Zeus landed, roared, flashing fangs the size of steak knives, and bounded across the parking lot. The fringe of tentacles around his neck snapped open, individual tendrils writhing. We passed each other, him sprinting at the creatures and me running in the opposite direction to Rhino.

Gunfire popped behind me like firecrackers going off—Leon, thinning the pack. He’d run out of bullets before they ran out of bodies.

I jumped into Rhino, mashed the brake, and pushed the ignition switch. The engine roared. Cornelius flung the passenger door open and landed in the seat. I stepped on it. Rhino’s custom engine kicked into gear. We shot forward and jumped the curb onto the grass.

In front of us the lawn churned with bodies. A trail of scaled corpses stretched to the left, piling up at the curb of Allen Parkway. Across the street, Leon methodically sank bullets into the creatures in short bursts, using traffic as cover. Zeus snarled next to him. A corpse of a scaled beast lay nearby and Zeus raked it with his claws to underscore his point.

On our right the female agent and the leader had put their arms under the injured man’s shoulders and staggered toward the parking lot. He hung limp, dragging his bleeding leg behind him. The leading beasts on the left snapped their jaws only feet behind them.

No more people would be mauled by these things today if I could help it.

I steered right, cutting the creatures off from the MII agents at a sharp angle. The enormously heavy bulk of Rhino smashed into the closest creature with a wet crunch. The armored vehicle careened as we rolled over a body. We burst through the edge of the pack into the clear. I put my foot down on the accelerator, tearing down the lawn. Behind me the pack thinned out as the creatures got in each other’s way trying to turn to follow us. For a moment, the cluster of bodies dispersed. Something spun in their center, something metal, round, and glowing. The strange magic knot.

“You see it?”

“I see it.” Cornelius pulled the tactical shotgun from the floorboards and pumped it.

“Can you reach their minds?”

“No. They’re too preoccupied.”

Asking him what that meant now would distract him. I made a hard left, clipping what was once the back of the pack, knocking the stragglers out of the way.

“Ready,” Cornelius said, his voice calm.

I hit the button to lower the front windows and cut straight through the pack, mowing a diagonal line to the left. The churning rolling thing spun on our right, drawing tight circles on the grass. Cornelius stuck the barrel of the shotgun out the window and fired at the metal object.

BOOM.

My ears rang.

BOOM.

“One more time,” Cornelius said, as if asking for another cup of tea.

We flashed by the pack, smashed head-on into a beast, and I veered right and jumped the curb back into the parking lot. In front of us, the MII vehicle, a silver Jeep Grand Cherokee, peeled out onto Allen Parkway with a squeal of tires. The stench of burning rubber blew into the cabin.

“You’re welcome,” Cornelius called after them and reloaded.

I made a hard right onto the parkway. The pack of beasts streaked by on our right.

BOOM.

BOOM.

“Didn’t get it,” Cornelius said. “The slugs bounced off the metal. There’s something alive inside that spinning shell.”

“Animal?”

“Not exactly.”

If it was alive, we could kill it.

We could drive around until the pack tired enough to slow down, grab Leon and Zeus, and drive off, but then these things would rampage through Houston. There was a group of kids playing baseball just a quarter of a mile down the road. We had passed them and the adults who were watching them on our way in to retrieve Rosebud.

Rosebud!

“Where’s the monkey?”

“Safe in the BMW.”

Oh good. Good, good, good.

I pulled a sharp U-turn and sped down the street back toward the parking lot. The beasts scrambled to follow. The gaps between the bodies widened to several feet and I saw clearly the source of the magic. Two metal rings, spinning one inside the other, like a gyroscope. A small blue glow hovered between them.

We passed Leon. He pointed to the glowing thing with his SIG and pretended to smash the two guns in his hands together. Ram it. Thank you, Captain Strategy, I got it. That thing had survived the river. If I hit it with Rhino, it might just bounce aside, and if it was arcane, there was no telling what sort of damage it would do to the car. No, this would require precision.

“Rapier?” I asked.

