Or, rather, I saw him, a troll different from all the rest, darker of color and wilder of eye, because he’d seen some shit in his short life. And I’m afraid I mean that literally. Because Stinky, who eats everything that doesn’t try to eat him first, had accidentally swallowed him along with some animated circus cookies that Olga had brought over from a troll bakery. They’d been galloping and neighing and generally stampeding around the kitchen table, and Stinky, never one to miss an opportunity, had opened his mouth and let them just fall in.
Only something else had fallen in as well, and gone for the ride of its life.
We’d managed to retrieve the little troll after his journey, but he’d never been quite the same again. Including his hardened leather battle gear, which was sadly acid eaten and useless by the time he, uh, popped up. So Stinky, who had been made to understand that you don’t eat little sort-of-sentient creatures even if they only got that way because of a spell, had made him a new set.
Which was why one of the suddenly massive former chess pieces was wearing soda can armor.
Only the house, which I guessed was what was doing this, had fiddled with that, too. The familiar red background and white curly letters of one can were now a thick, molded breastplate that Batman would have been proud of; the formerly flimsy red, white, and blue logo of another was a shield Captain America might have envied; and the bright blue and green pauldrons and orange and white shin guards could have been borrowed directly from Iron Man.
Who I really wished would show up right about now, because we were still getting hammered.
Maybe because our attackers didn’t feel anything. Or if they did, they gave no sign. Even when I got my shit together, grabbed a jagged piece of wood that the trapped monster was shredding as fast as the house could regrow it, and started trying my best to shove it through its eye.
Only it didn’t have eyes, although it could obviously see. But there was nothing inside the vague indentations in the skull but darkness and more rock. And when I did finally manage to break off a chunk, it didn’t seem to care. Just kept coming at me, only now with the added horror of doing it sans a third of its face.
I turned around and ran.
“What is it?”
That was Claire, pulling on a dressing gown and coming out of her room as I half ran, half limped into mine.
“You know that learning curve you’ve been on?” I said, throwing open my closet door. “It’s been accelerated.”
“What?” She’d come in behind me. “Dory—”
I grabbed a duffle bag in one hand and her arm in the other. “Get to the kids. You’re the last line of defense. Anything gets past me, burn it to the ground.”
I didn’t wait to see if she got it or not. Because, in the short time I’d been away—and it had been fucking short—the lead creature had broken loose from the house and leapt up the stairs—
Only to be blown all the way back down, into the line of backup headed this way. And with a new, basketball-sized burning hole in its torso, the blackened edges still on fire when it landed. And sent the others falling into what had become a battle of epic proportions and was about to get more so, because the duffle I’d grabbed wasn’t black.
There was nothing in my usual stash that would work on these things; I wasn’t even going to try. So I’d gone straight for the red sack of special-occasion toys I rarely use since none of them are legal and all of them would normally be massive overkill. But it always helps to be prepared, I thought, ratcheting the special shotgun again.
And cutting loose.
The nice thing about buying magic from dark mages, I thought, is that they just don’t give a damn. There’s none of the hand-wringing, permit needing, or side-eye giving that you get from the legit places, not to mention that the selection is, oh, rather better. Because this little baby was the definition of one shot and done.
Except when used on these guys, apparently. Because while this thing would put down a charging bull elephant—or a freakishly huge rock monster—in a single shot, the latter didn’t stay down. Like the first creature I’d hit, who had ended up sprawled on a pile of his buddies, but who was already getting up, was closing the wound, was coming for me—
And was getting his head blown off for a chaser.
But even that didn’t seem to matter, to him or to the others I was busy turning into Swiss cheese. Because they healed the same way they’d formed: by pulling dust and dirt through the air, or through cracks in the floorboards, or from under the front door. And there was no way to stop it, because the wards, good as they were, had been designed to keep out normal threats—spells and hexes and more mundane stuff like bullets.
They weren’t designed for this.
That thought connec
ted to something in my brain that had been nagging at me, like maybe it was important. Only I didn’t have time to worry about it right now. Because I was going to run out of rounds before they ran out of dirt, which meant, okay.
No more Ms. Nice Guy.
Which is why the next minute or so saw thirty grand’s worth of next-level, badass, lethal-as-we-wanna-be magical weapons go up in smoke. And fire. And a hail of flying steel shavings that buzzed through the rock like a drill bit through wood, leaving only dust clouds behind.
Which immediately coalesced into more rock monsters!
It quickly became apparent that, while my toys worked a wonder on flesh, nothing works on dirt. And that includes the ever-nasty, always-favorite, terribly expensive dislocator, the kind of pretty bauble that, once it explodes in your face, you no longer have a face. You have ears growing out of your knee and a smile on your ass and brains where your kidneys ought to be, because your entire upper body has just been dislocated—to somewhere not conducive to life, hopefully.
Because the damage is not reversible.