Fuck!
I landed on my butt and let out a breath. The zombie mannequin laughed at me, a hideous sequined dress the color of blood hanging off its bony shoulders. Prom Queen Zombie. Fucking Fright Fest.
The little dog trotted over to me, curled up against my thigh, and licked my pant leg. Its black tail wagged, sweeping broken glass in all directions. You could barely make out its shape under the mass of matted fur.
I reached over and gently stroked its back. The tail wagged harder.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered. How had it survived here? What did it eat? On second thought, I didn’t want to know.
The dog stared up at me with big brown eyes full of endless canine devotion. It seemed to be saying, Please don’t leave me alone in the dark. I’m hungry and dirty and lonely with no one to take care of me.
The beam of a flashlight sliced through the gloom in the hallway behind me.
“Bad people are coming,” I whispered. “What am I going to do with you?”
The little dog scooted closer to me.
I scooped the dog off the floor. It was so light, it had to have been starving.
Another thud. They were getting closer.
If I left the doggie in the open, it would make noise and they would shoot it and me. No, that would not be happening.
I squinted at the store, taking in the width of the entrance, the distance to Sephora, and the piles of debris. I’d have to take off my shoes for this plan to work.
“Time to go.” I ran into Sephora. Here’s hoping I had time to prepare a nice surprise.
Ten minutes later, the hunter team entered JC Penney in a standard formation for clearing large rooms. There were three rules all SWAT and military teams lived by when searching a building: never enter alone, don’t move faster than you can think, and stay out of your partner’s line of fire. I had hoped for some wannabes who would wander around in groups of one or two doing the dynamic entry with dramatic jumping and running, but no. These people knew their business.
The first two hunters, dressed in black tactical gear and wearing ballistic vests, walked in at opposite sides of the wide entrance and halted, each of them covering their sector of the room, slow and methodical. They knew I was alone, and they had cleared the rest of the mall, so they had me cornered.
The two sentries stopped, just as I thought they would. The one on the right halted less than five feet from where I lay under dirty plastic stained with fake blood. I had arranged the debris into a pile of generic garbage identical to other such piles scattered around the mall and buried myself in it.
A five-man team moved forward between the sentries, passed them, and cautiously walked deeper into the store, heading for Sephora. There should have been more of them. They must have split up and left the second team upstairs to clear the upper floor.
The clearing team kept walking. Nobody spoke. No static came from their radios. Nobody wore low-light gear. The inside of the store wasn’t dark enough.
Five minds. I had hoped for smaller teams of two or three. I would have to beguile them with voice alone and do it fast. My magic took a little while to gain a hold. The moment the first word came out of my mouth, they would shoot at me. I needed to be heard but not seen. There was no margin for error.
They should’ve been close enough by now. I held my breath.
Behind me, my cell phone alarm went off.
If they had been amateurs, they would have dropped everything, and all run over to look for the phone. Instead, the clearing team ignored it. Looking for it meant they would have to turn their backs to Sephora, and since the ringing cell was obviously a distraction, they surmised that I wanted them to keep away from Sephora, so they stayed on their present course.
The sentry closest to me turned right and walked toward the sound. His buddy didn’t move, covering the left side of the room.
A step.
Another step.
A black combat boot landed mere inches from my face. Glass crunched under the heavy rubber sole. I could reach out and touch it.
Another step.
I tried not to breathe.
Another.
He moved past me. The phone kept playing, eerily loud in the silence. I had hidden it under more plastic. It would take him a bit to find it.
Now. I had to do it now.
I slipped from under the plastic and dashed to the remaining sentry. He never saw me coming. My magic pulled me. I lunged, following its lead, and sliced his throat, severing the jugular and the carotid in one smooth thrust. Blood wet the blade. The sentry spun, choking on his own blood, unable to cry out. I thrust, putting three years of practice behind my sword. Funny thing about ballistic vests, they were designed to disperse the kinetic impact of a bullet, not stop a blade. My gladius cut through the Kevlar like it was a quilt, severing the man’s aorta. I sprinted to the other hunter, my socks muffling my steps.
He’d reached the counter where I’d hidden the phone and was pulling the plastic off it. I clamped my left hand over his mouth and drove the gladius into his lower back, just under the body armor and into his kidney. The sharp blade sliced through the bundle of nerves and pain receptors, drowning the hunter in agony. I jerked his head back and slit his throat, cutting through the carotid and the trachea. The man sagged, and I gently lowered him to the floor.
A harsh metallic taste washed over my tongue. My hands shook. Blood dripped from my gladius onto the floor.
I’d just killed two people.
This was it; they were dead, and I could never take it back.
A two-shot burst crackled inside Sephora. Someone found the Prom Queen wearing my favorite coat.
In a moment, they would come out and realize they were missing two of their own people. I had to move or die.
I sprinted to the right, behind the clothes racks, which I had pushed together into a crescent shape around Sephora. The still ringing phone would buy me a few precious seconds but not many.
A dark, human-shaped shadow moved away from the group and came straight for me. That was not the plan. I crouched to the right of the gap in my makeshift barricade.
The sound of his footsteps drew closer. The dark outline of a gun emerged, followed by his arms, then his leg.
I held my breath.
The hunter turned to my left toward the phone, exposing his back. I lunged from a crouch and slashed across his spine, just under the bulletproof vest. He cried out and swung around. I stabbed him in the throat and withdrew. He collapsed. They had to have heard his gasp. Now or never.
I took a deep breath and sang out, pouring carefully measured magic into my words, “Baa, baa, black sheep . . .”
Gunfire tore through the store, but I was already moving, sprinting behind the metal clothes racks. To my magic-enhanced vision, the four remaining hunter minds fluoresced in response to my song, pale smudges of grey light in the darkness of the store.
The shots died.
“Have you any wool?”
Bullets ricocheted from the clothes racks, tracking my voice. I dropped to the floor and crawled behind some wooden displays. They stopped shooting.
“Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.”
A bullet tore a chunk from the plywood counter just in front of me. I scrambled to my feet and dashed the other way. The rest of the hunters moved toward me, closing in on my position like sharks.
“One for my master, one for my dame . . .”
The gunfire died. Silence claimed the store. I inhaled.
Four voices chorused in perfect unison. “And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.”