Dim Sum Asylum(81)
Up close, the animated sculpture was massive, at least six feet long, with an enormous wingspan nearly double that. I had to give credit to the artist who’d crafted it, because it was nearly perfect, right down to its head-encompassing compound eyes and its jointed legs that advanced its long, heavy body beautifully. The metal and thin glass constructs of its wings were the only spots of color in its pale gray form, their opalescent sheen splotched with smears of yellowish mud.
I needed to find Trent before the dragonfly’s weight crushed him. Smaller branches shifted as the thing moved. The tree’s rain-dampened leaves made it difficult for the statue to get a good purchase on the wall and ground, and its legs moved furiously, trying to stab its pointed, hooked feet into something solid to stand on.
The branch pinning me down shifted, and Trent sat up, shoving it off us. With his gun in his hand, he unsteadily got to his feet, a thread of blood running down from his temple before turning to a pink wash across his cheek from the pouring rain.
I’d have fainted in relief at finding him alive if I wasn’t so scared the thing would eat us if I stopped long enough to kiss him.
“That’s got to be… crap, that’s a big dragonfly,” he said as he grabbed at my arm to pull me up. “You okay?”
“Yeah, let’s get going. We’re going to need to be clear of that thing.” There was a good ten or twelve feet of distance between us and the dragonfly, but its struggles looked like they were paying off. Like the sculpture, I was having a hard time getting my footing with the wet greenery, and while the rain was slowing to a steady light patter, the nip in the air remained to chill our wet clothes.
The stone insect began to move quicker, slithering across a chunk of mortared brick, turning another branch into mulch, then opened its powerful maw to snap at the air above our heads. I smelled blood, more than what there should have been from the cut on Trent’s forehead, and something pale dislodged from its mandibles, bouncing on the fallen branch to land with a splat at my feet. I couldn’t tell if it’d been a man or a woman. There wasn’t much left but the person’s face—and only enough to make out part of their lips, some of their nose, and most of their right eye. Mostly skin, but still enough bone fragments to hold the shape of their cheek and a bit of the shocked expression they had right before they died.
“I’m fine.” After helping me up, Trent steadied me as I stood, thankful to find my legs could support my weight. “But we’ve got a small problem.”
“Bigger than this?” Trent grunted, helping me get clear of the fallen branches. “What the Hell could be worse than this?”
“That.” I nodded toward a rustling coming from one of the long buildings as another of the caster’s animated monsters pushed its way past a set of shoji doors. As I reached for the spell breakers I’d packed into my jacket, I replied with a grimace, “That’s what was wrong with this picture. That fountain had three of these damned things, and it looks like the missing one’s found us. Watch my back. I’m going to see if I can salt the ground at least enough to slow it so we’ve got time to take care of that one.”
Twenty
I HAD other things in my bag of tricks, but they were rogue and untested. Slowing down the first sculpture would help give us some time to take care of the one rampaging through the estate’s outer buildings and walks. Trapped with its limbs tangled in a web of branches, uneven debris, and rebar grid, I at least had a fighting chance of throwing the dragonfly closest to us off its course. If it bought Trent and I fifteen minutes, it would be enough to see if we could stop the other one, and if we failed, then it wouldn’t matter if the first one broke free because we’d probably both be dead or close to it.
As if it could sense my intentions—and for all I knew, it could—the concrete monster on the wall lashed, a lean flash of stone and glass. It raged and thrashed, legs tangled in slender, unforgiving branches, and its long tail whipped out behind it, trying to push itself into striking distance. Its wings beat at the trees, struggling to get past the foliage, and Trent pushed me back a few steps, covering me.
“Really, dude?” I sniped, shoving at his shoulder. “Watch your own six. The other one’s coming. Right now I need you to cover me while I slow this one down. Then we need to get someplace we can put our backs against.”
The sculptures were heavy, fueling much of their destruction. Sheer weight mattered when diving into a fight, and there was no way we could go toe-to-toe with those things without some kind of arcane help. The first dragonfly tore through the wall as if the stone were rice paper, and from what I could see of the second, it was disoriented, careening about the long entrance halls in a blind fury.
Bits of the buildings were flying up into the air, crashing down into the fountain, and breaking sections of the pergola’s support. There would be no hiding by the remaining inert dragonfly. I couldn’t trust it not to come to life while we put our heads into snapping range, battling the other two. The main house, with its sprawling outer decks and low-slung roofs, didn’t seem like it could put up much of a fight against a nearly solid battering ram with a skull-crushing jaw, let alone two of them.
The spell I had in mind was a simple one, and I’d used it before to subdue a simurgh who’d taken to attacking tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf. While the crazed bird was definitely smaller than the dragonfly, it was the only thing I had in my arsenal to slow something with a greater mass than a bison.