I was disgusted. The bastard knew almost as much about what we were doing as we did. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s an office. We didn’t find anything.”
“Well, then,” he said, “you will not mind searching again, Mr. Dollar. Because we are very keen—that is the word, yes?—to find that particular item. We have a buyer who will pay us with something much better than money.”
“And what if we won’t help?”
“Then you will watch your companions killed one by one—starting with the young women. You see, I know something about you, Mr. Dollar. I know what you are. But I wonder, do all your companions have the same unusual background you do? I think not. And I think you will find it painful to watch them being shot to death, one at a time. So I suggest you get to work.”
I hesitated, trying desperately to think of a way to stall them, to confuse them, or just distract them long enough for us to try and get away. But I came up with exactly nothing. Zero. Which seemed like a pretty good indicator of our chances.
“All right,” I said. “You’re the boss. For now.”
“Oh, for much longer than that.” He laughed as if he was really enjoying himself, but the gun never wavered from where he held it against Halyna’s head.
thirty
death by porcelain
VON REINMANN and his cronies herded us toward the stairwell that led to Donya Sepanta’s secret office. These fuckers had been watching us for awhile, it was clear, or more likely their demon minions had done it for them. It was an object lesson in the power of selling your soul. They’d reached out to Prince Sitri, Eligor’s rival, and from the depths of Hell he’d sent them what they needed. Just as any jumped-up punk with a gun instantly becomes a threat, anybody with infernal backup becomes a monster.
“How is getting hold of this horn going to do you any good?” I asked von Reinmann. I already knew what his plan was, of course, I was just stalling. Half a dozen guys were pointing serious guns at us, but assholes love to talk about themselves.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “You think only of small things—your woman, your boss, your job.”
“I haven’t thought about my job in years, von Rhinemaiden. Only a dick thinks everyone else is a dick.”
“And the small-minded always think they are the measure of all things. They cannot understand those who have bigger thoughts, larger aspirations . . .”
I let him blab, hoping he’d work himself up into a mighty we-will-rule-the-world froth. I was close enough to Sam now to whisper and trust to my old buddy’s angel ears.
“Do you still have that glove thing?” I asked in my quietest back-of-the-classroom voice. “The one you wear to do shiny stuff?”
“The God Glove?” That was Sam’s nickname for a very powerful object Anaita had given to him to help him perform his Third Way job. “Yes, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“I’m not really interested in good or bad ideas, right now,” I whispered. “Because as soon as we’re in that little room down there, it’ll be a kill zone. The moment they’re done with us—rat-a-tat-tat.”
“No, I’m telling you, B, it’s a really bad idea!” Sam wasn’t whispering any more.
“I don’t care! Do something!”
“. . . But I see you are not even listening,” said von Reinmann. “You think you will distract me until you think of some plan. Go down the stairs now, Mr. Dollar. By yourself. If you are not back with the horn in two minutes, one of your companions will die.” He chuckled. “My choice. Probably one of your girls.”
“Fuck it yourself, you Norwegian bitch!” said Halyna, which I didn’t think helped the tenor of the conversation. “We are not girls, we are fucking Scythians!”
Clarence reached out and grabbed her arm to try to shut her up. At their feet, Oxana was finally stirring.
Von Reinmann smiled and looked at Halyna, then his watch. “So. If Dollar is not back in . . . one minute and forty-four seconds, you will be the first to be shot, whore.”
“One thing I don’t think you boys from the Black Sun understand,” I said, stepping in front of Sam to block their view of him. (I prayed he was doing something worth blocking.) “You are only children with guns. But we . . . we are angels of the Lord!”
Von Reinmann looked at me with zero fear or concern. Apparently he’d figured that out already. “So? You have bodies full of blood and organs. We have guns. We win.” He looked at his watch. “One minute and twenty-two seconds, now.”
“No, I said,” and I made my voice louder, “we are angels of the Lord!” Still nothing happened, except me looking like an idiot shouting at men with AR-16s, so I screamed, “Sam! For fuck’s sake, don’t leave me hanging here!”
