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“It’s going to be ugly, B. Go in heavy. Reverse the cloak as soon as you see the
Celestial. You won’t attack Rondeau—you’ll recognize him as an ally, the same way
you recognized me.” That last was as much a hope as a declaration. “Go for the
sorcerer. And if they’re both there, go for the young one, because that’s the real enemy,
in the apprentice’s body.” That would spoil Rondeau’s wish to restore the apprentice to
her own form, but he’d get over it, if the end result was the preservation of his own life.
B sat up, his injuries healed. He stretched his arms over his head, testing his flexibility.
“What about, ah, magic? Won’t the sorcerer try to fight me?”
“Don’t worry. Spells slide off the purple like water slides off a duck. You won’t have a
problem. It’s…going to be messy, B. It’s best you don’t look back at the mess you’ll
make of them when you’re done. Just take Rondeau, and come back to the hotel. Then
wish me luck, because I’ll be tussling with Mutex by then, if all goes well.” She wanted
to tell him to resist the moment of inhuman coldness that would come over him after he
reversed the cloak, but why bother? Even she couldn’t resist it. She would just have to
hope it wouldn’t last long.
B frowned. “Shit, Marla, I just realized—if I’ve got the cloak, you don’t. You’re going
to face Mutex without your best weapon.”
“I’m my best weapon, B. Don’t worry about me. If I can get past Mutex’s frogs, and his
hummingbirds, and deal with his tendency to move at mind-blurringly high speeds, I
shouldn’t have any trouble taking him out, even without my cloak.”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” B said.
“This is an iffy business. Come downstairs. We’ll order room service. I know we ate
already, but using that cloak burns calories like you wouldn’t believe.”
Marla felt ridiculously like a mother sending her son off to his first day of kindergarten,
but in this case, she was sending a seer and oracle-generator into mortal danger. She
wanted to pat his cheek and tell him to be careful. Instead, she said, as gruffly as she
could, “Bring my cloak back in one piece. And you’d better be in one piece inside it.”
“How about Rondeau?” B said, smiling, still pumped from his first experience using the
cloak. “How many pieces do you want him in?”
“No more than two,” Marla said. “As for the Chinese guy, you can break him into as
many pieces as you want.” She hesitated, then decided to give in, a little, to the
protective impulses she was feeling toward this man, her newest brother-in-arms, who
had so recently been a stranger. “I appreciate your doing this. You don’t have to.”
“I know,” he said.
“Don’t die.”