The skinny one drew his gun. The buff one with the tattoos and the tank top lunged forward and struck with a cat-quick fist, clocking Stone in the jaw with the effortless aim of a guy who did this sort of thing as part of his daily routine.
Two thoughts flashed through Stone’s mind as he flew backward and crashed, stunned, onto the walkway on the other side of the alcove.
The first was that magical shields only worked when you got them upbeforethe bad things hit you.
The second was that Tank Top even had tattoos on hisknuckles.
Apparently, there was no accounting for the things you noticed when about to get your head blown off by two guys you had no personal beef with.
Stone shook his head, trying to clear the static enough to form a spell.
Skinny and Tank Top were already closing in on him. If he didn’t get it togethernow, getting out of this dump and back to civilization in the morning was going to be the least of his worries.
Where the hell was Luisa?
And then he spotted her.
She hovered a short distance behind Skinny and Tank Top, floating high enough to give him an unobstructed view of her off-kilter face above them. She caught his eye, and then she did something unexpected.
She cut her silvery gaze sideways.
Very obviously sideways.
Comicallysideways, with a level of exaggeration worthy of aThree Stoogesshort.
For good measure she jerked her neck to the same side, which, given her current state, was more unsettling than comical.
Stone’s brain got hung up on what the hell she could mean by all of this, but his reflexes did the same thing anyone else’s would have under the circumstances.
He looked the same way she had.
This was all happening at lightning speed. The drug dealers hadn’t shot him yet, probably because they’d figured out the blast would rouse every sleeping guest at the motel. But that didn’t mean Stone wasn’t about to be in a world of hurt if he didn’t come up with something pretty damn quick.
What was Luisa trying to show him? There was nothing there—certainly nothing he could use as a weapon. All he saw was the chain-link gate across the alcove, the corner of the shadowy maid cart behind it—
And the lock holding it closed.
Popular wisdom states that when you’re about to die, you see your life flashing before your eyes in a split second. Stone had no idea if that was true, but something absolutelydidflash across his mind at that moment. Three thought fragments, in quick succession:
His ridiculous notion, earlier tonight before any of thisnonsense had started, that he’d seen the maid cart move behind the gate.
The wispy red energy he’d spotted drifting around it.
And Luisa’s vision of her murderers stuffing her body in the cart.
It all came together in a sudden, magnificent bloom of insight, driving the last of the static cobwebs from his brain.
His manic, feral grin must have startled the drug dealers, at least enough to pause before they reached him. Only for a second, but that was all he needed.
He reached out with his magic and popped the lock on the gate, pulling it free and tossing it aside.
Behind Skinny and Tank Top, Luisa’s plain face lit up in triumph.
After that, everything happened even faster.
Luisa disappeared again, or maybe she just moved so quickly Stone could no longer follow the motion. Whichever it was, a second later a bright red glow flowered in the alcove. Stone couldn’t see much of it from his vantage point on the ground, but that made it somehow worse—as if an unseen portal to hell were opening just beyond his vision.
Skinny and Tank Top got the full impact, though.
