I’D BEEN CAUGHT up in events over my head quite a few times over the years. Just when I thought I was getting pretty good at treading water and keeping stable, a new wave came up to knock me over. A bigger one. The waves were getting very big these days, and I was less sure of my ability to stay afloat than ever before. There was too much to know. I’d never learn it all. I would never learn half of what I needed to know. Yet somehow I had to keep trying—and hope.
Of course they were gods. Anastasia had worshipped this woman since she was a child, eight hundred years ago. Because Xiwangmu had earned such worship.
Still, I shook my head. “No. I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff and met a lot of weird beings. But this is where I draw the line.”
Sun said, “Take everything else that you know is real—vampires and werewolves and ghosts are the least of it. Why not this, too?”
“But that would mean everything is real,” I said.
Sun raised an affirming brow.
I had always drawn lines. Before I became a werewolf, I had assumed—blithely, confidently—that I knew what was real and what wasn’t. The world was solid and logical. Then I’d been attacked by an oversized wolf late one night, and a lot of assumptions turned inside out. Werewolves were real, and I’d stepped through a certain kind of looking glass. Then I’d met vampires, were-jaguars, were-tigers, psychics, wizards, ghosts, djinn, fairies. With each encounter I erased the line and drew it a little further out. Like, maybe Bram Stoker’s Dracula had been based on a real-live—real-undead—vampire. Maybe a lot of those stories had their roots in reality. But that didn’t mean that some ultrapowerful guy named Zeus ever turned himself into a swan to try to pick up girls. It didn’t mean that when you prayed there was actually someone out there listening.
Did it?
“I don’t understand,” I said simply. Maybe it was don’t. More likely it was can’t. I was caught in a cosmic tsunami.
“It’s best if you don’t think about it too hard,” Sun said.
That was the problem—I didn’t trust what I couldn’t think about and pick apart. What was I supposed to do, knowing that the world was that big? How did you strip down and take a shower knowing that some omnipotent god somewhere might be watching? Answer: you lived very, very softly, to make sure no god took an interest in you. I thought about this, regarded the Monkey King and Queen Mother of the West, and realized I was pretty much fucked, wasn’t I?
Ben loomed protectively nearby. He put his arm across my shoulders, pulling me into the shelter of his body, kissed my head above my ear and stayed there a moment, his lips pressed against me, his breath stirring my hair. I closed my eyes and focused on that touch, because that was my answer—you clung to what you loved, and that kept you going.
“We need to discuss,” Xiwangmu said. She clapped twice and a pair of girls appeared from the shadows, dressed in elaborate silk gowns, their hair done up with pins and charms. They carried trays stacked with bowls and saucers and a steaming pot of what smelled like earthy, spicy tea. They spread a cloth on the floor and began arranging tea service for seven.
“Do we have time for this?” I said. “It must be getting close to dawn.”
“It’s an hour away,” Anastasia said.
I didn’t have a watch; our phones had gone back to dead, and we had no way of telling time. The night seemed to have gone on for days already. It had gone on forever. But clearly Anastasia knew exactly how close sunrise was. Not that she seemed worried about it—she’d gone back to her poised, superior self. She was also staying close to Xiwangmu, within reach of her throne, as if she planned on kneeling at the goddess’s feet at any moment. She and Grace both stayed close to her, like an honor guard.
“This is a war council,” Xiwangmu said. “Now, sit.”
The serving girls had vanished when I wasn’t looking. Xiwangmu left her throne to take her place in the circle, and Anastasia and Grace sat on either side of her. The nine-tailed fox crept out from under the table and pressed itself to its mistress’s side, and she clicked at it and scratched its ears. I sat across from her, flanked by my own escort of Cormac and Ben. Ben was looking growly; Cormac looked like he wanted to take notes. He still had a bruised eye and cuts from his fight with Roman, but he didn’t seem to mind. The injuries were fading, as if just being here had a healing influence. Maybe it did.
Sun Wukong dropped his staff, which vanished. I was looking right at it and it vanished. He let go, it should have fallen to the floor, but it never did. He flopped cross-legged in the spot between Grace and Cormac, the two magicians. I kept staring.
“What?” he said.
“Where’d it go?”
He tilted his head and smirked, clearly admonishing me for asking such a silly question.
Xiwangmu raised an apple-size bowl of tea and sipped. The rest of us followed suit. I didn’t know what I expected the tea to taste like—something magical and divine, probably. Exotic and full of sparks and fireworks. A tea that would fill me with enlightenment and reveal the answers to all my abstract questions.
