Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

“Okay, you’re still his girlfriend,” I said, because this seemed to be important for some reason. “I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear that.”

“He won’t be happy! He won’t be happy at all!”

“And why is that?” Marco demanded, looking like he’d like to introduce her to the nearest window. The kind without a balcony.

But Rian didn’t look like she cared. “Because he’s about to be killed!” she shrieked, and grabbed my hand.

And the next thing I knew, we materialized in a roar of noise, like a wave crashing onto a beach. Make that a thousand waves onto a thousand beaches, I thought, momentarily deafened. And staring around at a bunch of backs, because we’d landed in the middle of a crowd.

I never shifted into crowds for fear of ending up inside another person, but Rian must have had better control. Possibly because she didn’t exactly shift, but instead could transition between the human and the demon worlds. Which is where it looked like we were, in the middle of a crowd on what appeared to be some old wooden bleachers.

I thought there might be an arena down there that the bleachers were surrounding, but it was hard to tell since almost everyone was taller than I was. And many of them were holding containers of beer and popcorn in the way. Along with the usual bad-for-you stadium snacks like nachos and chili dogs and huge squirming black insects on a stick, still trying to claw and bite despite being drilled through.

Rian dragged me past, still staring, and the scene rippled at the edges. Other holes appeared here and there, maybe because there were just too many people for any glamourie to compensate for. Or maybe because there was no substitute for some of them, nothing except shuddering horror.

I jerked back from something I’d seen once before, a giant clear slug of a man, with an evil-eyed demonic thing crouched inside his overlarge belly, black and red-eyed and visible through the layers of translucent, glistening fat. Which was horrible enough, even before the red eyes swiveled to mine. And I started backing up the other way because no, no, no—

And ran into something else.

Something that looked like some kind of centaur, if instead of the back half of a horse you substituted a horse-sized scorpion, complete with curling barbed tail, and way too many legs and pincers in the place of hands. I shied back from him—it—as well, looking this way and that, but seeing no way out. Just a crowd of monsters who had just seen me, too, and were closing in on all sides, popcorn or whatever the hell it actually was forgotten in the headlong rush for a real meal.

I screamed and shifted, with nowhere in mind, just “away.”

And away is where I went, only it wasn’t an improvement. I looked up from the panicked crouch I’d landed in, and found myself in the middle of a huge open space, surrounded by towering stands full of monsters. And, yeah, it was an arena, all right, filled with what must have been ten thousand screaming fans, like a major league football game. Only I didn’t see a football.

I did see the giant pincer that plowed into the ground a second later, though, throwing up a great welt of sand. And Casanova, the usual suave and impeccably dressed casino manager, running past wearing a loincloth and an expression that went beyond panic, left fear in the dust, and was well into full-on heart attack territory. Only he was a vampire, and his heart didn’t attack.

But something else did. I had a half second to see a massive carapace coming my way, black and oily and shining under the lights, before it blocked out most of them. Along with the stands and the crowd and the sky, because the thing was big as a bus. And that wasn’t counting the hairy legs large as tree trunks that caged me in on all sides, before some protrusion as big as a sword flashed down—

And missed, because I’d just shifted to Casanova. Who was halfway across the sandy soil of the arena, and moving fast. At least he was until he ran into me and we boiled over in a rolling, cussing, screaming ball, and I shifted—

Back into my atrium at Dante’s.

I hit the marble floor, scattering sand everywhere, and Marco grabbed for me with a snarl—why, I wasn’t sure.

Until I realized—Casanova hadn’t come with me, despite the fact that I’d been clinging to him with both arms and a leg when I shifted.

But something else had.

Something else that I didn’t even get a good grip on before it jumped from my back to Marco’s face, like a prop out of freaking Alien. Long, black, king-crab-sized legs wrapped around his head, extending from a beetle-like body, a miniature of the one I’d just fled from. And which I felt

like fleeing from again but instead I was screaming, “Get it off him! Get it off him!” while a dozen vamps tried to do just that.

Fred burst out of the suite with a kitchen knife and plunged it into the space on the creature where hideous body met ugly head. And jerked back, I guess trying to peel off the horrible shell. And ended up with only a broken knife for his trouble.

So he tried using his hand instead, before jumping back. “Shit! Shit!”

“What is it?” I said, afraid he was going to say “poison.”

“The damned shell is razor-edged. It almost cut my hand off!”

“Here!” One of the boys threw him a jacket, which he wrapped around his bleeding digits before trying again.

And this time, he actually managed to peel off the shell, with a horrible squelching sound that I thought I might hear in my nightmares from now on. And then Rico was there, blocking the entry to the main part of the suite with an expression that said a platoon wasn’t getting past him, and Marco was grabbing the knife. And throwing himself onto the creature, which had just rebounded off the wall and onto the floor and was still moving.

And biting and fighting and scurrying around the atrium, leaving a trail of slime behind that wasn’t eating through the floor but was tripping the hell out of the vamps trying to catch it. And then the creature lunged for me again, only to get caught in midair by Marco’s knife, before slamming into the wall over my left shoulder.

We both looked at it for a second, the knife quivering out of the still-moving body, the splatter of black ooze that had smeared the plaster and left flecks all over my shorty pink nightgown, and the chittering, squealing thing.