“I’m sure they’ll be coming out after me soon enough. They’ll be the ones dressed in white sheaths stained with wine and carrying staves. Bloodthirsty look in their eyes, chunks of meat in their teeth-you can’t miss them.”
She wasn’t kidding. A particularly piercing scream drew my gaze to the entrance, where a diminutive brunette in a white nightie had seized a much taller woman by the hair and a fistful of fabric at the small of her back. As I watched, this tiny woman-who could not have weighed more than 110 pounds-heaved the larger one off her feet, spun her around like a discus thrower, and slung her in a high, shrieking arc across the parking lot, over our heads, to land ruinously on top of Frank and Eric’s patrol car.
I almost wished Granuaile could have seen it; she wouldn’t have thought the Bacchants were victims anymore. Laksha laughed, somehow thinking the poor woman’s death was funny. We had different senses of humor, I guess.
I couldn’t stay back any longer. Not only was it clear that Laksha had done all she was going to do, but now the police would be getting involved. I had to eliminate the threat before bullets started flying and ricocheting off the Bacchants’ magic hides. There was no danger of being lured into their orgy now; the happy time was over and the madness had begun.
Still in camouflage, I charged the wee Bacchant as she tore after another panicked clubber. A second Bacchant emerged from the club, bloodstained and wrathful, eyes bulging as she grabbed a full-grown man and broke his back over her knee in one of those wrestling maneuvers that simply wasn’t for show. Too late to save him, but not too late for the fellow the tiny Bacchant was after. As she seized him by the collar of his Dolce amp; Gabbana shirt, I came in low with the bat in my left hand and swept her legs out from under her so that she fell ungracefully on her backside. She made the sound a cat makes when you step on its tail, and now that I was closer I was surprised at how young she was. She had probably been pretty once, with a name like Brooke or Brittney or maybe Stacy. She might have been captain of the cheer squad and a homecoming queen, driving to school in a pink Cabriolet her daddy had bought for her. Now, however, her nails were more like claws, and her teeth were filed to points, and she had blood dribbling from her mouth-and it wasn’t hers. I brought the bat in my right hand down hard on her face before she had time to leap back up. I even hit her again to make sure she was through, regretting the necessity and thinking that one never quite gets used to crushing skulls. Then I looked up to track where the other Bacchant went.
She was coming for me. She couldn’t see me, but she knew something had just taken down her sister and it was still nearby. This one had never been pretty. Her hair was the frizzy, curly kind that looks like a halo of shag carpeting, and it was matted with blood and pieces of recent victims. She had a beaklike nose, a single eyebrow above it like a malevolent, hairy caterpillar, and the same pointed teeth that the smaller Bacchant had. Her arms looked like flabby shanks of lamb, but there was a preternatural strength inside them. I know because, when I took a swing at her with the bat in my right hand, thinking I’d clock her upside the head, she felt it coming somehow and broke it in two just by doing one of those wax-off moves from The Karate Kid. Now holding half a bat with some sharp splinters at the end as I followed through, I had to think quickly as she kept rushing forward, reaching for me with a clawed right hand, and bringing her left one back around. If those got hold of me, I wouldn’t stay in one piece for very long. I shifted my grip on the bat handle so that my thumb was on the bottom instead of the top, and as her nails dug painfully into my left shoulder, I stabbed down with the sharpened splinters of the bat into the side of her neck where it met her collarbone. That set her back some, and she yowled as she released me to deal with it. I dissolved the camouflage on it so that she could appreciate what was causing the pain. She jerked it out as I backpedaled and shifted the bat in my left hand to my right, and though a fountain of blood spurted forth, she didn’t appear to feel faint: She actually accessed a whole new level of pissed when I already thought I’d never seen anyone madder.
I stepped to my right as quietly as I could and watched her scream away what little mind she had left. Regardless of her incredible strength, that was a mortal wound, and she couldn’t last much longer while losing that much blood. Bacchants aren’t great healers, and she couldn’t see through my camouflage, so I thought all I’d need to do now was wait a couple of minutes and make sure she didn’t hurt anyone else. But the damn thing took a deep breath to scream some more and smelled me.