It was just green tea, maybe with a hint of mint. It tasted very good, maybe the best green tea I’d ever had—perfect leaves harvested at the perfect time and brewed perfectly in exactly the right temperature water. But I couldn’t sense anything magic in it. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.
Xiwangmu said, “You seem disappointed.”
“What? Oh, no, it’s fine. It’s really good. It’s just I wondered if maybe you’d spike it with the nectar of the gods or something.” I shrugged and ducked a sheepish gaze. Anastasia frowned at me, and Grace gaped at me, appalled. “Stupid idea. Forget I said it.”
Sun laughed, but it was good-natured, not mocking. Friendly. He said, “You want the Elixir of Immortality from her, you have to steal it.”
“You would know, wouldn’t you,” Xiwangmu said to him darkly, hinting at a story between old, old friends. The kind that neither party would ever let the other forget. For all their power, for all their talk, they seemed like friends. Like people. Which made it even harder to believe in gods.
The council began.
XIWANGMU HAD known what she was doing with the council. We hadn’t stopped, rested, eaten, drunk anything, done anything but hunt, fight, seek, and flee for hours. Even ten minutes of sitting, sipping tea and nibbling on little rice crackers that the young women brought out, made me feel better—a little more ready to head back into the tunnels and face what was there.
But only a little. We were talking about confronting Roman, after all.
“How do we know he’s even still here?” Ben said. “He’s got the pearl, why do you think he’s going to stick around?”
“Because Anastasia’s here,” I said. “He wouldn’t pass up a chance to finish her off.”
“Or you, really,” Anastasia said.
Yeah, I supposed there was that, though I didn’t like to think of being that high up on Roman’s hit list.
Sun said, “I’d really love to know who’s helping him.”
“Yes,” Xiwangmu said. “So would I.”
Ben said, “There’s still the problem of where exactly he is, and what you’re going to do once you find him.”
Sun chuckled. “Oh, I’ll take care of that, don’t worry.”
As to how to find him, I had an idea. “What do you do when you want to draw someone out?” I said. “You lure him. Your fox taught us that.”
The creature yipped and opened its mouth wide; Xiwangmu scratched its ears.
“So, what, we use you as bait? No way,” Ben said.
Cormac said, “We’ve got his tokens. We ought to be able to track them backward.”
“But they’ve been neutralized,” Anastasia said. “The magic in them is gone.”
“Maybe it is,” he said. “They still came from him.”
The idea seemed chancy, but it also gave me a little hope. If Roman was still around then so was Henry, so was the pearl. All wasn’t lost, yet.
“We have to try,” I said, pulling the coin from my pocket and giving it to Cormac.
The vampire closed her eyes, and for a moment was so still she seemed truly dead. Her chest was still, her skin lacked color. I could push her and she’d fall over.
Finally, she opened her eyes and said, “I would love to see that devil gone. Forever, so he can never hurt anyone else.”
Xiwangmu said, “I agree that Gaius Albinus will look for a chance to destroy you. You can use that desire against him.”
Anastasia nodded. “Yes. Let’s catch Roman.”
We made a plan.
The problem was, we didn’t know anything about Roman’s guide. He or she was Chinese, most likely, to know the secrets, tricks, and magic of the tunnels. Sun Wukong and Xiwangmu seemed confident that he or she was a god. They also said there were hundreds of Chinese gods and goddesses. “Even we need books to keep track of them all,” Sun said, laughing. Still joking at a time like this.
Whoever it was, Roman had kept the guide hidden. We didn’t know what its powers were, or its weaknesses. Now, had Roman hidden the guide because he/she/it was weak? Or because he was a powerful ace in the hole that Roman would only use in an emergency? Like if, say, Sun Wukong showed up again?
Assuming we could draw them both out—assuming that Roman hadn’t decided to flee since he had the pearl and he didn’t need to bother with Anastasia—we had to hope we had enough firepower to get the pearl back and drive them both off, if not destroy them entirely.
It would be such a relief to drive that stake through Roman’s heart here and now, and never worry about him again.
We didn’t have much time to gather supplies and organize. Dawn was close—I was afraid that Roman had left Henry senseless on street level in full view of sunrise where he’d go up in flames at the first hint of daylight. Cormac made a whole list of items he wanted—a crossbow, wooden bolts, holy water, stakes, crosses. Sun Wukong found him a crossbow, and Cormac looked at it askance—it was old, the wood weathered, the mechanism stiff and unwieldly, as if it hadn’t been used in a century. I think he was hoping for something big and modern, made of plastic and steel.
