She disappeared before Kerry could finish.
Lilas’ eyes were huge in her pale face and her whole body trembled. I scooped her into my arms and held her tight.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” She clung to me, though, and her small fingers knotted into the back of my shirt.
“Lilas!”
Hinge, the little pest, started to climb me to reach her. If you’ve never had a skeleton skitter up your body like a spider, you can’t understand how creepy it is, even if you know the skeleton in question. I knelt and laid her on the floor just to get him off of me.
“What happened?” He stroked her hair back from her forehead.
“We bounced off St. Pat’s,” she whispered. “Gina said someone must have warded it for some reason. Then this … thisthingcame at us. Gina grabbed me and brought us back here.”
“Did she tell you what her plan was?” I asked, wondering if anyone else had noticed Gina was injured. “Do you know where she went just now?”
Lilas shook her head.
“Maybe back to St. Pat’s,” Rome guessed. “Her husband’s there, after all, and Jax and Gigi.”
“Maybe she—” Kerry stopped and went stone-still. “Rome, do you smell that?”
“Yeah. Whatisit? No Diabolical stink I’ve ever come across.”
“It reminds me of the d—”
A bomb went off, and the front door shattered into a thousand slivers of metal that flew in every direction. Acting on instinct, I jumped up and sprayed out power to glob them all together into a harmless lump before anyone got impaled.
Kerry manifested his sword in a wicked-fast move. Rome was only a hair’s breadth slower drawing his short swords from his back holsters. Good thing they so immediately understood we were under attack because huge, hairy, clawed things exploded into the room.
At my feet, Lilas screamed and curled up into a little ball.
“It’s the things!” she shrieked. “From St. Pat’s! Thethings!”
Hinge wrapped his skeletal self around her, as if his bones could protect her.
Things got messy quick after that as Rome and Kerry slaughtered their way through the furry bodies. Realizing I could get in some licks of my own, I called for George, and my sledgehammer exploded out of a wall into my waiting hands. I didn’t want to get in the warriors’ way, so I squared up in front of the kids and assumed responsibility for keeping them safe.
One of the monsters charged straight at us, its long, red tongue lolling out of its fanged mouth.
“Mira!” Hinge warned me.
“I see it.”
Bracing my feet wide, I swung that twenty-pound head of hardened steel right into its skull with a gruesome crunch.
“Go back where you came from,” I growled.
More creatures poured through the busted doorway like a malevolent shag carpet, and the tide of the battle carried me away from the kids. I fought fiercely to get back to them, ignoring the burn of the big muscles in my back and arms as I wielded the hammer with all my physical might. I was leery of using power to fuel my swings because I might need it later.
And I ain’t had a good workout in forever.
“Mira, can you get out with the kids?” Rome hollered.
How did he want me to do that? Enemies flooded through the door and we were twenty stories up, so going out the window wasn’t an option.
“Don’t think so,” I grunted as I drove my foot into a beast’s gut, then swung George like a ball bat into its face.
