herself together, and stood up, laughing drunkenly. Several of them splattered and did not get up.
I shot and shot and shot and shot.
The other shells, meant to stop the other paradigms, did little or nothing to these girls. Maybe one fell down on her rump and started crying, maybe two. Most of them slapped the bullets away like annoying hornets. Or brushed away the bleeding wounds as if they were nothing, Colin-like.
They had wands and spears in hand, and more than one girl was still clutching a convenient tree or oblong slab of rock. Then they were in a circle around me, dancing and screaming and laughing, pounding me over and over, stabbing, bludgeoning, whipping. One girl on her hands and knees put her teeth to my arm and bit.
I was bruised, but was not hurt. Even the tree trunk smashing over and over against me merely drove my armor-stiffened body into the dirt, but did not crush me instantly into red paste.
But I was blacking out, and the girl biting my vambrace was reaching for the seam where my helmet met my neck...
A column of fire fell down from heaven. It was a pillar, a turning inferno fifty yards high and six yards in diameter, surrounded by a whirlwind of smoke and ash. It landed in the midst of the dancing maenads and exploded. Long ropes and tendrils of flame surged out in each direction, taking up the half-naked girls and throwing them against the cliffside.
The maenads shrilled their horrid war cry and rushed into the fire, stabbing and swinging their spears and tree trunks. The column vomited fire across the spears and trees and ignited them.
Then the column shrank, grew brighter, stiffened, and exploded outward in each direction with mind-numbing violence. The flash dazzled me; the report deafened me. In the afterimage, I saw the silhouettes of women spinning end over end, against rolling clouds of red and black smoke shot through with tongues of fire.
Good thing Amazons built their armor to be fireproof. Or maybe the column of fire had done something particular to save me. Because when the swirling fires died down, there, in the midst of the smoking crater, surrounded by smoking ropes and helixes of dying flame, was Colin.
'You look good in that outfit, Dark Mistress,' were the first words out of his mouth.
'Yeah, so do you,' I whispered. He was in his classy black tuxedo, with a large gold ring shining on his finger. 'Kind of hurt, here...' I finished.
All the rapid healing the maenads had been doing must have peopled the area with a lot of healing energies, because all Colin did was lean down and kiss me on the thigh, and my leg was fixed. Once again, there was no transition, no logic to his power. One moment: broken leg, pain...
the next: no pain.
Maenads scattered to each side of us were groaning and giggling and climbing to their feet, shaking ashes from long (utterly unburned) hair.
Colin put his arm around me, picked me up, hugging me tightly to his chest, and he kissed me fiercely on the lips. With his thumb, he turned the collet of his ring inward. Maenads blinked, their eyes blank, and began looking left and right, making little murmurs of annoyance and wonder.
The fire and ash had made the maenads take their crazed eyes off us for an eyeblink, and that was all the ring of Gyges needed.
A swarm of black feathers erupted from Colin's back as ten-feet-wide hawk wings expanded into view. And then I was in the arms of a dark-winged angel in a tux, and we were flying away, skimming the trees.
Behind us, disappointed maenads whined and stamped their feet.
Nymphs
In the air, his arms around me, I spoke over the rush and whistle of the winds against his black wings. 'Pillar of fire. How did you manage that?'
He shouted back, cheerfully. 'I am a shape-changer. Why assume we are limited to organic shapes? Quentin told me the secret name of fire.'
I said, 'Where are the others?'
At that moment, I saw or imagined the rifle slung over my shoulder flicker and grow bright. It was hard to use my higher senses when I was enclosed in Colin's arms, but something in the rifle had just become very useful to someone else.
Without pause, I shrugged my shoulder half an inch into the blue direction and let the shoulder strap fall past and through my arm, grabbed the barrel with the other hand, and flung the mass away, amplifying the outward momentum- it was the quickest way I could think of to get the weapon as far away from us as quickly as possible.
The weapon had a computer inside it. Why not a radio link, a tracking device, a coordinating circuit for the commanding officer to find missing squad members? Why not a self-destruct mechanism?
The weapon opened up like a flower of pale fire. In the middle of the explosion hovered a blue eye, shedding concentric shells of crystal. Shrapnel ricocheted off my suddenly stiff armor. Blue light clung to Colin, flaming like cold napalm; he was falling, his face covered with blood.
