Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,79
asked.
I struggled to come up with Phase Two. “Once you catch your breath, do you think your music could put a hex on both of them?”
“And make it stick for more than a few seconds? I don’t know. They’re both powerful in their own ways.”
I peeked around the edge of the SUV just as Epunamlin reached the other side of the street. His tongue flicked in and out of his mouth a couple times, and then he stopped where he was. Somehow he could tell A’marie and I had stopped running, and he was waiting for Sylvester to show up before he moved in for the kill.
“Okay,” I said, “then we won’t count on it to last for more than a moment or two. But tell me you have something sharp.”
“My horns?”
“No offense, but I’m not sure they’ll do the job.” Which meant I was going to have to drag somebody from the normal world into my problems after all. “Stay here.”
I ran for the trailer. Using the cars for cover, I kept low. But I had to come out into the open to get to the door. Epunamlin spotted me as I scurried up the three wrought-iron steps. A shot punched through the window on my left, making a hole and a spider web of cracks.
I hustled through the door and yanked it shut behind me. The salesman behind the desk had his eyes and his mouth open wide. You couldn’t blame him for being startled. First a bullet whizzed out of nowhere into his office, and then a crazy guy wearing nothing but swim trunks followed it in a split second later.
The salesman had a letter opener on his desk. I grabbed it. I looked around for another object like it and didn’t see one.
“They don’t want you,” I said. “Stay inside, stay low, and you’ll be all right.”
I threw open the door and dived back out. Epunamlin tried to draw a bead on me, and then thought better of it. Probably because right about then, Sylvester’s truck pulled up, and the weeping willow man climbed out.
I crouched back down beside A’marie. “What are we doing?” she asked. Her voice was tense but not panicky, and she’d caught her breath.
It only took a few words to explain, although with Sylvester and Epunamlin moving in on us, it felt like it was taking forever. When I finished, A’marie said, “Be careful.” She put the pipes to her lips and started playing.
I sneaked away. Sylvester and Epunamlin stopped where they were. The big guy stamped one foot like a trick horse counting, and the snake swayed from side to side and waved his pistols around. I still hadn’t had a good enough look at them to know what kind they were. Something that didn’t hold many more rounds, I hoped.
Unfortunately, the magic only kept Epunamlin and Sylvester trying to dance for a couple seconds. Then, just like A’marie had expected, they shook it off.
“Darn it!” Sylvester shouted. “Stop it, A’marie! We still don’t want to hurt you!”
A’marie did stop playing. “You don’t want to hurt anybody!” she yelled back. “You’re not a killer! Just calm down and let us talk to you!”
Sylvester looked at Epunamlin. “You know why we’re doing it,” said the snake. His baritone voice almost sounded prissy, like he’d learned to enunciate perfectly because he was afraid that if he didn’t, humans—and near-humans—wouldn’t be able to understand him at all. The sunlight gleaming on his black scales made him look as wet as A’marie. “And I am a killer. Just help me catch him, and I’ll take it from there.”
Sylvester’s mouth tightened under the mask of hair. “Okay,” he said.
“Good man,” Epunamlin said. “You swing left and I’ll go right.”
I’d figured they’d spread out to search. I actually wanted them to. But it still made for a nerve-wracking game of hide and seek. They hunted me along the rows of cars with prices and messages like “Cold Air” and “Super Clean” painted on their windshields, while I tried to maneuver around behind whichever one I could. My mouth was dry with knowing that Sylvester was tall enough to look over the cars. And though Epunamlin generally crawled with his head and about a yard of scaly body raised—maybe to keep his wooden arms from banging and scraping along the ground—all he had to do was dip down to peek underneath.
But like I said before, I’m sneaky when I want to be. Eventually I made it to Sylvester’s