ground his teeth together. Without reinforcements, he would have his hands full here.
Vanity spoke in a soft voice unlike her own. “Rock, I have a better idea for us. I’ll go to Zibock alone and take my little people. You stay here and keep watch on the Millets.”
“You don’t decide my actions for me,” Rock growled.
He tore the chain from his pocket and his fingers furled around a black cylinder. Instantly, a blue beam shot across Vanity’s eyes. She stared into the light, unaffected, and ripped the laser from his hand. “You can’t stop me. We know how powerful you are, but there are two of us and only one of you. John, whom I call Servant, not slave, has abilities you know nothing about.”
John made an angry noise but subsided.
Ben heard Rock bellow. And Vanity laughed again before the sound changed into a yipping cackle. Ben was certain he knew what was happening.
With three of them and one of him, to let them discover him before he was ready could be suicidal. Ben switched his attention back to the Embran.
He wasn’t disappointed. The door to the birdcage stood open and inside, Vanity morphed into the bat that immediately surged to several times the size it had been when he saw it before. Hastily, it wrapped its agile claws around the neck of a bottle, one of a number lined up on shelves of supplies. Ben was sure these must be the containers of orchid food Willow had mentioned. If she was right, there were shrunken people hidden among the bright granules.
Ben saw another movement and his stomach flipped. Willow crept through the entrance to the conservatory and inched toward the group of Embran.
He waited. If she heard him, she didn’t respond, although he couldn’t feel any shield over her mind.
A violent crash brought a scream from Willow. Ben leaped from his hiding place and stopped her from rushing forward. She was no match for his speed or strength, and he held her back easily while the Embran were absorbed in each other.
The bottle Vanity had picked up looked as if it had exploded on the floor. “Catch them,” she screamed to John. “I need something to carry them in now.” She grabbed another and threw it to John, who put it on the nearest bench. More bottles headed for John, and Ben figured either John had dropped the first one, or Rock had intercepted and smashed it. Brilliant turquoise granules had scattered everywhere.
“Stop it,” Willow moaned softly, her eyes wild and searching the floor.
The bat continued to pass bottles. Some John caught, some Rock snatched and immediately smashed. With the last bottle, Rock knocked John out of the way and swept the rest from the bench where they’d been placed. They crashed in heaps of myriad colored granules.
“So much for your plans to impress Zibock,” Rock said to Vanity.
She swelled even larger, her eyes glittering with fury.
John’s uncontrolled fluctuations ceased. His face became all but featureless while he stretched longer and longer, growing thinner at the same time.
John turned into a red, hard-shelled thing, the elegant clothes gone, more twitching appendages appearing rapidly. He was jointed, like a creature wearing armor.
“Save your time,” Vanity hissed at him. “I must go to Zibock alone. Wait here…Servant.”
John’s dislike for his nickname was evident. His tentacles slapped the cage bars angrily, slipped through, and Vanity’s bat bared its sharp teeth to bite, snapping off a piece of tentacle while John howled.
Even more horrifically, Rock’s mouth opened wide, wider than should have been possible, and when it started to close, a massive hooked bird’s beak replaced the lips. Pointed ears rose on top of the head, ears from which loose skin trailed like gray capes. Slimy feathers and hair sprang over his rapidly bulging body. Swaying with every move, a beard of fat hung beneath the beak. And the wings that had made Willow call this a raptor spread with enough force to knock holes in the walls.
Giving attention to the contents of the smashed jars was out of the question yet. Rock’s raptor form swung about, thrashing plants to shreds.
He saw Willow and roared as if in pain when he must have realized she could make a lie of the story he had told Vanity.
“What is she doing here?” The bat made a move to leave the cage, but at that moment, the small, green bird in the cage rose from the end of a perch. It flew at Vanity, stopped as it drew close and whipped its blue-black snakelike tongue around her head. Gasping, she heaved to free herself but the bird’s tongue tightened on her.
“Call off your bird, Servant,” she gurgled to John, who made a cackling sound and leaped about.
Rock lunged at Willow, his beak snapping. He snatched her up by the shoulders and shook her like a rag doll.
Ben had no choice but to give the creature all of his attention and hope John’s malignant bird would keep Vanity busy. John seemed transfixed at the struggle inside the cage.
Grabbing a potting fork from a box of tools, Ben thrust the sharp tines into the part of Rock’s belly that had yet to finish its transformation. An insane roar sent shock trembling through the atmosphere. Battling powers clashed.
Sykes appeared beside Ben, taking in the scene quickly. And Pascal was there almost at the same time.
“What took you so long?” Ben said.
“If you had made contact with Nat before wading in here, it wouldn’t have taken so long.”
“Enough, you two,” Pascal ordered, sidling toward the elongated red monster that was John, where he stood before the bat writhing in the birdcage.
Giant talons had replaced Rock’s hands, and Willow was clutched in one of them. Back and forth she swung with the wounded beast’s stumbling gait. Thick black fluid dribbled out around the fork tines still embedded in its belly.
Sykes pried Willow from the talons, and Ben, focusing on his own fingers, sank them into slimy feathers and fur. Instantly, smoke rose and the acrid reek of burning tissue. Rock howled and cast about, wild and still too strong to be taken down easily.
“Willow,” Ben shouted, unable to see where she had landed. “Just answer me.”
“I’m okay,” she said.
Growing tiny, the bat slid free of the bird’s tongue and fell as if dead, only to leap up, its size ballooning again and its needle teeth glinting. It cast around, searching for something.
Before Ben could stop her, Willow threw herself toward the smashed bottles, and he stared, amazed, at figures uncurling to full height—men and women, naked, but obviously too distracted to be concerned with their bodies.
“Heavenly hedonists,” Pascal exclaimed, although Ben thought the apparently appropriate description was accidental.
“Get out of the way,” Willow ordered the group. “Get back. Chris, Fabio, take them all out of here.”
Chris, Fabio and a woman who held Chris’s hand, stood their ground, but the rest edged carefully backward.
Ben heard another scream. Willow’s. Yanked by the rapidly growing bat, she fell inside the cage. Vanity had taken the key and deftly used her claws to close and lock the door on the inside.
He shot to tear at the bars.
Shrieking with unearthly laughter, Vanity threw Willow to the ground and spread herself on top of her, completely hiding Willow.
Ben strained at the bars and one began to bend outward. “Leave her,” he yelled at Vanity. “Get away. Willow?”
Willow didn’t answer, and Vanity only swelled larger, her whole, ugly body vibrating while she continued to laugh.
Swaying in front of Pascal and Sykes, John used his tentacles to snap at them, forcing both to engage him. One at either side, they pummeled him, but he kept swinging at them.
With a last huge shout, Vanity rose up, revealing a rapidly changing gelatinous mass. Inside it, Ben saw Willow fighting to escape. She might as well have fought with superglue.
What he saw next took his horror to a new level. Starting at one end, the mass formed itself into a hard,
