Black offered me a hand. I took it, climbed to my feet, looked down at the woman. Tears had tracked clean lines in her dusty face, and she was scraped all to hell and would have a rainbow of bruises tomorrow. But she looked to be in one piece.
The building, on the other hand, had seen better days. The front half had all but collapsed, and the rest didn’t look especially stable.
“Slowly,” Black told the woman, and we each offered her a hand as she sat up, her movements slow and deliberate even as people swarmed around us to remove rubble, to help others. And in some cases, to fight over damaged cars or loot pulled from the building’s smashed windows.
“Just breathe,” I said. She nodded, and I could see the gratefulness in her eyes. And then she glanced back and saw thedestruction she’d escaped from—and the pile of rubble that now contained her car. And would have covered her.
“You’re okay,” I said as the sobs began in earnest, and waved an arm at a nearby med tech. “She was in the car,” I told them. “She needs to be looked over.”
“You look pretty busted up yourself,” he said, with typical midwestern frankness.
“I’ll heal,” I said, and limped back to the spot where I’d left Rose and was baffled to find she was still there. She hadn’t so much as moved from her position, despite my giving her ample opportunity to get away.
That surprise faded when I saw the hunger in her eyes—and recognized it. As Patience had said, she was feeding off the chaos—the pandemonium she’d spawned with a flick of her hand. This was her power, I thought, as two women pushed a gurney between us and settled the woman from the vehicle upon it. This was the destruction she could wreak. This was the power that had her exiled from Chicago.
That should have been enough to have me turning back or looking for backup, because what could a bit of steel do against her? But I didn’t stand still, because that wasn’t my nature. And I was too furious anyway. I walked forward, one slow step after another, until only five feet separated us.
She was scenting the air again. For what? Is that why she’d come back to Chicago? To claim some treasure she’d left behind? Or find some treasure she hadn’t been able to claim the first time?
“Get out of my city.”
It took a moment for her to drag her gaze away, look at me again. “No. I entered here, and my business is not done.”
“I don’t care. Either you leave, or I’m going to send you back to wherever you came from. I’m going to be the one who stops you.”
The dull roar of the magic machine began to sound again, recharged and ready for another round of lightning. Based on the last one, we had only a couple of minutes before lightning groped for her again.
I couldn’t tell if Rose was aware of the danger or was worried about it. She cocked her head at me, brow furrowed as if I were a puzzle she didn’t know how to solve. “Why would you try to stop me? Why do vampires hate other supernaturals so much? Is it because they aspire to be human? Because they miss being human? That self-loathing is a very unattractive quality.”
“We don’t hate all supernaturals,” I said with a thin smile. “Only the assholes.”
The roaring grew louder, and this time Rose glanced up and looked mildly concerned. I had a visceral memory of her screaming and sobbing from the back of the SUV, and my anger sparked again.
She flicked a hand again, and I went on guard.
Behind me, a human screamed, then slammed a tree limb into the window of a building to our west. Then again, then a third time, until the glass spider-webbed and cracked and imploded inward. Others picked up bricks and chunks of asphalt deposited by damage to building and street, began heaving them at each other.
“Stop,” I said, looking back at Rose, and tried to appeal to her self-centeredness. “If you destroy Chicago, what kingdom will be left for you?”
Her smile was... malevolent. “There will always be a human looking for a fight,” she said. “And they’re rarely the only ones.”
I assumed she meant Sups and realized I hadn’t seen any others beyond me, her, and Black in this chaos.
And then I heard a new sound. A different sound.
I spun around, sword raised. This time, it wasn’t humans or vehicles aiming for me.
It was a very big cat. Tall and sleek with black fur, and nearly eight feet of muscled power. A black panther, or so it looked to me.
I froze, trying to understand what I was seeing. Was it a shifter? A hallucination? Because I hadn’t seen many panthers in the South Loop recently. I swallowed as it advanced, teeth bared and hissing, and maybe for the first time thought fondly of the smaller Eleanor of Aquitaine.
“Stay back,” I said, and sliced my katana through the air, the move sending a fresh wash of pain through my hip.
The panther ignored it, swiped (its paw as big as my head), and made an unearthly sound that was eerily human and had the hairs on the back of my neck lifting.
Zoo, I belatedly thought. The South Side Zoo. I hadn’t been there in years—there weren’t many animals left out after dark—but they’d had big cats. Had Rose managed the zoo escape? Or had she somehow directed the panther here to this spot and made it eager to attack a person?
Or was it just more of the improbable being made... actual?