Cruz screamed in sheer, out-of-control terror. Malik’s face was a mask of horror, teeth bared, eyes wide. Shade’s insides turned to water. She felt a desperate urge to find a bathroom, preferably one on another continent. But she did not scream, she had no right to scream, she was a monster, too, or would be in mere seconds.
“Malik!” She grabbed his shoulder. “You and Cruz get the hell out of here. Now! I have to—”
But what she had to do was not made clear, because the magma creature had turned his attention back to the Okeanos nestling up to the dock.
He . . . it . . . began to run.
One step and he was twenty feet away. Another great bounding step on legs as long as telephone poles and as thick as ancient redwoods. The vibration of each planted foot was like a low-level earthquake.
“He’s not exactly slow himself,” Shade muttered as she pushed open the door and stood on legs not quite her own.
The police forces in the parking lot didn’t need to be told to fire—they blazed away with handguns and shotguns, but if the bullets struck the magma creature, there was no sign that they were a problem for him. And then the monster threw wide his arms, a defiant Is that all you got? gesture.
Bang-bang-bangbangbangbang!
The police fired until their clips were empty, reloaded, and fired again, and all to no effect.
The monster bent to bring his hideous, burned-reptile head lower, mouth wide in a grin full of fire and smoke. He let go a sound that even from more than a hundred yards shook Shade down to her bones.
Ggggrrrahhhh-hah-hah-GARRRRR!
They had made a stop at a martial arts store and picked up various weapons for Shade: throwing stars, nunchakus, an actual sword, but they were pitiful stuff to use against this creature. Shade retrieved a pathetically small knife and an absurd set of nunchucks and realized looking at them that she had no chance, no chance at all.
Run, Shade, run away!
She could be in the next county in five minutes’ run. She could be in Mexico in twenty minutes. This creature was orders of magnitude too strong, too dangerous for her to battle.
But you’ve got nunchakus! a savagely sarcastic inner voice reminded her.
I need a damn tank!
She glanced at Malik and Cruz, frozen in their slowness.
“Hero, villain, or monster,” Shade said shakily. “And I’m supposed to be the hero.”
In her imagination it had always been a battle against the blood-smeared girl, against Gaia. In her fantasies she’d had powers of her own, and though the battle had been hard, she had always prevailed. She had always triumphed. Her throat had never been cut. There had been no scar to serve as a constant reminder that she, Shade Darby, was respo
nsible for her mother’s death. That she, Shade Darby, had been helpless and weak.
But this was not fantasy. This creature was thirty or forty feet of very real fire and death.
I can’t beat that!
If she turned away, if she ran like every ounce of her brain was screaming at her to, it would all be for nothing. She’d have condemned Cruz and Malik and herself to eventual prison. She’d have ruined her father’s career. All for nothing.
Was this how real world heroes felt? Trapped? Too committed to run away? You didn’t see that in the movies, Shade thought, you didn’t see the bone-rattling fear that came with facing deadly battle. Hopeless battle.
He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me!
She had impetuously attacked Knightmare at the lighthouse, but she’d figured she could hold her own with him. Knightmare was big and dangerous, but this? This magma beast wasn’t some art student playing the villain and waving his sword around; this was death made flesh.
What a fool she had been, what an arrogant, stupid fool. And now she could either run away and live with the knowledge of her cowardice or endure the pity of Malik and Cruz, and then their bitter resentment that their lives had been disrupted and perhaps shattered for nothing. For nothing.
For nothing but my fantasies.
Fight or flight? Basic human hardwired survival instincts. Fight or flight?
She had read somewhere that every battle at some point turns on the willingness of one person to run toward danger . . . or to turn and flee.