I stumbled back, despite the fact that they couldn’t reach me, then shifted them into another group leaping for some of the shoppers. And I do mean into. I didn’t mean to do it, but I was freaking out and hurrying, and there were a lot of them, and—
And that, I thought, doubled over in pain from multiple shifts in close succession, yet still staring. At what looked like a human rat king, with the bodies of one group spearing those of the other, in a huge, meaty mess that had the shoppers retching and slipping on decomposing entrails, even while the bloody, filthy mass of limbs kept on squirming and reaching out, trying to drag them down—
“Jo!” I screamed, staring at the skies. “You want me? Come after me!”
But there was no answer. Unless you counted the other two blue diamonds suddenly starting to descend. And that was while bodies were still spilling from the first, and now jumping for people in midair.
Pritkin stared at them, but there was nothing he could do without dropping his shield, and people continued to stream out of the massive apothecary. Strange as it seemed, all of this had happened in maybe a minute or two, with no opportunity for those on the upper levels to even reach the street. So I did the only thing I could think of, and threw a bubble of slow time over the surface of the nearest blue hell.
But while it didn’t stop the flow of bodies, it did slow them way, way down, leaving something that looked like a modern sculpture hanging in the air as they leisurely descended in a waterfall of flesh, their bodies sickly pale under the dirt, their faces savage against the night. I stared up at it in disbelief, clutching the sobbing child and feeling dizzy.
And not just because I had a new entry in the impossible-shit list in my brain. But because they’d touch down eventually, and when they did, they’d join the others now spilling out of the other two diamonds and running in all directions. And I couldn’t slow them all!
“Focus their attention on us,” Pritkin gritted out.
“What?”
“Don’t let them scatter! They’ll slaughter the whole street!”
And, okay, he had a point, but what the hell was I supposed to—
“Damn it, Cassie! Do it now!”
So I did it now, shifting the drifts of flaming debris piled along the sides of the street into the bodies. And I shifted a lot. For a second there, it looked like a couple of armies had lined up to shoot volleys of fiery arrows at each other. There wasn’t a corpse that wasn’t riddled with pieces of flaming wood, and some looked like fiery porcupines.
But these corpses weren’t the brittle, desiccated kind that might have gone up like kindling. They were damp, even soggy in some instances, and burned slowly, if at all. So all I’d done was to piss them off.
Way off.
I was nauseous from the power drain and seriously considering losing my dinner, but I nonetheless noticed when the whole street suddenly stopped, like somebody had barked out an order I couldn’t hear. And turned as one, their jaws working as if biting the air, and the milky or missing eyes somehow focusing. On us.
And then they leapt, all at once, which . . . yeah. That might not have been the best plan after all. Because, sure, it had saved the crowd—for the moment, anyway. But who was going to save us?
And I guess Pritkin agreed, because his eyes had just blown wide.
“Shift out!” he ordered, right before the whole damned street slammed into his shields, scrabbling and clawing and trying to bite.
“Like hell!”
“Goddamn it, Cassie! Do as I say!”
“One of these days, you’re going to learn that that doesn’t work,” I snapped. “Might as well be today.”
Pritkin cursed, which got him nowhere. If I shifted out, he was coming with me. But if he went, so did the street, because he was a one-man army, and was literally the only thing holding it together right now.
But he wasn’t going to be doing it for long.
His shields, once so solid that they’d resembled blue ice, were bucking like a storm on the high seas under the onslaught. And that was a problem for more than just us. It sent the heavy glass and iron pieces sloshing around over the crowd’s heads back in the atrium, to the point that even I could see that they weren’t going to last. And no way could I shift that much!
But I didn’t have to.
There’d been a time in this job when I’d run around like a headless chicken, reacting more than thinking, because stuff like streets filled with fiery zombies tended to fuck with your head. But I’d had a four-month apprenticeship in hell—sometimes literally—and I was harder to rattle now. So I pulled my power around me, trying to scrape together enough for a shift—back in time.
I didn’t need much, just an hour or so, maybe even less. Just enough to give us some goddamned warning! And allow us to get forces in place to handle this, whatever the hell this was!
I had the power. I could feel it, shuddering at my fingertips, cascading through my body, shivering down my spine. Easily enough for a short jump to warn the court, to get Gertie involved, to—
To do nothing, because I went nowhere.