The crowd fell instantly silent as Kymeran and human alike stared, dumbstruck, at the smashed window. The most shocked expression belonged to Oddo, who seemed genuinely stunned by what had just transpired. But before the green-haired magician could apologize or find out if the victim of his prank was hurt or not, a frightened voice cried out:
“The Kymies are trying to kill us!”
The underlying tension between the Calf’s regulars and the human interlopers finally burst forth, and within seconds the humans were throwing tankards and barley wine bottles at what they perceived to be the enemy. Luckily, the majority of Kymerans weren’t so drunk that they automatically retaliated with sorcery; instead they protected themselves with their right hands, flicking aside the various missiles hurled in their direction before they could make contact.
Lost in the middle of the chaos, Oddo quickly found himself surrounded by angry humans. An arm flailed out and punched him in the face. Oddo put his right hand to his mouth, his eyes widening in astonishment when it came away bloody. Surrounded and outnumbered, he dropped back, his eyes growing darker as he lifted his left hand.
Suddenly Hexe was no longer at my side, but pushing his way through the crowd. He grabbed Oddo by the left wrist, pulling the warlock’s arm back and pinning it to the small of his back.
“Stop, Oddo!”
he shouted.
“It’s bad enough as it is already, without you making things worse!”
The drunken wizard struggled to free himself, only to stop upon recognizing Hexe. As the flicker of hellfire cradled in Oddo’s palm winked out, a bottle came flying out of nowhere and struck Hexe in the head. A couple of Kymerans quickly darted forward and grabbed him and Oddo, dragging them into the protection of their circle.
I dove into the crowd and made my way toward Hexe, putting my formative years in the mosh pits to good use by throwing elbows and knees in every direction, and God help anyone or anything that got in my way. Suddenly a Kymeran with a turquoise mohawk stepped in front of me, deliberately blocking my path. He smelled dangerous, like gunpowder and a lit match.
“Keep to your own, nump!” he growled, raising his left hand in warning.
“Leave her alone, Skal!” Hexe barked, pushing his would-be protector aside. “She’s with me!”
Skal lowered his hand and stepped away, but the loathing in his eyes as he looked at me did not disappear. I pushed past him and threw my arms around Hexe, only to gasp at the sight of blood running down the side of his face.
“Oh my God, baby—you’re hurt!”
“Scalp wounds bleed like a bitch, but it’s superficial,” he reassured me, pointing to the laceration just above his left temple.
Suddenly the air was filled with the wailing of sirens, and a couple of old-fashioned paddy wagons drawn by centaurs outfitted in riot gear rounded the corner. The wagons had the letters
PTU
stenciled on their sides and flashing blue lights mounted on top.
Hexe muttered, “About damn time.”
“You’ll tell ’em I didn’t
mean
to put the nump through the window, won’tcha, Serenity?” Oddo asked anxiously. “They’ll believe it comin’ from you.”
“Of course I will, Oddo,” Hexe said, doing his best to calm the worried sorcerer.
The doors of the paddy wagons flew open and members of Golgotham’s peacekeeping force, the Paranormal Threat Unit, jumped out onto the streets. Composed of a mixture of Kymerans, “gifted” humans, and other paranormal races, they were outfitted in specially charmed and modified police gear designed to handle the dangers unique to the magic-using community they policed.
The leader of the PTU squad, a tall Kymeran woman carrying a bullhorn and dressed in full-body armor and riot helmet, stepped forward to address the unruly crowd. “Everybody calm down! My name is Lieutenant Vivi of the PTU and I want your hands where I can’t see’em!”
While the Kymerans did as they were told, placing their hands either behind their backs or in their pockets, the humans in the crowd exchanged confused looks, unsure as to what to do. Baffled by the instructions, one of the humans automatically raised his hands over his head.
“I
said
keep ’em where I can’t see ’em!” Lieutenant Vivi snapped.
Pale green ectoplasm shot from her right hand, wrapping itself around the befuddled human like bandages around a mummy. Within a heartbeat the human was cocooned in the viscous substance from the neck down, rendering him completely immobile. The remaining humans started to shout obscenities and push and shove one another in a panicked attempt to escape, mistaking the restraint of an unruly suspect for another attack.
