Seymour stared.
Sariel shrugged.
Seymour looked at Day.
She meowed and shrugged too.
Fantastic.
Their presence had drawn the attention of the human dancers, though most continued their frantic movements without directly acknowledging them. One of the cowboys, however, turned his head toward them. His face morphed into a mask of utter agony and he moved his mouth in a silent plea.
Seymour wasn’t the best at reading lips, but he swore it was…
Help me.
Not even knowing what he could possibly do, Seymour found himself stepping forward in order to assist.
Sariel’s hand on his shoulder stopped him, and he again shook his head.
Seymour wanted to argue, but a loud cry snapped his attention back to the dancing crowd.
The cowboy’s moment of distraction had apparently been enough to throw off the entire group, and the dancers tripped and fell all over each other. Most of them landed in clumsy heaps, the few left standing continuing to twirl desperately as if nothing had happened. The giant couple in the middle stilled, and the green man was furious.
“Howdareyou!” he snarled, his wings flapping as he stalked toward the cowboy. His voice was rich, rumbling and echoing throughout each inch of the large space like the purr of a giant jungle cat.
“Please! Your Majesty!” the cowboy pleaded as he dropped to his knees. “I didn’t mean?—”
The cowboy’s mouth vanished.
There was simply no more mouth.
No lips.
No seam.
Nothing.
The cowboy screamed, but it was muffled now. He clawed at the blank slate of flesh where his mouth had once been, and his eyes rolled back. Flowers sprouted out of his nose, his ears, and still more from the front of his pants.
Seymour didn’t want to think about where those were coming from.
The cowboy floated up and then was hurled against the nearest slab of concrete, his body imploding inward until there was only a new bloom of bright flowers in its place. These were blue. His cowboy hat wafted toward the ground, and that was it.
He was gone.
Seymour clung to Sariel, no longer finding the surrounding flora as beautiful as before.
“Oh, my darling,” the headless metal man soothed. “My sweet kitten. My beloved. What’s wrong?”
That was definitely Talos.
Even without a head, he still sounded like a game show host.
The green man pouted and crossed his arms. “He ruined our dance! Hello? Everything was so perfect! It wasperfect!” He eyed the other dancers, who were frantically trying to recover and continue. “I should take the rest of them. Start over. And then?—”
“Darling, please.”
“No, I want todestroythem?—”
