And then a second later, someone grabbed the other one.
“Go ahead, Sergeant, go ahead,” a familiar voice said. “I’ve got ’er.”
I looked around to see Red wearing my old leather coat. And a stern expression. And slicked-back hair, because he was doing a damned fine impersonation of a war mage. Except, you know, for the two feet of leather he was dragging, ’cause the guy wasn’t much taller than me.
Aren’t you a little short to be a storm trooper? I thought hysterically, and bit my lip.
“And who’s got you?” the sergeant asked dryly, because he wasn’t buying it, either.
“Good question,” Red said, and hit him over the head with a heavy-looking vase.
It broke with a splintering crack nobody heard over the din, the sergeant took a nose dive, and I took another kind of dive for the stairs. Only to have Red catch me and drag me back into the office. “What are you doing?” I rounded on him. “This is our chance! We can get out while they’re distracted!”
“Which would be a fine and admirable plan,” he agreed, slamming the door behind us. “If not for one small inconvenience.”
“What inconvenience?”
“They just locked down the building. Why d’you think I’m up here?”
“I don’t know. Why are you here?”
“So your demon can get us both out! Did you get him?”
“I got him,” I said, pulling out the trap.
And then Rosier fell out.
Onto his face.
What was left of it.
Red looked down at the motionless creature, and then up at me. “Now what?”
A minute later, Rosier was back in the box and we were out the window and onto the roof. Where it was still raining cats and dogs—and war mages, by the look of things, because a wave of them were prowling around the streets below in twos and threes. And even if I’d wanted to drop into the middle of that, there were no fire escapes, and the nearby buildings weren’t anything like nearby enough. And they had steeply pitched roofs running with rivers of dirty water that were busy pouring off into the street six stories below.
I’d have had to have a death wish to try landing on one of them.
And I didn’t.
I really, really didn’t.
“Y’know, I’m not trying ter seem ungrateful,” Red commented. “But I’m not seeing how this helps us.”
Neither was I.
Until a cart pulled by a single, sway-backed old horse came trundling down the street. It looked to be full of trash. Smelly, smelly trash that the war mages were ignoring as utterly beneath them.
Fortunately, I didn’t have such high standards.
I looked at Red. “Do you trust me?”
He blinked, like he wasn’t used to being asked that question. “More ’n I trust them.”
“Good,” I said, and bopped him.
A moment later, I’d climbed around the window to the biggest, swiftest-moving waterfall I could reach, which was cascading down to the roofline and off the edge, into the street below. The street filled with war mages. The street that passed right by the front of war mage HQ.
The street the horse cart was going to be passing along in about a second.