Sean’s body blurred and a massive werewolf landed on the tiles, tall, muscular, with enormous shoulders and huge hands armed with two-inch claws. The robed figure spun toward him. The werewolf bared his fangs and lunged at the corrupted innkeeper, stabbing so fast, the knife turned into a green streak. Lightning burst from the robed figure and singed his fur, but he kept stabbing in a frenzy.
I yanked the robe over my head. The skin on my chest burned as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it, but I didn’t care. I sprinted to them.
The fur on Sean’s arms curled. The stench of burned hair polluted the air. The robed figure spun, trying to avoid the knife. Shreds of its robe fluttered in the air - Sean had landed some cuts.
The corrupted innkeeper raked at Sean with its withered hand, its claws dripping magic. Blood gushed from the werewolf’s chest.
I flicked my whip, feeling the creature’s magic shift in response. The energy whip snapped, bouncing off the empty air two inches from its head. Fast. I snapped the whip again. Somehow it slid aside. That’s fine. It couldn’t dodge me forever.
Sean slashed at its back.
Magic exploded from within the robe. The blast wave lifted me off my feet. I flew back, swept away like a mote of dust in a tsunami, and hit a building with my back. Oh, it hurt. It hurt so much.
Sean fell through the canopy above me and crashed next to me in the middle of broken wood and torn fabric.
The creature brought its arms together. A torrent of energy shot out from between its hands, a lance aimed at us.
I scrambled to my feet and thrust myself in front of Sean. The whip wouldn’t stop it. We were dead.
It was an innkeeper.
I dropped the whip and the glove, grabbed a piece of broken railing and held it in front of me, focusing on it. It wasn’t a broom, it was barely a staff, but I was an innkeeper, damn it, and he would not kill Sean.
The torrent of energy punched me and broke over the staff, the orange lightning splitting and burning with deep turquoise where it touched my staff and magic. My skin went numb. Someone had sunk tiny hooks into my veins and yanked at them, trying to rip them out of my body.
It hurt.
The hooded creature arched its back. Its robe turned pure black, as if the color had been sucked out of the fabric. The tattered hem frayed, unraveling. The torrent hit me harder.
God, it hurt. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt…
My whole body shook from the strain. Pain wrapped around each vertebra in my spine and squeezed, grinding cartilage and bone to nothing. My arms tried to wrench out of my shoulder sockets.
An eerie, unearthly shriek cut at my ears. The hooded thing was screaming.
I tasted blood in my mouth.
I couldn’t hold it forever. I…
A stream of bullets hammered the creature from the left, each impact a ripple in the air, stopping just short of hitting its body. The torrent of energy weakened. It was shifting magic to cover itself.
The agony was turning my brain into mush. I gritted my teeth and stepped forward, pushing the torrent back. A step. Another step.
The hooded creature took a step back.
Yes!
It took another step, bending under the strain of shielding itself from the barrage of bullets and my magic.
Sean darted from behind me, the knife in his hand.
I screamed and sank everything I had into my staff. It split the way innkeeper’s brooms did. A sharp wooden blade formed on its top. I pushed it into the torrent, until the blade pointed directly at the corrupted innkeeper, slicing through the current of energy.
The robed creature’s magic tore out of it in an orange half-sphere, covering it against me and the shooter. Sean loomed behind it. The knife flashed and the robed figure collapsed in a limp heap.
The pressure of the foul magic vanished.
I sank to my knees and lay on the ground. On my left a grizzled older werewolf lowered a bizarre-looking Gatling gun. Thank you, Wilmos. Cookie stopped jumping up and down next to him and ran to me.
Sean picked me up off the ground. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. I couldn’t even talk.
His lips brushed mine and he squeezed me to him gently as if I were the most important thing in the world.
* * *
My mouth finally obeyed. “Tank?”
“At my shop,” Wilmos said. He was looking at me as if it hurt him.
Sean started down the street in the direction of the inn.
“No!”
“Dina, you’re badly burned. You need the inn to heal you.”
“Get the tank.”
“Later.”
“No.”
“Don’t argue with me.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t look any different. But his tone severed the words like a knife. It was impossible to keep arguing. I still tried. Making words took effort and endurance I didn’t have.
“Failed once. I can’t… walk into the inn without the tank. Guest. Trust. Please. Please, Sean. Please.”
He snarled, his wolf mouth baring his teeth.
“Please.”
Wilmos looked at him.
“We’ll get the tank,” Sean said.
“Body…”
“And the corpse,” he said, fury snarling in his voice. His gaze fixed me. It was direct and cold. A wolf gaze. “Not another word until we get to the inn. Close your eyes and rest.”
The last thing I saw was Cookie’s bodyguard picking up the hooded body. I laid my head on Sean’s shoulder and closed my eyes, drifting, neither awake nor asleep, but stuck in a painful confusing place in between. My chest burned.