Brandt caught sight of her. “Cara! What are you—”
His words went muffled as she plunged through, striking sparks where shield met shield.
The noise on the outside was worse than she had expected, even through two layers of shield-spell. Her pulse hammered in her ears, and she wanted to double over and puke with terror, but she didn’t let herself give in to the fear, didn’t let her determination waver. Instead, trusting the others to cover her with whatever firepower they had left, she bolted for the bat demons’ leader.
Before, she had used her people as a distraction to save her own ass and get the win. This time she would do the reverse. Please, gods.
A dark shape closed on her from the left, another from the right. No! She dodged, tripped, and nearly went down, and then a roar of magic exploded behind her with a shock wave that nearly flattened her. She didn’t look back, just kept racing across the sandy surface until she was within range of the huge camazotz, which was standing there with its hands out to its sides in the apparently universal gesture of, Bring it on, bitch.
But although she was five-foot-nothing and weighed a hundred or so pounds soaking wet, she hadn’t grown up on a cattle ranch for nothing. And the fight training at Skywatch had been brutal but effective. She went in low, dodged the bat demon’s first swipe, ducked under the return, and felt the whiff of a wing slash right above her. The thing’s second blow caught her squarely on the shield and sent her flying back to crash into the cavern wall.
She hit hard and found that the shield didn’t do a damn thing to buffer the impact, leaving her dazed. She thought she heard someone shout her name with frantic worry, but she couldn’t stop now. The camazotz approached her, loomed over her—
And she yanked her machine pistol off its harness, fired screaming, and blew its head to mush.
Reality shifted around her as the creature’s body wavered for a moment, still upright, and then toppled in slow motion, crumpling forward onto her. She tried to roll clear, but shock and the power drain of the blood-link slowed her reflexes and the body hit her, slid sideways, and pinned her lower legs to the ground.
“No!” She shoved at the huge creature. “Gods, no!” It didn’t move. But already she could see the wounds beginning to knit as the thing regenerated.
The battle raged around the dome in a cacophony of gunfire, explosions, and screams, but the leader’s silence hadn’t gone unnoticed. A pair of camazotz detached from the dome and headed for her, eyes blazing.
Panic slashed through her and adrenaline flooded her bloodstream; she struggled, shoving at the big creature, trying to move the immovable— Shit! Don’t be an idiot. Going for her knife again, she risked turning off the shield to grab the bat demon’s limp penis. It was as thick as her wrist, slick with sweat and ichor.
Gagging, she set her knife to the base and started hacking. Ichor spurted, but she kept going, sawing through the surprisingly tough flesh until, with a last rasping knife slice, the thing’s penis parted from its body.
And all of it—bat demon, dick, ichor, and all—disappeared in a puff of oily smoke.
“Cara!” Her head whipped around at the sound of Sven’s voice, and her heart clogged her throat at the sight of him charging down from a narrow ledge with Mac right behind him.
“Sven!”
“Behind you!”
Magic boomed suddenly at her back, driving her to her knees. A wing whipped where her head had been, and a clawed hand slashed through the nearly empty air, just grazing her shoulder. But even that small slice burned like unholy hell, more painful than anything she could remember experiencing before.
She screamed, fell, and rolled, trying to get away from the camazotz that rose over her, its eyes burning with feral hatred.
“No.” She grabbed for her pistol, but the harness was empty and her hands were rapidly going numb. Dimly she remembered Natalie talking about how one small scratch from a camazotz could knock out a full-grown man for twenty-four hours or more. “Noo!”
It furled its wings and leaned in, reaching for her with wicked claws as its mouth gaped wide to reveal viciously sharp reddish brown teeth. But then a dark blur raced up behind the demon and launched itself into the air with a feral roar, and a lean, dark-furred coyote slammed into the bat demon, driving it off her with a ravenous snarl.
“Mac?” Cara slurred, confused, yet beginning to hope against hope that this was real and she wasn’t already dreaming. Yet her vision blurred and it suddenly seemed that there were two coyotes attacking the camazotz. Which had to be a dream.
Then, as her consciousness wavered, she saw Sven coming toward her, saw all the world’s anguish in his stormy eyes, saw his mouth moving, shaping her name, and—
Nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“No! Cara!” The words tore themselves from Sven’s throat as he raced toward her, aware that JT was closing from the other direction, shielded and carrying his medic’s kit.
The winikin didn’t waste words; he dumped the kit, drew his knife, and killed his shield as he strode toward where Mac and the sable coyote were standing over the body of the demon they had taken out. When the female snarled at him, Mac barked a warning, or maybe an explanation.
And Sven didn’t catch a word of it. The new coyote hadn’t spoken to him since that first blast of communication, and he was deaf to Mac. More, his magic was dead. Finished. He’d used it up fireballing Cara’s attacker… and he’d been too damn slow to do it.
“I’m here, babe,” he said, dropping to his knees beside her and gathering her in his arms. His voice broke at the limp, unresisting feel of her normally strung-tight body and the pale gray-green cast to her skin, the fierce reddish black of the claw scratch on her shoulder. JT joined him, his face going grim, and Sven’s voice broke as he kept talking to her. “Sorry. You don’t like ‘babe,’ do you? I’ll have to come up with something else.”
He was babbling but he didn’t want to stop, because if he did, JT would tell him what he already knew: that the equinox and the closeness of the end date had strengthened the venom of the camazotz from a soporific to a poison.
“Let’s get her inside the shield,” JT said, his voice equally ragged. “Natalie fought it off in a quarter the time it should have taken her to wake up, I think because she was connected to the magic. You can boost her, help her.”
Sven nodded and gathered Cara up, hating how light she was in his arms, as if the life had already drained out of her.
“Hurry!” Brandt called from the center of the chamber, where the defenders had knocked back nearly all of the camazotz, buying a brief window of safety while they all regenerated. Some of the winikin were out hacking away and puffing the bat demons to dust, but the creatures were regenerating faster than they were being banished. “Run!”
Sven ran, with JT leading the way and the coyotes on his heels. They made it inside the shield-stone perimeter just as the first demon lunged to its feet once more, screeching and pissed off, only to get a faceful of explosive-tipped jade bullets and go down again.
“Everyone back inside the line!” Patience commanded as six other camazotz regained their feet, then four more. “Retreat, now!”
Most of the winikin responded instantly. Breece, though, kept hacking away, calling, “Just one more—” She broke off with a strangled cry when the demon yanked itself from her grip, grabbed her by the neck, and bit down.
The crunch was horrific; the sight of her body going limp and then getting tossed aside was even worse.