The mantis’s head whipped toward me, and it screamed again. It ripped out the ax and came to its feet in the same instant.
“Get clear!” Gard rasped.
I did, diving to the side and going prone.
The wounded woman emptied her assault rifle into the mantis in two or three seconds of howling thunder, shooting from the hip from about three feet away.
Words cannot convey how messy that was. Suffice to say that it would probably cost more to remove the ichor stains than it would to strip and refinish the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.
Gard gasped, and the empty rifle slid from her fingers. She shuddered and pressed her hands to her belly.
I moved to her side and picked her up, trying not to strain her stomach. She was heavy. Not like a sumo wrestler or anything, but she was six feet tall in her bare feet and had more than the usual amount of muscle. She felt at least as heavy as Thomas. I grunted with effort, got her settled, and started for the door.
Gard let out a croaking little whimper, and more blood welled from her injury. Faint pangs of sympathetic pain flickered through my own belly. Her eyes had rolled back in her head. It had taken a lot to beat Gard’s apparent pain threshold, but it looked like the visit from the Denarian—and the activity it had forced on her—had done it.
The day just couldn’t have gotten any more disturbing.
Until the splattered mass that had been the Denarian started quivering and moving.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I shouted.
Where there had been one big bug thing, now there were thousands of little mantislike creatures. They all began bounding toward the center of the room, piling up into two mounds that gradually began to take on the shape of insectoid legs.
The shotgun downstairs roared again, and running footsteps approached.
“Harry!” Thomas shouted. He appeared at the bottom of the stairs, sword in hand, just as I hurried out the door, still toting Gard.
“We had company up here!” I called. I started down the stairs as quickly and carefully as I could.
“I think there are three more of them down here,” Thomas said, making way for me. He took note of Gard. “Holy crap.”
A corpse lay on the floor of the entry hall. It was black and furry and big, and I couldn’t tell much more about it than that. The top four-fifths of its head were gone and presumably accounted for the mess all over the opposite wall. Its guts were spilled out on either side of its body, steaming in the cold air drifting through the shattered front door. Hendricks crouched in the shadowed living room, covering the entryway with his shotgun.
Something scraped over the floorboards of the ceiling above us.
“What’s that?” Thomas asked.
“A giant preying mantis demon, dragging itself over the floor.”
Thomas blinked at me.
“That’s just a guess,” I said.
Hendricks growled, “How is she?”
“Not good,” I said. “This is a bad spot to be in. No defenses here, not even a threshold to work with. We need to bail.”
“Shouldn’t move her,” Hendricks said. “It could kill her.”
“Not moving her will kill her,” I countered. “Us too.”
Hendricks stared at me, but he didn’t argue.
Thomas was already reaching into his pocket. He was tense, his eyes flicking restlessly, maybe in an attempt to track things that he could hear moving around outside. He dug out his key ring and held it with his teeth. Then he took his saber in one hand, that monster Desert Eagle in the other, and started humming “Froggy Went A-Courting” under his breath.
Gard had slowly grown limp, and her head lolled bonelessly. I was having trouble keeping her steady. “Hendricks,” I said, nodding at Gard.
Without a word he set the shotgun aside and took the woman from me. I saw his eyes as he did, touched with worry and fear—and not for himself. He took her very gently, something I would never have imagined him doing, and growled, “How do I know you won’t leave us behind? Let them rip us apart while you run?”
“You don’t,” I said curtly, picking up my staff. “Stay if you want. These things will kill you both; I guarantee it. Or you take a chance with us. Your call.”
Hendricks glared at me for a moment, but when he glanced down at the unconscious woman in his arms, the rocky scowl faded. He nodded once.
“Harry?” Thomas asked. “How do you want to do this?”
“We head straight for your oil tanker,” I said. “Shortest route between two points and all.”
“They’ll have the door covered,” Thomas said.
“I hope so.”
“Okay,” he said, rolling his eyes. “As long as there’s a plan.”
Footsteps crossed the floor above us, and paused at the top of the stairs.
Thomas’s gun swiveled toward the stairs. I didn’t turn. I covered the doorway.
A voice like out-of-tune violin strings stroked by a rotting cobra hide drifted down the stairs. “Wizard.”
“I hear you,” I said.
“This situation might be resolved without further conflict. Are you willing to parley?”
“Why not,” I answered. I didn’t turn away from the door.
“Have I your word of safe passage?”
“You do.”
“Then you have mine,” the voice answered.
“Whatever,” I said. I lowered my voice to an almost subvocal whisper I was sure only Thomas could hear. “Watch them. They’ll try something the second they get a chance.”
“Why give them the opportunity?” Thomas murmured.
“Because we might find out something important by talking. It’s harder to question corpses. Switch with me.”
We traded places, and I kept my staff pointed at the stairs as the mantis-thing came down them. It crouched on the topmost step it could occupy while still maintaining visual contact with the entry hall. It looked none the worse for wear for being blown to hamburger by Gard’s rifle.
It crouched, the motion eerie and alien, and tilted its head almost entirely to the horizontal, first one way, then the other, as it looked at us. Then its stomach heaved. For a second I thought it was throwing up, as a yellow-and-pink mucus began to emerge from its mouth. After a second, though, it lifted its clamplike claws and gripped its head, then peeled it back and away from the mucus, the motion disturbingly akin to someone donning a too-small turtleneck sweater. A human face emerged from the mucus and gunk, while the split carapace of the head flopped about on its chest and upper back.
The Denarian looked like she was about fifteen years old, except for her hair, which was silvery grey, short, and plastered to her skull. She had huge and gorgeous green eyes, a heart-shaped face, and a delicate, pointy chin. Her skin was pale and clear, her cheekbones high, her features lovely and symmetrical. The second set of green eyes and the sigil of angelic script still glowed faintly on her forehead.
She smiled slowly. “I wasn’t expecting the chain. I thought fire and force were your weapons of choice.”
“You were standing on top of someone I knew,” I said. “I didn’t feel like burning her or blasting her through the wall.”
“Foolish,” the girl murmured.
“I’m still here.”