And then the scream came. It was all Kyrie and yet not human—a warbling mix of terror coming from a feline throat designed only for roaring and hissing.
Without even noticing what he was doing, he broke into a run. He made the turn ahead in the street in time to see the beetle creep into the greenery-choked garden of the castle.
And the scream came again.
* * *
Kyrie was hallucinating. Or rather, the panther was. In front of the feline eyes arose a hundred little animals that needed hunting, or rearing predators.
And yet, at the back of the panther's mind, Kyrie managed to remain lucid, or almost lucid. There was a beetle. She must not loose track of that. A beetle with shimmering blue-green carapace. And it was trying to kill Kyrie. And lay eggs in her corpse.
This certainty firmly in mind, Kyrie aimed at anything green-blue that she caught amid the snatches of illusion clogging the panther's vision. The panther's claws danced over the extended limbs with what looked like a poison injector at the end but might merely have been a lethal claw of some sort. She careened over the bug's back, and scrambled halfway away before the beetle caught up.
They were right over the graves, and the funky smell of them disturbed the panther, even through the hallucinations.
And at the back of the panther's mind, Kyrie knew soon she would be dead and buried in this shallow grave.
* * *
Tom had run full tilt into the garden of the castle, before he realized what he was doing. He was only lucky the beetles were too busy to realize he was running after them.
Of course, what they were too busy with was Kyrie. And once they noticed Tom they would start pumping the green stuff, and make Tom high as a kite and his fighting totally ineffective.
Twenty yards from them, seeing the huge black feline leap and dance ahead, in mad attack, Tom stopped. He pulled his jacket off, and tossed it in the direction of a tree, making a note where it was. He would come back for it. Then he peeled off the white T-shirt and, wrapping it around his head, tied it in a knot at the back. Its double thickness of fabric made it hard to breathe, and he could wish for better clothes to fight in than the pants that were slowly castrating him.
But he didn't get his choice. And it didn't matter. He must fight for Kyrie.
He grabbed a tree branch and plunged forward into the battle swinging it at any beetle limbs within his reach.
Clouds of green stuff emanated, turning the air green and shimmering.
Tom realized the smaller beetle—the one he'd followed?—was immobile and rubbing its wings to emit cloud after cloud of green powder. Meanwhile the one fighting Kyrie—and so far not losing, though also not managing to get any hits in—was not emitting green powder.
Interesting. So, they could only make people hallucinate when they weren't actively fighting, was that it?
Well, he thought, jumping back and landing atop the beetle, with a huge tree branch in hand. Well. He was about to take the fight to the enemy.
* * *
And now Kyrie was sure that she, personally, was hallucinating. On top of the panther-conjured images of scared little furry things, there was . . . Tom. Oh, not just Tom, but Tom in gloriously tight jeans, with his shirt removed, and his muscular chest bare in the morning sunlight.
Of course, the shirt he'd taken off was tied around his face, which seemed a really odd hallucination for her to have. And she would think she would dream of his grabbing her and kissing her, rather than of his hitting some very hard blows on the beetle with a huge tree trunk—far too big to be a branch—he'd got from nowhere.
And yet, she thought as she tried to concentrate on hitting any green-blue bits of bug that she could see through the panther's addled eyes. And yet the sight of him fighting the bug was far more distracting than the sight of the small furry things could be for the panther.
She bit and snarled and clawed at bits of bug, but in her mind she was admiring the way Tom leapt, the way he could turn on a dime, the force he put into the swing of that tree branch in his hand. From his movements, he too must have taken gymnastics or dance, or something.
Absorbed between her fight and disturbing glimpses of half-naked Tom, she could barely think. She heard the squeal of brakes toward the back entrance of the garden, but she paid it no attention.
Which is why she was so shocked to see Rafiel running toward them, gun drawn, blond hair flying in the wind and his expression quite the most distraught Kyrie had ever seen. He was screaming something as he ran, and it seemed to Kyrie—through the panther's distorted senses—that one of the words was "die." The other words, though, were "gravy" and "pick." She wasn't sure what gravy had to do with it.