“Angel! You think you are clever!” von Reinmann shouted. He had apparently finished his invocation. A cloud of mist was now rising before him, making the already prismatic light shift and writhe like tendrils of transparent kelp. “You liked my goblins, my marrerit? Then you will truly love the Nokken!”
I wanted to say something, if only to keep my own spirits up, but so far Oxana’s pockets were a dry well, and every time I looked over my shoulder, the horrible mess coiling at Baldur von Reinmann’s feet was getting bigger and more real. Things I thought might be tentacles lifted and swayed, except one of them had a glassy flower at the end that swung toward me, displaying a mouth like the biggest, ugliest lamprey you ever saw, surrounded by fringes and tendrils that seemed to move in some unfelt current. The tentacles grew and spread and lifted high, wreathing von Reinmann’s triumphant figure. He held the medallion up like the prize for a grueling race. The Nokken was both substantial and insubstantial—transparent and watery, but its massive, growing coils now smashed the nearest display cases into powder. The head-tentacle rose up ten, twelve feet in the air, questing for prey, and when it saw us it seemed to swell even larger, the central limb, or neck, as big as a redwood trunk. The mouth gaped so wide I could have pushed a wheelbarrow down it and never touched the sides.
I darted a look at Sam. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and his face was as pale as death. I only knew he was still alive by the movement of his lips as he silently mumbled what looked like the same phrase, over and over.
I thought it might be time to start mumbling myself, and I had just started, “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” when Oxana finally caught hold of my hand—apparently she’d been trying to get my attention while I was staring at the hydra-thing—and pushed it into her shirtfront.
She had a sheath strapped between her breasts, with the handle of a knife right against her sternum. As my hand closed on the weapon, I cried out in relief and then shouted, “Let it go now, Sam! Let it go!”
He hesitated for a second or two. The Nokken began to draw its coils together to slither toward us. Something that strong, that nasty, would chew through Sam’s fading defense like a kid’s pup tent. Sam opened his eyes, saw it coming, saw me, and then suddenly the strange rainbow edges on everything just vanished. Sam’s barrier gone, the gunmen who had been pushing against it now tumbled forward at our feet. Sam collapsed too, dropping exhausted to the floor like a pile of damp laundry.
I had the blade properly now. It was a tactical knife and not the best for throwing, but I wasn’t shopping, I was doing my best not to die. The nearest of the fallen Black Sun commandos was crawling after his gun with the obvious intent of shooting me in the near future, so I pulled the knife back behind my head and then flung it, end over end, hard as I could.
By the way, throwing a knife hardly ever works. I’m also not very good at it. Leo, my old top-kicker in the Lyrae, used to tell me, “Boy, I hope you always carry a big gun, because you’re useless with sharp stuff and you’re even worse at hand-to-hand.” And you know what? He was right.
I didn’t hit what I was aiming at, which had been the best and biggest target, von Reinmann’s torso. The tactical knife flew wide, and if he hadn’t turned to watch his hideous water-beast do whatever it was going to do to us, it would have flown right past him and probably skidded all the way to South Korean Textiles. Instead it hit him in the forearm, blade first. It didn’t hit straight enough to stick, but it gouged his arm deeply just below the wrist. The medallion flew from his hand and landed on the ground several yards away. He grabbed his bleeding arm and looked at me with such hatred that if Norwegian Death Stares really worked, I’d be playing banjo in the backwoods of Hell right now. Then he realized that he didn’t have the medallion anymore. And so did the Nokken.
The translucent thing was on him like a snake taking a mouse, so quickly that I barely saw it happen. One moment Baldur was standing there looking like I’d butted ahead of him in the Express Check-Out lane, the next moment a giant column of pulsating transparent muscle and goo curled down and swallowed him from head to chest. I could see von Reinmann’s eyes bulge, his mouth open helplessly, but then the swirling interior of the thing made it hard to see as it gulped more of him inside. The Nokken began to change, growing less clear, more smoky and obscure, so that within moments I could only make out a dark shape spasming at the center of it, still fighting for a breath it would never get to take.
I was snapped out of my mesmerized stare by the sound of a gun firing right beside me. Clarence had picked up an AR-16 a Nazi had dropped after falling through the vanished barrier, and he was proceeding to blow the shit out of everything within reach, including (nearly) me. I retreated a few yards to get out of the kid’s line of fire. The Nokken had now almost disappeared, and finished doing so as I watched, leaving behind only a greasy residue and one of Baldur von Reinmann’s expensive black Oxfords.
Halyna quickly found a gun too, and within seconds the remaining Black Sun guards were running for their lives. I kneeled beside Sam to see if he was okay. He was, but just barely, his chest hitching like he had tuberculosis. I tried to get him onto his feet, but he was fighting me.
“Cut it out, you dumbass,” I explained. “I’m trying to help you!”
He put a hand on my face and, with surprising strength for someone who looked like he’d been run over by a cement truck, shoved my chin around until I was looking back across the hall.
The Nokken was gone now. The Nightmare Children were fleeing, literally running up the backs of the escaping neo-Nazis. Some of them got tangled up together; a few of the swastikids were stamped into bloody, arm-waving pelts, and some of the neo-Nazis went down under swarms of panicked Nightmares and never got up. But the bugbears hadn’t gone anywhere. In fact, they were moving back in on us, as though all of this had been preliminary to the real fun starting.
I didn’t have time to worry about it, but in the back of my mind I was also wondering why the museum guards or even the cops hadn’t come swarming in after all the ruckus we’d made. Turns out that von Reinmann and his stormtroopers, far less interested in secrecy than I was, had rounded up all the museum workers and tied them up, except for the one poor guard upstairs who’d surprised them. They’d also used some kind of barrage-jamming device to make sure no alarms or phone calls went out. That was when we’d lost communication with Wendell.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit!” Oxana was on her feet, still woozy but looking for a weapon. Halyna and Clarence fired into the advancing jelly-blobs with no huge effect except to scatter bits of them, which promptly started inching back to their mother-blobs. Sam was trying to get up.
“Halyna, throw Oxana your gun,” I shouted. “You find the flamethrower!”
To her credit, she only looked at me like I was crazy for about a second, then turned and flipped the AR-16 to Oxana, who scrambled across the floor under our not-too-effective covering fire, grabbed the clunky ancient weapon, then crawled back to us.
“You’ve got two bursts left, don’t you?” I shouted to Halyna over the intermittent rattle of gunfire. She glanced at the tanks and nodded. She looked terrified but not panicked, which I admired as much as I could at that moment. “Okay, everybody, try to herd those things toward the wall there.” I pointed to an empty spot beside the open doorway to the hidden office, about five feet from where the huge mosaic of Anaita still hung high on the wall, watching the whole thing with what appeared to be divine amusement. I ran to the spot. “Push them along with the first burst when I tell you to!” I yelled. “But save the second burst, Halyna—save it! Now, the rest of you, force them over here where I am!”
I watched as Clarence figured out he could get the bugbears to follow by charging at them, firing, then retreating again. I called to Clarence and the others to change their angle so they’d be driving the jelly-slugs toward me.