to deflect only a portion of the attack and was knocked to the ground and badly dazed.
What I had mistaken for a piece of rope instantly transformed into a twenty-five-foot-long albino king cobra as it hit the floor. Trinket reared up, hissing like a steam engine, and flared her hood, causing different heads, all belonging to various lethal snakes, to sprout from her milk-white torso.
Trinket lunged at Bonzo, but the hell-ape grabbed me about the waist and leapt out of the way. As Syra’s familiar regathered for another strike, a vulturelike creature, larger than a condor, with the toothed bill and reptilian head of a pterodactyl, swooped down from the rafters of the warehouse, clawing at Trinket’s ivory scales. I recognized it as Esau’s own familiar, Edgar, in his demonic plumage.
Trinket’s extra heads hissed and struck at Edgar, momentarily scaring him off, while her cobra head spit venom at Bonzo, striking the familiar square in the eyes. Bonzo shrieked and let go of me, clawing at his face. I took full advantage of my freedom and ran for cover behind a stack of palettes as the hellspawns continued their fight to the death.
As the blinded Bonzo staggered about, screaming like a monkey house, Trinket wrapped her two-story-long body around him faster than a thought. Once her enemy was caught within her limbless embrace, the hydra’s heads struck as one, delivering a chorus of death bites. Bonzo screeched in agony as the venoms of the black mamba, krait, pit viper, puff adder, rattlesnake, and sea snake were pumped simultaneously into his body.
Boss Marz was standing over the prone figure of Lady Syra, his left hand aglow, ready to deliver the coup de grace, when he heard his familiar’s death-scream. The crime lord’s face turned pale as he saw Trinket slither away from the hell-ape twitching on the warehouse floor.
“Leave him alone, you monster!” Marz screamed. He turned his back on Syra and ran to his dying familiar. Dropping to his knees, he grabbed Bonzo’s blood-smeared hand and pressed it gently to his cheek. “You can’t die here,” he told the hell-beast. “If you die in the mortal world, you die forever. Please, go home, Bonzo.”
But it was too late. Perhaps Trinket’s hydra venom had paralyzed the familiar, or maybe he needed eyes in order to travel between dimensions, but the hell-ape did not disincorporate the way it had when Scratch came close to killing him in battle. With a final, childlike whimper, Bonzo shuddered and went still.
Suddenly there was a huge thud, as if a battering ram had been slammed into the side of the building, and one of the loading dock bay doors abruptly gave way. The clockwork dragon, still dressed in the golden skin of the last battle-dragon, pushed its way past the twisted metal. As Boss Marz and his assembled Maladanti stared in disbelief at the creature before them, the clockwork dragon’s hinged jaws fell open and issued a thunderous call to war.
PTU officers in riot gear, leprechauns armed with shillelaghs, Amazon archers, Valkyrie spear-maidens, centaurs in war-armor wielding maces and swords, merfolk equipped with tridents and nets, and unarmed satyrs, fauns, and huldrefolk came pouring through the breech. At the head of the charge was Captain Horn, dressed in his formal uniform, his hands empty save for their magic.
Boss Marz quickly got to his feet, his dead familiar forgotten, to marshal his own troops.
And the battle was on.
The gang members surged forward to meet the invaders, hellfire and lightning leaping from their left hands. Some of their volleys found their marks, while others were dodged or batted away by PTU with strong right hands, sending the deadly missiles careening through the warehouse like errant pinballs. Within seconds the interior of the warehouse had become utter chaos.
A group of leprechauns, lead by Seamus O’Fae, swarmed a Maladanti like soldier ants, beating him mercilessly with their shillelaghs. As they took their much larger opponent to the ground, Little Big Man gave a war whoop and bashed in the gangster’s skull. An Amazon archer put an arrow in the chest of a Maladanti spellslinger, only to be engulfed in hellfire. A Maladanti screamed in terror as he fell under the rending hands of a half-dozen maenads. Old Lord Chiron, accompanied by Kidron, Canterbury, and Lady Syra’s chauffeur, Illuminata, charged through the madness, smashing their adversaries with flying maces and flailing hooves.
