It was, however, a standoff, and Max was the one who figured out how to break it.
"Here!" she said. She pushed the steel cable into Gio's hands. He managed to close his half-numb fingers around it, immediately feeling it biting into his skin. There was blood on Max's palms.
But she was now free to dive for the air pistol, which Gio had dropped when Javic snared him.
Recognizing that he was now a sitting target, Javic released the fiery ropes. Gio stumbled backwards as the pressure on his wrists was suddenly relaxed, along with the abrupt disappearance of the searing pain. Gio's sudden movement wrenched on the steel cable wrapped around Javic's arms, knocked him flat when he had just started to rise, and dragged him a few feet forward. Javic, however, now had his hands free. He began to writhe out of the cable, while doing something complicated with his right hand in the dirt.
Max jockeyed for a good angle with the dart pistol, then yelled when two stone hands erupted from the ground and closed around her ankles. Her shot went wide, the dart plunking in the ground beside Javic's leg.
There was no help for it, Gio thought; he was going to have to shift. Most of Max's weapons, aside from the grenades, were of little use against Javic's stone servants. Rather than trying to free herself, however, she was quickly reloading the dart pistol with her feet pinned to the ground. It was clear that she understood Javic was the real target.
The stone hands holding her ankles wrenched her off balance. Max went to one knee with a gasp of pain, and her next shot missed as well.
With Javic's attention now on Max as the greater threat, she was in danger, and Gio's choice was abruptly clear. He shifted with shocking speed, more swiftly and easily than ever before, and bounded forward. Two swats of his stone paw shattered the bonds on her feet. Then Gio lunged for the magician.
His jaws snapped shut on empty air. Javic, with the cable lariat still dangling from one arm, scrambled a few feet away and gestured. Some of the stone around his feet separated from the rest of the ground and lifted him into the air like a flying surfboard.
Oh no, you don't.Gio swatted it out from under him. The rocks went flying one way, and Javic flew the other. In midair he lashed out with a pair of his fiery ropes and hooked one of the beams protruding from the cabin's wall. It smoked a little, but he whipped around and landed on the roof, stumbling but catching himself as he landed.
Gio hated to give him credit for it, but that had been a pretty cool move.
Unfortunately, now he was on the roof, out of reach. Gio stood up on his back legs and swatted at him, but even with his massive size, he couldn't reach all corners of the roof, and he was much too heavy to climb up.
A stoneskin lumbered into view around the hut. Its abrupt appearance made Gio realize that he wasn't sure where Max had gone. Restocking weapons, he hoped. He lashed out at the stone mannequin and knocked it down with a swipe of his stone paw.
Huffing for breath, Javic turned and gestured at the air. A portal began to open above the roof. In the bright summer air, it was like a slice of winter. Snowflakes sifted down, and Gio caught a glimpse of black-robed cultists and a snow-covered cliff behind them.
Then Max sprinted around the corner of the hut yelling, "Gio, shut your eyes!"
She lobbed something that flashed in the sun, a well-placed throw that sailed through the opening.
Either the cultists or Javic saw it coming. The portal winked shut, and the object clattered across the roof instead of landing in the middle of its intended targets, the cultists. Javic kicked it, and it went sailing off and detonated on the other side of the cabin with a loud noise and a flash of light. Javic yelped in shock.
Max snatched up the dart rifle. "I just don't have the range with the pistol, and I only have two shots left," she told Gio. "Distract him!"
Gio had an idea for how to do that. He whacked the wall of the hut with a massive stone paw. The logs were sturdy, but after years of weathering, they were no match for his weight and power. The wall collapsed inward, and the roof began to come down.
Javic yelled again and scrambled to get his balance on an intact section of the roof. He was blinking painfully; it looked like the flashbang had done a little damage, at least.
Then the ground under Gio lurched and moved.
Gio tried to say, "What?" but it came out as a feline growl. The rock rose up like Javic's stone surfboard, but rather than lifting him into the air, Javic flipped him as if launching him from a catapult—straight at Max.
If he hit her as a lion, he was going to kill her. Gio shifted human, and they went down in a tangle of limbs. He tried to roll and take the brunt of the fall himself.
The next thing he knew, Max was lifted away from him. One of Javic's fire-ropes was around her throat. Max's eyes were wild and she clawed at her neck as she was lifted into the air by force.
She was choking to death, and Gio saw red.
He reached for the rifle that she had dropped. It was loaded and ready to go. With Max's life on the line, Gio found a chill calm settle over him. He squeezed the trigger.
Distracted and still half blind from the flashbang, the magician didn't see it coming in time to do anything about it. The dart thunked into his arm. He started to turn toward them, and then folded up and vanished from sight.
The fiery rope disintegrated, and in the same moment, the stoneskins closing on them collapsed into heaps of rock. Max fell to the ground, coughing.
Gio reached for her. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," she wheezed, rubbing her throat. "Where is he?"