Grace had a bag full of charms, spells, and unlikely weapons—sticks of incense, bells and rattles, firecrackers. “Noises drive off demons,” she explained.
“So I could just scream real loud?” I wasn’t helping very much. All I had were my convictions. And teeth and claws, if it came to that.
Xiwangmu was our ace in the hole, which meant she was staying here. It seemed somehow unfair. I was in awe of her, but also perplexed. I didn’t know how to act around her. Maybe she really was a god and not some powerful sorceress with delusions of grandeur. But she wasn’t my god. The world may have been stranger than even I ever imagined, but I wasn’t going to fall on my knees before every being who came along claiming to be divine. Seemed like a person could get in a lot of trouble doing that.
“My warrior days are behind me,” she said, seeing us off at the doorway to her garden.
“I thought gods were supposed to be eternal. Once a warrior, always a warrior,” I said.
Her smile was amused—and way too human. She didn’t match my idea of divinity—austere, distant, unknowable. Metaphor and literary invention. Obviously, I was going to have to think about this.
“We live our lives same as anyone else.”
I pursed my lips. “Does that mean you can die?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
She folded her hands before her, so they were hidden in the sleeves of her robe. “I will be here, if you need refuge.”
If this went badly, we’d have someplace to flee to. But if this went that badly, I wasn’t sure we’d have the opportunity.
Sun Wukong’s job was to deliver the Dragon’s Pearl to Xiwangmu. If our trap failed, if Roman turned it back on us, he would do everything he could to retrieve it and then flee. That was his priority. He would help us if he could, but we weren’t as important as the pearl. They hadn’t actually said that, but the implication was clear, and Anastasia and Grace had seemed to take the conclusion as a matter of course.
I wasn’t so sure that was the best strategy. I had my own plan, unspoken to the others: to protect my pack, Ben and Cormac, and get us out of there safe. If we could bring down Roman, fine. But I wouldn’t do that at the cost of my pack, and I wouldn’t defend the pearl at the cost of my pack. A wise wolf gave up a difficult hunt. You didn’t want to spend more calories than you’d get from the kill. Simple economics.
Six of us went into the tunnel, which closed us in darkness as soon as the door shut. Grace lit her lantern, and with her leading, we traveled down the tunnel to find our battleground. Cormac walked a step behind her, both Anastasia’s and the Dodge City coins in hand. Amelia had some kind of spell planned for them. We’d see.
Only Grace’s footsteps scraped on the stone floor. The rest of us were hunters, warriors. I watched, eyes and ears straining, for any hint of our enemy. Tipping my nose up, I breathed deep to take in as much of the air, as many scents, as I could. All I smelled was stone and incense.
Ben and Cormac stayed within reach; I always knew where they were.
The tunnel opened into a room, not terribly spacious—twenty by twenty, maybe. Large enough to move in, small enough to be defensible. The problem was, each of the four walls had an open doorway leading to another tunnel. This was a crossroads, and Roman could come from anywhere.
“I don’t like this,” I said. “Too many ways to sneak up on us.”
“No, we can use this,” Cormac said. He produced tools and items, the ones he’d used for the compass spell earlier. He drew the chalk circle and design on the floor, set the mangled coins—both Anastasia’s and the one from Dodge City—within the circle, then set a silver dagger in the middle.
Holding my breath, I watched.
The dagger scraped on the stone floor as it began to turn. It inched clockwise, then slipped counterclockwise, more confidently, turning until it stopped—pointing solidly at one of the doorways.
“So he’s there?” I said.
“Yes,” Anastasia said. “He’s coming.”
Oh. Well then.
“Let’s go, then,” Cormac said, scooping up the objects and scuffing out the chalk markings. He then went to one of the corners, set down his bundle of stakes, and worked to draw the crossbow.
Ben squeezed my hand. We stood in the center of the room, side by side, facing the doorway the dagger had marked. The tunnel beyond looked like a black throat.
Grace was laying strings of firecrackers around all four walls. If she had to set those things off, it was going to get real loud in here. My ears hurt just thinking about it.
Anastasia waited in the middle of the room, placing herself in the line of fire as bait. Sun Wukong stationed himself in the opposite corner as Cormac, where he smiled over the proceedings, leaning on his staff, which had reappeared as inexplicably as it had vanished. His otherworldly sense of amusement was starting to wear thin.
