“If this is Cavendish’s idea of a birthday surprise, I approve,” he told me, hanging the coat on a rack. And revealing a Victorian-era version of Pritkin’s war mage getup of potion belts and holsters, guns and knives. But he didn’t draw any of them, or even look particularly concerned.
Maybe he didn’t find a blond naked chick all that intimidating.
His eyes went over me, and a slight smile broke out behind his beard. “It’ll be hard to top this come November,” he told me. “If I do the same for him, the poor gel’ll freeze!”
I didn’t say anything.
“What do you have behind your back, little one?” he asked, finally noticing my awkward stance.
I shook my head and still didn’t speak.
“Oh, come now. You can show me.” He came toward me, face cracking into a full-on grin. “You can show me anything you like.”
So I did.
And then the room was empty again, and the box didn’t even feel heavier.
I clutched it.
I really liked this box.
His coat was still dripping onto the floor where he’d left it. I went over and put it on. It was huge on me, even bigger than the last one, and it didn’t have any weapons in it. But I still felt better.
I’d been a naked chick with a box.
Now I was a clothed chick with a box.
That’s what you call progress.
I grabbed the second box off the counter and fled.
Back through the door into the hall, back through the gallery of monsters, who still tweaked and flinched a little as I passed, but no longer tried to leap out of their wanted posters to claw at me. Back through the door, which wasn’t locked, because who locks the front door of a police station? Even a supernatural one? And then back into the narrow alleyway, which had turned into a narrow, brick-lined, water-filled canal, because it was bucketing down outside.
I stopped abruptly.
I might just as well have run straight into hell.
Rain pelted me in stinging silver lines that burst on my skin, hissing and fizzing like miniature comets. Lightning flashed like fireworks overhead, illuminating the street and making all the shadows grow and writhe. I stared around, seeing van Gogh’s Starry Night come to life if you added a few Goya monsters in the co
rners, and I suddenly wondered if either of them had known an incubus.
And then thunder hit, practically on top of me, crashing like a nuclear blast inside my skull, until it was all I could do not to start screaming again.
I slammed back inside, put my back to the door, and then just stayed there, shuddering and shaking and breathing hard.
And realizing just how much of a mess I was in.
I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t shift, might never be able to shift again, the way I felt, which meant they were going to find me. They were going to find me any minute and lock me up, because the trap might not work, but they’d find something that did. I knew war mages well enough to know that, and I didn’t have that kind of time; I didn’t have any—
I didn’t have any.
Boots hit a wooden floor, coins jingled in a pocket, and the smell of a cigar, sweet and pungent, teased the air. And then a cry from inside the room I’d just left: “They’re gone!”
And I was slamming back into the rain-drenched hell outside, leaping off the wooden landing, and scurrying under the stairs, just before three guys burst out of the door behind me, the rattling of boards over my head as they descended almost worse than the thunder.
But in a way, that was good. Because I was so preoccupied with the drum, drum, drumming in my head that I forgot to react. I don’t think I so much as flinched when brilliant lights illuminated the outside of the building a second later, or when an alarm began blaring inside, muffled but still distinct this close, or when more thundering feet tore out of the door, calling instructions to each other.
Or when a man stopped, right over the top of my head.