I saw Kidron gallop forward, snatching up Hexe and swinging him onto his back. Together the childhood friends stood their ground, the centaur swinging a battle-axe while Hexe bashed their attackers with a morning star.
Elmer, Lady Syra’s former footman, charged one of the Maladanti, catching the gangster on his horns and sending him flying into the air with a single toss of his thickly muscled neck. The minotaur’s bellow of triumph quickly became a scream of agony as he was fried by a shock of lightning and dropped to the floor like a side of beef. In turn, the Maladanti responsible for slaying the man-bull did not have long to gloat before finding a Valkyrie’s war-spear in his gut.
Giles Gruff, still wearing his monocle, used his shepherd’s crook to pole vault himself into an enemy, smashing his cloven hooves into the gang member’s startled face, while his fellow satyrs and fauns surrounded a couple of spellslingers, keeping them off balance and unable to defend themselves by butting them from every possible direction.
I heard the roaring of big cats and saw a pair of tigers and a mountain lion maul a Maladanti spellslinger. Once they were finished with him, Lukas, Meikei, and Dr. Mao set about looking for fresh prey. A half-naked huldra leapt upon one of the gang members, bearing him to the ground as she throttled him with her tail, only, in turn, to be set ablaze by yet another of Boss Marz’s croggies. And in the middle of it all was the clockwork dragon, its golden hide immune to hellfire the same way a duck sheds water, lashing out at its attackers with its whiplike tail. I could feel the leash of energy between us, allowing me not to so much consciously control its actions, but guide them. The animating spark that I had placed within my creation made it both a part of me, and yet a thing of its own, not unlike, in its own way, the child I now cradled in my arms.
From my hiding place, away from the bloodshed of the battlefront, I could see that Erys had finished charging the portal that would serve as the doorway between worlds, the sigils and signs that covered the massive stones now glowing like they were radioactive. The red fog had all but disappeared, providing an all-too-clear view of what lay in wait beyond the threshold, not just for Golgotham, but the entire world as well.
“Bring me my sister!” Erys commanded. “With her blood, I can at least open the portal wide enough to allow the first wave through! Once my allies have a toehold in this world, there is nothing these fools can do that can stop them.”
Marz turned to grab Lady Syra, who was lying on the floor, still dazed from his attack, only to find Trinket in his path. The familiar’s multitude of heads hissed angrily at the Maladanti as she tried to defend her fallen mistress. But as the hydra advanced on the gangster, there was screeching noise and the hell-bird Edgar descended upon her yet again.
With a snap of his toothy beak, Esau’s familiar succeeded in biting off one of Trinket’s extra heads. Boss Marz summoned forth flame, scorching the flailing neck stump before it had a chance to regrow and multiply. The hell-bird snipped off another head, then another, and each time Marz cauterized the neck before it could regrow, until Trinket was left with just the one. The badly wounded familiar spat a streamer of venom at the Maladanti in a last ditch effort to protect itself, only to have it fall short of its mark. With an angry hiss, Trinket disincorporated in a puff of sulfurous smoke—fleeing back to whatever hell had spawned her to avoid meeting Bonzo’s fate on the mortal plane.
“On your feet, woman,” Marz growled as he dragged a semiconscious Syra to where Erys stood before the portal, ritual knife in hand. “The Witch King commands your presence.” As he let go of her arm, Syra crumpled to the floor like a Japanese lantern at the feet of her brother’s stolen body.
“Look at you,” Erys sneered. “Your love has made you grow old and soft before your time, little sister. I’m doing you a favor, really. But in memory of our childhood—I shall make it quick. I can not say the same for the others.”
As Erys raised the ritual dagger above her head, the knife was abruptly wrenched from her grip, as if yanked by an unseen hand. The dagger hung suspended in midair, just beyond Erys’ reach.
“Who dares?” Erys shouted, her face flushed crimson with rage.
“
