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“You’ll have to tell me about that, if we survive the afternoon,” she said, wrapping the
cloak around her shoulders. “Right now we’ve got a wall of birds between us and our
target, Tlaltecuhtli is stirring, and I think Cole was just about to tell me some more bad
news.”
“Cole?” Rondeau said. “I wondered who the old guy was. Nice to meet you. You’re shit
at following people discreetly, though, I gotta say.”
“Yes,” Cole said, “I suppose so. Formal introductions can wait. Listen to me. Mutex is
raising the frog-monster, yes, but he’s prepared another spell as well. He’s going to cast
a spell of psychic transposition.”
B and Rondeau looked at him blankly, and Ch’ang Hao looked at him with the
disinterest of a snake watching the strange capering of mammals it wasn’t quite ready to
eat. But Marla understood. “The Thing on the Doorstep trick.”
“What?” Rondeau said. “Who’s he going to switch brains with?”
“Tlaltecuhtli,” Marla said, coldness spreading inside her, making her feel like a sort of
animate statue of herself. “Mutex isn’t just raising the god. He’s going to become the
god. He’s going to take control of the god’s body, and leave the god’s mind in his
human one.”
“And because he’s using the Cornerstone, he won’t go insane, and the switch will be
permanent,” Cole said.
“Fuck,” Rondeau said. “We can’t have that.” He handed an aerosol can to B, and
holding the other in his left hand, marched up to the wall of hummingbirds. He flicked
on the lighter and depressed the button on the can, moving the flame into the spray. A
modest gout of fire shot forth from the can, but the effect was dramatic—the birds
touched by the flame fell, smoking and flapping, and while other birds moved in to fill
the vacant positions, Rondeau kept sweeping the flame over them, and the fence grew
thin. B stepped up at a different place on the fence and lit his own homemade
flamethrower, turning his face away and wincing—sensibly, Marla thought, since there
was a good chance that the flame would travel back up the spray and the can would
explode in his hand.
“Rondeau, that’s perfect!” B was right—Rondeau was crucial here. Fire had killed the
birds before, and it would kill them again. “But I can do better than white-trash
flamethrowers.” Marla had just done this spell yesterday, so it was easier to do it now,
with the mental patterns fresh in her memory. She sucked the remaining heat from the
dead bodies inside the garden, but that wasn’t enough to do anything noticeable with—
and then she thought to steal heat directly from the hummingbirds. They were small, but
there were lots of them, so maybe there’d be enough heat.
Once she tapped into the hummingbirds, she gasped. It was like she’d tried to draw heat
from a campfire and found a volcano instead—the birds contained astonishing amounts
of energy, heat bound up in their ruby breasts. She felt her temperature rapidly rising
into the danger zone, and she flung heat back at the birds.