Hannah sprinted through the trees, racing toward Lia and the safety of Bag End with all her might. Lia was already coming on the run when she spotted her friend and angled her trajectory so their paths through the plants would intersect. She was freshly dressed in jeans that clung to her still-damp skin and her hair was barely toweled dry. Tom’s frantic psychic alarms had roused her from her hobbit hole, but the images she was getting from him were jumbled and confused, with so much going on in them. The one thing she knew for certain was that she didn’t have time to sort them out. Dealing with this morning’s new threat, whatever it turned out to be, was going to require improvisation, since she’d had no chance at all to prepare for it.
“Han, what’s happening?” she called out, through the diminishing screen of foliage that separated them. “Tom saw someth-”
A sharp, hard gunshot hammered the air, leaving Lia’s ears ringing. Hannah clutched at her side and went down, driven to the ground by a bullet. She crashed out of sight into a massive billow of blue hydrangeas.
“Hannah!” Lia screamed, like she’d never screamed any other word in her entire life.
She brought her cherry branch up, but more gunfire tore apart a bromeliad that was hanging inches behind her head, and she shrieked as involuntary survival reflexes made her drop to the ground for cover.
She peeked up over a fern frond and saw two men coming toward her. Saw the guns they held in their hands: black and menacing things that seemed out of place here amidst the Yard’s sea of living green. Faced with the weapons, the only thing Lia could do was scramble away, back into the dense camouflage provided by the enveloping plant life she knew so well.
She was shaking by the time she reached the back of the Yard, her guts knotted up with adrenaline. The men with the guns were still pursuing. She could hear them crunching and rustling through the plants somewhere behind her. Directly in front of her was a woodpile, several feet high and seven or eight feet long. A small cluster of century-old walnut and pecan trees stood off to her right. Some of them extended a branch or two out over the Yard’s rear fence.
Lia looked back over her shoulder, cringing against the shots she expected to erupt at any second. Gods and demons were all a part of her program, but guns upset her badly.
For a moment, she almost didn’t know what to do.
Black Tom left his catbody on the shack’s roof and let his awareness bloom large, out over the Yard, then scanned the property for Lia. He still tended to think of her as his Winter Flower, the first name he’d ever known her by, especially when he was scared for her. He’d called out to her on instinct when Lyssa and her crew first pulled up, but now he regretted the impulse. Steering his girl away from this situation would’ve been the smarter thing to do.
If those men hurt his Lia, Black Tom was apt to lose his mind. At which point several distinct forms of hell were likely to break loose. Tom had never been the same man again after the last time he unleashed such a torrent of grief and rage upon others, after Dulce died… even if the others in question had deserved it.
He was distracted, scattered, trying to keep track of more than a dozen people all at once, but the percussive sound of a gunshot caused him to draw all of his awareness straight down toward it.
Hannah was the one who’d been shot, he saw instantly, as he watched the man he’d labeled Brickface deftly disarm the trigger-happy fool responsible for it. Mr. Brick’s technique looked like some fancy martial arts sort of thing, perhaps military training. The gunman hit the ground with a solid thud that was nowhere near satisfying enough for Tom.
“What the hell, man?” the shooter said, looking up at Brickface, who’d thrown him down and taken his weapon before he so much as knew what was happening.
“Do you know what ‘alive’ means, you goddamn idiot?” Brickface barked down at him. “It tends to be the exact fuckin’ opposite of bein’ fulla bulletholes!”
“What’d we all bring guns for, then?” the shooter asked, getting to his feet and rubbing at the back of his head.
“To point ’em,” Brickface yelled. “Not to fire ’em! They’re fuckin’ motivational tools, is all.”
He dropped the clip out of the grip and cleared the chamber before giving the younger man his weapon back, shaking his head as he did so. “You just better pray that Lia chick’s not the one you hit,” he said. “For your sake.”
Tom thought he had no idea how right he was about that, as Brickface tromped off in the direction Lia had fled. His Winter Flower was all right, Tom sensed, terrified but still unharmed… which was more than he could say for poor Hannah.
She was fading. Lying in the dirt, surrounded by broken blue flowers, with both hands clamped to her injured side. Blood was soaking through her clothes. There was blood everywhere, it seemed like. Tom knew his girl would not have wanted him to leave Hannah’s side, so he moved in close enough to feel her pain as well as touch her thoughts, to see if there might be anything he could do.
Hannah looked up, and Tom thought for an instant that she was somehow seeing him.
Then he looked back (or rather he let his disembodied self experience three hundred and sixty degrees of visual awareness. There was no need to turn around when he wasn’t using physical eyes to see. Habit was always a considerable force when it came to perception, though).
Sitting behind him and looking right through him, a few feet away from Hannah, were, well, things. Frogdogs, was the best description Han’s unstrung mind would offer. A sizable ring of them hunkered there, watching her, behaving like exemplary models of calm and patience. She had no idea what they were, or even if they were real, although Tom recognized them as the entire clan of Crouchers he and his Winter Flower had long ago petitioned to guard their front gate. The same ones that had trailed el Rey’s mercenaries into the Yard a few minutes ago.
Hannah looked pale. Tom could feel that she was blacking out, possibly for good. The Crouchers all watched her in silence, with hungry expressions on their lumpy, curious faces. The man who’d shot her also stepped up to view his handywork, and Han turned her head, with an effort, to squint up at him.
The gunman couldn’t see the Crouchers. Tom touched his mind and knew that it was so. All the guy saw, lying in the bushes, was a nice, mom-type lady whose clothes had gone a dark, wet red all down her left side. Tom sensed that he’d shot men before, several of them, but this, he did not feel good about.
That’s much too little, much too late, cabron, Tom thought, feeling not the slightest glimmer of pity for the gunman, even though he knew from firsthand experience what was going to happen next.
Hannah rolled her head away from her shooter in order to look back at her Crouchers, all of which squatted close to her eye level. She was seeing them, all right. They were fully visible to her. Her gunshot wound must have temporarily shocked her eyes open to the subtler aspects of being, Tom surmised. Such things were not unheard of.
He looked back down and saw that the creatures had all turned around to consider the armed intruder who’d come to stand over Hannah.
He also saw, with no surprise (before he winked away to drum up more assistance), that every last one of them was grinning.