“Is there a ritual?” I screamed, and then screamed again as lightning flashed right above us.
But somebody must have had some coven training, because it was all redirected—at Jo. She disappeared off the top of the building where she’d paused one second too long, and the laughter abruptly stopped. I wasn’t sure if that was because she’d shifted or because she’d been fried, but I really hoped it was the latter.
“It doesn’t matter!” Hilde shook me. “The power knows what you mean. Just say it!”
“You’re hired!” I yelled, just before I was jerked onto another rooftop, where soaked wooden tiles cascaded under my scrambling feet.
A body landed heavily beside me, a knife blade flashed and came down, burying itself in wood, and I shifted to the next roof, screaming—
And then pushed a crumbling chimney down onto the woman who had followed on my heels.
Jo cursed and shot a spell, but the bricks hit her arm, and it went awry. I fell off the roof anyway, because the damned thing was pitched at a freaking sixty-degree angle, but somebody’s spell grabbed me out of thin air and shifted me—somewhere. I couldn’t tell with rain blinding me and thunder deafening me and something tugging at my mind, something I’d seen, something strange. Only who the hell could think in this?
And it didn’t get any better. What followed was a surreal game of hide-and-seek played out across the rooftops of London in a storm for the history books, and maybe it was in them, I didn’t know. All I knew was running and leaping and thanking God they built houses almost on top of each other whenever the hell this was, and falling and scrambling and feeling spell bolts hit down all around me, crashing through chimneys and punching through roofs, and that was with my posse deflecting most of them off into the storm.
I could see them now, in glimpses, those courageous, insane women, popping up on rooftops here and there, limned by lightning, throwing spells at Jo that she dodged as easily as she did the bolts stabbing down from above every few seconds, because the very heavens seemed to hate us!
At least they hated me. Because a forest of lightning—not blasts this time but threads—surrounded me suddenly, like a cage. It caused me to have to stop on a dime, to keep from plowing straight into them—
Unlike some pursuers that I hadn’t even noticed until now.
“You have got to be shitting me!” I screamed as a group of pale bodies sprang at me out of the night, only to be roasted on the bars of my cage. I shifted out, the smell of cooking meat in my nostrils, to a nearby roof. And looked back—
Only to see what had to be thousands of bodies swarming through the narrow streets, surging up the sides of buildings and crawling over rooftops in ways that human bodies just don’t. I guessed they were staying low to avoid the winds and hugging the roofs to keep from being blown off them, but that’s not what it looked like. It looked like I was being followed by an army of pale, human-sized spiders, something that, despite everything, had me almost frozen in horror for a second.
And then the real lightning storm started.
Because the heavens all but cracked open, and what had to be a thousand deadly silver threads slammed down, blasting through the ranks of the dead, incinerating half of them where they stood or crawled, and blowing many of the rest back through the air, away from me.
And I guess Jo didn’t like that. Because a second later, she shattered this shard, too, like she had the last, when I went from smog to hurricane. And now where was I?
All I knew was that I fell into the middle of a darkened street from what had to be four stories up. It should have broken every bone in my body, but somebody got a shield underneath me at the last second. One that I bounced on a couple of times before falling off into the road—a very different one.
It was bone-dry, under a cloudless night sky. It was paved, with streetlights on the corners, only they weren’t lit. It was also eerily silent, with my labored breaths sounding loud in the night.
That and the fact that there were no lights in the windows, or lighted signs over shops, or any form of illumination at all other than the nearly full moon overhead, was enough to tell me where I was.
And when.
But if the bombers were coming, they weren’t here yet. And the streets of wartime London were as deserted as they ever got—for a moment. Until the swarm came, boiling over buildings and around corners on every side: hundreds, thousands, and then what might have been tens of thousands of them, I didn’t know. Just that they were everywhere, including at both ends of the street, cutting me off. And when I tried to shift for the fiftieth time today, I went nowhere.
She’d been wearing me out, I realized, the ozone smell of lightning and depleated power in my nose.
Even with all her power, she’d been worried, and Jo wasn’t like the other acolytes I’d faced. She didn’t overestimate her abilities or underestimate mine. She got backup—a crap ton of it—and still took the time to tire me out to the brink of exhaustion before she was finally ready to end this.
I guess I should be flattered, I thought, as she appeared at the end of the street.
And then someone tried to shift me away.
I could feel the tug of magic, pulling on me; just as I could feel another, far stronger stream slap it down. Over the next moment, I experienced the sensation of almost shifting again, and again, and again, as more of my acolytes located me. There was a second when I swear I could see spectral versions of myself leaping into the sky, in all different directions, like petals on a flower—
Before slamming back into place, hard, because Jo was done playing.
But my acolytes weren’t, only I don’t think “play” was the right word. Not when the hordes of bodies leaping toward me suddenly paused in midair. And then began moving a whole lot slower. They surrounded us, clawing and reaching but barely moving, forming a stadium of flesh, ghostly pale against the night—
And, suddenly, I understood one thing, at least.
“That was my father’s idea!” I yelled at Jo, who had paused to admire her handiwork, I guess. Or to fit in one last gloat.