45 
BEST BE NIMBLE, BEST BE QUICK, IF YOU GO BENEATH THE LIMBO STICK
Not knowing what the hell else to do, Sig escorted me to the far side of the storage bay, where another narrow tunnel ramped upward. I set Kasia down beside the entranceway and took another chem stick, this one off Sig’s hip. I cracked the stick and tossed it upward. The glowing cylinder landed and briefly revealed a freight elevator and a door, then rolled back halfway down the sloping hallway before the cylinder’s path curved inward for reasons known only to it and mathematicians. The chem stick traveled in a semicircle and wound up nestled against a wall.
I moved forward while Kasia pulled herself to her feet and Sig urged on those who were still waiting on the other side of the storage bay. They were knights and werewolves, ferocious fighters every one, and there was still a long, reluctant pause before they obeyed her.
The door at the end of the hall had a window the size of a small picture frame centered in its upper half, and beyond it I could make out a stairwell going up. I stepped to the side and broke the window with the butt of my shotgun and was rewarded with a burst of flame that set the forearm of my armor on fire and blew the door off its hinges. There was no point waving and running about—it was the fresh rush of oxygen that had caused the fire to ignite—so I bent down and folded myself over my forearm until the flames were smothered by my fire-resistant armor.
Sig and Kasia moved up to cover the door from the side while I composed myself. “Molly’s shadow did this,” I told Sig.
It was Kasia who responded. “Why do you say so?”
“Smell that?” I asked. The air was full of a potent blend of cleaning products, lighter fluid, and concentrated amyl nitrates whose presence I won’t explain further because they’re really not the kind of thing anybody should play around with. But somewhere on the other side of that used-to-be door was a container whose lid had been lifted when Molly’s shadow walked past. “I was the one who taught Molly how to make that trap out of cleaning supplies and a few odds and ends.”
“Hmmn.” Kasia nodded at the freight elevator. “Which do you prefer, then? The elevator shaft or the stairwell?”
“The stairwell.” More practical or not, I was following Molly’s shadow, but I didn’t feel like admitting to a sentimental streak right then.
Ben’s voice came from where he was standing down the hall, behind the corner of the entranceway. “Hold up. I want to bounce something off you.”
Bounce was another code word. It could mean that Ben had just gotten word through the werewolf telegraph system, or it could mean that one of the knight teams had managed to enter the building through the access tunnels and ventilation ducts or lobby. If that were the case, the forces aboveground could flush out any nearby ambushers or trap them between our two forces.
“Sure,” I called back to Ben. “I was just thinking the other day that you and I never really have a chance to chat anymore. What’s up?”
“I’m having a little problem.”
“I told you to go before we left,” I said. “We’re not stopping to look for a bathroom now.”
“I’m not getting word from Simon anymore. Somewhere down the line, our telegraph system got cut.”
My first thought was that we’d been flanked, that some kind of butt-uglies had cropped up behind us and were rolling our forces up like a carpet. “Anybody hearing any signs of attack?”
“No.”
“There wasn’t an attack,” Sig said. “They’re just not there anymore. Or we’re not.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head in a way that could have meant anything and didn’t mean anything. “I don’t know what I mean. But it’s true. It feels like the whole world is a ghost.”
“We’re not in hell,” I said. “Trust me. I once worked at a fast food restaurant in Cleveland where the milk shake machine was always breaking down.”
Sig’s helmet stilled as she gave me a look.
“We might be on the spirit paths,” Ben said.
One part of my brain was rapidly thumbing through mental index cards of every fairy tale and fable involving spirit worlds and alternate dimensions that I’d ever read, but there were so many that I gave up fairly quickly. Another part of my brain was tallying how many people we had in or around the tower. There were probably at least a hundred knights at the tower lobby. Three other underground teams had been moving through ducts, service tunnels, and ventilation shafts, with at least forty fighters trailing them. “So, what I hear everybody saying is, we’re screwed, and there’s nowhere to go but forward, so we’d better stop talking and go there fast.” I speak Fucked fluently.
