falling?»
BACK IN THE ROOM I GRABBED A CHANGE OF clothes and showered. When I returned,
dinner had been brought in by the Red Guard: beef stew with fresh bread. Raphael had vanished
right after dinner, and the shapeshifters invited me to play poker.
They killed me. Apparently I was made of tells: they could hear my heartbeat and smelled the
changes in my sweat, and counted the number of times I blinked, and knew what cards I had before
I looked at them. If it had been strip poker, I would've had to give them the skin off my back. I
finally gave up and went back to my bed to read one of Doolittle's paperbacks, since he was
otherwise occupied. The good doctor turned out to be a card fiend. Once in a while, I glanced at
them. The six shapeshifters sat like statues, faces showing nothing, barely lifting their cards to steal
supernaturally fast glances. It felt weird to fall asleep with someone else there, but there was
something almost hypnotic about their absolute stillness that lulled me into sleep.
I dreamed that Curran and I killed a dinosaur and then had sex in the dirt.
AT ABOUT NINE, CURRAN, DALI, AND I MADE OUR way to the Gold Gate to see Andrea,
Raphael, Jim, and Derek take on the Killers.
The magic was up. Andrea grinned as she passed me by. She carried her SIG-Sauers in hip
holsters and a crossbow in her hands. With the magic up, the guns wouldn't fire, but she must've
wanted to be prepared for the shift.
Jim and Derek carried nothing and wore identical gray sweatpants. Raphael carried two tactical
knives, both with oxide finish that made the blades Teflon-black. The knife in his left was shaped
like a tanto. The blade in his right was double-edged and slightly leaf-shaped: narrow at the handle,
it widened before coming to a razor-sharp point. Raphael wore black boots, fitted black leather
pants that molded to him with heart-shattering results, and nothing else.
As he passed me, he leaned to Curran and handed him a paper fan folded from some sort of flyer.
Curran looked at the fan. «What?»
«An emergency precaution, Your Majesty. In case the lady faints.»
Curran just stared at him.
Raphael strode toward the Pit, turned, flexed a bit, and winked at me.
«Give me that,» I told Curran. «I need to fan myself.»
«No, you don't.»
We took off to the stairs for the better view. When the three of us settled on the staircase, Andrea
was drawing her crossbow in a businesslike fashion. The three shapeshifters spread out in front of
her.
Across the expanse of sand, the Killers waited in a two-by-two formation.
The Killers gave off a distinctly Japanese flair. Their Stone, a huge, towering monstrosity, had to
weigh close to four hundred pounds. Dark indigo, he stood eight feet tall, with arms like tree trunks.
A big, round gut protruded above his kilt, as though he'd swallowed a cannon ball. Two horns
curved from the coarse mane of dark hair dripping from his skull, and two matching sabertooth-like
tusks protruded from his lower jaw. His brutish, thick-featured face communicated simple rage, and
the huge iron club in his hand signified his willingness to let it loose. An oni, a Japanese ogre.
Next to him crouched a beast bearing a striking resemblance to the stone statues guarding the
entrances to Chinese temples. Thick and powerfully muscled, it stared at the crowd with bulging
eyes brimming with intelligence. Its flanks were dark red, its mane short and curled in ruby ringlets.
It sniffed the air and shook its disproportionately huge head. Its maw gaped open, wide, wider, until
its head split nearly in half. Lights glinted from brilliant white fangs. A Fu Lion.
Behind him a thin-lipped redheaded woman in a white shirt and flaring black pants held a yumi,
a two-meter-tall, slender, traditional Japanese bow. By her side stood an Asian man with striking,
pale green eyes.
The archer began drawing her yumi bow. She stood with her feet wide apart, the left side of her
body facing the target-Raphael. She raised the bow above her head and lowered it slowly, drawing
as it came down, wider and wider, until the straight line of the arrow crossed just under her
cheekbone.
A silver spark ignited at the tip of the arrow and ran down the shaft, flaring into white lightning.
Across the sand Andrea waited, with her crossbow down at her side. Raphael casually twirled the
knife in his right hand, turning it into a metal blur.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands braided into a single fist.
«They aren't children,» Curran said to me. «They know what they're doing.»
It made no difference to me. I would rather walk a hundred times into the Pit than see one of
them die in there.
The gong struck.
The archer fired.
Andrea snapped the crossbow up and fired without aiming. In the same blink Raphael slid out of