Come to think of it, Marcone was making them look incompetent with what he was doing. Good to know it wasn’t just me he did that to.
Two blocks away was a wall of eight-foot high orange and white plastic sheeting covered with environmental hazard warnings, and I headed for it the only way I thought could slow down the otso behind us:
I ran straight through traffic.
Headlights flared in my eyes. Cars honked and swerved. I had to stagger to one side, hauling a babbling Tripp with me to avoid a garbage truck, and I heard the thing hit the indestructible flesh of the spirit bear with a shockingly loud crunch of metal and breaking glass and exploding headlights.
“Come on!” I screamed and flung myself at the plastic sheeting with the full weight of my body and Tripp’s hitting it at a dead run.
We crashed through the plastic, and into the ruin the Titan had wrought upon my city.
It was like walking into a different world.
A forty-story building had fallen a block away from the plastic walls. Broken concrete and shattered glass and the twisted and torn ends of rebar had washed out like a tsunami over the adjacent buildings in a wave seven or eight feet deep, partially collapsing them. A gas station convenience store leaned at a forty-five degree angle near at hand. I scrambled up a slope of treacherous gravel toward its canted roof, dragging Tripp with me.
“We shouldn’t be here!” Tripp howled. “We’re trespassing! There was a sign!”
Behind us, the otso smashed its way through the plastic sheeting and crashed into a pile of rubble like a small locomotive. It hesitated for a second, head whipping around at all the urban carnage, and I felt bad for the spirit of the creature that had been trapped in the skull—it probably wasn’t having any better a time than I was. It opened its mouth and let out the ghostly echo of a bear’s roar, before its glowing eyes focused on Tripp again and it began rumbling toward us.
“Come on!” I shouted. “Get higher!”
We climbed the roof of the old gas station as the otso began slamming its way over the rubble in pursuit.
“This isn’t happening!” Tripp shrieked. “This isn’t happening!”
“Now you know how Maya feels, huh?” I panted. We got to the highest point of the roof, at its far end, and I had to grab Tripp to keep him from scrambling right over it and falling ten feet onto more rubble.
“Not yet!” I snarled. “Get ready to drop!”
“What!?”
I whirled to find the otso just reaching the lower end of the slanted roof. I planted a kiss on the bomb for luck and slung it across the forty or fifty feet between us. The spirit bear roared in fury as the object came clattering down in front of it, and slammed one enormous paw down on top of it.
“Jump!” I snarled, pulling Tripp against my chest and pitching backward, over the edge. I flung out my right hand and my will as I did, snarling, “Hexus!”
Between my hex and the otso’s, bad things were going to happen.
There was a flicker of sparks and a fraction of a second later, the bomb went off.
As explosions go, I’ve been closer to worse—but I wasn’t falling toward broken ground while I did it. The sound of it was enormous. The slope of the roof offered us some shelter, much of the blast followed its contour, carrying a cloud of shrapnel made from shattered concrete and broken glass up and away from us while we enjoyed the relative safety of being in the shadow of the blast. Even so, I picked up a few dozen minor cuts and abrasions and wounds—and that was before I hit the ground.
The spell-armored surface of my duster, at least, kept me from being impaled on a sharp end of rebar, and it likely stopped a lot of flying glass and rock—but it didn’t keep me from dislocating four ribs or from minor tearing of muscles in my lower back as Tripp Gregory landed on top of me, and the two of us bounced down the slope of rubble on the other side.