Ben didn’t take more than three seconds to think that over. “Yeah.”
At least this John Dee didn’t seem any more capable of using his Book without limits than Reader X had. The ground would have swallowed us whole. The air would have turned to fire. Hell, the bowels of the building might have turned into actual bowels and farted us out the sewer system.
The sounds of gunfire and breaking glass and the smacks of shattering concrete were breaking out in the stairwell above us. Ben had one more thing to say, though: “The traps this Molly shadow thing is setting are bad news too. Molly knows how you work. You might want to keep that in mind.”
“Got it,” I said.
I still wasn’t used to working with people in helmets again, and when four knights and four werewolves emerged from the shadows, I couldn’t stop myself from taking the time to identify them by smell and size and movement. One of them was Ben’s right hand, Louis. Another was Stuart, the young, stocky knight who kept showing up and smelling pissed-off about it. I used sign language to split us into two teams.
Louis took control of the second team, and they began to noisily unload climbing gear in front of the elevator doors. The sounds of fighting upstairs had only gotten louder, and I moved into the stairwell and inhaled deeply. It was still difficult to smell anything other than burnt air and ammonia.
“There’s something worse waiting for us in this stairwell,” I told Kasia.
I knew because I had taught that fire trap to Molly to keep werewolves or vampires from sensing anything else. The explosion temporarily damaged enhanced hearing, the heat from the fire interfered with infrared vision, and the dispersed ammonia disrupted scent trails. “Trust me.”
There were faint hints of illumination coming from the stairwell landings above. The light was shining through the small square windows in the upper frame of each stairwell door, but it wasn’t much. Each set of staggered staircases was separated by three-and-a-half-feet-high metal rails, but the bars had a solid wall of thick red sheet metal welded over them, with the words ROCKWALL TOWER WEST painted on them in white swirly letters. There was a slanted crack shaped like a triangle where the stairs on the left and the stairs on the right met and passed each other, so that you could only peer through the rails for half of the steps.
I risked a peek upward into the vertical crack, half expecting something nasty to come dropping down. Molly’s double had already proven that she could make homemade combustibles, and that wasn’t even accounting for magical nasties. But all I saw was a dark stairwell that went fourteen floors up. I felt like I was at the bottom of a huge gullet.
I began to creep up the stairs, negotiating the deep shadows cast by the scant lighting. Kasia trailed one flight behind me, and Sig was a good eight feet behind her. A paladin named Miguel who I didn’t know was our anchor, and after him, Stuart took charge of the larger group that would be following us. Below, I could hear the second scouting group begin to pry open the freight elevator doors. Thankfully, there were no explosions from that direction, but there were yells coming from the ground-floor lobby above. No, not yells. Screams.
Each separate set of stairs was twelve steps between landings, one middle landing between each floor, and I kept creeping my way up to ground level. The screams and gunshots were coming through the first-floor landing, and I tried to look through the small square window, but the window was coated in blood and fleshy bits. “Watch the first-floor door until I get back,” I whispered to Kasia. There was no way I was going to bypass that door without at least peeking through it—I’m just not wired that way—but I was still convinced that something nasty was waiting for us farther up the stairwell, and I at least wanted to secure the landing directly above us before we stuck our noses in any other wood chippers.
That turned out to be the worst good decision I ever made.
As I cautiously moved up to the stairs that led to the second-floor landing, something big moved. It was reptilian and scaled and long-bodied and flexible and cold-blooded and apparently capable of staying completely still for long periods of time, and did I mention that it was big? A head the size of an armchair came lunging around the landing from the adjacent stairs above me, and I fired both barrels of my shotgun. I think the loads ripped into the thing’s eyes. The head did stop moving forward, in any case, but a jaw opened and revealed fangs that seemed a lot larger than that head should have been able to contain. I saw those fangs clearly because fire built up at the base of the thing’s throat right before a solid sheet of flame came roaring out of its mouth.
