It had been unnerving to see Winston struggle. It was exponentially worse to watch the insanity travel its way through a crowd.
The women fought back as I pushed them apart, turning on me instead of each other. I swept the feet of the one on my right with a low kick that put her on the ground. When she went down, I turned to the other, ducking to dodge a ball-fisted slap. She wasn’t a fighter. She was an animal, striking back at something that was attacking her. Something predatory.
I came up again, shoulders hunched in case she tried to make another move. That she wasn’t trained didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. She windmilled both arms at me, nails bared, a manicure that couldn’t have been more than a few days old. I grabbed one of her arms, turned and twisted until she was bent over, wrenched by the shoulder. She wouldn’t know how to escape the move, so I used the moment to my advantage. Or tried to. The other woman popped up again. With my free hand, I hitched up the right side of my dress and kicked out, toe pointed.
I caught her underneath the chin, snapped her head back. Her eyes rolled, and she hit the ground.
“Good girl,” I said, and turned back to the other woman.
“Sentinel,” Ethan said, and I glanced back at the black bow tie he’d extended. His hair was loose around his face, his shirt unbuttoned. “Tie her hands.”
I nodded, took the thin panel of silk as he ran forward and blocked the strike of a woman carrying—quite literally—a wooden rolling pin that looked like it was still dusted with flour. And worse.
Focus, I told myself, and pulled the woman’s other arm back. By that point, her voice had become one long ramble of throaty pleas. “Make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop!”
“I’d like to, but you don’t want to be coldcocked, so you’ll have to settle for second place.” I maneuvered her to the bike rack and pushed her to the ground, then pulled her arms through one of the rack’s supports and used the bow tie to secure her. “We’ll get you unconscious as soon as reasonably possible.”
I turned, was pushed backward by Catcher’s outstretched hand as a blue ball of fire whirred past me, thrown by Mallory’s hand. It hit a man wielding a bloody wooden baseball bat in the chest, sent him flying backward, arms and legs thrown forward by the momentum. He flew ten feet before hitting the sidewalk, arms and legs splayed. And he stayed down.
I looked back at Catcher in horror. “Did she kill him?”
“God, no. It’s just force, not fire. Kind of like getting hit by a very large beanbag.”
I looked back at the man. Sure enough, his chest continued to rise and fall, but he didn’t try to get up. I’d say that hit the mark.
“Shit!” Mallory called out, as a hulk of a woman—easily six and a half feet tall and two hundred forty pounds of muscle—stalked toward her. Two whole Mallorys would have barely covered her bulk. Her Cubs T-shirt was torn and bloody, blood dripped from her nose, and her eyes were wild with fear. And she was much too close for Mallory to use magic.
“Stop screaming!” she said, accusation clear in her eyes. “Stop screaming! Stop screaming!”
“I’m not screaming!” Mallory said, now screaming.
“Later,” Catcher said, and went to help his wife.
The gleam of metal in the streetlight caught my eye, and I looked back. A woman walked forward, chef’s knife in her hand. She was wearing pajamas and scuff-style slippers, and I’d bet the knife had come from her kitchen.
For whatever mysterious reason was driving them, she’d probably walked right out of her house and right into hell.
Her hair was short and curly, her eyes wild and panicked. She raised the knife in one hand, beat against her temple with the other. “Get them out of my head!”
“I can help you,” I said, reaching out a hand while I kept my eyes trained on the knife and its wide, flat blade, with a pattern that looked like mokume-gane. If it had been well cared for, it would be sharp and could do some damage.
“You can’t!” She screamed it, putting so much energy into the sound her body bowed with the force of it. “They won’t stop. I will make them stop! I will stop them!”
She held the knife to her throat, and my heart seemed to stop sympathetically.
“Please don’t,” I said, trying to draw her gaze back to me. “I promise I can help you. There’s a place you can go where the voice won’t bother you anymore.”
That place might have involved a cell and a drug-induced coma, but it was all I had to offer at the moment, at least until we learned more.
She paused for a moment, shoulder twitching up toward her ear, and I could see hope spark in her eyes. But it was a small spark, extinguished by whatever delusion ripped through her awareness. She grabbed handfuls of her hair, bent over from the waist like the voice had weight and was pulling her to earth.
She screamed and stomped her feet in obvious frustration, and when she lifted her gaze again, there was a horrible desperation in her eyes. “This won’t end. It doesn’t end. It’s the same thing all day, every day, and there’s nothing you can do about it or that I can do about it. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop!”
She regripped the knife so the blade pointed toward her, a new grim determination in her eyes.
“No!” I said, and ran forward, but I was a moment too late. She plunged the knife into her abdomen, dark blood staining her apron. The fingers still wrapped around the blade turned crimson as she fell to her knees, eyes wide. She looked down, horror filling her eyes, and began to shake.
“Little help here!” I called out, and dodged forward. She pulled one hand away, began to beat back at me. I grabbed her slick wrist, wrapped my free hand around the one still on the knife. There was no telling what she’d punctured, or if pulling out the knife would make the situation worse.
Malik hit his knees beside me. “Do exactly what you’re doing,” he said, and pulled off his jacket. “Keep your hand on the knife. I’m going to apply pressure.”
I just nodded, since I was busy trying to keep the woman’s clawing hand away from me. She was still screaming; her plan to kill the noise by giving herself a brutal amount of pain clearly wasn’t working.
Malik wrapped the coat around the knife below our joined hands, pressed firmly down. The woman screamed with pain, which made more delusional heads turn our way.
A blue ball whizzed by, sparks jettisoning as it passed like an out-of-season sparkler. I looked up, watched it stream toward a young man in his early twenties in athletic shorts and shower shoes shuffling forward, hands gripping his head like he was trying to rip away a vice. He hit the pavement much the way the first one had.
“Merit,” Malik said. I looked back, found him nodding toward my skirt.
“Shit,” I murmured, and slapped at the sparks that were eating their way through the silk. But my hands were very much occupied . . .
“I got it,” Amit said, slapping out the sparks with a hand. He blew away the ashes, tamped again just to be sure, and then looked back at the woman bleeding on the ground in front of us. There were streaks of blood on his face.
“Cadogan House has a unique way of partying,” he said.
I looked back at my hands, covered in blood and around an equally bloody knife, hoping to God I wouldn’t lose the woman I hadn’t been able to save.
“Yeah. I’d say that about sums it up.”
• • •
The ambulances arrived first, sirens roaring toward us, lights flashing. Catcher pulled the EMTs to our position, and they worked to stabilize the woman, get her into the ambulance. They must have been experienced with disaster work, as they didn’t flinch at the sight of the chaos, or the humans on the ground.
“Keep her guarded and secured to the bed,” Catcher said of the woman with the knife. “She did this to herself.”
“Suicide?” one of the EMTs asked, crossing himself in the process, two fingers across forehead, breastbone, left, and right.
“Not exactly,” Catcher said. “But we don’t have time to explain right now. The Ombudsman will be in touch.”
They nodded, swept her away and to the hospital with sirens roaring again.