Chapter Seventy-Five Oh No Ban-She Didn’t
No wonder he was freaking out about me taking the tapestry yesterday—and about it being broken now. He needs it for tonight or those monsters are going to have to wait around for another three months.
“So what do we do?” Ember asks, looking back and forth between Jude, the tapestry, and me.
“We fix it. What else can we do?” Simon shoves a frustrated hand through his hair.
“And you think fixing the tapestry will also fix Clementine?” Luis taps a nervous finger on his knee. “She can’t go through another incident like that again.”
I shoot him a grateful smile.
He returns my smile, but he’s still got that look in his eyes—that eventually we are going to be talking about what happened.
The thought makes my stomach ache, so I hold on to what Remy told me. That the past is set, but the future isn’t. I don’t know what I have to do to make sure Luis doesn’t end up like that flicker, but somehow, I’m going to find out.
“If Clementine is right and the tapestry is talking to her because her new power is related to it, then it stands to reason that fixing the tapestry should also fix whatever’s going on with her,” Remy says. “But if it isn’t…”
“What do you mean if it isn’t?” I sit forward, alarmed now. “I absolutely cannot go through the rest of my life seeing everyone and everything in triplicate. I just can’t!”
Jude takes my hand and strokes a soothing thumb over my knuckles. “We’ll figure it out,” he tells me with such confidence that I almost believe him.
Of course, the fact that he looks as stressed as I feel doesn’t help with that.
Luis leans down next to the tapestry, and as if to prove he means business, he tugs on a couple loose threads at the corner of the tapestry. Instead of unraveling that little section, the tapestry lights up. It goes into some kind of defense mode, and all four of its edges roll under so that no one can get to any of its end threads.
“Did anyone else see that?” Luis asks. “Or is the stress making me hallucinate?”
“Oh, we saw it,” Simon tells him.
“Because this wasn’t hard enough,” Mozart deadpans.
“There has to be some way to—” I crouch down next to the tapestry so I can get a better look at it.
I’m cut off as an argument breaks out on the other side of the room. I turn just in time to see a dragon in human form go tumbling across the front half of the common room.
He hits the wall hard, and it takes him a moment to recover. But then he’s running full tilt toward the vampire that hit him. As he runs, he stays in human form except for the huge pair of greenish yellow wings he sprouts out of his back.
When he’s about five feet away from the vampire, he grabs her and takes to the air, climbing all the way to the top of the room’s thirty-foot ceiling before dropping her.
Amazingly, she lands on her feet, then launches herself into the air after him. She can’t fly, but she can jump pretty damn high, and she almost manages to grab his foot.
But he kicks out at the last second and hits her square in the face. This time when she falls back to earth, it’s more of a crash. She lands on her side and goes skidding across the worn-out tile, only to come to a stop at Danson’s feet.
He blows a whistle, and when the dragon ignores him, he bellows up at him, “Land, now!”
But the dragon is suddenly the least of his problems, because a pack of four wolf shifters in their human forms takes advantage of the momentary distraction and surrounds a small group of banshees.
“Oh, shit,” Jude murmurs next to me.
“They wouldn’t,” I tell him.
“Fuck, yeah, they would,” Izzy says, as if there’s no doubt in her mind about what’s going to happen.
Danson’s got his hands full, so I look around for Ms. Aguilar, only to find her mediating some kind of disagreement between a siren and a witch.
I want to yell at her that we’re about to have a major problem, but it’s not worth it. Because no matter how strangely endearing Ms. Aguilar is, her discipline is no match for an obstinate kindergartener, let alone a bunch of pissed-off paranormals.
So instead, I take off running toward them just as the wolves advance. If I can get there soon enough, maybe I can stop this from turning into an absolute, unsalvageable shit show.
Jude passes me about halfway across the room and all but throws himself between the wolves and the banshees. But it’s already too late, because the second one of the wolves makes a grab for one of the banshees, she lets loose with a scream that is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever heard.
In the first couple of seconds, she brings the entire room to a halt. The next few seconds she has all of us—even the fighting vampire and dragon—covering our ears and dropping to the ground. Several seconds after that, the wolves start howling right along with her as their delicate eardrums burst from the extremely high-pitched scream. And finally, about thirty seconds after the banshee starts to wail, the windows explode into a million shards of glass.
And that’s when all hell really does break loose.