Tom rolled right. A grinding whine rattled his teeth in their sockets. Tiny cement bits stung his face. He threw up an arm to protect his eyes. When he dropped it the flying man had vanished. He’d left a hole drilled right into the dark cement of the Louvre entry floor. “How the hell did he do that?”
Lohengrin answered with his longsword. Tom rolled right. The blade bit into the cement for half its three-foot length. Tom rolled back, swinging his right foot across him in a fierce crescent kick. He caught the blade’s flat. He expected the blade to snap. Instead it ripped a big divot out of the cement as it snapped from the knight’s gauntleted hand. Then it vanished.
Neither surprised Tom enough to put him back. But the glowing fist-sized spiked ball whistling down toward his face did. He threw up an arm, managed to block the morningstar’s stubby handle. It didn’t stop the ball on its chain. It whipped around and slammed into the side of Tom’s head, just behind his left eye.
Once more superhuman reflexes saved him; he yanked his head sideways far enough to keep from having a spike driven into his brain. But the ghost steel bit painfully into his temple. He felt his left cheekbone break, shoot pain back through his brain like white lightning, tasted blood as a spike pierced his cheek.
Tom kicked. His sole caught the spectral tasset that protected the top of Lohengrin’s right thigh. The knight’s feet shot out from under him. His faceplate shattered cement beneath him as the morningstar disappeared.
Head pounding, Tom jumped to his feet. Lohengrin popped up just as quickly. A spike-backed battle-ax appeared in his hand. “Shit, where do you get those?” Tom asked, and loosed a sunbeam. It struck the center of Lohengrin’s breastplate. It seemed to shatter into a hundred backscatter shafts of blinding light. Tom heard screams as bystanders got scorched.
He launched an overhead right at Lohengrin. If he didn’t knock the knight into something hard enough to jelly his bones, he’d at least stun the fuck enough to finish him. But the German learned fast. Rather than blocking with his shield he swung it up like a tailgate. Its edge jammed painfully into Tom’s biceps, jamming the punch midflight. Its freight-train momentum still blasted Lohengrin back, skidding across the floor with a shriek of ghost-steel digging furrows in concrete. But he caught Tom a glancing shot under the arm with his ax.
Tom gasped and dropped to one knee. The blow had either busted several ribs or chopped them right through. And Lohengrin had kept both his feet and his grip on his weapon. His ice-blue eyes glaring over the top of his shield from behind narrow eye slits, he charged.
But Tom learned quick, too. He flung his left palm up toward the ghost steel-masked face. Lohengrin read the threat within the gesture. He tried to throw himself aside. He was almost fast enough to defeat Tom’s movement. But not faster than light. The sunbeam clipped the left side of the winged helmet, enveloping his eye slit. Tom saw hell-glare flare within.
When Lohengrin hit the floor and rolled onto his back he was once more a studly German dude in a suit, with arms outflung and the left side of his face a smoking mess.
Bugsy saw the room from ten thousand angles, each one of them moving, spinning, trying not to get killed. He’d lost too many wasps already. If too many more went down, he wouldn’t be able to re-form. Endgame. Over. Dead unless Cameo used some little tchotchke of his to haul him back out of the grave. He swirled around, going in for fast stings on the PPA Leopard Men, distracting the guys with just guns, and trying to stay clear of Tom Weathers.
Then Lohengrin went down, ghost steel armor blinking out like it had never been there, and Tom Weathers towering over him for the kill.
Ah fuck it, Bugsy thought, and dove in.
From all across the Louvre, the wasps dove in toward a single target: Tom Weathers. The Radical turned at the sound of wings, flame dancing out. Bugsy split, shifted, tried to avoid the fire. He felt wasps cooking off like a deep, unspecific ache. Lohengrin was moving, moaning. He had his hands up, cupping his seared face.
Not letting you kill him, Bugsy thought and pressed in. A dozen wasps got through, stinging Weathers on the back of the neck and curling around toward his eyes.
Ellen’s voice came out of nowhere. “Bugsy! Drop! ”
No. Not Ellen’s.
Simoon’s.
Bugsy retreated, pulling his wasps together in a corner near the men’s room. The wind picked up, grit in the air. Bugsy shifted his insect bodies into the more familiar flesh. There weren’t enough. He could feel his breath rattling in his lungs. The tendrils of sand in the air bit at his skin.
Which meant it was shredding Weathers.
Simoon’s wind shrieked like a banshee, the sand looking more like a fog. The glass pyramid was already pocked and white where she’d brushed against it. Weathers, in the worst of it, lifted off his feet, arms and legs swinging, and crashed against the wall.
“That’s my girl,” Bugsy said weakly. “Get him.”
Baghdad, Iraq
The Caliphate of Arabia
They landed hard on the red-and-black Persian rug. Noel left Siraj whimpering on the floor, ran, and yanked an embroidered runner off a table. He couldn’t help but notice in one of those odd dislocating thoughts that always float past when a person was in a crisis that he hadn’t disturbed a single item of bric-a-brac on the table.
Returning to Siraj, he pulled out the splinter and wrapped the leg tightly in the runner. He stood and wiped his bloody hands down his pants. “I’ll let them know you’re here. They’ll get you to a hospital.”
“Never mind me,” Siraj gritted, through teeth clenched against the pain. “Get a gun. You have to go back. Go back and kill him. Make certain of it this time.”
“You seem to be under the misapprehension that you can still give me orders. Quite wrong. You just lost your hold on me. The secret is out. Weathers knows, and there’s nothing you can do to me. Now my wife is a target, and I’m more concerned about her than I am about you. Here’s some free advice. Never sleep in the same place twice, and get yourself some good doubles. Good luck.”
And he teleported away.
The Louvre
Paris, France
“Fuck!” Tom exclaimed as the wind slammed him into a wall upside down. He felt like a character in a fucking cartoon. The fire blasts he’d desperately launched in all directions had fatally flamed several people, including at least one Leopard Man. But he didn’t know who the hell was doing this to him.
The wounds Lohengrin had dealt him were weakening him fast from blood loss. Tom willed himself insubstantial and dropped to the floor as the miniature twister spun him back out in the middle of the room. By now most of his escorts were down. They’d been able to do little more than keep the enemy aces off Tom’s back. Now they converged on him with a vengeance.
A blow to his kidney made him gasp with pain. He turned into a right hook that busted his jaw and spun him back, and caught a glimpse of a big handsome woman in a suit, with black shiny braids flying about her dark face. She’d been introduced to Dr. Okimba as Wilma Mankiller, a Canadian strongwoman ace from the Blood branch of the Blackfoot Nation.
Tom prepared to flame her. Again the floor surged beneath him. He hit hard and rolled across the floor. Burrowing Owl flashed right through the spot where he’d been and ground his way into the floor without seeming to slow. That dude’s starting to piss me off.
Tom saw another figure flying beneath the pyramid. It launched a beam at him: red, white, blue. The fallen Kraut knight wasn’t the only one who knew the danger of an aimed palm. Tom hurled himself away. The French ace Tricolor’s signature beam seared Tom’s right side as its main energy blasted the floor. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Tom shot back a fire blast. Three-toned light flared around the slim figure. Fuck. Force screen.