Finished with the firecrackers, Grace lit four sticks of incense and set them in each corner. After that, I couldn’t smell much from the tunnels, just the spicy-sweet reek of the burning sticks.
“Is that really necessary?” Ben said. She’d blinded us, scent-wise.
“Yes,” she snapped back.
My shoulders were bunched, my hackles raised. I had to wonder, had we set this trap for Roman, or had he set it for us?
“Keep it together,” Ben whispered, pressing his shoulder to mine. Funny, I’d been just about to tell him the same thing.
“He may not even come, this close to dawn,” Anastasia said. This had to be nerve racking for her—she wasn’t any safer this close to dawn than Roman was. Her last apprentice—a gorgeous woman, very young in terms of both her age and the length of time she’d been a vampire—died when she was exposed to sunlight. Anastasia had to be thinking about her. I certainly was—I’d watched it happen, and I never wanted to see that again.
“It’ll be all right,” I said to her. Somehow, it would. We were underground—she’d be safe, surely.
“Heads up,” Ben said, leaning toward the doorway, his head cocked, listening.
The room fell so quiet I could hear the muted fizzle of the smoldering incense sticks. From the doorway to Cormac’s right, a set of shuffling footsteps sounded—heavy, clumsy. Like someone big and drunk was dragging himself along the wall. It certainly wasn’t Roman. We’d never hear Roman coming, which was a big part of the problem with setting a manually operated trap for him.
Right then, Roman didn’t matter: something was coming toward us.
I kept my breathing steady and settled myself more firmly into my body, my legs, my muscles—ready to spring in any direction, to leap in an instant, and fight.
Henry stumbled through the doorway, as though the darkness had spat him out. Swaying for a moment, he blinked in confusion. He looked unhurt physically—only his expression was odd, dazed. He wore a bronze coin on a chain around his neck—one of Roman’s binding coins.
He looked at me, opened his hands, and scattered a few dozen small objects on the floor between us. They flashed in the light and tinkled like bells when they hit the stone. Then he collapsed on his side.
I started to run to him, but Ben held me back. “Kitty, look.”
The objects Henry had thrown looked like jacks, a children’s toy. Studying them revealed their sharpened points, like twisted knives—caltrops. And they were silver. If one of them even scratched us, we were done. Clinging to each other, we moved back. Roman had immobilized us without even touching us.
“I hate this!” I growled.
Grace went to check on Henry, touching his face, his arm. How did you tell if a vampire was okay? Feel for a pulse? Make sure he was breathing? No and no. He looked dead—pale and cold, unmoving. Of course he looked dead, he was a vampire.
“Grace?” I said. “How is he?”
Grace rolled him onto his back, smoothed the hair away from his face, and pulled back an eyelid to check his eye. He seemed to be sleeping—except for the not-breathing part. He had to be alive, or whatever the vampire equivalent of alive was. He was still here, he hadn’t disintegrated. So that was something. His clothes hadn’t been mussed or altered—even his shirt was still in place. He’d just appeared. Or rather, he’d been shoved in here as a distraction.
“I think he’s okay,” she said, but sounded uncertain.
“Anastasia, what’s wrong with him?”
“Incoming,” Cormac called before she could answer. He held the crossbow ready, aiming at the opposite doorway from where Henry had appeared. He had a clear shot through the middle of the room.
Grace pulled Henry into a corner, and I reflected on the irony of trying to protect an undead guy who was essentially immortal. If said undead guy was unconscious and possibly injured, how would we ever know? Was there a vampire doctor we could take him to?
I was constantly astonished by the absurdity of it all.
“What are we going to do about this?” Ben said, nodding at the silver knives scattered on the floor. We braced, wolflike and ready to pounce—but away from danger, away from the silver.
All I could smell was the stupid incense, and the hallway appeared darker than it should have—my wolf eyes should have been able to make out something. Something had caught Cormac’s attention. Movement flickered in the shadows, or in my own imagination.
The thing that crept in through the doorway made no sound. At first glance, he was a man, incredibly tall, as tall as the doorway, and bulky, stout and full of muscles. He wore nothing but worn trousers and went barefoot. At second glance, however, the details became uncertain and impossible. The figure moved hunched and low, like a wrestler approaching an opponent. As if he was sizing us up. Except his eyes were sewn shut. Two rows of vertical, swollen stitches marked where eyes should have been. Black stitches also marked his nostrils, mouth, and even his ears—he didn’t really have ears, just crusted stitches crisscrossing holes on the sides of his bald head.
