During my younger days, some people occasionally got ideas about burning me at the stake—there was a time when tattoos meant you had made a “compack widda debbil”—but I never stuck around long enough for them to try it. I had witnessed a few burnings though. It was usually not a witch at all but some poor person who’d committed no other crime than being born gay or with a third nipple or a birthmark of some kind—and the screams were terrible, unlike any other pain I’ve heard. This is truth: “Burning alive” is a wholly inadequate phrase to communicate the agony involved in the process. It’s every nerve in your skin screaming about the apocalypse, and there’s no way you can block that out and find a happy place. This wasn’t hellfire or magical in any way; it was simple chemistry, and, as such, my cold iron amulet afforded me no protection.
I rolled onto my right side to smother the flames along my tattoos. I couldn’t let my skin melt there or I’d be unable to use magic. I activated my healing charm to start repairing and replacing cells already caving in like Styrofoam; my face and torso were on fire, not my legs. I spat out the words to unbind my shirt even as the elf with lighter fluid poured on more fuel. The whooshing sound a grill makes when the flames are goaded isn’t so pleasant when your rib cage is serving as the grill.
I lost my ability to track what was happening. I knew there were four other elves and they would probably finish me, but I couldn’t think of anything but putting out the fire. And maybe getting my next breath. The fire on my face was sucking away all available oxygen, and I was gasping for relief.
I wondered if this could be it—surviving nearly 2,100 years, only to be torched by bloody dark elves in a sporting goods store. Nerves screamed despite my efforts to block them, and my left side was entirely aflame; still, I pushed myself up and let the remainder of my shirt fall away. Some of the flames fell with it—but that Svartálf with the lighter fluid kept spraying me down to keep everything alight. A growling noise I’d been hearing for a while was coming from my own throat.
Five closely spaced pops sounded in my ears, and the elves dropped—well, four of them did. The last one managed to go smoky before Granuaile could take him out, but the standard knife he’d been holding clattered to the floor.
“Drop and roll, sensei! We have a few seconds.” She ran toward me with a semiautomatic in one hand and her staff in the other. The shattering glass I’d heard earlier had to be my apprentice securing the firearm. Dark elves littered the ground; she’d pulled off a fantastic ambush. I rolled around on the industrial carpet and discovered it wasn’t very smothery. It worked to some extent, but I couldn’t put out my face and hair, and it hurt so badly I couldn’t think what to do about it. Probably because my brain was rather concerned with cerebral hypoxia at the moment. Granuaile fired a couple more times, presumably at the elf she’d missed, and then flannel began to rain from the sky. That smothered the flames admirably, and I realized that Granuaile must have disrobed mannequins to help me put out the fire on my head. I would never scoff at flannel again. Able to suck in a glorious breath or two, I took advantage and tried to return my nervous system to manual control rather than the autopilot of instinct.
“Did we get them all?” I gave a muffled shout through a red-and-black shirt.
“I don’t know, still scanning,” Granuaile replied. “I did get that one I missed earlier when he became solid.”
With the flames extinguished, I could mute the pain enough to think somewhat clearly. “We need to go,” I said, tearing the shirt from my head. It felt as if some skin probably came off with it. “Tar stains. Security footage of nonhumans. You know what’s going to happen to the building.”
Granuaile’s eyes widened. “Oh! We need to go.” The distant wail of sirens emphasized the necessity.
“Indeed,” I said. “Help me up.” I extended my right hand and she grabbed it, hauling me to my feet.
“Oh, gods, Atticus, your face …” The horror of her expression informed me that I wasn’t handsome anymore.
“If it looks half as bad as it feels, I don’t want to know. We’ll have to find a place where I can replenish.”
Turning to the apoplectic manager, I called, “Run for your life!” in Greek. “And don’t forget that guard in the corner of the store!” It was now up to him to heed or ignore my warning.
As we moved toward the door, my skin still palpably cooking and every available pore sweating, I said, “I’m running low on magic. I can cast camouflage on us both to get out of the door safely, but I won’t try to maintain it. I need to keep healing if I want to come out of this without scarring.”
Sirens honked obnoxiously through the streets; the manager’s backup was coming, and he’d be giving them a detailed description of us, no doubt. And the security cameras would have the whole thing on tape. The question was whether Theophilus (or Leif) had any intention of letting the police have access to either.
Actually, that wasn’t the only question. Why were dark elves working with vampires? The dark elves were supposedly behind the Fae assassination attempt earlier, so did that mean that vampires were also in league with the Fae? And who amongst the dark elves had thought it was a good idea to disguise themselves in Midgard as a bunch of clowns?
These mysteries would have to be solved later. I cast camouflage on us both, and the stored magic in my charm fell to near empty; I kept my pain suppression on but couldn’t afford any more magic to heal. The manager squawked when we disappeared.
We motored through the door, flashes of movement with uncertain shapes, and turned left down Kaisareias Street, heading south by southeast, dodging around people who couldn’t see us and made no room. Some of them sensed movement—the air went shimmery for a second—and stopped in their tracks, but most were unaware that they were obstacles in a street slalom course. I was running very awkwardly; my left side didn’t want to move.
After about a block, I turned off the camouflage to preserve what little magic I had left. We heard honking that wasn’t the annoying sirens of approaching police. It was the sort of honking you hear from horns mounted on bicycles. We also heard bells. Whistles. Kids laughing. I also heard gasps and startled cries as I passed by, a half- melted madman with a sword accompanied by a pretty girl with a staff and a gun.
The source of the happy noises became clear at the intersection of Vizyis Street, where we almost ran right into a whole parade of clowns—evil dark elf clowns, grinning luridly under the streetlights. They were coming from a greenbelt that wound through the city; either purposefully or accidentally, they stood between the nearest source of magical power and us.
At the same time—or close enough as to make no difference—an explosion behind us meant someone had firebombed the sporting goods store with military-grade weaponry. I bet it was Leif, and he knew very well that I had already left the building. I doubted the manager or the security guard Leif had charmed had made it out. There might have even been some other employees and customers left inside, tucked into a corner somewhere.
Most eyes were drawn by the explosion. But some, especially those closest, couldn’t miss the burn-scarred man and the athletic woman running across the street. The man was carrying a sword, which was illegal in Greece, and the woman was carrying a firearm, which was turbo-illegal due to Europe’s profound lack of a second amendment.
Fingers pointed at us, and I urged Granuaile to keep going.
Some of the clowns peeled off and pursued us on elevated bicycles and unicycles and miniature scooters; some turned the other way, toward the sporting goods store and the approaching police.
The explosion and the dissolution of the clown parade had confused onlookers and pushed some of them toward the edge of panic. These people didn’t know precisely what was going on, but they knew the clowns weren’t smiling and it wasn’t fun for the whole family anymore.
A couple of clowns took out their black knives, and people started to scream after that—so many people think all clowns are evil anyway, and this only confirmed it. Once the screaming started, there was unbridled pandemonium.
“Pandemonium!” I said. “
“Tell me about it,” Granuaile huffed beside me.
“I will if we can get out of this. We have to get to that greenbelt. Circle this block and head back.”
“Where have these guys been hiding?” Granuaile wondered aloud. “They didn’t travel directly here from the Norse plane, right? They had to have been staying here?”
“That’s a good point. Once the vampires found out where we were—”
