Then Lohengrin went down, ghost steel armor blinking out like it had never been there, and Tom Weathers towering over him for the kill.
Ah fuck it, Bugsy thought, and dove in.
From all across the Louvre, the wasps dove in toward a single target: Tom Weathers. The Radical turned at the sound of wings, flame dancing out. Bugsy split, shifted, tried to avoid the fire. He felt wasps cooking off like a deep, unspecific ache. Lohengrin was moving, moaning. He had his hands up, cupping his seared face.
Not letting you kill him, Bugsy thought and pressed in. A dozen wasps got through, stinging Weathers on the back of the neck and curling around toward his eyes.
Ellen’s voice came out of nowhere. “Bugsy! Drop! ”
No. Not Ellen’s.
Simoon’s.
Bugsy retreated, pulling his wasps together in a corner near the men’s room. The wind picked up, grit in the air. Bugsy shifted his insect bodies into the more familiar flesh. There weren’t enough. He could feel his breath rattling in his lungs. The tendrils of sand in the air bit at his skin.
Which meant it was shredding Weathers.
Simoon’s wind shrieked like a banshee, the sand looking more like a fog. The glass pyramid was already pocked and white where she’d brushed against it. Weathers, in the worst of it, lifted off his feet, arms and legs swinging, and crashed against the wall.
“That’s my girl,” Bugsy said weakly. “Get him.”
Baghdad, Iraq
The Caliphate of Arabia
They landed hard on the red-and-black Persian rug. Noel left Siraj whimpering on the floor, ran, and yanked an embroidered runner off a table. He couldn’t help but notice in one of those odd dislocating thoughts that always float past when a person was in a crisis that he hadn’t disturbed a single item of bric-a-brac on the table.
Returning to Siraj, he pulled out the splinter and wrapped the leg tightly in the runner. He stood and wiped his bloody hands down his pants. “I’ll let them know you’re here. They’ll get you to a hospital.”
“Never mind me,” Siraj gritted, through teeth clenched against the pain. “Get a gun. You have to go back. Go back and kill him. Make certain of it this time.”
“You seem to be under the misapprehension that you can still give me orders. Quite wrong. You just lost your hold on me. The secret is out. Weathers knows, and there’s nothing you can do to me. Now my wife is a target, and I’m more concerned about her than I am about you. Here’s some free advice. Never sleep in the same place twice, and get yourself some good doubles. Good luck.”
And he teleported away.
The Louvre
Paris, France
“Fuck!” Tom exclaimed as the wind slammed him into a wall upside down. He felt like a character in a fucking cartoon. The fire blasts he’d desperately launched in all directions had fatally flamed several people, including at least one Leopard Man. But he didn’t know who the hell was doing this to him.
The wounds Lohengrin had dealt him were weakening him fast from blood loss. Tom willed himself insubstantial and dropped to the floor as the miniature twister spun him back out in the middle of the room. By now most of his escorts were down. They’d been able to do little more than keep the enemy aces off Tom’s back. Now they converged on him with a vengeance.
A blow to his kidney made him gasp with pain. He turned into a right hook that busted his jaw and spun him back, and caught a glimpse of a big handsome woman in a suit, with black shiny braids flying about her dark face. She’d been introduced to Dr. Okimba as Wilma Mankiller, a Canadian strongwoman ace from the Blood branch of the Blackfoot Nation.
Tom prepared to flame her. Again the floor surged beneath him. He hit hard and rolled across the floor. Burrowing Owl flashed right through the spot where he’d been and ground his way into the floor without seeming to slow. That dude’s starting to piss me off.
Tom saw another figure flying beneath the pyramid. It launched a beam at him: red, white, blue. The fallen Kraut knight wasn’t the only one who knew the danger of an aimed palm. Tom hurled himself away. The French ace Tricolor’s signature beam seared Tom’s right side as its main energy blasted the floor. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Tom shot back a fire blast. Three-toned light flared around the slim figure. Fuck. Force screen.
He was plucked off the floor and caught in a bear hug from behind. He thrashed his legs and snapped his head back, but the Blackfoot ace was a canny enough grappler to keep her face away from his attempts to pulp it with the back of his skull.
Tom knew he was stronger than she was. He could’ve broken free. If he hadn’t already been weakened by all the battering and bleeding. It was all he could do to keep from passing out from the pain her embrace caused to his seared and busted body.
Through agony-slitted eyes he saw the flying Frog aim his hand again. He phased out. Wilma Mankiller bellowed in surprise as the tricolored beam hit her.
Almost at once Tom rematerialized. Going insubstantial took more out of him than any other power. He dropped to his knees and was instantly bowled over as Burrowing Owl erupted through the floor beneath him again.
In midair Tom flung out an arm. White light lanced from his palm. The beam transfixed the flying man’s torso. He dropped straight down smoldering without making a sound.
Other aces were all around him, crowding in, pummeling him, but they couldn’t use beam weapons for fear of toasting each other the way Tricolor had toasted Mankiller. But they hurt him. He felt his left arm break. Something else lanced through his guts from behind, almost buckling his knees. He lashed out in all directions. He managed to knock down a guy who looked like he was made of some transparent semiliquid crystal but felt like metal, won free of the scrum, if not the fucking hateful bugs.
Something wrapped itself around his waist. It clung as if covered with glue. He felt himself yanked off his feet, saw he was being pulled toward a car-sized toad squatting to one side of the melee. “Oh, fuck me,” he moaned. He had no choice but to go insubstantial again. The bulbous eyes seemed to bulge more than usual as his captive passed clean through him. Tom stopped behind Toad Man, spun, grabbed him by a hind leg. Then a flashbulb went off in Tom’s skull. White dazzle filled his eyes as migraine pain blasted his brain.
Snowblind. He’d never experienced her power firsthand but he knew what it did. The blindness would last for minutes; if he stayed here he was well and truly fucked.
But the pain also shocked enough adrenaline into his system for one final surge of super strength. He flung Toad Man up at the pyramidal roof. Then he launched himself in normal flight, steering toward the crash.
Agony bathed his legs as some sort of energy beam brushed them. For a split second he expected to implode his skull on an intact strut. At this point he could give a fuck. Instead he felt cold high-altitude air on his face, smelled diesel fumes and fireplaces. He was clear.
With no perceptible interval he was in orbit, feeling vacuum tugging at his skin and the cold of space sucking warmth from his bones.
But alive. And free.
For now.
Ellen was kneeling at Lohengrin’s side. She was naked, except for the cameo at her neck. Bugsy was naked. The Louvre was really a hilariously stupid place to be hanging around naked.
The sirens were all around. Men and women in paramedic’s uniforms. Police. At least one SWAT team.
Bugsy knelt beside Ellen. “M’okay,” he said.
“You’re not,” she said.
The gurneys were coming out. Garou’s body covered in a blanket, blood soaking through the cloth. Snowblind was on her feet, but only with the assistance of two medics. She was crying. Buford was walking around, apparently unhurt, but with a stunned expression. Burrowing Owl was dead, too. And there, along the wall, a dozen nat soldiers and security men. And as many of the PPA’s Leopard Men. All of them incapacitated or dead.
Bugsy coughed. His lungs felt fragile. His body felt too thin, like if you held him up to a flashlight, his bones would show. He’d never lost that many wasps at once. He wasn’t sure he could. “Klaus,” he said. “You okay?”
