Chapter Eighteen #3
I ignored the part about my hands. If the runes didn’t work, cyborg hands were better than nothing. “So if you miss with your single round, we move to plan B.”
“What’s plan B?” he asked.
“I wade in under a blood hedge, let the bot attack me, hope I survive the blast, and then suck up all the demons. This bot is likely to be more powerful than the drones. Its containment bomb is too heavy to fly.” With those words an image solidified.
A future firm and fixed. “Go to my porch at the back of the apartment building. It’s coming from that way.
” I pointed to the back left. “As soon as I’m in position, shoot it if you can. ”
“War bots are fast. Why is it so slow? Weather? Or something else?”
I closed my eyes and let my thoughts wander.
Nothing came clear. Not for the first time, I wished I had the precog I had as a child, so distinct, so perfect.
Now it was like dough—lots of ingredients, all mixed up, rising fast, and opaque except for bright flashes that never showed certainties.
“I don’t know. Stuck in a snowdrift? Maybe?
” I pointed again toward where I felt the pull of the feelings-futures-bad-things.
His boots in one hand, Villetti opened my apartment door long enough to lean into the hallway and shoulder a weapon.
It was loaded with a silver-colored rocket with fins.
It was smaller than I expected. I remembered his joke about his big gun, and smiled.
Villetti slid into his boots, strode to the windows and outside, into the cold.
I followed and gave him my last three hedge amulets.
“Drop the hedge to fire. Open a new one, the instant you fire. It’ll protect you from smaller demons for a few seconds, and shrapnel for several minutes. ”
“Copy that.”
I turned away and closed the porch doors between us.
To my armaments, I added my long- and shortsword, both across my back so snow didn’t impede the blades, and a thigh rig with a .
45 loaded with demon rounds. The mag held only four.
Each round was worth a week’s income. Pricy.
Illegal. But I was under the queen’s banner so I figured I could get away with it, and maybe get reimbursed if I had to use them.
To kill someone. Someone who had been possessed and had no way out but death.
Aurora walked to me, leisurely, tail high, the very tip curling back and forth, her green eyes on me. There was intent there. Borealis was right behind her, also holding me in place with her mixed blue and green cat eyes. Their body language said, I want to speak.
“What? I don’t speak cat. And witches don’t have familiars.” Mama did. But KitKit was a twenty-plus-year-old one-off who had been kept alive and healthy by Mama’s earth magic.
Both cats leaped to the back of the couch and sat. Staring.
Letting my angst out with an irritated breath, I walked to the back of the sofa and leaned against it. Neither cat was purring. Neither was asking for food, treats, or play. They stared at me. Unblinking.
“What,” I repeated. When neither moved, a glimmer of knowing snapped into place in my mind. I forced myself to relax, letting the tension flow out of me. “What?” I asked, gently.
Both cats stretched up, placing their forepaws on my thighs. They used their heads and paws to push aside my null cloak and placed their foreheads against my belly armor. They rested there. The synchronicity was unsettling.
They still didn’t purr. This was freaking weird. After a little over half a minute, they both pulled back, and Aurora opened her mouth and began to…talk.
It was cat language, all yooowls and long kic-kic-kics, and roooomows and other things I couldn’t reproduce.
They had spoken to me in cat-talk the day I picked them up from the shelter and never again, though I had heard them talk this way to each other from time to time.
Familiars. A shiver went through me at the thought.
When Aurora was done, she and her sister leaped to the floor and sauntered away.
“That was unnerving,” I said. “If you were trying to say I should stay alive, so your food supply is safe, I agree. I’ll try to stay alive, so you get fed.”
Neither cat looked back at me.
“Crazy cats.”
EJ entered, and I helped to heft Walter onto his shoulder, making sure the stake stayed in place.
“Don’t be stupid, sis.”
“I’ll try.”
EJ looked at me, the ambiguity in my reply raising a question in his eyes.
