plates making a sandpaper noise as they circled each other. As I slid, I kicked out, sending chunks of clay and stray books into the mouth, choking it. It reared back in surprise and a solid kick sent it flying onto two of the wolf things, scraps of their dark skin simply tearing loose and spattering the walls.
Something swooped towards Johnny, a hovering creature that seemed to be mostly teeth, like a flying shark, and I hurled pieces of debris at it till it came for me instead, the end of its beak stabbing me in the collarbone as I dodged. I grabbed its head, smashed it as hard as I could on the edge of the stairs, and kicked it down onto the others, who immediately turned on it.
Panting, I scrambled back up to Johnny, who had somehow succeeded in melting rather than burning a hole in the door on our side, through which the bar was just visible around the smoldering, liquidized wood. The other monsters had already finished their fallen victims, and were coming back for us. I kicked futilely at them, and covered my eyes as Johnny let loose another blast of flame, but worryingly weaker now, smaller, less virulently bright.
Looking at the burn marks on her arm, I saw the problem. Her reach wasn’t long enough: she could grab the bar through the hole but couldn’t push it up, lacking both the leverage and the strength.
I balanced on the top step, just a few inches wider than the others, and reached through the still-hot wood, banging my hand at once on the bar; she’d guessed pretty close to where it was. I pressed my entire body to the door to get the heavy bar up, straining to pass the pivot point where it wouldn’t simply fall back, listening for the clunk.
The door flew open, letting in a welcome breath of clean air that blasted my hair back. I grabbed Johnny’s shirt and hauled her after me, jerked back in a moment and losing my grip as something behind her seized her leg. She shrieked and fought at it, nothing coming from her hands now. I seized the bar and brought it down on the thing’s head, sending it shrieking backwards for just long enough to shut the door. I threw the bar down, and we raced through the darkened house.
She paused at the last moment, near the gate. “The books! I could—”
“We are not going back for any books, you fucking dipshit!”
“Let’s just get out of here,” she gasped, wheezing from the dusty air. “Wait. What’s…”
Akhmetov was curled up in a corner by the cement wall, far from the house, shivering and clutching his purple lantern. Inside, the noises had ceased, replaced by a faint, high chant that sounded painfully familiar, though I wasn’t sure from what.
The look on his face. The monsters hadn’t dropped that iron bar; they’d come in from somewhere else. Perhaps only haste or a last glimmering of conscience had stopped him from resetting the locks. I wondered what They had offered him to do that, and to take off the protective glamour, to let Them in. His uncertainty, Johnny had said. Trust that. And we hadn’t; and we were right not to.
It didn’t matter. I glared at him as I towed Johnny away, a limp bundle barely able to walk, and kept walking till we found a public park, collapsing onto a concrete bench under a dozen tall, dark trees. The air was cold and clean, the cinnamon-sand smell muted by leaves. Far below us, the dark streets were outlined in pink and orange, gleaming here and there off solar panels, some larger buildings—castles?—lit up more extravagantly still, with coloured spotlights.
I was shaking and had barely caught my breath; she looked as if she were barely breathing. Her bag was twice the size of mine; she must have stuffed the books into it.