“I’m not doing it again.”
“Obviously not, you can’t make it be more on fire now, can you? ...Maybe a tree?” Clayton looked around to see if there was a tree he didn’t like that wasn’t close to his boat.
That was when he saw his boat blip out of existence.
His first thought was that this inevitable mishap was going to cost him far more than fifteen minutes. It was going to fully rob him of crumpets; he just knew it.
Chapter
Twenty
CLAYTON
“What the ever-loving bloody fuck did you do?!” Clayton rounded on Mal, ready to tear him apart.
“That wasn’t me.” Mal had lost the laid-back demeanor he’d had all morning and shifted to the lethal man Clayton had met in Boston Below. “Get behind me.” He shoved Clayton behind him without waiting for him to respond.
“You didn’t do this?” Clayton’s face drained of all color as he felt the spell on Merry’s doll ping in his mind. It was faint but clear. Merry was in trouble. His voice was hoarse as he whispered, “The children.”
“I need to get you out of here,” Mal said, like it was a rational course of action and not the absolute load of fire beetle dung Clayton knew it to be.
Clayton made to sprint for the empty spot his boat used to reside in, but Mal grabbed him by the arm. Clayton used his fancy Guard training moves to dodge Mal’s grasp because fuck that bullshit.
Wonder upon wonders, it actually worked, but Mal didn’t stop. In a blur of motion, he was in front of Clayton, blocking his way to the dock.
“Get the fuck out of my way,” Clayton snarled. His mind was protesting urgently against offending the person who was seemingly able to bend reality to his will, but Clayton couldn’t hear it past the screaming void that had sprung up in his chest the second he’d realized Mal wasn’t playing a joke on him.
Clayton’s people were on that boat. Hisfamilywas on that boat, and he would do whatever it took to get them back unharmed.
Clayton feinted to one side and kicked out to do a leg sweep on Mal, but Mal suddenly wasn’t there, and Clayton’s arms were trapped behind his back in a vice-like grip.
“Calm yourself, and I will help you fix this,” Mal said in his ear, voice harsh with some unidentified emotion. His chest was plastered against Clayton’s upper back, and he trapped Clayton's hands in one of his so he could wrap an arm around his waist. “Don’t fight me.”
Clayton’s head throbbed in pain the way it often did when something Claytony was about to occur. There was a loud crack at their feet, and Clayton braced himself for anything, but instead of having the gates of hell open up and swallow him whole, Mal was the one who fell.
A half-rotten wooden plank on the boardwalk had given up and taken a swearing Mal with it. He hadn’t gone far. Only one leg had gotten swallowed, but it was enough to slow him down.
Clayton used the opportunity to make a break toward the boat slip, but he stalled out when an air sprite dropped down to hover in front of him. Samantha’s voice came from the misty creature, and it stopped him in his tracks.
“Clayton, what happened? Are you okay? Merry’s doll just sent out a code yellow, and then Marshall told me the shields he put on your boat vanished from his senses.”
Clayton recognized the air sprite. Fzzt had taken a liking to Clayton a few months back, and it had been lingering around the chapter house a lot lately. Clayton was touched that it had allowed Samantha to use it as a messenger. It would have needed to bring a friend in to relay Samantha’s side of the conversation, and that was a level of focus most air sprites couldn’t muster.
Mal caught up to Clayton, blurring into existence next to him with superhuman speed, but he didn’t try to restrain Clayton again. He seemed to have been mollified by the fact that Clayton had stopped racing to the empty boat slip.
“I’m fine, Samantha,” Clayton responded as his mind finally kicked in and started to do its job. “Did his shields vanish, or did they break?”
Marshall’s shields were among the strongest out there, so if they’d broken, Clayton was fucked. Anyone who could take them down was far stronger than anything Clayton was capable of dealing with.
His eyes flicked briefly to his new pet monster before turning his attention to Samantha’s hurried one-sided conversation with Marshall. Either she had a magic item that allowed her to communicate with Marshall freely, or he’d set up a mindlink with her. If it were the latter, his boss was a lucky bitch. Marshall had never done that withhim.
“Marshall said they vanished from his senses. They didn’t break. What happened?”
“Someone took my boat with my family on board. I was outside, so they didn’t take me. I just… stood here and watched it happen.”
Like an utterly useless person, a mean portion of Clayton’s mind inserted. Clayton told it to bugger off because he was too busy to feel like shit at the moment. It could make an appointment and come back later.
“Ask Marshall if he can trace it,” Clayton demanded and then waited impatiently while Samantha relayed his question, playing with Mal’s hand like a fidget toy. When he pricked himself on a claw, he looked up at Mal, suddenly realizing that he’d been holding the man’s hand without even thinking about it.