The bloody broken bat suddenly became a wooden stave thrown at my heart, as she turned and chucked it uncannily in my direction. I had to drop to the ground to avoid it, and before I could roll away, she was on me. Quickly, I thrust the second bat up crosswise toward her throat, dismissing its camouflage too, hoping she’d take hold of it rather than groping for my neck. If she got hold of my head, she could tear it clean off. She took the bait, grasping the bat at either end and trying to wrench it free from my grasp. I held on for the first spastic attempt, but just barely. Her blood was dripping steadily down on me, ruining my camouflage and supposedly sapping her strength, but I could tell she was still a couple of oxen ahead of me in the muscle department. She gathered herself for a truly mighty yank, and as she did I knew I had to end this before she could use it against me. So when she yanked a second time, I didn’t even try to hold on but rather let go, which caused her to throw her hands up over her head as she unexpectedly met no resistance. That left her completely unguarded, as I intended, so I drained the last of the power stored in my bear charm and channeled it all into my left shoulder and arm. I rose in a stomach crunch and plowed my fist hard into her chin. The impact broke the first joints of my index and middle fingers, but it also snapped her neck.
That solved my immediate crisis but left me with several others. Completely drained of magical energy, I couldn’t begin to heal or shut down the pain. And all the weariness of my earlier casting of Cold Fire came back to settle heavily on my frame, even as the shag-haired Bacchant settled heavily astride my hips. There were still panicked clubgoers streaming out of Satyrn, and Frank and Eric, the broken-nosed cops, were heading my way with guns drawn. To top it off, I was so drained that I couldn’t maintain the camouflage spell any longer, and I became clearly visible to them. This just wasn’t the right time or place to have this fight, and that’s why I lost it.
Oh, were they happy to see me again. Not only was I visible, but so was my sword that had disappeared earlier, and a woman with a giant bloody wound was lying on top of me. Never mind that the sword was still in its scabbard and I was lying on top of it; never mind that a cursory forensics inspection would reveal that the wound wasn’t a sword wound; in their minds I had just about decapitated the poor woman with a bad hairdo.
So it was hands up, roll over facedown away from that woman, spread your legs, take off that weapon, and then a pair of cuffs around my wrists as half-naked people continued to run away, not from me, but from whatever horror awaited inside. Once I was subdued, it gradually dawned on them that I wasn’t much of a threat to the public: The public was freaking out about something else. Frank thought he should maybe take a peek inside.
“Don’t do it, Frank. One of them is still in there.”
“You shut up,” Eric said, poking me in the ribs with his gun. Authority established, he asked, “One of what?”
“These ladies in white that have been killing people. If you have to go, use your baton, not your gun.”
“Right,” Frank said sarcastically. “Ladies in white killing people. Like this very dead lady in white right here. We’ll be sure to follow your advice.”
Frank went into the club gun first, while Eric tried to take Fragarach away from me, which was resting by my side on the asphalt. It was bound so that it couldn’t be moved more than five feet away from my body, and, unlike camouflage, it wasn’t a spell that depended on my current power level to be maintained. It would stay bound to me until I dispelled the binding, so Eric was about to lose a fight with an inanimate object. He was so surprised by it pulling away from him the first time that he dropped it. He tried again, and dropped it again.
“What the hell is going on? Are you doing that?” he asked.
“Doing what, Officer? I’m facedown in the parking lot with my hands cuffed behind my back. What kind of bullets do you use?”
“Shut up. Full metal jacket.”
“Please tell me they’re copper jackets.”
“I said shut up. They’re steel.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Shut up.”
Eric was about to pick up my sword again, but he was distracted by the sound of shots being fired in the club. Nine of them, out of those modern guns the police carry, at a Bacchant with immunity to iron. And then we heard a man screaming horribly over the techno thrum.
“Frank!” Eric cried.