A great white light burst up and outward from where we stood, bright as a Saturn rocket lifting off, a blinding radiance that made the neo-Nazis stumble back. A second later the light faded to a fierce glow that only burned at the end of Sam’s uplifted arm. Timon and Pumbaa found their courage and stepped back toward us.
“Aren’t the bad guys supposed to die or something, Sam?” I asked.
“Shut up,” he said. “I’m working.”
“I have grown tired of your silly shit.” B von R looked a little shiny—in fact, everything in the museum hall suddenly looked a little shiny—but he sure as hell didn’t look blasted by angelic fire, or even mildly singed by angelic lukewarming. “Shoot all of them,” he told his men. “Except Dollar and the red-haired girl.”
I didn’t even have time to dive for the floor. The guns roared, coughing flame. Bullets that would rip us to pieces rushed toward us at twice the speed of sound, far too fast for even an angel to see . . . except that I could see them. And they were slowing down rapidly. In fact, the closer they got to us, the slower they went, until they stopped and then fell to the ground like tiny, exhausted lead birds. Ping, pingety-ping-ping, ping. Dozens of them, rattling to the museum’s tile floor.
“Wow,” I said. I could see the astonished faces of the neo-Nazis only yards away, but except for the sort of prism-like glow around the edges of them and everything else, all looked normal. “Nice one, Sammy boy.”
“Just . . . hurry up . . . and figure out the next part,” Sam gasped, face dripping sweat, arm radiating light like a live-action Statue of Liberty. “Because I can’t do this . . . too long . . . and we’re going to have . . . real trouble soon.”
The neo-Nazis were trying to shove their way through our God-Glove barrier, but having the same problem as the bullets. They would shove forward a little way, but then the emptiness seemed to thicken before them. Veins bulged on their necks as they tried to force their way toward us, but they couldn’t get closer than a seven- or eight-foot radius, and when they fired again, the bullets didn’t make it any closer to us than before, sometimes barely getting out of the barrel before slowing and falling.
Still, we had no guns inside the Glove’s hemisphere of light, and I was having a difficult time thinking of what we’d do when Sam couldn’t manage it any longer. Oxana had finally recovered enough to get onto her hands and knees. Halyna was kneeling beside her, and Clarence was trying to help her stand. I hoped they were also explaining about the bad men trying to kill us, and that Oxana wasn’t too badly hurt, because whatever happened, I was pretty sure some strategy on the order of run like motherfuckers would be in order very soon.
In the middle of this intense five or ten seconds of panicked thought, a memory wafted up. I threw myself down next to Oxana and began to pat her clothing up and down.
“She is okay!” Halyna protested.
“Good,” I said. “But that’s not what I’m doing.”
I looked out past Black Sun commandos trying to pierce our ring of protection. Von Reinmann had withdrawn to a display area at the top of a couple of steps, like a cat seeking out the highest place in a room, but it didn’t look like a retreat. He
took off his gaudy medallion and held it in his hand. As I frantically scoured Oxana’s jumpsuit pockets for a weapon, since she was the only one who hadn’t been searched, I saw him hold the medal out before him, swinging it on its length of chain like a prop in a bad hypnotism act. Then he began to chant.
I’d say my heart sank, but my second-favorite organ (just in front of brain, just after you-know-what) was already huddled down at the bottom of my rib cage, and had been there ever since the Nazis-with-guns element had been introduced. Because I recognized the chant, if not the language von Reinmann used. It was a summoning, like the one we’d seen on the flash drive footage. I could only pray—and I mean that literally, because I am a goddamn angel, and sometimes I have to do it—that he wasn’t calling Sitri.
Please, God, I know I’ve been a pretty bad servant, but there are people here who are actually almost entirely innocent . . .
