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“We’re not moving, and we’re on the ground floor. Even if the cables snapped or
something, we aren’t going anywhere, and if the doors get jammed, I can get them
open.”
Rondeau nodded, the birds still hovering before his face. “Yeah, all right,” he said.
“They’re right in front of me, so I guess the sound of the Curse will hit them first
anyway.” Rondeau spoke briefly, three guttural syllables, and the air in the elevator car
suddenly grew very hot and uncomfortable, the walls around them and the cables above
groaning.
The two hummingbirds burst brightly, whitely, into flame, and fell to the floor of the
elevator, their furiously beating wings throwing off streamers of smoke and shedding
sparks. Marla and Rondeau jumped away from the flames, and Marla hit the “Door
Open” button on the elevator. The doors slid apart slowly, creaking—Rondeau’s
primordial Curse had twisted something in the mechanism out of true. They exited the
elevator, stepping over the flash-charred bird bodies.
Rondeau spat onto the concrete. “Gah, I hate doing that, speaking that language always
makes my mouth taste like cat shit.”
“You know this from personal experience?”
“When I was young, and I’d just taken over this body, I didn’t know what was good to
eat and what wasn’t. Let’s not get into that.” He looked around nervously. “I always
expect some sort of cosmic retribution for Cursing in the language of the gods, too.”
“Maybe that bad taste is the retribution,” Marla said. Rondeau had the gift of tongues,
but only in a limited way. Hamil believed that when Rondeau capital-“C”-Cursed, he
was mispronouncing the first Word that had created the universe. The results were
always unpredictably destructive, though Marla couldn’t recall them ever involving
white-hot fire before. Marla suspected there was no such divine association—she
believed in gods, plural, or at least in supernatural beings with powers far beyond those
of even magic-savvy humans like herself, but she didn’t believe in one creator-god
who’d made the universe by speaking a series of well-formed sentences. It seemed more
likely to her that Rondeau had lucked into some set of primal incantations, the language
of demons, perhaps the language of whatever kind of creature Rondeau really was,
inside that stolen body. Either way, the Curses were handy, though often more trouble
than they were worth, and occasionally prone to backfiring in unpleasant ways, though
never on Rondeau himself—just on innocent bystanders. Marla had once suffered a
minor concussion as a result of one of Rondeau’s Curses.
“Maybe we should head over to Finch’s party,” Marla said. “It’s getting to be that
time.”
“Yeah,” Rondeau said. “Let’s hope we don’t run into any more birds along the way.”
As they walked through the parking garage, Marla saw a shadow near one of the ramps
to an upper level. She stopped, blinked, whispered a spell to turn on her night-eyes, and
looked again. There was a man, not very tall, slim, holding a cane. He wore something
like a top hat, but it was vaguely furry, and he was looking straight at her, probably