An instant later, the bottom half of the door exploded into flying daggers of wood. My shield stopped anything heading toward Mac, but I couldn’t catch them all. One of them clipped my left cheekbone broadside—if it had tumbled for another fraction of a second, the sharp end would have driven right into my brain. As it was, it hit me like a baseball bat, stunning me and knocking me down.
The world did that slow-motion echo-chamber thing that happens sometimes with a head blow, and I saw our attacker come in.
At first, I couldn’t translate what I was seeing into something that made sense: It looked something like those giant spinning, whirling tubes covered in strips of soft cloth at an automated car wash, the ones that actually shampoo your car. Except it wasn’t a tube; it was a sphere, and it wasn’t at a car wash; it was rolling in through Mac’s doorway.
Mac’s shotgun went off, the sound of it slapping me in the back. Those things are loud in an enclosed space. Dust and bits of scrap cloth flew out of the attacker, but it didn’t slow down. The giant rag ball hurtled toward me, until Thomas dashed in from the side and smashed it with a roundhouse swing of one of Mac’s heavy oak tables.
Quick bar fighting tip for you—in real life, when you hit a guy with furniture, it doesn’t break into pieces the way it does in the movies. It breaks whoever you hit with it. There was a meaty sound of impact and the rolling shape’s forward momentum was instantly converted into a perpendicular line drive. It streaked across the room, trailing streamers of grey-brown cloth like a ragged comet, the cloth flapping and snapping with unnatural volume until it hit the wall with a solid thwack.
Another fighting tip for you: Don’t stay on the ground. If you don’t know exactly what you’re up against, if you aren’t sure that the guy you’re fighting doesn’t have a buddy coming along who might help, you can’t afford to be down and relatively motionless. My body was already moving, though I wasn’t sure how it was doing that, pushing me back to my feet.
Mac put a hand on the bar and vaulted up onto it like he did it all the time. The attacker bounced off the wall, rolled across a tabletop, and fell to the floor in a heap. Mac took a pair of quick steps to get a better line of fire, and boom went the shotgun again. Another cloud of scrap cloth and dust flew up from the attacker.
The room lurched back into normal speed. Dozens of strips of the dark sackcloth came flying off of the thing, twining in an instant around chairs and tables. A chair flew at Thomas, knocking the table out of his hands, and he was forced to dodge to one side instead of closing in. Mac’s shotgun bellowed three more times, and I hurled another lance of force at the thing. Mac’s shells did nothing but create puffs of debris, and my own arcane strike split and flowed around the thing, shattering a chair and smashing in a portion of the wall behind it.
And it laughed.
Furniture exploded out from it, flung with superhuman force. My shield barely caught the narrow edge of a table that had been flung like a Frisbee. Thomas’s legs were scythed out from under him by a flying bar stool, and he hit the floor with a huff of expelled breath. Mac had already thrown himself down behind the bar—but when another table hit it, there was an enormous cracking sound, and several pieces of wood broke under the impact.
A shape stirred in the writhing mass of ash-colored sackcloth and rose, its outline veiled but not entirely obscured by the cloth. It was lanky-tall, and had to stand hunched over to avoid the lazily spinning blades of the ceiling fans. It was more or less human-shaped, and I was suddenly struck by the realization that I was looking at a humanoid who was wearing some kind of enormous, ungainly garment made of all those restless, rustling strips.
It lifted its head slowly and focused on me.
It didn’t look at me—it didn’t have any eyes, just smooth skin laced with scars where they had once been. Its skin was pearly grey lined with darker stripes that made me think of a shark. Its mouth was gaping open in a wide grin that reinforced the impression. It didn’t have teeth—just a single smooth ridge of bone where teeth would have been on a human. Its lips were black, and its mouth smudged with more of it. Twin trails of saliva drooled from the corners of its mouth, leaving black streaks to down past its chin. There wasn’t a hair to be seen on its head.
“Wizard,” it said, and its voice was the same as had come through the glossy stone. “Your life need not end this day. Surrender and I will spare your companions.”
I could hear Mac reloading behind me. Thomas had his gun in his hand, behind his back, and was prowling silently around the room to force Sharkface to turn to keep an eye on him.
Except it didn’t have eyes. Whatever this thing was using to keep track of us, I had a feeling that just standing in an inconvenient spot wasn’t going to net us much of an advantage.
“Surrender,” I said, as though trying to place where I’d heard the word before. “Yeah, um. I’m not so sure I want any surrenders today. There was a sale on surrenders last week, and I missed it, but I don’t want to rush out and buy another one at the regular price right away. I’m afraid the sale might come back a week later, and then, I mean, come on. How stupid would I feel then?”
“Levity will not change the course of this day,” Sharkface said. Its buzzing, twisting voice was distinctly unpleasant in my ears, the aural equivalent of the stench of rotting meat. Which was appropriate, because the rest of him did smell like rotting meat. “You will come with me.”
“Isn’t that what Mab said, Harry?” Thomas quipped.
I kept my hand shielded from Sharkface with my body and gave my brother the finger. “Look, Spanky,” I said to Sharkface. “I’m a little busy to be tussling with every random weirdo who is insecure about his junk. Otherwise I would just love to smash you with a beer bottle, kick you in the balls, throw you out through the saloon doors, the whole bit. Why don’t you have your people contact my people, and we can do this maybe next week?”
“Next week is your self-deprecation awareness seminar,” Thomas said.
I snapped my fingers. “What about the week after?”
“Apartment hunting.”
“Bother,” I said. “Well, no one can say we didn’t try. See you later.”
“Harry,” said a strange voice. Or rather, it wasn’t strange—it was just strange to actually hear it. Mac isn’t much of a talker. “Don’t chat. Kill it.”
Mac’s words seemed to do what none of my nonsense had—they made Sharkface pissed off. It whirled toward Mac, dozens of sackcloth strips flicking out in every direction, grabbing whatever objects were there, and its alien voice came out in a harsh rasp. “You!” Sharkface snarled. “You have no place in this, watcher. Do you think this gesture has meaning? It is every bit as empty as you. You chose your road long ago. Have the grace to lie down and die beside it.”
I think my jaw might have hung a little loosely for a second. “Uh. Mac?”
“Kill it,” Mac repeated, his voice harder. “It’s only the first.”
“Yes,” Sharkface said, tilting its head almost to the perpendicular. “Kill it. And more will come. Destroy me and they will know. Leave me and they will know. Your breaths are numbered, wizard.”
As it spoke, I could feel a horrible, hopeless weight settling across my heart. Dammit, hadn’t I been through enough? More than enough? Hadn’t my life handed me enough misery and grief and pain and loneliness already? And now I was going to be up against something else, something new and scary, something that came galumphing at me by the legion, no less. What was the point? No matter what I did, no matter how much stronger or smarter or better connected I got, the bad guys just kept getting bigger and stronger and more numerous.
Behind me, I heard Mac let out a low groan. The shotgun must have fallen from his fingers, because it clattered on the floor. On my left, I saw Thomas’s shoulders slump, and he turned his face away, his eyes closed as if in pain.