“Angel! You think you are clever!” von Reinmann shouted. He had apparently finished his invocation. A cloud of mist was now rising before him, making the already prismatic light shift and writhe like tendrils of transparent kelp. “You liked my goblins, my marrerit? Then you will truly love the Nøkken!”
I wanted to say something, if only to keep my own spirits up, but so far Oxana’s pockets were a dry well, and every time I looked over my shoulder, the horrible mess coiling at Baldur von Reinmann’s feet was getting bigger and more real. Things I thought might be tentacles lifted and swayed, except one of them had a glassy flower at the end that swung toward me, displaying a mouth like the biggest, ugliest lamprey you ever saw, surrounded by fringes and tendrils that seemed to move in some unfelt current. The tentacles grew and spread and lifted high, wreathing von Reinmann’s triumphant figure. He held the medallion up like the prize for a grueling race. The Nøkken was both substantial and insubstantial—transparent and watery, but its massive, growing coils now smashed the nearest display cases into powder. The head-tentacle rose up ten, twelve feet in the air, questing for prey, and when it saw us it seemed to swell even larger, the central limb, or neck, as big as a redwood trunk. The mouth gaped so wide I could have pushed a wheelbarrow down it and never touched the sides.
I darted a look at Sam. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and his face was as pale as death. I only knew he was still alive by the movement of his lips as he silently mumbled what looked like the same phrase, over and over.
I thought it might be time to start mumbling myself, and I had just started, “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” when Oxana finally caught hold of my hand—apparently she’d been trying to get my attention while I was staring at the hydra-thing—and pushed it into her shirtfront.
She had a sheath strapped between her breasts, with the handle of a knife right against her sternum. As my hand closed on the weapon, I cried out in relief and then shouted, “Let it go now, Sam! Let it go!”
He hesitated for a second or two. The Nøkken began to draw its coils together to slither toward us. Something that strong, that nasty, would chew through Sam’s fading defense like a kid’s pup tent. Sam opened his eyes, saw it coming, saw me, and then suddenly the strange rainbow edges on everything just vanished. Sam’s barrier gone, the gunmen who had been pushing against it now tumbled forward at our feet. Sam collapsed too, dropping exhausted to the floor like a pile of damp laundry.
I had the blade properly now. It was a tactical knife and not the best for throwing, but I wasn’t shopping, I was doing my best not to die. The nearest of the fallen Black Sun commandos was crawling after his gun with the obvious intent of shooting me in the near future, so I pulled the knife back behind my head and then flung it, end over end, hard as I could.
By the way, throwing a knife hardly ever works. I’m also not very good at it. Leo, my old top-kicker in the Lyrae, used to tell me, “Boy, I hope you always carry a big gun, because you’re useless with sharp stuff and you’re even worse at hand-to-hand.” And you know what? He was right.
I didn’t hit what I was aiming at, which had been the best and biggest target, von Reinmann’s torso. The tactical knife flew wide, and if he hadn’t turned to watch his hideous water-beast do whatever it was going to do to us, it would have flown right past him and probably skidded all the way to South Korean Textiles. Instead it hit him in the forearm, blade first. It didn’t hit straight enough to stick, but it gouged his arm deeply just below the wrist. The medallion flew from his hand and landed on the ground several yards away. He grabbed his bleeding arm and looked at me with such hatred that if Norwegian Death Stares really worked, I’d be playing banjo in the backwoods of Hell right now. Then he realized that he didn’t have the medallion anymore. And so did the Nøkken.
The translucent thing was on him like a snake taking a mouse, so quickly that I barely saw it happen. One moment Baldur was standing there looking like I’d butted ahead of him in the Express Check-Out lane, the next moment a giant column of pulsating transparent muscle and goo curled down and swallowed him from head to chest. I could see von Reinmann’s eyes bulge, his mouth open helplessly, but then the swirling interior of the thing made it hard to see as it gulped more of him inside. The Nøkken began to change, growing less clear, more smoky and obscure, so that within moments I could only make out a dark shape spasming at the center of it, still fighting for a breath it would never get to take.
