Despite the fact that we’d arrived at sunset rather than midnight, the barrier I’d felt burning against my skin for almost a mile lowered when we approached.
The door swung open of its own accord—not like automatic doors at the grocery, but the slow, ponderous grating of squealing metal as the two-story delivery doors opened inward. It was meant to be creepy, and succeeded admirably. Even creepier, the witch was using magic to create invisible walls forming a hallway leading to the very center of the room. Those walls were all that shielded us from dozens of M. Necrose victims who shambled and scraped across the floor toward the living, moving beings they could sense but not see.
If I’d thought Principal Sanchez and the guy in the hospital were the worst things I’d ever seen, I simply had nothing to compare them to. Now I did, and the principal and her security guard were positively red-carpet material by comparison to the creatures pressing in against the magic. Skin hung in shards from nearly liquified muscles and bones that glowed with an eerie green-white. The sounds they made as they shuffled and scraped were … wet and made me want to claw away from Matumbo and run out in panic.
Where was aggression when I really needed it?
Glinda’s voice came from above and to our left. “You came early. How rude! I haven’t even had the chance to finish my preparations.” She was standing on the second-floor balcony, staring down at us like a Roman empress looking down on the Circus Maximus.
Those who are about to die, and all that. But I didn’t plan to.
“I brought the siren bitch.” Matumbo was flawless in her portrayal of Jean-Baptiste. There was contempt in the voice as she dropped me heavily to the floor.
Wish she’d given me warning she was going to do that. Ow. I pretended to rouse slightly, as though I wasn’t in my right mind.
“So I see.” Glinda looked me up and down critically. “Hmph. This is what my husband betrayed me for? By the way, did you enjoy fighting him, Siren? It seemed perfect retribution to send him to the hospital to kill you after what he did. I really thought that would have done it. But really, he died to protect that?”
That was Jamisyn? Yeah, he deserved it, but I felt sort of bad about snapping his back now. Oh, and the incinerator, too, I suppose.
“I want my money!” The fake Jean-Baptiste was doing a bang-up job keeping Glinda distracted.
Until she wasn’t anymore.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” And she dropped the walls.
The smell assaulted me first and my stomach threatened to bring up the beef broth. I kept it down, but it was a struggle.
I’d really hoped to keep up the charade of the trance until I was closer to her. But I didn’t know if Agent Matumbo could be killed by M. Necrose. I didn’t dare take the risk. Instead, I took the initiative and leapt forward, kicking the first zombie off her feet. My foot sank into what appeared to be a solid calf and squished. Eww. Sheer instinct made me pull it back before I normally would have and scrape off the gook on the floor so I didn’t slip later.
Oh, I was so throwing away everything I was wearing tonight if I made it home alive. I didn’t want to look at their faces closely. I was afraid I’d recognize someone from the school. Matumbo raised a shield that stopped them cold, and Bruno reached around it to throw a fireball at the nearest zombie and slammed the fallen zombie with multiple spells that froze her in place. Apparently, they’d discussed a strategy that I didn’t know about. Rizzoli had drawn his firearm, and began carefully putting a bullet between each zombie’s eyes. The creatures burst into flickering blue-green flame. The effect was eerie as hell, but effective. What in the hell?
He turned to catch my eye. “Experimental rounds.” He put down two more zombies in rapid succession. Between all of us, we were nearly through them. “The director commissioned them for use on vampires, but this works, too.”
I have got to get me some of those.
“We get through this and I’ll make sure you get a box.”
The key, of course, was getting through this. Because losing a few zombies wasn’t going to stop Glinda. There were plenty more coming, crawling over the bodies of the fallen. Plus, she still had all her stolen magic, and who knew what else in reserve. Since the troops hadn’t come in, the barrier had to be backed up, and its magic made it impossible for me to speak mind-to-mind to John.
The action didn’t stop while I was thinking this. In fact, it had intensified. Glinda threw a blast of power our way that narrowly missed hitting me in the leg. I threw myself sideways and skidded across linoleum slick with vile fluids. Bruno and Matumbo sent nearly simultaneous attacks at her from opposite sides of the room, but she stopped them effortlessly.
I noticed, when the guys attacked, that the glow from the collar diminished a bit. Maybe she hadn’t taken enough power to keep it regenerating. I had to tell the others but couldn’t let her know what I noticed. It was time for me to, as Rizzoli put it, do my damnedest. I pressed fingers to my temples and shouted in my head for all I was worth, praying that Matumbo would keep the zombies from sinking fangs and claws into me.
Aim for the collar. Make her defend it. Can you take down the barrier, or is she the one powering it?
I felt a tentative brush of words against my head. It hurt to listen for it, as though it was on the other side of a powerful waterfall. No, it’s not her. I’ve been trying to feel for the power source, but that damned necklace is putting out too much interference. If you can keep her off-balance, I’ll see what I can do.
For the most part, she was ignoring me as being beneath her notice. They needed a distraction, and I was the only one available to give them one. I could jump straight up twenty feet if I tried, but she’d simply blast me out of the air. But if I moved from perch to perch, she’d have to focus on me to hit me. That could give the mages the time they needed. If I was really lucky, I might even get within striking distance.
I moved to where she couldn’t see me very well and crouched, ready to pounce to my first spot. That’s when the cavalry arrived in the form of a dozen FBI agents, a glowing John Creede, and one tall gray wolf. They all aimed weapons for the balcony and apparently Rizzoli wasn’t the only one with the special shells.
Glinda took one look at John Creede, his eyes filled with fire and fury etched on his face, and panicked. She pulled a small ceramic disk from her pocket and hurled it onto the floor between Bruno and Matumbo. It shattered, as Glinda had meant it to, and I felt a sickening, and all-too-familiar lurch.
She’d summoned a demon.
Oh, crap.
We’d closed the rift, so demons could no longer pass through at will. But their dimension still existed. A human stupid enough, with enough power, could still summon one. And Glinda had summoned a doozie. I wondered immediately if it was the demon disk Eirene once lost in the desert. People had searched for hours but came up empty. She had the money to pay for it if someone found it and decided to profit from the sale.
The demon screeched with a lipless mouth, showing row after row of serrated teeth that dripped venom. His bellow of fury was loud enough to make my ears bleed, and I found myself as deafened as if I’d been standing next to an explosion.
He stood three stories tall, his hide like that of a rhinoceros—if the rhino came in black with oil-slick-colored highlights. He had only one pair of legs, but sported six tentacled arms. Each one of them had a weapon and they all moved independently of the others.
Fuck a duck.
A mace ball the size of a chair descended on us and Matumbo barely managed to get a shield up in time. It deflected the blow but sent us to our knees. She looked at us like we’d lost our minds. “So what are you waiting for? Attack it!”