wide, his feet on the floor. There was a single bullet hole in his chest. He looked like a lumpy bundle of old clothes.
Was he dead? I’d assumed he’d be as hard to kill as a sorcerer, especially with normal weapons. Ansel Zahn had been reduced to a bloody mess by an amateur firing squad, and he’d laughed about it. And Wally had said he was full of predators.
But now he had a hole in his chest, and he wasn’t moving at all. Had they done my job for me?
I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.
“That’s not cool, man,” Stoned said. He pointed at me. “This guy’s a witness.”
“You saved me the trouble,” I said. My hand brushed against something on the table. It was a wallet, bulging with paper receipts and cash. One of those scraps of paper might lead me to his spell books, and damn if I didn’t want to steal his money.
“He laughed at me,” Fidel said, staring down at Wally’s body. The hammer of his pistol was cocked. I looked at the other guns, but their hammers were all uncocked. Stoned rolled his eyes and shared a glance with the others. The three of them looked disappointed.
In the moment they looked away, I pocketed the wallet.
Fidel chewed his lip as though he was trying to work out a tough math problem. “First, he refused me. Then he laughed at me.”
“What now, Fidel?” The short, muscular man with the heavy beard stepped close. “You promised us something. How you gonna deliver now that this guy is dead?”
Wally’s shirt moved.
“You guys should get out of here,” I said.
Muscular pointed his gun at me again. “You ain’t calling the shots here.”
“It’s not about who’s the shot caller,” I said. I pointed to Wally. “This guy isn’t as dead as you think.”
Wally’s shirt twitched and shifted. One of the guys cursed in surprise, and they were behind me all of a sudden, because I’d moved toward Wally’s body without even realizing I was doing it. The clean, cold certainty I’d felt while I was stalking him had evaporated. More predators were about to get loose, and there was nothing between them and the world except me. I raised my ghost knife.
A gleaming red ball pushed its way out of the hole in Wally’s shirt. Then another, then four, five, six more were coming out as if they were being pushed through the opening. They tumbled down the sides of Wally’s body like golf balls and stopped in the folds of the blankets or in the nest of his crotch. A couple struck the floor with a heavy thunk.
Spiny metallic needles extended from their bodies, and they began to scramble toward us. I gripped my ghost knife tightly and moved forward to meet them.
The sound of the shot, the spark on the creature’s shell, and the bloody wound on his leg all seemed to appear in the same instant.
He fell back against the wall as the predator advanced on him. The bullet’s impact had as much effect as it would against a bank vault.
There were a dozen predators fanning across the room toward us and more coming every moment. Three were a second or two away from my own ankle, and I swept my ghost knife through the lead.
It burst into flames as I leapt back. The fire touched the two behind it, and they burst apart as well.
The sudden flares stopped the gunfire, at least. Fidel and his cousins backed toward the door, leaving Muscular cut off against the wall. Stoned drew back his leg and kicked at one of the scuttling little balls, but it was like kicking a metal post anchored into the ground.
I had to move away from the burning spot on the carpet. Stoned fell backward toward the doorway, cursing. Fidel and one of his cousins grabbed at him, but they were so spooked and frantic that they worked against each other. I could hear Muscular behind me, shouting in Spanish, his voice going high with fear.
Everything was loud and bright and hot. The carpet was burning, streaming thin black smoke that smelled like burned plastic. It was all too much. I couldn’t think clearly.
I moved toward Stoned, Fidel, and the others and cut through one of the predators pursuing them, then drew back. The creature burst into flames, then the others began to go up in a chain reaction, spreading the fire from the wall to the dresser and cutting off my path to the door. I turned my back on the popping sounds and the growing firelight.
Muscular had scrambled into a corner. He’d tucked his injured leg behind him and hammered at the closest of the predators with the butt of his pistol, but there was no effect at all. His teeth were bared in raw terror, and I rushed toward him, ghost knife in hand.
The nearest of the predators began to tear through his leather shoe with its needle-sharp forelegs. I saw blood, but Muscular didn’t do anything more than grunt. I swept my spell through the creature, and this time I saw that the predator didn’t split apart—its shell and limbs seemed to vanish, revealing the expanding fire from inside it.
Now Muscular screamed as the flames engulfed his leg. A second predator burst into flames nearby, and I fell away from the heat. There were no other creatures close enough to go up with it.
Christ, the things were still coming through the hole in Wally’s chest, as though he had an inexhaustible supply of them. The flames blocking the way toward the door had spread with startling speed; the front half of the dresser was wrapped in fire. Black smoke flowed along the ceiling and out into the hall through the door that Fidel had left open. The smoke alarm shrieked out in the hall, but I could still hear predators popping like caps in the fire.
The way out of the room was blocked by burning carpet, so the predators were trapped on the far side of the