I was snapped out of my mesmerized stare by the sound of a gun firing right beside me. Clarence had picked up an AR-16 a Nazi had dropped after falling through the vanished barrier, and he was proceeding to blow the shit out of everything within reach, including (nearly) me. I retreated a few yards to get out of the kid’s line of fire. The Nøkken had now almost disappeared, and finished doing so as I watched, leaving behind only a greasy residue and one of Baldur von Reinmann’s expensive black Oxfords.
Halyna quickly found a gun too, and within seconds the remaining Black Sun guards were running for their lives. I kneeled beside Sam to see if he was okay. He was, but just barely, his chest hitching like he had tuberculosis. I tried to get him onto his feet, but he was fighting me.
“Cut it out, you dumbass,” I explained. “I’m trying to help you!”
He put a hand on my face and, with surprising strength for someone who looked like he’d been run over by a cement truck, shoved my chin around until I was looking back across the hall.
The Nøkken was gone now. The Nightmare Children were fleeing, literally running up the backs of the escaping neo-Nazis. Some of them got tangled up together; a few of the swastikids were stamped into bloody, arm-waving pelts, and some of the neo-Nazis went down under swarms of panicked Nightmares and never got up. But the bugbears hadn’t gone anywhere. In fact, they were moving back in on us, as though all of this had been preliminary to the real fun starting.
I didn’t have time to worry about it, but in the back of my mind I was also wondering why the museum guards or even the cops hadn’t come swarming in after all the ruckus we’d made. Turns out that von Reinmann and his stormtroopers, far less interested in secrecy than I was, had rounded up all the museum workers and tied them up, except for the one poor guard upstairs who’d surprised them. They’d also used some kind of barrage-jamming device to make sure no alarms or phone calls went out. That was when we’d lost communication with Wendell.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit!” Oxana was on her feet, still woozy but looking for a weapon. Halyna and Clarence fired into the advancing jelly-blobs with no huge effect except to scatter bits of them, which promptly started inching back to their mother-blobs. Sam was trying to get up.
“Halyna, throw Oxana your gun,” I shouted. “You find the flamethrower!”
To her credit, she only looked at me like I was crazy for about a second, then turned and flipped the AR-16 to Oxana, who scrambled across the floor under our not-too-effective covering fire, grabbed the clunky ancient weapon, then crawled back to us.
“You’ve got two bursts l
eft, don’t you?” I shouted to Halyna over the intermittent rattle of gunfire. She glanced at the tanks and nodded. She looked terrified but not panicked, which I admired as much as I could at that moment. “Okay, everybody, try to herd those things toward the wall there.” I pointed to an empty spot beside the open doorway to the hidden office, about five feet from where the huge mosaic of Anaita still hung high on the wall, watching the whole thing with what appeared to be divine amusement. I ran to the spot. “Push them along with the first burst when I tell you to!” I yelled. “But save the second burst, Halyna—save it! Now, the rest of you, force them over here where I am!”
I watched as Clarence figured out he could get the bugbears to follow by charging at them, firing, then retreating again. I called to Clarence and the others to change their angle so they’d be driving the jelly-slugs toward me.
“Halyna, now! Light ’em up!”
Fwooooossshhh! A great billow of greasy flame exploded from the rifle-shaped nozzle. The half-dozen bugbears flinched back and then retreated, moaning in anger and distress so deeply that the few glass cases still unshattered now vibrated and cracked. Some of the nasty blobs were burning like Christmas puddings covered in brandy. I turned and reached as high as I could, then opened a Zipper right in front of the wall, from a couple of feet over my head down to the floor. Then I did a sensible thing and got the hell out of the way.
I knew Halyna couldn’t see it, so I shouted again, “Now give them the second burst! Drive them right toward me! Force them all the way to the wall!” I was taking a huge risk, of course, because I had no idea whether or not anything as weird and inhuman as the bugbears could be pushed through a Zipper and into no-Time on the other side, but it was all I could come up with.