It hadn’t been there before. It had been brick shadowed in the gloom of torches and lanterns, but now it was pure black with the sheen of dirty oil. “Goodfellow, stop your bitching. What’s that?” I pointed up.
“Zeus’s pubic lice. We took up a collection. They were supposed to be exterminated three weeks ago or I never would’ve brought us here.” He already had his sword drawn. “The blood. The blood our clothes are soaked in. It woke them. They sleep in the side tunnels. It’s the manananggals.” It was the sound a cat would make coughing up a hairball or Salome would make coughing up a Great Dane, but apparently it was serious. Goodfellow was already moving back toward the entrance. “I’m going to eviscerate every last one of those lazy exterminators. Run. Run!”
Strange, twisted heads lifted from their bargaining to watch with suspicion and nervousness as we tore through the market, trusting that if Goodfellow thought it was bad after facing Hephaestus and his crew, it was plenty goddamn bad.
“Manananggals,” Niko said as we ran, his own sword out, “are descended from the ancestors of bats. An offshoot. They’re similar to vampires, although vampires are descended from Homo sapiens, humans. They suck blood through a hardened, long, tube-shaped tongue, sometimes even taking the blood directly from the heart if they strike deeply enough. They form in colonies as real bats do, but are much larger. They—”
A dark olive-skinned hand came up to smack the back of Niko’s head like the countless times my brother had smacked mine. Kalakos growled, “We are about to die. Could we do it without the enlightening voice-over? Khul!”
“I still hate you, Kalakos,” I said, “but that is a memory I’ll keep to my dying day.” Which might be this day.
I looked up to see the stream of silent wings in rippling motion, a river of night streaming over our heads. Niko’s general pissiness at having his lecture interrupted was apparent. “Fine. One last fact. They don’t attack one at a time or even two or three. The entire colony will swarm down on us the same as a school of piranha. They will blanket us. There’s no way from beneath that. They’ll suck us dry in seconds.”
Jesus. Could this day get any worse? And dying in a pink shirt was still in my future. Goddamn it.
We were halfway to the arch when I raised my eyes again. One of them hit the wall, tumbled, and, before it straightened, its flight let me see more than I wanted. What fresh hell was this? They were cut in half at the waist. No legs. Only a waist and a heavy sac of intestines that should be cascading out…but weren’t.
“Holy shit, why are they sliced in half? What keeps their guts from falling out? That is disgusting. Niko…”
“If we live, you can Google it when we get home. I don’t want to weigh you down with so much information that it slows your running.” If we lived…I was currently on Niko’s shit list, which made one not that invested in living.
“I was listening. I didn’t do anything. It was Kalakos. I marvel at every fact that falls from your lips, I swear.”
“You’d best hope and pray we do die.” One drop of vengeance in an ocean of head slaps I’d received over the years and Niko was holding a grudge. After the past two days, the calming effects of his meditation were taking a beating.
It didn’t matter. It looked as if my suggested hopes and prayers were coming true. Now I heard them, the rustle of their wings. They were coming down, the shroud to cover the dead—and we were the dead. The size of a medium beagle, they had pinpoint eyes of milky white, ears huge and pointed, snub muzzles pouring gray mucus, clawed hands at the juncture of the wings, and a curved dagger of a tongue plenty long enough to reach my heart. I lifted the Glock, but it was hopeless. I could take out ten Cyclops, but these were in the hundreds. Three swords and a fast reload and we were screwed all the same.
Until it came through the arch we’d been running for: a flying serpent with intensely blue scales, black wings, four taloned feet and legs curled under its belly, a sleek head with a sunburst of black spines, and eyes that rivaled the sun at noon.
It also breathed fire. We’d had some serious run-ins with fire today. We dived to the slime-covered floor as the flames of an entire forest fire turned the colony of bloodsuckers above into ash. It continued with its flight and smashed through the far wall, and here was hoping this was not the day for a scheduled tour or that ticket was going to be really worth the price.
“That was a dragon,” I told the puck accusingly. The blackened ash continued to fall.
“I’m aware.”
“You said there were no such things as dragons.”
“There aren’t.” He tried to wipe the ash from his face and hair, making it worse. “And don’t ask. Just embrace a little mystery in your life and that you have that life left to embrace anything at all.”
That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t done.…I mean, shit, a dragon. Who as a kid doesn’t want to believe in dragons? But I didn’t get a chance to push it. Dodger, puppy-dog tears and a watch he could trade for a condo, started squawking loudly enough that the whole market heard this time. “Auphe!” A wing pointed. “Auphe! With the black hair! Auphe!”
I’d said there were creatures down here I hadn’t seen before topside. There were creatures I couldn’t have dreamed up or have made out of a squid, a vampire, a revenant, an entire pack of Wolves, a shark, a Sasquatch, a pig, a chain saw, and a hot-glue gun. “I think I want the bats back. At least that would’ve been quicker,” I muttered, holding out my left hand to have the xiphos slapped into it.
It would’ve been.
I’d told Kalakos at Dodger’s booth. This was my life. Massive unpopularity and/or fear. Anything between was as atypical as it came.
Vendors and customers both attacked. It wasn’t all of them. Some were too small and harmless for the weapons we were carrying. Some were too huge and gelatinous to move more than an inch every fifteen minutes. Some, led by Jackdaw, were watching from the side and taking bets. A trickster, a lying, betraying, crocodile tear–spurting trickster, could figure the odds with no problem.
“When have any of your informants ever once not ended up not trying to kill us?” I gritted.
The puck lifted his shoulders without a trace of guilt. “I warn you each time. I can give you the information, but I can’t make your brain absorb it or your ego swallow it.” He swung his sword and sliced a clump of those fourteen long blood leeches he’d talked about earlier on our way through the tunnel. They had reared up over his head, their tails knotted for a base of balance—a base that also tangled and wouldn’t let them separate to flee when Robin’s sword cut through rubbery flesh. Sucker mouths lined with a circle of teeth all made the sound of a fox-caught rabbit.
Ever heard a rabbit scream? It’s the sound of a burning house full of trapped children. I haven’t heard anything worse for fear and pain, and I hoped I didn’t.
I avoided the flopping of their death throes. I hoped it was their death throes and they weren’t like worms: Chop one in half and you suddenly have two. Niko took off two heads of a three-headed humanoid lizard with one stroke of his sword. A creature that was either a Turkish Karankoncolos or a down-home Sasquatch—I couldn’t keep them straight—was leaping toward Goodfellow and me as if it were a spring-loaded grizzly bear. I shot it in the chest three times, which knocked it sideways into Niko.
“Shit!”
I tossed aside monsters and planted the Glock in the bear-thing’s humanlike ear and put two more rounds in at the same time a silver blade came through its throat and out one slitted purple-black eye. You could say that took care of it. I pushed and helped roll its three hundred pounds off Nik, who staggered to his feet.
“’Kay?” I asked.