I ran a fingernail over his forearm.
He shivered. “Annette?”
The problem with the power I’d inherited—one of the many problems—was that it worked on me, too. The more his lust grew and poured over me, the more my blood heated to meet it. I wanted to throw him down and ravish him as the world came down around us. But I had decades of experience managing my own desires. When I spoke again, my voice was almost normal. “I need you to focus, Duke.”
“I’m extremely focused.” His hand cupped my face. His thumb stroked my lip. “I’ve missed you.”
I nipped his thumb with my teeth before I could stop myself. Dammit, this wasn’t the time. Reluctantly, I pushed Duke back and tried to concentrate on things like the shoggoth in the pit and the building about to collapse around us. “How many people are upstairs?”
“I think it’s just one family.” His words were raspier than usual. He reached for me.
I slapped his hand away. I had a lifetime of experience smothering my body’s reaction, but I’d overdone it with Duke. Most of his higher brain functions were offline. I could see it in his parted lips, the flared nostrils, the unbroken eye contact, the way the tip of his tongue moistened his lips...“I’ll take care of them. You need to get out of here.”
Duke swallowed. “I...I should help. They’re my friends.”
“You are in no condition to do anything but get the hell away from here,” I said sternly. Maybe a little too sternly, judging from how he straightened and caught his breath. I stood and retreated a step.
“Annette...” He clenched his fists. “About the way I acted when you were here before—”
“Take a minimum of three cold showers,thendecide what you want to say to me.” I pointed to the closest window. “Go.”
His steps were unsteady, but he avoided the gaping hole in the floor and reached the window. Once he’d climbed out, I headed for the door to the staircase.
I tried to move the collapsed section of ceiling holding the door in place but gave up immediately. I doubted even Jenny could have budged that.
So, I went for the direct approach. I pulled my knife and stabbed the closest part of the door. An axe would have been better, but my knife had been enchanted to penetrate kraken scales. The door was old, solid wood, and I pierced it like it was balsa.
Screams erupted from behind the door. My heart stopped. Had I hit someone? But the blade was clean when I pulled it back. They were probably just frightened by me hacking through like Jack Nicholson inThe Shining.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you were so close. My name’s Annette. I’m here to get you out. How many of you are there?”
“Six.” The voice was oddly high-pitched and melodic. “What happen? Is earthquake? Why Duke screamed?”
“Duke is fine, and there was no earthquake. Don’t worry. You’ll be safe as long as you don’t look directly at the eldritch horror digging a pit below the bar.”
A child began to cry. At least, I assumed it was a child. I suppose my “reassurance” could have driven an already-frightened adult to tears, too.
“Stand back.” I continued my assault. It didn’t take long to hack a foot-wide hole through the door.
“That’s enough big,” someone yelled from the other side.
I peered through and found myself face-to-face with a family of pukwudgies. The closest—the patriarch of the family, presumably—had a bulbous face with a nose like a potato and a chin like a slightly smaller potato. His skin was dark green, and he had quills instead of hair. He wore loose, much-patched blue jeans. Quills on his back poked through the tatters of an old T-shirt.
Most importantly, he was only two and a half feet tall, and he and the others all looked small enough to fit through the opening I’d made.
Without a word, he passed a pukwudgie toddler through the hole. The child was a third the size of the adult, but its quills were sharp as a kitten’s claws. Blood blossomed from the pinpricks it left on my hands and arms.
He handed over a second child before I could finish settling the first. Thankfully, the rest of the family was older and able to climb through on their own.
The ground rumbled again. Another arcade game fell into the pit with a loud splash. Chunks of plaster rained down. I hunched my back, doing what I could to protect the prickly, whimpering children.
“Why happening this?” yelled one of the adults.
That was a good question. If Alex’s goal was to sacrifice the Gauntlet’s supernatural patrons—maybe by feeding them all to the shoggoth?—then why hadn’t he acted to stop me from rescuing the last of those patrons? Or if it was a trap, why hadn’t he struck while Jenny and Temple and I were at our most distracted?
The answer came at once. Because it was neither a sacrifice nor a trap. It was a distraction. Alex had lured the three of us out, away from the protections of Second Life Books. Not to kill us but—
The remaining section of floor broke away from the rear wall. It dropped to a forty-five-degree angle, sending me and my two young pukwudgies sliding toward the pit. I hugged the kids to my chest with one hand and stabbed my knife into the floor with the other to stop our fall.
