Callie—disguised as Gunther—wheeled around and saw Lina charge through the door. Callie let out a squeak and grabbed Wally. She pushed him down to the ground and threw herself on top of him. Lina, seething with rage by the time she spotted the eight young men there for the meeting, hurled two large balls of icy mist at them.
The blast knocked all of them off their feet and coated the warehouse’s concrete floor in ice. Before they could regain their footing, they’d been swarmed and disarmed by the shifters.
Zack put his hand on Lina’s back. “Babe? You okay?”
She set her jaw. “I will be shortly.”
Callie, who was now back to looking like her normal self and helping Wally to his feet, shouted at Zack. “Get her out of here. Now! She’s going to kill them!”
“There’s a problem with that?” Lina asked as she shook off Zack’s arm.
“Yeah, that’s a problem,” Callie said. “We need to interrogate them first.”
Lina felt her rage dissipate. “Good reason.” She allowed Zack and Brodey to lead her outside.
“Wow,” Brodey said. “I think you’re getting the handle of this Goddess gig,”
Zack agreed. “I think you’re overthinking stuff. When it comes to needing to do something, you seem to instinctively know what to do—”
A shout of surprise from inside was all the prompting Lina needed. Before Zack and Brodey could stop her, she dodged past them and back inside the building. One of the cockatrice was trying to shift while Wally and one of the dragons wrestled with him.
Instinctively, Lina raised her right hand. A fireball formed over her palm. The cockatrice completed his shift and now stood nine feet tall. He slung Wally and the dragon off him. As the cockatrice raised his head to howl, she hurled the fireball at it, vaporizing him before the final echoes of his cry even silenced. Nothing remained of him except a sooty pile of ash that settled gently on top of his discarded clothes and shoes.
All the other cockatrice and most of the other shifters froze and looked at Lina.
She had another fireball ready in her palm. “Any of you other fuckers want to try something like that?” she said to the cockatrice prisoners.
The remaining seven cockatrice shook their heads. They all looked young, even younger than Gunther.
She let the fireball dissolve. Wally and the dragon both climbed to their feet. “Glad you’re on our side, Lina,” Wally quipped.
They interrogated the other cockatrice. When they finished, Jan and Rick looked at Zack and Brodey. “Take her back to the hotel,” Rick said. “We’ll handle this.”
“I want to help!” Lina protested.
“We don’t want you helping,” Jan said. “You don’t need to see this. I’m afraid what it’ll do to you.”
She started to argue with him when Callie grabbed her arm. “I’ll take her.” Lina was going to argue with her, too, when Callie dug her fingers into her upper arm. “No, you listen to me,” Callie said, storm clouds brewing in her expression. “The guys are right. Let them handle this. Please.”
Something in the way she said it brought Lina around. She quit fighting her. “Fine.” On the way back to the hotel, Lina said, “I thought you were on my side.”
Callie smiled. “I am. Do you really think we’re going back to the hotel? Have you learned nothing from me yet?”
Lina stared at her for a moment before she broke into peals of laughter. “Where are we going?”
Callie’s face turned grim. “To the nest.”
They drove for twenty minutes, into a dark rural area that looked like it was more farmland than anything. Callie switched off the headlights as she turned onto a dirt track that didn’t resemble a road so much as it resembled a really long, rutted mud puddle. She let the car coast to a stop and shut it off.
“What are we doing here?” Lina asked.
Callie smiled and reached up to switch off the dome light. “Hope you don’t mind a short hike.”
Lina followed Callie out of the car and across the darkened field. Clouds obscured the moon and stars, but as Lina’s eyes adjusted, she easily found herself following Callie.
After a few minutes cross-country trekking, they hunkered down behind a low stone wall near a farmhouse. Inside the house was dark with the exception of a light in one window on the end closest to them.
“That’s the nest?” Lina whispered. It looked like a normal house.
She nodded. “Sir’s going to spank the crap out of me for this, but it’s worth it.” She looked at Lina. “I saw this address come up in the stuff we got at the carver’s. It was there again in the silversmith’s stuff. Delivery address. And one of the phone numbers we pulled off Gunther’s phone is registered to this address.”
“Do we tell the guys?”
She grinned. “Fuck, no. Why do you think we’re here? This is their next stop, but I have a feeling if those yokels at the warehouse don’t report back sooner rather than later, these assholes are going to bug out.”
They crept across the farmyard. Lina’s heart pounded in her chest. She was armed with a sadomasochistic immortal, sarcastic wit, and unreliable fire and ice skills.
She was no longer sure this was such a great idea.
Callie pointed up to where an electric line entered the house near the roof. Lina wasn’t sure what Callie wanted her to do. Then Callie made a motion at it like she was tossing something.
Lina got it. Taking a deep breath and trying not to think about it, she held out her palm as if holding a softball and envisioned throwing a fireball at the wire. To her shock and amazement, it worked.
With a shower of sparks, the electric line burst into flame and fell from the wall, where it started arcing on the ground.
Inside the house, they heard several male voices shout. Callie whispered, “I’ll get the front door,” before dodging around the house.
Lina waited there. As two men rounded the corner from the back of the house, she threw fireballs with both hands. One took out one man, the other went a little wide and caught a barn on fire.
“Ooops!”
She didn’t have time to think, because the other man immediately began to rip his clothes off as he shifted into a cockatrice.
Answers that question. No doubt about his identity. She lobbed another fireball at him, which he dodged. Then she was standing face-to-face with a fifteen-foot-tall cockatrice even uglier than Lenny and Edgar had been.
“Fuck!” She heard Callie engaged in a fight on the front side of the house. She tried another fireball, which the cockatrice ducked. Then she had an idea and lobbed an icy mist at its feet.
It laughed at her, but when it took a step it slipped and fell right on the downed power line, which still arced in the grass.
The cockatrice let out a horrific screech as it shuddered and shook, the current frying the evil clucker where he lay.
Lina dusted off her hands and with a pleased smile turned to help Callie.
A really angry looking woman stood there behind her. Before Lina could react, the woman launched herself at Lina, swinging with both hands and screaming epithets in something Lina thought was Dutch, but she couldn’t be sure.
Lina fell to the ground under her assault. As the woman sat up to punch Lina in the face, a shot rang out and a hole appeared in the middle of the woman’s forehead. She fell back, dead.
Lina scrambled out from under the woman’s body and turned, ready with a fireball in her hand. Zack ran up carrying a rifle.