Physics.
I jumped over the rail and began to climb the stairs, heard only the light swish of grass as the creature tracked me. We reached thetop nearly at the same moment. I stood there, watching as it pivoted to face me, and opened its arms to take me down
I waited until I could hear the slide of stone against stone, until it was leaning toward me—and then I dropped back. With nothing but air to grab, it tripped down one step, and then gravity picked up the fight, pulling it down riser after riser until it moved like a boulder, rolling head over feet. It hit the pavement with a bright, tremendouscrackand shattered into a shower of pieces.
I took one breath, turned back toward my companions just as Petra sent a bolt into a wild boar that shattered it right down the middle. But I didn’t see Theo.
“Damn,” I said, and ran to the lookout at the edge of the hill.
Relief swamped me when I saw Theo climbing toward me in the grass, the bear close on his heels. But the rain had slopped up the grass, and the animal couldn’t get traction on the incline, which put a gap between them.
“Up here, Theo!” I called out, and went over the lookout rail to extend a hand; once he was up here, we’d lure the bear to the stairs and use that trick again.
But the bear regained its footing. And this time, it climbed faster.
“It’s moving!” I called out. “Hurry!”
He picked up what speed he could on the hill, until his foot slipped, and he went down on his belly. The bear swiped, but Theo yanked his foot back just in time and instinctively swept out his casted arm. The bear had been reaching up again, and the cast, heavy and solid, caught it off balance and sent it staggering backward, then tumbling down the hill. It struck a boulder in the landscape, bounced into the air, and hit the sidewalk at the bottom. It shattered like a piñata.
Theo climbed over the rail, looked back. “That’s just... terrible,” he said, chest heaving as he caught his breath. “R-I-P, bear.”
“It’s kind of pitiful, right?”
“And the mayor’s going to be pissed.”
“She can blame the demon,” I said, and we both jumped when lightning crashed within a few blocks, the thunder nearly instantaneous and just as terrible.
“Maybe let’s get off this hill?” he suggested.
“During a lightning storm, good call.”
We ran back to join Petra. “You okay?” I asked.
“Having a ball,” she said, and looked like it. Her straight hair was a little frizzled now, as if the lightning had given her a different kind of buzz. There were still half a dozen animals milling in the open space, but Petra was doing a pretty effective job of making countertops and bathroom tile out of them.
And it took me a moment to realize who’d find that very, very disappointing.
I looked back at Rosantine. Her lip was curled, her shoulders tight, and there was a hungry look in her eyes.
“Demon magic incoming,” I said.
She flicked out a hand again and...wait.
That wasn’t just a flick—she was drawing something with her fingers, tracing a shape in the air. If a sigil was the key to her power, who wanted to bet she was drawing the same sigil in order to use that power?
Her movements were so fast, and over so quickly, that I wasn’t able to “read” what she’d drawn. And the angle was too awkward for me to get a sense of its shape. But there were definitely intentional gestures there.
And I’d been staring long enough that I nearly missed the tricksy glance she gave to the flashing sky.
“Everybody down!” Petra said.
Theo cursed, grabbed my arm, and pulled me to my knees as the world flashed green and every hair on my body stood at attention.
“Shit,” I said, heart pounding as I braced for the literal lightningstrike. The odds of any one of us being struck by lightning were extremely limited. Unless you had a chaos demon doing the work. The epitome of the improbable becoming exceedingly fucking probable.
Lightning was having quite the week in Chicago.
Petra reached her hands to the sky—and took the full force of the lightning. The world flashed green once more, then twice, and the hardclapof sound was louder than anything I’d ever heard.