“I’ll try to be smart and safe,” I said.
He grunted and left the apartment.
I followed but when he took the elevator, I turned the other way, taking the stairs fast, my mind cataloging and contemplating the ever-changing, smudgy, uncertain potentialities.
There were too many. I hit the bottom floor and nodded to the armored guard at the front door, her face hidden behind a smoky-toned military helmet and face shield.
Between the back exit and me was a four-by-four, armored, golf cart–sized vehicle, loaded with a blocky device about the size of a traditional house stove-oven unit.
It had a gray matte finish with a door on top and two buttons on the side, one red, one green.
It was the biggest containment vessel I had ever heard of.
At the sight of it, the futures unknotted, like watching a mixer in reverse as strands of possibilities decreased and redefined themselves. Unfortunately, all of them contained elements of everything bloody and bad.
I nodded at the guard standing beside the ATV. Peg was the only person with enough strength in his cyborg leg to shove the vehicle through the drifted snow to maybe get it close enough to catch the demons that were coming.
Walking toward the futures, I sidled around the armored ATV to the back exit. Pushed open the door. Stepped into a veil of swirling, falling, white. I caught a glimpse, a bloody vision, of a headless guard.
Time was out, but I turned back inside and said, “Let’s get that baby outside and then you get behind it.
” I held the door while he maneuvered the four-by-four through the opening and into the whiteout.
Immediately, the four-by-four was confronted by a three-foot drift, so I climbed into the driver’s seat and touched the ignition, driving while Peg pushed.
We made it about six feet from the building before the thick tires were in snow that came halfway up the body of the vehicle.
Hoping I was right, I said, “Good enough,” and clambered off the front seat, through the snow, to the part-cyborg man at the rear. “When instructed, you duck and press this.” I gave Peg my last portable hedge of thorns. I had a small blade for myself. My gauntlet hedge would have to do.
He tried to hand it back. “I’ll be okay.”
Heat flashed through me, the heat of knowing a death that was preventable. “You listen to me, you stupid man,” I hissed, pinning him with my eyes. “They don’t make cyborg heads and you’re gonna need one if you don’t take this and use it like I told you.”
Over my ear-patch comms, EJ’s voice barked, “Take the amulet, Meadows.”
“Yes, sir,” Peg snapped back.
Over comms, Villetti said, “Peg. From this distance, the containment vessel won’t be able to seize all the demons that are released. You’ll only be able to capture ones that make it within fifty feet.”
“Roger that. Fifty feet,” Peg said, his voice grim.
Fifty feet. The futures swirled like the snow, just as blinding in the night.
A delicate quiver in my hands, I pulled my hood up and made sure the cloak was sealed.
I walked through the streetlight illumination and deep shadows toward a fight I didn’t want and might lose.
To save Walter. They wanted Walter. If they got Walter, they would change the world.
The containment vessel at fifty feet wasn’t enough. I knew that.
It’s just me and my magic staff. I remembered the little girl saved by a witch in a blue cloak. Not enough this time.
Lumbering through the drifts, around mounded cars, through the swirling snow, I searched the darkness for a camouflaged military bot that would be visible only by a really good seeing working, or by someone like me who could see raw magical signatures.
My hands ached, the left one feeling as if I gripped dry ice, burning cold even through the gloves where I touched the staff.
Across the street, down the block and to my right, approached a green-orange-red-black magic.
The demon signatures were twisted through with black motes.
The invisible bot moved toward a mound where a neighbor’s red car usually parked.
Twenty feet behind it swirled brighter green magics, clear as if the snow weren’t falling in a whiteout.
I now knew one other thing for certain, and tapped my ear-patch.
“The bot isn’t alone. We have two fangheads approaching across the street on the sidewalk, hidden by the cars and snow, and one…one something else.” I recognized the magics and the presence of demon energies. I blew out a pained breath. “The bot is being trailed by Nyoka.”