I didn’t know how he could sense anything—I didn’t know how he could breathe. Yet he kept on, stepping carefully, flexing his hands as if preparing to strike.
If he didn’t breathe, could we stop him?
Grace gasped as if she recognized the creature, which would have been great, because then she knew what it was and would know how to stop it. But she didn’t say anything. Maybe he was mortal, human. Maybe we could just beat him up. But that didn’t explain the ruin of his face or how he could function without four of his five senses.
The crossbow fired and a bolt whistled past me, smacking into the monster’s neck. The shaft stuck out of sickly grayish skin, quivering. Behind me, Cormac cranked back the crossbow for reloading.
Not that it would help, because the monster didn’t much notice. He grunted, swiped at the bolt, pulled it out, and tossed it away. A bare trickle of blood ran from the wound. So, he was a near-invincible kind of otherworldly monster. Check.
Cormac slung the crossbow over his shoulder and began rummaging in his coat pockets.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Not going to waste ammo I’m going to need for the vampire,” he said.
Anastasia stared at it with awe and doubt.
“What is it? Who is it?” I shot at her.
“Hundun,” she murmured. “God of chaos.”
Of course he was; we had to get one of those in the mix.
“I don’t know—I thought the guy was dead,” Sun said.
“Wait a minute—if he’s a god how could he be dead?” I called out.
“Oh, gods die all the time.”
I would have to parse that later. “That means we can kill him, right?”
He didn’t answer.
Common sense—Wolf’s common sense—told me that I didn’t know enough about this enemy to be able to fight him. He wasn’t prey, and this wasn’t a hunt. We weren’t cornered—we could escape through the doorway behind us, avoiding the silver caltrops. We could run. We ought to run. That was common sense. But I couldn’t leave the others. And I couldn’t help.
The creature had paused a moment, seeming to look at each of us in turn, noting us, marking us. Then he almost nodded, a single tip of his head, which he swung around to focus on Sun Wukong as if identifying him as the most dangerous among us.
With what seemed to be a sense of a joy, Sun took a running start and leapt forward, meeting the blinded monster head-on. Holding his staff with both hands, he jabbed upward, aiming for the creature’s chin—but the thing, this strange god of chaos, sidestepped and whirled to slam his fists into Sun’s back. The creature’s speed belied his size and apparent lack of senses. Maybe the thing really could see, somehow, and all the stitches were there for horrifying effect.
My common sense was failing me.
Struck hard, Sun stumbled forward, but was able to quickly spin to once again face his opponent, and in the same movement he struck again, cracking his staff against the monster’s head. The being shook off the blow and swung a punch at Sun, who dodged it by jumping over it. It all happened in a blur.
“Sun, you must break him!” Anastasia called. “Break through, remember the story.”
“I can handle it!” he called, and she hissed as if she didn’t believe him.
“Cormac, the crossbow, you must aim for his eyes, open his eyes!” Anastasia yelled.
The creature lunged again, punching with both fists.
“I’m feeling so useless,” Ben said. We were still on the sidelines, watching a fight that would have been amazing if it had been in a kung fu epic. Being able to smell the sweat in the room made it too real.
Cormac hadn’t heard the vampire. He—Amelia—was still rummaging for whatever protective or defensive spells they had. I was furious that Ben and I had been sidelined by toy-size hardware.
Then I saw him, in the shadows of the same doorway Henry had come through, aiming a crossbow of his own at Anastasia.
I didn’t think. I took a running leap and sprang over the stretch of spilled caltrops, hoping, reaching, praying I’d make it.
“Kitty!” Ben snarled after me. Then he called, “Cormac!”
I crashed onto clear floor and kept going, straight into Roman, tackling him. We both slammed into the wall. He growled and shoved me aside.
Wolf kicked and I let her come to the surface, allowed her instincts to fill me. Curling my fingers, I dug them into the vampire’s arm, raking, kneading, gouging. I might not be able to kill him, but I could keep him from using his weapon.
He swung me against the wall, cracking my head against brick. I saw stars, and Wolf bared her teeth at him.
“Kitty, the bag!” Anastasia called to me. “The bag!”
The words sunk in through the fighting haze. Roman was wearing Sun’s cloth bag over his shoulder, the strap repaired with a simple knot.