It was a dragon. A live dragon. No, bigger than life, and blacker than sin, and the dragon had its own opinion on how likely it was that a man called Charming could ever really win a fight with such a thing.
Later, I would decide that the dragon had been a number of security guards. Later, I would wonder if the security guards had been particularly fierce, or if John Dee 2.0 just associated dragons with beings who guard precious treasures. At the moment, though, I was too busy throwing myself over the rail to my right with no thought of dignity or how I was going to land. My upper torso hit the adjacent metal rail, and Kasia hooked her arm around my neck and pulled me over before I slipped and caught in the crack in between. Unfortunately, Kasia only had one working hand, and that hand was full of Desert Eagle. She shunted me aside, and I landed painfully and slid farther down the stairs as flames hit the landing wall above us and rebounded.
When I tumbled down to the next landing, I lost track of what was happening for a few seconds. There’s a sound that a very heavy, very sinuous body makes when it moves over a hard surface on clawed feet, its legs built low to the ground. I have no idea how to describe that sound, though. I don’t think the English language was designed with that kind of sound in mind, and I doubt many people who ever heard the sound lived to describe it. So I’ll make up my own word. Sklurrphlitle. There was a sklurrphlitl ing sound.
The paladin, Miguel, passed me while I lay on the ground silently reevaluating the decisions that had led me to this point in my life. He was unslinging a carbine of some kind from his back. Sig had stopped to pull me to my feet, and Kasia’s handgun came clattering down the stairs as I let go of Sig’s arm. I heard the distinctive hiss of a katana being unsheathed even with all of the background noise. Then I couldn’t hear anything but an impossibly loud roar. Something wet and fleshy hit the wall above me—I think it was a large piece of dragon tongue—and then Kasia’s sword and Kasia’s body followed it, her torso smashing into the same wall so hard that Kasia actually crushed a thin layer of stone and showered me with dust. I’m not sure, but I think the dragon had used its own skull and powerful neck muscles like a club.
Miguel’s carbine began chattering, and I didn’t wait to see how that was going to turn out. Naptime was over. I screamed at Sig to back up and grabbed Kasia by the scruff of something and hauled her body to the side, down three or four of the next set of steps, and a few seconds later, another rush of flame came pouring down from above and filled the landing we had just vacated. The sound of large teeth and tearing flesh followed. Miguel. I guess the dragon liked its meat well done. I eased Kasia’s body farther down the stairs, staying low behind the sheet metal that covered the stairway rail.
Below me, Stuart yelled some question and Sig yelled something back at him, but I was focused on what was going to hell above me. And I mean directly above me. A huge reptilian snout was peeking out over the stairway railing directly over my head, crossing over the vertical crack between adjacent staircases. The dragon sniffed loudly, its eyes gouged out by shotgun pellets, and then it started to open its big mouth again, probably to bathe the entire staircase in fire. I really wasn’t in favor of this idea, and I strongly expressed my disapproval by grabbing Kasia’s katana off the top of the landing and stabbing its blade upward into the underside of the dragon’s jaw.
The dragon recoiled violently, banging its head on the stair rails above it. I hope it bit more of its tongue off too, the bastard. The dragon roared again, and if it had been able to throw its entire body in the crack between overlapping staircases, it would have killed me for sure. Instead, it began sklurrphlitling down the stairs across and above me, preparing to sinuously twist around the landing so that we could meet face-to-face. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about that idea, either.
I had no clue where my shotgun was, and it would have been empty if I did, so I held on to Kasia’s katana and stepped up on a handrail, then vaulted over the sheet metal separating the staircases. The top of the adjacent metal rail caught me in the chest again, and if it hadn’t been sharply tilted, I wouldn’t have scraped over it. But it was, and I did, and I landed on the moving scaly back of a beast that was at least eighteen feet long and four feet off the ground. Like most dragons from the old tales, it was wingless.