Lieutenant Vivi raised the bullhorn to tell the crowd they had nothing to fear, but her words were drowned out by the scream of sirens approaching from the other end of the block. The PTU officer frowned and turned to stare at the NYPD Emergency Services Unit truck lumbering its way up the cobblestone streets.
The look of relief disappeared from Hexe’s face, to be replaced by one of alarm. The sight of New York City’s finest in Golgotham was as jarring as spying a centaur trotting through Central Park.
“Bloody abdabs!” he gasped. “What are
they
doing here?”
As the PTU responders stared in disbelief, an armed ESU squad poured out of the truck, riot shields and tear gas guns at the ready. At their head was a tall, muscular man with a gray crew cut, dressed in a Kevlar vest. He, too, was carrying a bullhorn, which he used to address the crowd.
“NYPD! Everybody freeze! Put your hands up where I can see ’em!”
Now it was the Kymerans’ turn to look bewildered. For a brief moment the groups of feuding humans and Kymerans were united in confusion as they alternately lifted and lowered their hands above their heads, uncertain which authority figure they were supposed to obey.
“I was wondering how tonight could possibly get worse,” Hexe said with a groan of disgust. “Now I know.”
The PTU commanding officer strode angrily over to the ESU leader. “Hey! Who do you think you are?”
“Lieutenant Daniel Trieux, New York Emergency Service Squad One, Lower Manhattan,” he replied curtly. “And you are—?”
“Lieutenant Vivi, Paranormal Threat Unit. This ain’t Lower Manhattan, Lieutenant—it’s Golgotham. You’re outside your jurisdiction. My team has things under control. I need you to stand down.”
“Sorry, no can do, Lieutenant,” Trieux replied sternly. “Nine-one-one received a call stating humans were under supernatural attack at this location. I’m under orders to extract all humans from the area and transport them to the Fifth Precinct.”
“This is a PTU investigation, and the only place anyone’s going is to the Tombs via PTU escort.” Lieutenant Vivi scowled. “You can pick ’em up from there. Like I
said
, we have things under control here.”
As Lieutenant Vivi argued with her NYPD counterpart as to who had the authority to haul the collective butts of the unruly crowd to jail, the Kymerans gathered outside the Two-Headed Calf began to mutter among themselves in their own language. Normally NYPD never ventured past the Gate of Skulls, leaving the peacekeeping in Golgotham to the Paranormal Threat Unit. Although I couldn’t understand what they were saying, it wasn’t hard to figure out that they were not pleased by the surprise arrival of New York’s finest. The same was true for the locals thronging the streets, who eyed the ESU team the same way gazelles size up a lion at a watering hole.
“They’re going to surrender me to the humans, aren’t they?” Oddo moaned, mopping the sweat from his brow with a filthy handkerchief. “They’re going to cut off my fingers because I attacked a nump.” He held up his hands, flexing the extra ring fingers that allowed Kymerans to work their magic. “I’m not gonna let that happen,” he said, his voice wavering on the verge of tears. “I’m not gonna to let them take my magic!” Before Hexe could convince him that his fears were unfounded, Oddo began pushing his way through the crowd, shouting at the top of his voice:
“The humans want my magic! They’re gonna cut off my fingers!”
The wizard’s paranoia swept through the assembled Kymerans like wildfire. Within seconds what had been grumbling turned into full-fledged dissent.
“Go home, numps!”
bellowed a Kymeran with a salmon pink afro.
“Nobody’s taking our fingers!”
“Golgotham is ours!”
yelled Skal.
“Leave now, before it’s too late!”
“Everybody calm down!” Hexe shouted, trying to make himself heard over the sea of angry voices. “The police are just here to escort the humans out of Golgotham!” But it was no use; the mixture of alcohol, paranoia, and discontent had turned the unruly crowd into an angry mob.
“Gardy looooo!”