“One moment.” Cornelius turned and hit the switch on the console between our seats. Most SUV vehicles had two front seats and a wide backseat designed to seat three. Rhino’s backseat was split into two, with a long, custom-built console storage space running lengthwise between them. The console popped open, and a weapon shelf sprang up, offering a choice of two blades and two guns secured by prongs.

I pulled another U-turn. A white truck screeched to a stop in front of me. The driver laid on the horn, saw the beasts, and reversed down the street at breakneck speed.

“Got it.” Cornelius turned back in his seat, my rapier in his hand.

I aimed Rhino at the gyroscope. Bodies slammed against the car.

“This is foolhardy,” Cornelius advised. “What if it explodes?”

“Then I’ll be dead, and it won’t matter,” I quoted.

“Using Leon as inspiration is a doubtful survival strategy.”

I slammed on the brakes. Rhino slid across the lawn and stopped. I grabbed the rapier from Cornelius and jumped out of the SUV. The rotating thing spun only fifty feet away from me. I sprinted to it.

A beast lunged at me. I jumped aside and kept running.

Behind me Rhino thundered as Cornelius revved the engine to distract them.

The air turned to fire in my lungs. I dodged a beast, another . . .

Thirty feet.

The shining object pinged me with its magic.

Twenty.

Ten.

The metal rings spun in front of me, a foot wide, splattered with slime and algae. Inside a flower bud glowed, a brilliant electric blue lotus woven of pure magic and just about to bloom.

My family’s magic coursed through me, guiding my thrust. I stabbed it.

The bud burst, sending a cloud of luminescent sparks into the air. Its glow vanished. The rings spun one last time and collapsed.

The beasts around me froze.

For a torturous moment nothing moved.

The creatures stared at me. I stared back.

The pack turned and made a break for the river.

It was over.

Relief washed over me. A steady rhythmic noise came into focus, and I realized it was my heart racing in my chest. My knees shook. A bitter metallic patina coated my tongue. My body couldn’t figure out if it was hot or cold. The world felt wrong, as if I had been poisoned.

The ruins of the device lay in front of me. I tried to take a step. My leg folded under me, the ground decided to spontaneously tilt to the side, and I almost wiped out on a perfectly level lawn. Too much adrenaline. Nothing to do but wait it out. Some people were born for the knife-edge intensity of combat. I wasn’t one of them.

Focusing on something to distract myself usually helped. I crouched and scrutinized the rings. The metal didn’t look exactly like steel, but it might have been some sort of iron alloy. A string of glyphs ran the circumference of each ring.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and snapped a pic.

The rings fit inside each other, the inner about three inches smaller than the outer one. The flower stalk was attached to the bottom of the inner ring. No, not attached. It grew from the inner ring, seamlessly protruding from the metal.

How?

I picked up the ring and tugged on the stalk. It held. I ran my fingers along the flower. Toward the severed end, where the flower bud had been, the texture felt like a typical plant. But the lower I moved my fingers, the more metallic the texture became. A true biomechanical meld. To my knowledge, no mage had yet achieved it.

Rhino rolled up next to me and Cornelius jumped out. Pale purple blood splattered the armored vehicle’s custom grille guard. Bits and pieces of alien flesh hung from the metal.

“Are you all right?” Cornelius asked.

No. “Yes. I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I know this was very unpleasant for you.”

Animal mages formed a special bond with a few chosen animals, but they cared about all of them, and we had just mowed down at least a dozen, maybe more.

Cornelius nodded. “Thank you for your concern. They weren’t true animals in the native sense of the word. It helped some.”

“Is this a summon?” I asked.

Cornelius shook his head. “I don’t think so. They feel slightly similar to Zeus. Not of Earth but not completely of the arcane realm either.”

“Earlier you said they were too ‘preoccupied’ to reach?”

Cornelius frowned and nodded at the rings and the bud within. “This object emitted magic.”

“I felt it.”

“The emissions were so dense, they effectively deafened the creatures. They couldn’t feel me. I tried to contact the object itself, but the biological component of it is so primitive, it was like trying to communicate with a sea sponge.”

The House lab scenario looked more and more likely. If these proto-crocodiles had come out of the arcane realm, we would have seen a summoner and a portal. Massive holes in reality were kind of hard to miss.