The dragon was suddenly in an odd position. Its forefront was now on the landing below me, its head just peeking around to the lower levels where I was supposed to be. Its hind legs were on the landing above me. And I was right on top of its middle. The dragon’s spine was too long for it to buck, and its mass was too great for it to ripple, so it just writhed. Fast. The metal railing lurched and half tore loose from the concrete stairs, but my foot still managed to kick off it so that I bounced back and stayed on the dragon’s spine, at least until the dragon veered in the opposite direction. Then I slid over the ridged, sandpapery surface of the dragon’s back before I could find any kind of handhold, and when I fell, I got pinned between the far stairwell wall and a massive torso that slammed into me like a tidal wave made of meat.
But that torso also impaled itself on the katana whose hilt I had managed to brace against the wall. The dragon’s scales only covered the upper half of its body. I couldn’t move anything but the forearm holding Kasia’s sword, but move that forearm I did, slicing the blade deeper so that I could lean into the wound.
The dragon screamed. Then there was a loud impact sound and the dragon died. Yeah, I know. Anticlimactic much? Unfortunately, the dragon didn’t stop moving. The dragon’s body kept convulsing from side to side and pounding me against the wall while I tried to free the sword and climb up over its back again. I’d grab a breath, have it knocked out of me, grab a smaller breath, and have my torso squeezed. I was having a Lamaze lesson from hell.
Somewhere in there, the cracked visor of my helmet turned into a spiderweb of fractured glass.
I’m not sure how long I spent like that before Sig came walking over the top of the dragon as if it wasn’t shuddering from left to right. She grabbed the shaft of the spear that was emerging from the back of the dragon’s skull a few inches beneath the sharp tip and pulled. I guess the spear had traveled between the dragon’s open jaws, up into the roof of its mouth, through its brain, and out the back of its skull. Once Sig had freed her spear, she held out her right hand so that she could grab my left. “Come on.”
Like I was just taking time to sightsee. To our left, we have stinking scratchy blood-splattered dragon scale that smells like bad aftershave and fish tank. To our right, we have profusely bleeding dragon flank that smells like burnt brass. Don’t be alarmed, folks; the blood may or may not be poison, but it isn’t acidic.
I could hear the second team that Stuart was leading moving around. The dislodged rail and its sheet metal covering had turned the lower stairs into a kind of crawlspace. Then Sig pulled my hand as soon as the dragon’s body shifted again. It gave me enough purchase to free myself and clamber up. I lay there on top of the dragon’s back for a few seconds, trying to regain my breath while its corpse shuddered beneath me. It was as if the dragon and I had just finished a particularly vigorous bout of lovemaking. The thought was so obscene that it almost got me moving again, but not quite.
“Good job.” By this time Sig was on the landing above me, guarding us. “You got it to open its mouth wide enough for me to throw my spear up its nasal cavity.”
“Just like I planned,” I gasped. The glass visor on my helmet was so splintered that I could barely see through it, so I took it off.
“Your pants are on fire.”
I thought Sig was just calling me a liar, but there really were small flames flickering on my left calf. I patted them out. Knight field armor is serious stuff. “Is Kasia okay?”
“She is. She won’t be moving for a while.” Sig didn’t sound too upset about that, but she didn’t sound too upset about Kasia still breathing, either.
“What are those sounds coming from the subbasement?” Now that my mind wasn’t going dragon dragon dragon dragon dragon, I was registering that the screams from the lobby had stopped, but there were new and weird noises down there.
Ben’s voice traveled up the stairwell from wherever he was crouching. “There are flying things in the elevator shaft.” He said this way too matter-of-factly. “Louis is handling it.”
Okay, then. I leaned Kasia’s sword against the wall. “Hey, Kasia,” I said in a normal tone of voice. “I’m leaving your sword on the landing right above the ground floor.”
Somewhere down below, I heard her voice, faint and ragged but alert. “Thank you.”
“Have you picked up Molly’s scent again?” Sig asked.
“No,” I said. “But I’ll find it.”
And I would.