“Got it!” I yelled.
“Got what?” Ray demanded, looking at me over his shoulder. “What is that thing?”
“Horus.”
“What?”
“The king of the gods!” I yelled, as a huge falcon tore off the side of the minaret, its wingspan big enough to threaten to block out the sky. I don’t know how large it actually was; I was kind of distracted. But I’d poured the rest of our magic into it, and I guess that reservoir had been worth the money. Because in that place and at that moment, it looked like a jumbo jet.
It soared into the air, then matched speed with us, the mighty wings knocking over a shop stall or two in the process.
“What the hell?” Ray demanded, staring at it.
“We just pulled rank!” I pointed at Louis-Cesare, and saw the bird's great head turn with my movement. “Save him!”
And Horus did.
Ray and I landed in a nearby alley to watch the show, because our ride was running out of juice. Sort of like the fey, I thought, watching the giant beak savage the no-longer-huge-looking creatures. It was a bloody slaughter, and I had no idea how we were going to explain this to Hassani, assuming he hadn’t engineered the whole thing, not to mention cover it up. But when I saw Louis-Cesare running toward me across the square, slicing and dicing fey as he went, it suddenly didn’t matter anymore.
Love . . . is a strange emotion, Dorina commented.
Couldn’t argue with that.
“You owe me an Omega for this,” Ray piped up, from behind me.
“What?”
“You know, the watch? The kind James Bond wears.”
I glanced back at him. “What about it?”
“I been thinking, and that’s what I want as a master’s g
ift.”
“Come again?”
“Masters always give their Seconds a gift, something to show off, only you haven’t ponied up yet.”
“I’m not much of a master,” I pointed out, watching Louis-Cesare decapitate two fey at one time without breaking stride.
“But I’m a great second.”
Yeah, I thought. He kind of was.
“What kind of Omega?” I asked, glancing back again—
In time to see him torn limb from limb by four fey.
“Ray!” I screamed, while someone else shouted: “Now!”
The alley lit up with a strange purple light, and something hit me like every freight train on Earth, all at once. I didn’t scream, but only because I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything, including fall, despite the fact that I’d been caught halfway through a leap. Except watch as what looked like a stone hockey puck—one of the captured fey artifacts—sent purple lightning scrawling up the alley walls.
I could feel Dorina struggling as hard as I was, but we remained suspended in mid-air while the lightning built and built above us, raising the hair on our head and arms and sending painful chills cascading up and down our body. And then it came crashing down, all at once, a searing torrent that felt like it should have incinerated us on the spot, or cooked our bones inside our skin. But it didn’t kill us. I didn’t know what it did, other than make me feel like I was coming apart at the seams.
And maybe I was.
A portal opened up in the opposite wall, and from the strength of it, it was headed a long way away. I barely noticed. A horrible ripping, tearing, sundering feeling had hit me, and suddenly, there she was, standing in the alley bedside me: Dorina, but not in the ghostly way she sometimes appeared when we had a chat. But solid. Real.