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“It is our allies attacking,” Hansen said.“An army of witches, mages of all sorts, demons—”

“Demons!”Dad scoffed.“They could give a shit about the world.I tried to get power out of them, and do you think they’d give me any?”

“They were saving it up for this,” Hansen said.“One great assault on our enemies—”

“Yeah, that’s going to work.”Dad rolled his eyes.But then they narrowed again, and he surveyed us, piercingly enough to make me duck my head.

“What are you thinking, boss?”Daisy asked, pushing her lips past his fingers.

“Distraction.We’re about to set off one hell of a disturbance in the spiritual realm, maybe enough to draw some attention.If the damned gods nose about at the wrong moment, it could be a real pain in my ass.Not to mention the risk of dragging one of them along with me, and wouldn’t that be something?”

“No,” Daisy said fervently.“It wouldn’t.”

“This might be useful.”Dad looked at Hansen.“Are you about to make a ruckus?”

“Huge.”

For the first time, Dad smiled.“Thenvia con Dios, motherfucker.”He looked at the cloud.“Take them into Vegas and shove ‘em out.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Iknew we’d reentered the real world when an explosion went off almost in my face.I froze, staring at a wall of fire exploding against a shield that hadn’t been there a second ago, but which was saving my ass right now.The fire licked around the bright blue bubble of Pritkin’s armor, trying to consume it and us, but flickered out after a moment in a wash of steam as the water element swallowed it whole.

And put it out.

“Shield, shield, shield!” Pritkin was yelling, but other protection spells were already blooming across our party.The witches threw a gold one over themselves and Alphonse, Enid shielded herself and Æsubrand in green, Bodil was outlined in a darker sapphire than Pritkin used, but which seemed to do the trick, and Mircea—

“Mircea!” I screamed, and Pritkin threw our shield outward at the same time Enid did hers, almost crushing Mircea between them.

But Pritkin managed to pull him inside, and we all hunkered down while another barrage fell around us, with chaos raging outside the thin bubbles of our spells.

For some reason, our allies had decided to focus their attack, not on the edges of the city as they’d planned, but in the center.Or maybe they were doing both; I couldn’t tell with explosions hitting down everywhere, buildings crumbling, and shards of glass, concrete, and faux stone thick enough to count as a hailstorm threatening to bury us alive.And people screaming and running and getting brought down by what amounted to a dozen daggers in them as soon as they moved, because this was not survivable!

“What the fuck!”I saw rather than heard Alphonse say, as a bunch of tunic and sandal-clad types like ourselves, probably some of the gods’ human servants, were nailed to the roadbed by a cluster of wooden splinters as big as saplings.

And that seemed to be enough for Mircea.He snatched me up from the crouch I’d instinctively sunk into and yelled at Pritkin.“Let’s go!”

“In a minute!”Pritkin was looking around wildly as if trying to get his bearings, like that was remotely possible in this!

“No, now!”

“I don’t know where we are yet!”

“And a delay will change thathow?”

Pritkin didn’t answer, but a blue, 3-D, map-like grid of the city popped into the air a moment later.It was fritzing in and out, probably from all the magic being tossed around, but he finally stabilized it enough to figure something out.Because after staring at it for a second, he abruptly took off.

“Come on!”he yelled over his shoulder, and everyone came on.All of us scurrying through the streets hunched over protectively, not that it helped.The shields were the only things keeping us alive, and I didn’t know how much longer they’d hold.

Because this was a magical barrage.

A palm tree vanished to our right, not going up in flames so much as disappearing into thin air from a nearby explosion.It shook our shields and collapsed the buildings on both sides like dominoes, spilling debris into our path and sending more bouncing overhead, with some of the spinning pieces being larger than me.I stared at them as we ran through the middle, until the clouds of dust that accompanied them coated the outside of our shields so thickly that I couldn’t see anymore.

Pritkin did something that cleared them off, but that only showed me a billowing yellowish storm on all sides, punctuated by screams, explosions, and quakes, the latter shaking the road under my feet.We somehow stayed up anyway, which was good since a cracking sound was our only warning before the street itself erupted, carved down the middle by some blast from far enough away that I couldn’t tell it apart from all the rest.But the result would have swallowed us whole if Mircea hadn’t thrown us to one side.

We hit the ground, and I looked across the street to see the rest of our party doing the same, while the edges of the roadbed speared upward between us in a long, jagged line.And then I wasn’t seeing them anymore, but not because I’d looked away.A metal shard had come out of nowhere and pierced our protection, dripping with a glowing orange curse and coming within a whisper of taking out my right eye.

Mircea swore and jerked me back, and Pritkin tossed a shoulder, sending the evil thing flying back out again, but the fact that it had gotten in at all…