“Are you sure?” Leon’s voice went cold.
When Alessandro looked at me, it was as if his world stopped. This man looked at me as if I were a pretty girl he’d like to screw.
“I’m sure.”
Leon faced the fake Alessandro. “Hey, dickhead. Your illusion needs work.”
The fake Alessandro jerked his hand up. The sun caught the stainless-steel barrel of a large caliber handgun.
Leon’s hands came up in a blur. The SIG and Glock firearms barked in unison, spitting bullets. The fake Alessandro collapsed.
Gunfire erupted, coming from all around us. Bullets scored the pavement. I grabbed Arabella’s hand and pulled her behind a black Mercedes parked on the street.
In the middle of the road Leon spun like a dervish, firing without taking aim.
Guns popped like firecrackers. A hoarse scream tore through the gunfire. Bullets punched the Mercedes and the sidewalk behind us. Arabella tried to rise to look over the hood and I yanked her back down. Leon’s guns fired in twin bursts. A man cried out, his fear-soaked shriek full of pain.
And then everything went quiet. The sudden silence was deafening.
I straightened.
Bodies littered the street, painting the ground with red, their guns next to them. At least half a dozen. No, more. The man to our left must have fallen from the roof, because his legs jutted at odd angles from his body, shattered. The woman to his left was missing a face. Nobody moved.
In the middle of the road, Leon watched as the illusion mage, still wearing Alessandro’s body, dragged himself down the driveway toward the parking garage. Two long red bloodstains painted the road in his wake.
Holy crap.
Leon methodically reloaded the Glock, then the SIG.
The illusion mage was still pulling himself away from the carnage, moaning as he slowly shifted his body forward.
Arabella counted the bodies with her finger. “Nine.”
The one-man SWAT team that was my baby cousin started forward. The mage heard him and frantically tried to crawl faster. A quiet desperate mutter came from him. “No, no, no . . .”
Leon reached him and kicked the mage over onto his back. The fake Alessandro squirmed. His body shimmered, melting, and snapped into Audrey. She looked at Leon with huge blue eyes, her heart-shaped, delicate face stained with tears.
Oh you scumbag. If Leon didn’t kill the mage, I would strangle that asshole myself.
Arabella clenched her teeth, her hands curled into fists, and started forward, then stopped. This belonged to Leon.
My cousin studied the petite girl on the ground.
“Please,” the mage pleaded in Audrey’s voice. “Please don’t hurt me.”
Leon raised the Glock and slowly took aim.
Audrey cried out, “You don’t have to do this. I have information, I can—”
Leon squeezed the trigger. The bullet bit between Audrey’s eyes. Her body melted into a large dark-skinned man in his fifties. The expression on Leon’s face made my stomach churn.
I pressed the car keys into my sister’s hand. “Get the car and call Sabrian, please.”
There were probably a dozen security cameras around us. I wouldn’t be surprised if Munoz was already on his way.
Arabella nodded and ran down the driveway into the parking garage where we had parked Rhino.
I crossed the distance to Leon. His tan face gained a green tint. He stared, unblinking, his eyes hollow. He looked dead. His arm was still raised, aiming at the corpse.
I put my hand on his forearm and gently pushed his arm down. “It’s over.”
He looked at me, his eyes glassy. “She’s still dead.”
“Yes. But he won’t hurt anybody else. None of them will hurt anyone ever again.”
He turned away from me and looked at the bodies as if seeing them for the first time.
Taking a life always hurt. It never went away, no matter how justified the kill was. It still cost you a piece of your soul and it hurt when that piece died.
A blur of green shot out of the decorative hedges on our left and smashed into me. Big scaly arms clamped around me and jerked me off the ground. I kicked my feet trying to break free, but it was like fighting in a straitjacket. Whatever grabbed me turned and ran. The buildings rushed past me.
Gunshots rang out behind us, Leon firing in a controlled frenzy.
Bushes loomed ahead. The creature tore through them, the branches raking my arms and face, and burst onto the bank of Buffalo Bayou.
It flipped me, and I saw it. It resembled a Razorscale, but built with reeds and metal. It had the same powerful tail and similar limbs, but where a true Razorscale had only two, this one had six, arranged in pairs along its body, and it towered over me, eight feet tall, not counting the four-foot tail. Its head swiveled toward me on a thick neck, a big beautiful flower with a single perfectly round eye in its center.
The Abyss had built a better construct. It was learning.
The creature clenched me to its chest and leaped into the muddy river. Water swallowed us. I flailed, panicking. The more I struggled, the tighter it held me. The beast shot through the river like a torpedo, the force of the water pressing on my face.
I would die in this stupid dirty river.
I clawed at the construct. It surfaced, spinning. For a moment there was air, and I gulped it, and then we were under again.
Another spin, a lungful of fresh air, followed by another dive.
It wasn’t trying to kill me. It was taking me to the Pit.
I spun my magic inside me, building it up.
The beast surfaced. I gulped the air and sang out a short high note. “Mine.”
The Abyss’ mind and my magic collided. The beast went under. Water flooded into my mouth. There wasn’t enough air. I clung to the construct’s matrix, grappling with the nebulous intelligence on the other end. It pondered me, stunned. Images flickered between us—Felix’s face, Felix facing the swamp, Felix asking, “Why are you here?” and the answer blazing in his mind in glowing numbers: “162AC.” More images, Cheryl, Felix saying in a weird echoing voice, “I found someone to take care of it,” a distorted image of Linus, and then me, wavering, as if I were underwater.
My air ran out. I knew I was thrashing, my body fighting on pure instinct. I poured all my magic into that connection, imagining me dying, imagining my limp body sinking into the muck of the river bottom, disappearing completely. I showed the Abyss the absence of me and sent a single focused torrent with the last bit of power in my oxygen-starved brain.
Stop!
The beast broke the surface in an explosion of foam, like a great white breaching, and hurled me forward.
Air, dear God, so much air.
I landed on my side on solid ground. Pain punched my injured hip and I barely noticed it, focused on sucking as much air as I could into my lungs. The Abyss hovered on the edge of my mind, watching.
Finally, I sat up, coughing. Water laced with mud came out of me. My mouth tasted foul. I looked up.
The Razorscale construct crouched by me on all six limbs. The white fringes of its petals shivered slightly, the turquoise eye staring at me with terrible intensity.
We were on some sort of muddy bank. Behind us and up, the sounds of traffic filled the air, so mundane it was surreal. I glanced over my shoulder. A tall concrete bridge towered over the river. It had to be Woodway Drive.
The construct leaned forward. Our eyes were inches apart.
Images slipped into my brain. I was sitting on a huge lily pad, bloodred flowers blooming all around me, glowing with magic. A tentacle slid through the water and dropped a fat fish in front of me. It flapped on the leaf, big mouth gasping. All around me the Pit sang, the splashing of water, the soft whispers of fish streaking under the surface of my leaf, frogs croaking, distant Razorscales bellowing, a bull gator roaring, birds singing . . . The Abyss serenaded me with the sounds of the swamp the way it heard them.