the creature’s back to distract it from killing Chico. He did his job well enough that the thing decided to do something about Sam instead.
The ghallu turned with a roar I felt as much as heard, a burst of pressure and heat that smelled like boiling sewage, then it flung a huge broken slab of the heavy mahogany bar at Sam. It hit like a missile and sent most of the tables flying as if they were bowling pins, silencing my buddy and his Mossberg. The impact knocked me down as well, and I knew I’d be limping later when the adrenaline faded. Before I could go help Sam the ghallu leaped toward the spot and began digging through the wreckage, roaring like a Harley that had lost its muffler. Even from a few feet away I could feel the heat radiating from it as if it were a dark sun. Worried that Sam might be unconscious and unable to defend himself, I stood up and gave the ugly bastard the rest of my silver rounds right in the side of its inhuman head. As my hammer fell on the last shell, and the flash of light caught that dreadful half-face turning toward me, twisted with near-mindless rage, I suddenly realized that we had this whole thing wrong: Sam and I had come here for the safety of the wards, but whatever Heaven had devised to protect The Compasses had come up short against this ancient hobgoblin. The bar was no longer a place of refuge, it was a trap with no way out but a fifty-foot drop or a deadly bottleneck in the stairway or the elevator.
More importantly, though, the monster was after me, not Sam or any of the others, so if they couldn’t help me kill it-and if Chico’s awesome silver-salt machine gun wasn’t going to do it, nothing else would-then I needed to get out. Otherwise my friends would die too, and what would be the point of that?
Of course, this was all completely academic because the ghallu had just refocused itself on me, a soft squishy thing with an empty revolver, standing only a couple of yards away. It dropped the shattered table it had just lifted, then sprang toward me like a cat on a lame mouse.
A stream of water smashed into the ghallu and knocked the thing stumbling to one side. It soaked me too but I hardly noticed that. The creature bellowed in anger and-hallelujah! — serious pain, enveloped in clouds of hissing, billowing steam. Police spotlights were now shining through the broken window from the street below, but even by their glare all I could see of our attacker was a writhing, black shape, a shadow within a shadow.
Monica and Annie Pilgrim stood in the doorway of the hall leading to the restroom, struggling to aim a giant fire hose as if they were wrestling a live anaconda, hammering away at the demon with something like a hundred pounds of water per square inch. The steam clouds were getting thicker and thicker but the creature hadn’t lost its footing and, in fact, appeared to be wading against the thunderous flow of the hose toward the source.
It had been a wonderful idea but it wasn’t enough water to completely cool the creature, or even enough force to slow it down very much. It was enough, however, to give me a single desperate idea and the chance to operate on it. As the room slowly turned into a boiling hot sauna, and the monster bellowed and gurgled and fought back against the hose, I leaped over the bar and dug through the wreckage until I found the bar hoses for soda water and tonic. I ripped off the nearest one, faucet and all, then crawled through the wreckage to the wall, feeling with my hands until I found a heavy extension cord, which I pulled loose from the socket. I could hear Chico groaning somewhere in the rubble.
“Chico?” I called. “You okay, man?”
“Some broken ribs, I think. I need to reload but I can’t find the rest of the fucking shells!”
“I’m getting out of here-I think it’ll follow me if I do.” I jammed the siphon hose into my belt, grabbed the extension cord, then straightened up and sloshed as quickly as I could past the splashing, thrashing giant and toward the shattered window. I was almost blinded by the thick clouds of steam, but fortunately so was the ghallu, and I managed to slither past just beyond its reach. The water around my ankles was already getting uncomfortably warm from the demon’s heat as I reached the jukebox and looped the extension cord around it, keeping an end in each hand like a logger climbing a big tree. It was almost certainly too far down to the street to jump without breaking an ankle-our angel bodies are tough but not magically invulnerable-but I was hoping to lessen the distance with this little trick. I climbed onto the window sill, kicking long slivers of glass out of the frame, then when the creature’s angry bellowing quieted for a moment I shouted, “Monica-take the hose off it!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Trust me!”
