Ritual Magic

you haven’t been getting it.”
    Benedict stopped to smile at his mate. “Know me pretty—”
    Thud.
    He froze.
    “What is it?” Arjenie whispered.
    He made the sign for silence and listened keenly. Then he spun. Quicker to take the bed with Nettie in it than to disentangle her first from the various tubes. He pulled his hunting knife from the sheath on his calf. “We’re evacuating. I’ll get Nettie. You get her IV.”
    She didn’t hesitate. She put her laptop on the floor and hurried to the IV stand.
    Thud.
    She must have heard it this time, too. Her eyes widened.
    “Bill, Tommy!” he snapped. “Get in here. Rearguard!” He laid the knife beside Nettie and shoved her bed, aiming for the door, which opened to admit the two guards. Arjenie kept pace with the IV stand. “Something’s on the wall outside. Something big. It—”
    Thud, thud, crack!
    “—wants in.”
    * * *
    L I Lei Yu woke suddenly, sat bolt upright in her borrowed bed, and did something she never did. She yelled. “Rule! The children!
Run!
”

TWENTY-FOUR

    “I T’S a gate!” Cullen cried. “It’s a goddamn gate!”
    “Weapons!” Lily snapped at the guards, drawing hers. “Fielding, go get backup. Lots of it, with the most heavy-duty weapons you’ve got.”
    “But we don’t know if—”
    She shoved him. “Go!”
    He ran.
    “Hold your fire,” Lily called, “until we—”
    Something
leaped through the gate twenty feet in the air, nearer the street than the building. It was big and squat and looked like the ugliest centaur ever—only someone had substituted “bug” for “horse” in the thing’s ancestry. Segmented like a caterpillar and armored like a dinosaur, it was a mottled dun and gray with a barbed tail at one end and a gorilla’s chest and arms at the other, and way too many legs in between. As it twisted in midair Lily got a glimpse of a face like a demented gargoyle.
    “Dworg!”
Cynna screamed.
    The guards opened fire.
    The creature landed on the roof of a Suburban. It was damn near as big as the Suburban, and metal crunched and crumpled beneath the impact. Instantly it leaped off, as quick and easy as if the bullets had all missed—leaped and landed on pavement with that muscular tail held curled up over its back like a scorpion’s. And raced straight at Lily and Cynna.
    Fast. Ungodly fast for such a large creature. Lily had her weapon out and aimed. She squeezed the trigger twice.
    It kept coming.
    Cynna hurled something at it. Something invisible.
    It stumbled and grunted what sounded like words—God, did it
speak
?—but recovered immediately.
    A wolf with fur the color of cinnamon landed on the armored back. Another one, gray and black, darted in to clamp his jaws on one rear leg, and that at last got the creature’s attention. It stopped abruptly, sending the wolf on its back tumbling to the ground. Those gorilla arms ended in claws like a bear’s, and the thing twisted to rake at the fallen wolf with those claws while its tail whipped out at the other wolf.
    It was so damn fast! But so was Cullen, who’d already danced aside. She couldn’t see what had happened to the black-and-gray wolf—and couldn’t stand around watching.
    “Cynna—come on!” She scrambled onto the nearest vehicle, a Ford just like hers, and Cynna vaulted up there with her. Lily jumped to the next one—a shiny black Mustang. Cynna landed beside her and together they scrambled onto the small car’s roof so they could vault over to the minivan beside it, while behind them wolves snarled and José shouted a quick stream of orders:
“Joe, Steve, Santos—keep it busy—”
    Lily jumped to the next car, an old Dodge Colt. “You sure that’s a dworg?” They were like a cross between a troll and a demon, Cullen had once told her, only meaner and harder to kill. Of course, he’d also said they all died over three thousand years ago. But Cynna remembered things from three thousand years ago—
    José:
“Go for the legs—”
    Cynna landed beside her. “Hell, yes! I stopped one of its hearts but—”
    “—Cullen, help Andy. Casey, with me!”
    Another jump, onto another government Ford.
    “They’ve got four hearts,” Cynna said. “And it took a hell of a lot of power—”
    White Nissan.
    “—to knock out just one. They’re—”
    Government Ford.
    “—resistant to magic and they heal ungodly fast and I can’t draw too much power or I’ll faint.”
    They’d gone far enough, Lily decided, to pause