And, sure enough, I spied a tiny guy all the way at the end of the hall, near the front door.
Making a run for it.
Only, weirdly enough, he appeared to be running this way. “Gessa, do we have a box or something?” I asked, wondering if the little thing had gotten into some paint somewhere, because he looked kind of red.
&n
bsp; And then the whole room did, when a giant fist came out of nowhere and sent me flying.
Chapter Sixteen
The blow felt like a sledgehammer backed by a semi. I hit the stairs hard enough to stun me; hard enough that my nerves started blaring all kinds of warnings from virtually everywhere; hard enough that I looked up and found myself already in ultra slo-mo, the way movies are filmed when the shit has most definitely hit the fan.
It works the same way for vampires, when their brains realize they’re in over their heads. Time, of course, doesn’t actually slow down, but their perception of it does, giving them what feels like a few added seconds to evaluate a situation. It’s one reason they’re so deadly, and why they move like quicksilver in battle, their every move looking precise, calculated, and well thought out—because it usually is.
That state had always been a rarity for me, and only in extremis. Probably wasn’t a good thing that my brain already thought I needed it, huh? Or the fact that it didn’t seem to be working right.
The hallway was fine, having taken on the familiar underwater feel of slo-mo: I saw Gessa through the door to the living room, looking up in concern, her brown curls bouncing slowly around her head; I saw a piece of the railing I’d hit on my way to destroy my rib cage flipping leisurely through the air; I saw little siftings of dust raining gently down from where the force of my impact had shaken them loose from the ceiling. Everything was exactly as I’d have expected.
Except for the fist slamming into the stairs, right by my head, still fast, still deadly, and still looking like it was in real time, to the point that I barely managed to dodge it.
Which meant that whatever was assaulting me was fast—very fast. Faster than me, I thought dizzily, trying to assess the situation while scrambling backward up the stairs. And attempting to avoid a second blow while still reeling from the first.
That wasn’t working so great, and wouldn’t have worked at all, except for the house. Because the latest massive hole that the Hulk-like fist had left in the stairs had just closed up around it, like a wooden maw clamping down—and clamping hard. That left me half a second to focus my bleary eyes on my attacker, only that didn’t help much.
Because I’d never seen anything like it.
It was roughly the size and shape of a large troll, only it wasn’t one. Not unless there was some kind I didn’t know about, made out of lava right before it hardens, with a cracked, reddish crust on top and fiery-looking stuff inside. Which would have been worth a double take or maybe two, but I didn’t have time.
Because the damned thing had two fists, didn’t it?
The second crashed into the wall beside me, because I’d dodged at the last second, sending shards of hardwood into the skin of my cheek and neck. I stumbled backward, halfway up the stairs now and still dizzy—because it had been all of a couple seconds since this whole thing started. And because we had wards, damn it! About a thousand of the things, many of which weren’t legal anymore, if they’d ever been, and all of them on steroids from sucking on an energy teat for much of the last century.
So how did the damned thing get in?
Make that damned things, I thought, looking past the huge, thrashing, rocklike beast, which now had both fists trapped by a pissed-off house.
And saw its backup—like it needed any—spiraling up from the floor.
That’s the best way I can describe it, although it doesn’t do it justice. More of the small things I’d mistaken for toys were running at me, a whole line of them from the direction of the door, and getting bigger and meaner with every step. And more like Pig-Pen, because it looked like all the dust in the house, even that sifting down from the ceiling, was curving, was flowing out, was joining up with the rock-hard bodies they were forming like little stairsteps—and forming them fast.
They were cleaning the house for maybe the first time ever, which unfortunately I wasn’t going to live to see because I couldn’t take this many.
But something else could.
Suddenly, out of every room along the hallway—the kitchen, the dining room, the guest bath, even the living room, prompting a startled “Eep!” from Gessa—came the cavalry. I was busy trying to get back to my feet while a roaring rock monster thrashed in my face, and my ankle, which had gotten injured along with everything else, kept trying to give way on me. So for a second, I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
And then I did, and I still didn’t believe it.
Because the huge bodies suddenly flinging themselves at our attackers looked a lot like—
The missing chess pieces.
They had the same mottled brown or dirty green skin tones. They had the same patched leather armor and dull iron and steel weapons. They had the same little tusks on the ogres and the same beady little eyes on the trolls, although “little” really didn’t work as a descriptor anymore.
Because they were huge.
For a moment, I thought I must have hit my head too hard, but then I saw it.