The stream of water shifted to the side and the ghallu straightened. For an instant I could see something of what it looked like undistorted by heat, its skin dark, knotted and shiny, like something out of one of Billy Blake’s most apocalyptic etchings. The pressure suddenly gone, the ghallu actually stumbled; before it could regain its balance and go after the two female angels who had made it so angry, I bellowed as loud as I could, “Hey, you! Yeah, you-big, hot and stupid!”
As the steaming thing turned toward me, I leaped off the window backward, one end of the heavy-duty extension cord in each hand like a giant jump rope. I had a moment of freefall, then a painful jounce that almost yanked my arms out of their sockets. I didn’t have long to suffer, though: my weight on the loop of electrical cord tipped the juke box over, a result I hadn’t expected, so instead of having a moment to ready myself for the rest of the drop I simply bounced once in midair and then kept falling.
I hit the ground with a painful jolt to both legs, but did my best to parachute-roll and disperse the force. As I lay panting on the ground feeling for anything interesting like compound fractures, I saw the ghallu staring down from the shattered window above me, haloed in the water from the hose that Annie and Monica had trained on it once more. The thing stood almost motionless despite all that pressure, looking for me…or sniffing for me. Police officers and firefighters were all over the sidewalk and street around me, clearly called in on what they thought was some kind of armed robbery of the Alhambra Building gone very wrong-another reason I had to get the monster away quickly, before it massacred them all. I rolled over, scrambled to my feet, and ran limping away from the flashing lights into Beeger Square with people yelling after me and a few policemen even trying to catch me.
That wasn’t going to happen.
As I reached the middle of the square I heard the first startled screams from the late-night crowds, and I knew the ghallu was after me again. That was one less thing to feel bad about-at least I was taking it away from my friends-but if the next part of my hasty plan didn’t work, I definitely wasn’t going to make it to Ash Wednesday this year.
A couple of teenagers riding double on a motorcycle almost knocked me over in their hurry to escape the square, self-selecting themselves as key ingredients in Part Two of my plan: I knew that if I didn’t get back into some kind of vehicle I wasn’t even going to make it to the far side of the plaza before the demon pulled all my bits off. I ran after the motorcycle kids and caught them in a few strides. I yanked the one in the back off his seat, then jumped up behind the driver and, before he realized quite what was going on, lifted him up and tossed him over too. I leaned down over the handlebars and fumbled the bike into second gear-it was a newish Yamaha, and I hadn’t ridden one in a while-then yelled back at its driver where he lay on the ground, “Tell me you got insurance. You do, right?”
He said something I couldn’t quite make out-I told myself it was, “Yes, plenty!” Then I gave it all the throttle I could, and it leaped ahead. The engine was surprisingly strong; the front wheel came up off the ground for a moment, but I leaned way forward and brought it down, then blasted across the square as fast as I could, weaving in and out of startled revelers who were beginning to panic and run in different directions- perhaps because of me, perhaps because of the giant, steaming, horned terror that was chasing me.
I almost dumped the bike getting out between a couple of official vehicles on the far side of Beeger Square but regained my balance and accelerated again along Main Street as I left the crowds behind. I was aiming for the open-air Riverside Shopping Center since it would be closed for the night, and I couldn’t really afford to dodge pedestrians much longer. The ghallu was just behind me, something I could hear even though I didn’t dare risk a look back at the speeds I was traveling. Up and down curbs and through pedestrian alleys not meant to be traversed at sixty miles an hour-I was coming damn close to killing myself and sparing the ancient demon-thing all the trouble. But somehow I bounced up an inactive escalator without popping a tire and made it to the upper esplanade of the Riverside Center. Now I risked a look back and saw the black shape coming up the escalator behind me. It had dried and was already ablaze again, flames licking its silhouette, gleaming red eyes fixed remorselessly on me.
The upper level of the Riverside Center has shops all along one side, but the other side is open to the