He wouldn’t drop the crossbow, which meant he couldn’t effectively get rid of me. I was hanging on him, tearing at him. The stitches in his silk shirt tore. I put my hand on the strap of the bag. I could rip it, take it away from him—
Air whistled past my ear. A crossbow bolt.
Roman made a noise, like the air going out of him. But he was still here—the bolt had landed in his left shoulder, inches from his heart. Inches from my face. But hey, I’d heal, Cormac had probably been thinking. In the center of the room, he was loading a bolt for another shot.
I’d found a tear in the strap and was breaking through the cloth.
Roman had had enough of all of it, because he spun into the room and swung me down to the floor, toward the pool of silver caltrops. It happened too fast. I would hit them, they would bite into me in a dozen places, and the poison would burn through my blood to my heart.
Then came wind. A fierce, fast wind, like the kind that blasted the plains in Colorado, scoured the room and swept the caltrops away, into the opposite wall.
Sun Wukong stood in a fighting pose, sweeping his staff along the floor, bringing the wind with it, until the silver was all gone. Hundun batted him in the head and he went flying.
I landed on the floor, Roman landed on me, and I rested, unhurt but for bruises.
Roman scrambled to his feet and fled back to the hallway because Cormac was pointing his crossbow at him. He fired; I didn’t see if he hit or not.
I was holding the bag, weighed down with what I hoped was the Dragon’s Pearl.
“I’ve got it,” I breathed around panting breaths. Wolf was clawing at my gut. Can we run now? Yes. Yes we could. “I’ve got it!”
“Then go!” Sun said, picking himself up, readying his staff. “I’ll take care of this one!” He went back to fighting Hundun, blocking the creature with his staff while he dodged blows.
I’d have been worried about Sun and his ability to keep fighting, except he was wearing this big silly grin like he’d never had so much fun in his life. In fact, his blows seemed particularly nonfatal. He’d knock the monster on the side of the head to rattle him, trip up his feet with the staff, make him hop and dance as he avoided the hits, and Sun jumped out of the way in time to avoid the monster’s blows. The creature didn’t look any more frustrated or angry than he had when he entered the room. He simply kept going, his head low, jaw set, determined. They were two actors playing their roles.
Then the room blew up.
It began with a few pops and white sparks, then turned into an explosion that raced around the edges of the room—fire traveling along the strings of firecrackers, igniting them all within seconds. Grace must have set hundreds of them. They cracked, banged, bounced, flew, threw multicolored sparks, and trailed clouds of acrid gray smoke behind them, until the room filled with the stench of the stuff, stinging my eyes and burning my nose. Not to mention the noise, which turned my head to cotton.
The eyeless, earless creature moaned in agony, the sound muffled by his sealed mouth. How could he even tell what was going on?
Someone grabbed my arm. I almost whirled and took a swipe at the person, my fingers bent like claws. Then Ben came close, bringing himself nose to nose with me. Even that close I couldn’t smell him for all the smoke and burning. My lack of senses put me on the edge of panic. The firecrackers were still going off, like sporadic pops of popcorn. Still loud, still producing smoke and fire. Something pounded against the walls hard enough to shake them and make the floor tremble. Mortar and dust shook from the ceiling.
I grabbed Ben’s hand; he’d be my anchor.
“Where’s Roman?” I hollered.
“Ran,” Cormac said. “Let’s go that way.” He pointed to the opposite doorway from where Roman had been.
The smoke cleared some, drifting out of the doorways. The monster held his wounded head in his hands, groaning as he crashed into the walls, looking for a doorway, trying to escape. Again and again, he slammed against the stone, rattling the room. Sun Wukong stood back, holding his staff defensively in front of him, watching.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll be fine, really!”
Who was I to argue?
More debris rained on us.
Coughing through the dust and smoke, Ben and I made our way to Grace and Anastasia. Henry still lay near the wall. His clothing seemed scorched by the fireworks, but he seemed otherwise okay. I pulled the chain with Roman’s coin over his head and threw it away.
“We’re going,” I called, and Ben and I took charge of Henry, grabbing his arms and pulling them over our shoulders. He seemed much lighter than he should have. We hauled him across the room after Cormac, who led the way, jacket and stakes in hand. Grace and Anastasia were right behind us. The vampire was looking ashen. Like the sky outside, if we had a window to look out.
As the room cleared, the blinded monster’s senses seemed to come to focus, and he turned to Sun and roared. The Monkey King faced him, staff in hand.
We fled down yet another brick and stone corridor. I had Henry on one arm and the bag with the Dragon’s Pearl on the other.