As it wrapped around my thigh, the limb felt warm and smooth, almost like plastic, but then it changed, becoming hot, painfully hot. It began to burn. I screamed, and blacked out.
And okay, that was the best thing that could have happened. “Hurt” doesn’t hold a candle to what I felt. I felt like I was nothing but pain. I felt like it was burning through the skin and into my leg.
It felt like that because that’s exactly what it was doing.
Rod whirled around more quickly than I’d have expected. Not Jaclyn’s (“a blur knocked me out”) level of speed, but fast enough that if I ever got thrown into Faerie and had to fight trolls, I’d give them some respect.
Fast enough that his punches took out two of them at once, and their automatic rifles might as well have been shooting marshmallows. He didn’t seem to care.
They were pouring into the room. I didn’t know how many there were. More than twenty for sure. Probably more than forty.
Well, except that after Rod took out like, half of them, they were backing up and not firing a whole lot.
A few stayed in the doorway, but the rest retreated into the hall. Voices shouted words I couldn’t make out mingled with the beeps, clicks and flat tones of walkie-talkies.
They were planning something, and we didn’t want to wait for it.
The metal looked wrong. Even rusted, the color shimmered between blue and green. Nick would have known the name of the metal, but I’d seen it before—in the engine room of the Heroes League’s “jet.”
Nick’s grandfather had scavenged the engines from an alien spaceship.
It put a new spin on everything in the room, and I had no way to read any of the clay tablets or anything. One of them might be the impregnator’s owner’s manual for all I knew. Continue reading Cassie: Part 16
Sam scried out the rooms behind the doors. Most of the place appeared to be a workroom—it was some kind of lab—but there were people locked in a storage room just off the main room.
There were seven of them, four girls, three guys, all around our age. A bucket sat in the corner. I couldn’t see details in the water basin, but I could guess what the bucket was for.
“I don’t like this,” Sam said. “The Nine? Without backup?”
“We can take them. It’s not like we’re storming their headquarters. This is a lab. Worst case scenario, we’re facing a bunch of guards, and maybe a scientist. Besides, we can’t leave them like that.” Continue reading Cassie: Part 15
A burst of light almost blinded me. The frog-things howled and held their arms in front of their eyes.
Sam shouted, “Both of you, come here!” She held the staff in both hands, keeping the top end high above her head. The tip of her staff blazed with light.
I didn’t hesitate, shielding my eyes from the light with my hand, and joining her. Within two of his steps Rod stood next to us.
I couldn’t see much of anything past Sam’s light, but within it, I could see everything like it was day. The frog-things backed away to the edges of the circle
“This is great. Why didn’t you do this before?”
“I’m not sure how long it will last.”
The shark monster wasn’t alone. Frog-things stood all around it, but the closest four of them held poles with hooks on the far end. Shark prods?
Rod muttered something hard to understand, but it ended with “—it.”
“I’ll take the shark,” he said, and put Sam and I down near the wreck of an SUV. Most of its front had been bitten off. I could see the tooth marks in the metal.
The missing chunk of engine and hood lay in front of it, but no mangled people.
I liked to imagine that the driver had escaped—somehow.
I’m an optimist like that. Continue reading Cassie: Part 13
Rod swore. Sam said, “I know. I know, but we need to calm down and make a plan.”
I barely listened to her. I was busy looking out the window.
The frog-thing that had tried to open the car door wasn’t coming closer. Not that there was much closer to come. I mean, it stood maybe two feet from the car, breathing and making low moaning noise. The creature tried to open the door once, but Sam had locked it after I pulled it shut.
Even as it grabbed the door, it kept its eyes toward the ground, away from the car’s lights. Continue reading Cassie: Part 12
“Do it, and hurry,” I said. “The guy in the van could be anywhere by now.”
And maybe I shouldn’t have said that because Sam didn’t look quite so happy afterward. I need to remember to think before talking. She’d have hurried even if I didn’t say anything.
On the other hand, she didn’t argue with me. Continue reading Cassie: Part 9
“Meet Patriot Jr.,” Agent Lim said. “His father is Patriot, one of the Liberators. He’s in the Young Liberators, and of course, the two of you know him.” He nodded toward Troll and Red Hex.
“This is the new Captain Commando,” Lim gestured toward me, “and the problem was that those guys,” he pointed at the guys on the ground, “were trying to kidnap a couple people, but it’s over. She stopped them. We’re cleaning up.”
“Nice work,” he said, and smiled at me. “Who are they with?”
“No idea,” I said, “I’m hoping Agent Lim will figure it out.” Continue reading Cassie: Part 8
“We had to change,” Sam said. “You don’t want to risk exposing who you really are. And then I set up a ward that stopped people from noticing that we were here. That’s why no one else came down the alley.”
“It’s really cool,” Rod said. “Think of it as a Someone Else’s Problem field from Hitchhiker’s Guide.”
So right, another guy who would assume that I’d read that book—because Nick and Marcus weren’t enough.