7
Zvera Comprachicos managed to get back on her feet within two minutes of getting grounded and blinded by the psychic flash from the northeast, where the bastard had stumbled off to with the Green Yin's sword.
But once she was on her feet, there seemed to be very little reason to go anywhere.
"Gah! That power is beyond anything we can fight!" Bruja croaked. She had managed to unthaw and mostly transitioned from toad to Mexican woman, but her skin was still grey and bumpy. Her dark eyes slid around, assessing the scene.
They were sitting on a half-destroyed bench by a bus stop facing into the Walmart, which looked like it had taken a direct hit from a tornado. Scraps of fabric and plastic were still falling down from above. Karet was leaning against the leaning bus stop sign without looking at anything, the muscles on one side of his face twitching all together periodically. Zvera and Bruja were now watching the few remaining bikers trying to start their trucks and bikes. More than half of them had been smashed and shredded, but even on the outskirts of the lot intact-looking vehicles were all unresponsive due to the bastard's engine-killer ray.
Zvera frowned at this, looked at Karet and the muscles twitching on his face, not asking him anything for now. She sat hunched forward, the sword out but lowered, sullen but not disagreeing with the skinwalker.
"Dawn soon for you," Bruja added, now looking totally free of her toad-shape. "Girl, you must know this, but your favorite enemy might be dead already." When the young strigoi bared her teeth at that, Bruja specified. "He was reckless with the making of golems, and he made one he couldn't possibly control. We all felt that. He thought he would raise and control Man-Eater, the fool! He was probably standing over this new one when it woke up."
Bruja's quick eyes darted around the lot frantically whenever Zvera wasn't watching her, looking for the glass dagger she had stolen. The odds of finding and putting it back in its place by Zvera's side without suspicion were poor - thankfully, the golem's awakening had been so thunderous that it gave a perfect alternative explanation to the vogelfrei's certain death by the visha kanya venom.
The remote vision of the elder monsters in Cleveland would be very sharp, and they might correct this belief - at a time when Bruja intended to be quite far away and in a different shape, one of a hundred different Brujas.
"What are you looking for?" Zvera asked.
A startled skinwalker does not look startled. She looks totally relaxed.
"Intact phone toy," Bruja lied. "Sweet tracker on sword, sword in golem - maybe he forgot to take it off." The vogelfrei had indeed been too focused on his imminent death to remove the GPS bug from the sword before installing it into the silver golem. As a result, Shashka Khazar was less than fifteen minutes from contact with what he thought was the vogelfrei carrying the longsword.
"He wouldn't make that mistake." Zvera said curtly, making a fist but keeping that fist on her knee. "He got me with a silent missile, and those fake whistles! And he netted me like a damn fish!" She thought of her mother watching from Cleveland, and squeezed her fist harder.
"Have ... it." Karet mouthed, dividing his words with a word-searching pause.
Zvera snapped at him. "What happened to you? You're not regenerating from anything I can sense! So why ..."
In perhaps a first for a Comprachicos, she stopped talking of her own accord, blinking in confusion when her harsh voice had absolutely zero impact on Karet ben Shadim. He didn't blink or stammer or prostrate himself like a proper commoner. He was still figuring out how to take the phone out of his pocket so they could use it to track the golem, and he might work out how to push the buttons and get the dot on the map in another half-hour.
Bruja scoffed. "The Angry Son killed the other lender, using him as bait. Made him scream like a human to call her." The skinwalker held up her right arm and pulled back her deer hide for Zvera's inspection, showing that it was still grey and bumpy with toad skin, behind the rest of her body. "His pain-weapon struck me here afterward. Our lender was weak against it, not prepared."
"How did he catch you?" Zvera asked, forcing herself to wait. The tip of her falx was circling like the tip of a ballpoint pen in the air as Karet found his words. His voice was broken even when it started to string words together.
"Called her ... for ... me ... then made me ... call ... for her."
Bruja scoffed again. "He used their love. He understands a part of love, at least. The stupid-making part."
"Give me the phone," Zvera said quietly, plucking it out of Karet's hand without meeting his eyes. He clearly needed more time. With some clumsiness she got the map loaded on the screen, and saw the signal that they'd been tracking since the mid-afternoon of the previous day.
"Damn it, I'm zoomed too far in. Need context. Karet, how do I-"
The residual soreness of this long, awful night was probably the main reason why the remaining vampires did not sense the giant animated lump of silver until it was in speaking range. A great bell rang across Coldwater's east end in the pre-dawn.
"ZVERA COMPRACHICOS, DAUGHTER OF KOTYS! I HAVE RECKONING TO MAKE WITH YOU!"
Zvera looked down between her legs, sighed, slapped herself in the face hard, and jumped up to her feet with the falx by her side.
"Girl!" Bruja hissed. "What can you-"
"It's his machine, his weapon, even if it killed him, and I'm in a Proofing. I have to fight it. No one interferes." Zvera delivered this order without looking at either second, looking across the lot to the northeast, finally feeling the sting of pure silver ... and much more. She started a stiff but brisk march toward the source of the pain.
Vivien strolled out of the darkness under one of the four lamps in the lot that had not been knocked down by Calxor, twenty-feet tall, gleaming and smiling, and pointing right at the approaching Zvera, her white hair flowing as if in underwater currents. The muffled starlight in her chest pulsed slowly.
"Indeed," she tolled. "None will interfere."