The steel cylinder caught the blades and broke one.
She raised the fire extinguisher and slammed it hard at the Tong Elf’s wrinkled-up apple-doll face.
Wham!
The Tong Elf recoiled, staggered back, and Camaro was on him in a flash. She hit the Tong Elf a second, powerful blow and—
Suddenly she fell to her knees.
She dropped the fire extinguisher.
She stared down at the long, glittering steel shaft that extended out of her chest. It was smeared with blood.
Feeling stupid, she turned to see the Skirrit standing behind her, its insect claw wrapped tightly around the short spear.
The golem tried to cry out in fear, seeing Camaro fall, but his tongue first had to be raveled back into his mouth, and his body first had to reassume some kind of normal proportions, and only then could he cry, “Camaro!”
The golem ran to her and knelt beside her as the Skirrit, showing no emotion on its dead-eyed face, pulled the spear from her body.
“Golem . . . ,” Camaro gasped.
“Camaro!” the golem cried.
Fighting, which had broken out between the foul creatures and the bullies, ended abruptly. It ended with half the bullies unconscious and the rest running for home and trying to come up with stories to explain why they had run in terror from their first real fight.
“Golem,” Camaro said, wheezing through her pain, “they’re going to try and make you do things . . . bad things. You can’t let them.”
“But . . . but I am just a golem,” he said. “I can only be what I’m made to be.”
“No, Golem,” Camaro said. She grasped his arm and pulled him down to her.
The golem saw her eyes flutter and she sagged back. He howled in pain and sadness, and he twisted one of his fingers off his hand and pushed the claylike mud into her terrible wound.
“You’ll be okay,” he said through tears that cut small channels in his cheeks. “You have to be okay!”
“Oh, isn’t this sweet?”
The golem had heard the voice before. A girl’s voice, though in truth the “girl” was millennia old.
He lay Camaro’s head gently on the ground, and turned to face what he knew would be his own doom.
She was stunning, of course, her red hair blowing in a slight breeze, her lips redder still, her skin the color of cream, her eyes like green fire.
Risky.
“Come here, little golem,” Risky said, and crooked her finger and smiled her crafty, evil smile. “We tried this once before and your little friend here got in the way. This time it doesn’t look like she’ll be much trouble.”
The golem felt something then. He felt something he had never really felt before. It was like there was a fire burning inside him. It wasn’t a feeling borrowed from Mack; it came from someplace else.
He leaped to his feet. His face twisted into a terrible mask of anger. And he stretched his hands out to wring Risky’s neck.
“Oh, how cute,” Risky said. “It has a temper.”
The golem wrapped its fingers around her throat and drew her close. And that was when Risky’s hand shot out like a piston and her fist rammed right into the golem’s mouth.
In seconds the golem began to feel . . . strange.
Different.