No Quest For The Wicked

Sam was flying back and forth above us, talking into thin air. “Yeah, I mean now. What did ya’ think I meant, whenever it’s convenient for you to drop by and help in the attack that’s happenin’ right now? I wouldn’t want to interrupt your dinner by being ambushed.” I didn’t see a phone, so I presumed I was getting a look at the way Sam communicated. “You’d better be here, ’cause if I die from this, I’ll haunt you.” He reached up a hand to tap his ear before saying, “Help should be on its way, assuming they don’t get lost or sidetracked.”

Owen’s phone rang, and when he answered, Rod was shouting so loudly that I could hear his voice coming through the phone from where I stood. “You had to go after an army, didn’t you?” he said. “There are hundreds of them. We can’t deal with this.”

Owen and I looked at each other, frowning. “How many do you see?” Owen asked me.

The wall of flame was fading, as Owen had predicted, and through it I could see the puritans. It was hard to count, since they were moving around, but there weren’t hundreds. “Five, maybe six,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what I’ve got.” Into the phone, he said, “There are only five or six. The rest are illusion. Just hit them with something.”

“And he’d better hurry,” Granny said. I glanced down to see that the water was two steps below where we stood. It wouldn’t drown us unless the wall of fire held it in, but it could make it very difficult for us to stay out of the flames.

“I am definitely coming in late tomorrow,” I said. “I so deserve comp time for all this. That is, if we survive.”

A moment later, there were shouts of horror from the gallery at the top of the stairs, and the wall of magical flame vanished entirely. We ran up the rest of the stairs, the rising water at our heels, and into the museum. “What did you do?” Owen asked into the phone.

I overheard the response as Rod said, “I gave them a little Hitchcock treatment.”

“Very nice bird illusions,” Granny said with a satisfied nod. The puritans ducked and flailed their arms as they fended off attacks from imaginary birds. That gave us an opportunity to make a run for the adjoining gallery, aiming for the Great Hall.

We’d almost made it when the bad guys realized that we were getting away, and apparently their mission was more important to them than their fear of a swarm of vicious birds because they came after us. We reached the entrance to the next gallery and found more puritans blocking the way. We were surrounded—again.

Then there was a guttural roar as Thor rushed out of the adjacent gallery, swinging his battleaxe and hitting one of the puritans on the kneecap. Another puritan rushed at Owen and me, and Owen swung a fist, hitting him squarely in the jaw and knocking him down. Owen shook his hand and grimaced in pain as he resumed running.

We made it into the next gallery, where Rod and Earl were waiting among a forest of Greek and Roman statuary, and I turned to see that Thor was escorting Granny through the remaining magical puritans toward us. I shouted a warning when I saw one of them closing in, but Sam swooped down on him, hitting him in the head with his stone talons.

The two remaining puritans came after us. Rod fought back with everything he had. “Hypocrites!” he gasped in between shouting spells. “I recognize that spell. It’s a recent MSI offering. They’re using the modern magic they supposedly want everyone else to give up.” He raised his voice and shouted, “And I bet you’ve got a computer and a cell phone, too!”

A rushing noise above made me look up, and then I cried out in joy when I saw that it was gargoyles. Our reinforcements had arrived! They flew the length of the gallery, but instead of attacking our opponents, they came straight at us, and not in a friendly greeting way. They were nearly upon us before we realized they were the enemy—more stained, mossy, old gargoyles like the one that had attacked us earlier. Now we were the ones ducking and taking cover from an aerial attack, only the attack on us was real, not an illusion of birds.

I swatted away a gargoyle that pulled at my hair, grazing my knuckles on the rough stone. A second later, someone knocked me to the ground and rolled me out of the way. I heard a thud as something hard and heavy hit the floor where I’d just been, then I looked up to see Owen leaning over me. “Oh, hi,” I said to him, a little dazed. I blinked to see that he’d moved me behind a headless Greek statue, and nearby a mossy old gargoyle with a chipped face was staggering on the floor, struggling to fly again. “Wow, thanks,” I added.