Rook

“I demand you tell me—” He stopped talking, and everyone else stopped as well because they could hear what was happening. From above us, there was a shrill screaming sound that grew in volume and intensity. It built and built, and we all huddled together as the sound entered our heads and trembled through our bones. Then, with a resounding crack, it arrived. A shock wave struck, vibrating through the shutters and fracturing the glass although not shattering it. There was silence.
    I reached out and touched the button Cahill had pressed, and the shutters slid down. In the courtyard, the spotlights had gone out, but we could see the corpse of the dragon lying on the ground. Its head had been severed neatly from its body, and in the gap, standing calmly at attention and covered in steaming dragon guts, was Pawn Monica Jarvis-Reed, who had just arrivedfrom four miles above us armed with only her own indestructible body and some easily laundered clothes.
    After that, as you can imagine, the evening broke up fairly rapidly, and if you’ll excuse me, I am now going to pass out from exhaustion.
    Love,
    Me
     

23
     
    T he two women lay on the floor staring blankly into space, dust settling quietly on their eyes. Their clothes were stiff with mildew, and all around them the cultists continued their chanting. A little way off, Goblet the hedgehog man was lying in a way that suggested he wouldn’t be going anywhere or doing anything for a while. Under a coating of fuzz, Shantay’s phone rang, playing a little electronic version of the
Addams Family
theme song.
    Myfanwy sat up with a gasp. She drew deep breaths of musty air into her lungs, and her fingers scrabbled along the floor as her whole body strove to pump oxygen to where it was needed. She fumbled for the canteen of water on her belt and then spent a long time gargling and spitting, coughing out whatever was offending her system. Finally, she managed to look around and answer the phone.
    “Hello?” she said hoarsely.
    “Myfanwy?” came Poppat’s voice; he sounded frantic enough to forget about protocol. “Thank God! We’ve been ready to have the whole site leveled and torched! We’ve had that phone ringing for forty-five minutes!”
    “Oh, really?” asked Myfanwy absently. “Well, don’t do anything to the house, I’ve figured out the problem.”
    “Brilliant,” said Poppat. “Is Bishop Petoskey okay?”
    “Oh, yeah,” said Myfanwy, leaning back against the prostrate form of her friend. “She’ll be fine in a minute or two, and this whole situation should be resolved in about half an hour.” She looked around at the mold coating the room. While she’d lain unconscious, new branches of fungus had grown out from the walls, covering thedoorway and weaving a barricade across the windows. “Yeah, half an hour… or so.”
    “Can I at least send in some troops?” the Pawn asked.
    “Probably best not,” she said, watching as a new arm of growth slowly stretched its way across the ceiling. “I’ll call you back when it’s clear.”
    “But you’re certain you’re okay in there?”
    “Yep. I’ll call you back in a bit.”
    “But what if—” he began, but she hung up.
    “Nice guy, but he really needs to have that manual removed from his colon,” she remarked to the chanting drones. “Of course, you guys have your own problems, but at least you’re not dependent on standard operating procedure.” She sighed and looked disdainfully at the mold coating her clothes and skin. It itched and seemed to consist of equal parts black mildew and some virulently orangey-red spores.
    Myfanwy called up in her mind a picture of the system she’d mapped out while tapped into the cultists. Once she’d figured out how it worked, the whole thing had proven… well, in fact it had proven to be horrendously complex. But at least now she understood it. With a mental twist, she disrupted all the tiny connections that made the spores a part of something larger. She blew on her skin, and the little flakes fluttered away dead into the air.
    Myfanwy then reached out with her fingers and touched the back of Shantay’s hand. Under her touch, spirals of silver spread out liquidly across the American’s skin, thickening and joining themselves until she was entirely made of metal. Her hair gave off little fizzling and crackling sounds as the metal coiled itself down and over her dozens of braids, like sculpture made by the most dexterous and anally retentive