Ms. Lewis didn’t have a ready answer.
Rose went on, her voice rising as she spoke. “Jacob’s Bell will be removed as a place, and all that is happening here is evidence as to why. The Practitioners here will die or leave, one and all. Let this be the first of dominoes to fall, on both counts! I am of the Abyss, and I am of Conquest, and from this seat, I deem this done!”
A vibration rattled through everything present. It was much the same as if something very heavy had been dropped just out of sight, rippling through the strange firmament above, the very air, and the ground below. The building seemed to waver.
The Welder, cast off of the Hellhound, fell at the hands of the possessed lawyer, fingers tearing his neck open. Paige’s light was forming a shield to hold the Hellhound at bay, but it wasn’t holding up.
Below the dragon, Mags was still on her back.
I’d told her to keep a goblin in reserve, fully expecting that we’d be beaten and battered, and that we might need a distraction to cover our retreat. Mags summoned it.
Not a particularly big goblin. Smaller than Buttsack, who was the size of a morbidly obese seven year old. Still it came when Mags tore the paper it had been bound into.
I didn’t hear the words, but I saw it run to the dragon’s dangling tail, which touched the ground. Climbing, and moving toward Ms. Lewis, who appeared to be unaware, her focus elsewhere.
Paige created a brilliant flash of light, and everything went white.
The light served to blind everyone present, myself included. Buying us time. I used the time to pull myself together. No longer a wing, but an arm, a hand.
In the time it took for the brilliant light to fade, people had repositioned, pulling back and away from the fighting. Only the Barber was still caught up with the tenacious Bristles, but even he was on his feet again, back to a wall, hacking the goblin’s shield to pieces.
The chauffeur had summoned two demons, and they didn’t look like small fry. They looked much like the Barber had. One was grotesquely fat, covered in boils, his ‘face’ a lanky mess of hair, the sides, top and back of his head replaced with faces that looked as though they belonged to drowning victims. The genitals that hung between the thing’s legs weren’t distinguishable as anything belonging to either gender.
The other was narrower, thin, with the head of an emaciated cat.
“I was diabolist,” Rose said, and she rose from her chair. She’d left traces of a partial handprint in the metal of the chair’s arm, and the print glowed faintly, as her gleaming white fingers did. “I’m now a servant of the Abyss.”
She faced down both of the demons and the chauffeur both, stepping forward.
“I think,” she said, “I’m qualified to tell you to get lost.”
She swept her hand to one side.
A glow similar to the one on the chair traced along the edge of the rooftop. As it faded, it left cracks in its wake.
The demons moved, lunging, the chauffeur moving after a bit more of a delay.
That corner of the rooftop caved in. The demons and chauffeur were all swallowed up in the falling rubble.
“Yes!” Mags crowed.
Don’t celebrate just yet, I thought.
This wasn’t done.
The Barber was winning its brawl. We still had two lawyers to deal with.
The goblin poked its head up behind Ms. Lewis. It sank its teeth into her calf. In the moments of struggle that followed, it managed to drag her off the dragon’s back. She and he dropped.
Freed, I immediately began crawling in her general direction. My fingers weren’t strong enough to drag my entire arm and the entrails that flowed behind, lacking a better word.
Instead, I used my fingers to hook into the cracks and individual stones of the rooftop, curled my arm, set the base down, and unfolded my arm, lunging out to reach the next handhold.
A foot or so of progress per attempt.
Chaos. Everything they had established was now breaking down. The power, their invincibility, the supposed inevitability of their victory.
We were, all of us here on the rooftop, people who had a tendency to stick it out, to bulldog our way through it all. Somewhere along the line, our belief in that had trumped our belief that they would win.
There wasn’t a single person in our group now who was intact. Our enemies, even the demons and lawyer who had been cast down with the section of roof, remained immortal.
There was a yelp. Buttsack followed it with a cry of his own, fleeing the Barber.
The Barber stood.
I wanted to act, to respond to situations as they arose, but that wasn’t a power I had anymore. Rose had taken on titles and roles, she’d adopted parts of me, and she was versatile. Able to call the maimed Nurse to her side, a temporary bodyguard. Mags had Buttsack. Paige… I suppose Paige was supposed to have Peter, but he’d collapsed, lying on his back, eyes open.
All I could do was continue my steady progress. I could see all the blades that lay between me and Ms. Lewis’ silhouette, as she worked on extricating the small, stupid goblin that was trying to attack her.
The possessed lawyer moved in the same instant his hellhound did. A two-pronged strike.
The burned Nurse flung herself at the Hellhound, only for the beast to explode into flame, leaving her to stumble through. She recovered and threw her arms around the feral lawyer. Her embrace singed clothing and made hair smoke.
Buttsack threw itself at the Hellhound, or tried to duck beneath it as it lunged, shield raised to protect himself, I wasn’t sure. Either way, his bulk was a stone for the Hellhound to trip over. Paige’s rebuke took advantage of that gap, a contained flash of light that acted like a slap to the face, making the Hellhound turn its head.
Things had reduced to a brawl. Chaotic.
Rose grabbed the chain, hauled on the slack, and forced a loop around the Hellhound’s muzzle as it came around to bite her.
Mags, for her part, threw herself forward to Rose’s side, snapping a combination lock through one loop of the chain.
The hellhound raised a paw and clawed at two of them, hard. Mags was unscathed. Rose wasn’t, and dropped, hard.
The Hellhound pulled, trying to get closer to the others, but there was no more slack in the chain, and try as it might, it couldn’t break the binding. Its tenacious attempts to pull free or get closer only served to tighten the loop.
Paige and Mags backed away, Paige dropping to Rose’s side to help put pressure on the claw wound. Buttsack, now behind the Hellhound, backed away in the other direction, toward the fracture on the far end of the roof.
I started to make my way through the blades that dripped with dragon’s blood. The ground itself was slippery, but the blades themselves were precarious handholds where the blood didn’t touch them.
The Barber was approaching, Rose was down, and the others weren’t capable or willing to get closer to either Barber or Hound. Mags bent down and grabbed Rose, pulling her further back.
In their efforts to get away, they backed straight up into Ms. Lewis, who had dispatched the goblin.
“This would be the beginning of the end, I suppose, for now at least,” Ms. Lewis said. She turned her head. “Christopher, don’t summon anything more. We should extricate, rather than entrench ourselves.”
Christopher, the possessed lawyer, scowled. He’d dealt with the Nurse, tearing her throat out, but was struggling to get the chain away from the Hellhound’s muzzle. The lock prevented easy removal, the hound wasn’t cooperating, which didn’t help matters, and it apparently couldn’t turn into fire when it was shackled.