Trail of Dead

She was fast, but she was still human, and she telegraphed the punch. I saw her rear her arm back, but I was already moving, pulling my wrists up and free through the wet golem’s hands. I ducked just in time, and Olivia’s fist drove into the golem’s face.

Wet clay or not, it had to hurt, because she cried out, backing up a few steps and clutching her right hand with her left, unaccustomed to pain. That’s what you get for trying to punch a null. I had a new problem, though: the golem was wet but not dead. His orders were to contain me, and he was going to keep coming. I slipped away from his first lunge and side-checked the off-balance Olivia, who slid on the carpeting and went down.

I ran.

Chapter 32

Jesse dashed back through the hallway and into the nearest corridor where the sprinklers hadn’t come on. He ducked into the first open doorway—an office. He’d just drawn his gun when he heard Mallory rushing into the hallway. Jesse took a deep breath, in and out, and stepped out of the office with his gun drawn. He switched the flashlight on as he went, holding it against the gun and shining it directly into her eyes. “Police. Don’t move,” he said levelly.

Mallory blinked in the sudden light. Her hands had been fussing at her neckline, but now she raised them slowly, the way everyone who has ever seen a cop movie knows to do. Then she began to mutter something, and this time Jesse recognized the language—it was Hebrew. He thumbed the safety off his weapon. “Stop. No spells, or I shoot now and try to figure out what the hell you were saying later.”

The witch closed her mouth, a murderous look in her eye. “So what’s your plan?” she asked in English, her voice a little out of breath from running. “Are you going to arrest me?”

“You killed two people, and were an accomplice in at least two more murders,” he pointed out.

Her smile widened. “True,” she allowed, “but we both know that the human courts won’t see it that way. And you work for them.”

She was extremely pretty, with thick dark hair plastered to her head, and might have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. She looked very small and wet all of a sudden, and the two of them stood there staring at each other. “I’ve been doing a lot of research lately,” Jesse told her, “and my guess is that you poured a lot of magic into that thing in there”—he nodded his head back in the direction they’d come from, where the golem was trapped inside Scarlett’s radius—“which hopefully means you don’t have much to burn right now.”

An insidious smile spread across Mallory’s face. Her hands didn’t move, but all of a sudden the neckline of her blouse jumped, as if someone had plucked at it. Jesse leveled the gun. “Stop it!” he yelled.

She took one small step closer to him, and Jesse tensed, standing his ground. Suddenly every light in the room flickered on, even the ones without light bulbs. The miscellaneous bits of trash and office supplies that had been scattered around the corridor suddenly rose in the air and began a whirling dance, like they were trying to form an invisible braid of energy. Jesse felt the gun tug and jump in his hand, and he dropped the flashlight and clutched the gun tighter, with both hands. “You were wrong,” Mallory called to him over the rustling of papers and junk. “I still have plenty of magic to burn.” And her blouse jumped again. The Transruah lifted out of her shirt and settled on her chest. She must have snatched it up when she came after him. Shit. “And I’m not just an animator,” she finished, her voice smug. “Now. Where’s my book?”

The gun began to spin slowly, twisting out of his grip. “I’ll shoot,” he yelled amid the chaos. He was about a second away from having to decide whether to release the gun or have his fingers broken.

“No you won’t,” Mallory said. He squeezed the trigger, but it was too late—the metal had crumpled, mangling the barrel. Yelping, Jesse released the weapon—which came flying straight at his head. He ducked the chunk of metal the first time, but it came right back at him, and Jesse took a hard blow to his temple, his ears ringing and his vision fuzzing over for a moment. Before he could really see what he was doing, Jesse lurched forward, missing the chunk of metal’s third effort to brain him. He tackled the witch, who merely laughed at him—until Jesse got his hands on the Jerusalem stone at her neck. He pulled hard, but the stone was on a leather string, not a chain, and Jesse took several more blows from flying objects before he was able to wrestle the leather thong from around her neck. Everything that had been flying around the room suddenly stilled, wavering in the air as Mallory tried to sustain the flow of magic without the Transruah to aid her. With no other ideas, Jesse gritted his teeth and lifted the witch to a seated position. And then he hit Mallory, a quick uppercut that snapped her head back. Her eyes went distant, and suddenly everything in the room crashed to the ground. The lights went out again.

Chapter 33

As it turns out, you can’t hide from a golem.

He didn’t bother trying to cut me off or dodging to get to me; he simply beelined toward me, wherever I went, and I wanted to stay in the part of the clinic where the sprinklers were going. Whatever direction I ran, the clay figure followed me, his surgical scrubs and hat plastered with mud. His face had mostly washed away now, and whenever he got close enough for me to catch glimpses of him I was newly inspired to run. I was much faster, since the golem couldn’t really run without slipping on muddy feet, but I was also high on morphine and sick from chemo and injuries. And the golem couldn’t tire.