We followed the old man and boy into the trees.
Chapter Forty-Three
Dory, Hong Kong
My new team raided my stash, and then took off through the streets, Ranbir in the lead with the activated charm in his hand. The hologram-type map glowed redly in the darkness, and it was dark. Magic and electricity don’t play well together, so the street lights were out, and not a single lamp or lighted sign could be seen anywhere.
To make matters worse, there were plenty of reminders of the recent battle to get in our way and slow down progress. It had taken a week for anybody to notice that magic was going haywire in parts of the city, and not much clean-up had happened by then. And nothing had been done since.
That left piles of debris everywhere, high enough to fill whole alleyways in places and to spill out into the streets. There was also an ocean of shattered glass glinting in the occasional beam of moonlight, like new fallen snow. But that wasn’t a frequent thing, as the cloud cover was thick overhead and completely opaque in the distance. Even up close, a thin mist hung in the air, silvering everything and reducing visibility to maybe a block.
The charmed map threw a red haze over Ranbir’s face, which wasn’t looking happy. He was trying to chart a path past the groups of moving dots, which none of us were enthusiastic about meeting. We couldn’t use magical weapons against these things, but regular old bullets didn’t do a lot, either.
What did work was vampire strength, but the vamps kept getting piled on, so evasion was definitely the way to go. Only with blocked off alleys, trash-filled streets, and destroyed buildings, that often wasn’t so easy. It felt like an obstacle course where one wrong move could get us killed.
No wonder Ranbir was sweating.
And then an ominous rumble came from further down our street, and everybody was.
“What was that?” Sarah asked shrilly. She’d followed her brother’s example and loaded up on weapons, but it didn’t look like they had made her feel any better. Her dark hair was up in a no-nonsense bun, to keep it out of her way in a fight, but her eyes were too-wide and her movements were jumpy.
Zheng had seemed to think that she and her team would be an asset, but he’d had false information. I honestly didn’t know if it had been a good idea to sign these guys on or not, but what choice did we have? Nobody else was crazy enough to try this.
Of course, maybe that should have told me something.
“Fast moving bogeys, coming this way,” Ranbir said, watching the map. And using the term we’d decided on for moving obstacles, because ‘monster’ made everybody nervous.
We dodged out of the street and into an alley—which turned out to be a dead end. It wasn’t supposed to be, but it had been blocked by a mountain of bricks from a destroyed building. And the lane across from it was no better, leading to what the map showed as a massive battle going on between bogies on one of the main avenues. I could hear the screeching and caterwauling from here; I did not want to see it in person.
But the rumble was now loud enough to cause little avalanches on the garbage mountains and to vibrate under my feet. The streets were a warren, and the buildings made sound echo everywhere. It was impossible to tell where the noise was coming from.
“Where are they?” I asked, and Ranbir pointed at something I couldn’t see, because we were running now and the map was jittering all over the place.
But a moment later, I didn’t need an answer, because I saw them: vague figures appearing out of the mist behind us. But not vague enough. For a moment, I just stared at yet another example that a lifetime of strange events had not prepared me for supernatural Hong Kong. Not even close.
Because we were being targeted by a group of motorcycle riding samurai.
They were 3-D, with bodies as solid as any of ours. But they were also black and white, as if the magic floating around the dead zones had activated a bunch of illustrations. The closer they got, the more likely that seemed, as they still had the sketch marks and the doesn’t-change-with-the-lighting shading of a drawing.
It was like being charged by a bunch of cartoons.
Sword-wielding cartoons, I realized, as steel glinted in a stray beam of moonlight.
Okay. Running faster now, alongside Sarah, who had noticed our latest problem and was bitching about it in a high-pitched voice. And yeah. Totally not going to rag on her about that later. Assuming there was a later, because the messed-up street had hardly slowed our pursuers down at all, and in fact had helped them by providing a ramp in the form of a fallen wall—
And now they were arcing overhead.
“We can take them!” Tomas said, as the rest of us rolled into the shadow of a bunch of burnt-out cars.
Louis-Cesare reached out and grabbed him, jerking the idiot down as swords rattled against the rooftops overhead. Tomas threw off his hold and glared at us, and I made a be-my-guest gesture. He scowled.
“I thought dhampirs were supposed to be tough!”
“Tough, not stupid.”
He frowned. “Are you calling me stupid?”
“No, just that the bonus stats all went to pretty.”