My hair stood on end at the sound of the traditional warning call of magic being unleashed. I turned and saw Skal draw back his left hand like a baseball pitcher winding up for a curveball and hurl a fistful of hellfire through the night air. A wild cheer rose up from the Golgothamites as the fireball landed atop the roof of the ESU truck, which proceeded to burn like it was made out of plywood.
I heard Lieutenant Trieux shout something through his bullhorn, followed by a series of dull
whumps
. Suddenly a dense reddish cloud rose up from the cobblestones like an evil fog. My nose began to burn and my eyes filled with tears. The surrounding crowd started coughing and hacking as the rapidly spreading fumes enveloped everyone in the vicinity—Kymeran and human alike.
Hexe grabbed my hand and dragged me through the wall of smoke. Although my vision was blurred, I saw Lieutenant Vivi point her right hand at her NYPD counterpart, encasing Lieutenant Trieux in his very own ecto-plasmic cocoon. The last thing I saw, before a rolling, blood-tinged cloud obscured my view, was the ESU team turning their weapons away from the crowd and aiming them, instead, at the PTU forces.
“We’ve got to get back to the house before these fools start slinging blind,” Hexe said as he led me through the chaos. All around us those caught up in the riot wailed and shrieked, urging one another to do battle, but the mob had no leaders or logic behind it, only blind animal fear.
Figures stumbled in and out of the low-hanging cloud of tear gas smoke, like lost souls trying to fight their way free from Hades. A crying Kymeran woman with coral pink hair staggered out of the fog, blood flowing down the back of her neck. Hexe motioned for her to join us, but she shook her head and went in the opposite direction upon realizing I was human. A satyr with a freshly broken right horn went clattering by, bleating in pain and fear, blood streaming from his broad nostrils. I glimpsed Skal, the Kymeran who had hurled the opening salvo, running through the haze, laughing maniacally, his left hand on fire.
Suddenly a policeman in full riot gear, his face obscured by a gas mask, materialized from out of the fog, blocking our path.
“Let go of the girl, Kymie.” Although his voice was muffled, there was no mistaking the intent behind the semiautomatic pistol pointed at Hexe’s chest.
I opened my mouth to yell at the cop and tell him that Hexe was trying to save me, not hurt me, but all I could do was cough and choke on the burning air. Hexe tightened his grip on my hand, but did not respond to the policeman’s threat.
The cop took another step closer, raising the sight of his weapon to Hexe’s forehead.
“I
said
let her go, Kymie.”
Just then there was a huge
boom,
as if a giant had clapped his hands beside my head, momentarily robbing me of my hearing. The policeman turned to look at where the ESU truck had been a moment before. It took me a second to realize that the vehicle’s gas tank must have exploded. As the policeman turned back to face us, Hexe quickly raised his right hand and the ESU squad member froze in place. We stepped around the living statue and continued running in the direction of Beekman Street, desperate to put the madness behind us.
Suddenly a blinding light stabbed down from above, accompanied by a thunderous roar and a wild wind, which tore apart the localized cloud of tear gas and the black smoke from the burning tires, dispersing it into the side streets and alleyways, as well as the nearby homes and businesses of countless innocent Golgothamites. I looked up to see an NYPD helicopter circling overhead like a mechanical vulture.
An armed police officer standing in the open bay of the copter pointed in our direction, and the spotlight swiveled to follow us. A second later the copter dropped so low I was afraid it might hit the roof of a nearby building. The backwash from its rotors was so strong it nearly snatched me out of Hexe’s grip. He stopped to scowl at the machine hovering overhead and lifted his right hand before his face, as if shielding his eyes from the glare of the searchlight. A moment later, the light wandered away, the occupants of the helicopter apparently no longer interested in us. We managed to get back to the boardinghouse without running into any further trouble.
Once we’d made it inside, Hexe slammed the door behind us and then slid down onto the floor of the foyer in exhaustion, resting his back against the wall. As I knelt beside him and kissed him, he grabbed me and pulled me close. We sat there for a long moment, trembling like foxes that had just escaped the hounds, secure in the knowledge we were safe in our den.