I screamed for help, but the puritans must have magically hidden us because the first few arrivals didn’t seem to notice us. The Eye must have still had its usual effect because a woman in an evening gown I thought was rather frumpy veered abruptly off the red carpet and headed straight for me with a truly frightening gleam in her eye. I struggled against my captor while a man ran after the woman, shouting, “Senator! Senator! Where are you going?” He caught her before she reached me, much to my relief. She’d looked like she’d have gladly cut my throat to get to the brooch.
No sooner had she been herded away from us than a tall, powerfully built man with a million-dollar smile came our way. He didn’t look quite as crazed, but he also didn’t look like he could be steered away by a mere aide. I wasn’t sure a brick wall would stop him.
A stone gargoyle, however, was another story.
Something winged dropped from the ceiling, coming between me and the powerful man. In the glare of the lights from outside, I couldn’t tell at first if it was one of ours or one of the zombies, but then I noticed that it moved too fluidly to be a zombie. I was close enough to feel the tingle of magic as the gargoyle gave the man a jolt that sent him back onto the red carpet.
At the same time, other bursts of magic forced our captors to free us. “C’mon, kids, let’s go!” a familiar voice said. I’d never been so glad to see Sam, and he’d come to my rescue many a time. “Out the back way,” the gargoyle continued. “It would be a feeding frenzy if you took the Eye out the front door near that power-hungry throng.”
While Sam’s team held off the puritans and their zombie gargoyles, Sam escorted us through the side galleries, back the way we’d originally come in. There was no sign of the fierce fighting that had taken place there earlier. Obviously, the gargoyle corpses had all been reanimated, but the fire, water, and thorny vines were all gone, too.
We paused in the stairwell to catch our breath. I hoped I didn’t look as bad as Owen did. His shirt was torn, he had a red patch on his jawline that would probably develop into a bruise, and blood trickled down his temple from a cut on his forehead. His clothes were disheveled, and his hair was even messier than it got when he was stuck on an intellectual problem and running his fingers through it. And yet, even though he was a total mess, he also looked disturbingly hot that way.
I was afraid to look at the condition of my tights, my hair probably looked like a bird’s nest after the gargoyles had dug into it, and I had enough stinging, sore spots on my body to indicate that I probably had as many cuts and bruises as Owen. I decided that if I lived through this, I was taking tomorrow off.
“I should have looked harder for the box,” I said. “That would have made this a lot easier.”
“You got the brooch. That’s the important part,” Owen reassured me.
“So, now where do we go?” I asked.
“We need to get away from people.”
“Yeah, I’m guessing we probably don’t want to plunge into the Upper East Side with this thing,” I agreed. “There might be riots.”
“Into the park,” he suggested. “This time of night, the population’s pretty sparse.”
“And the drunks and druggies aren’t known for their ambition,” I added.
Sam, who’d been keeping watch, said, “Okay, kids, time to go. I think some of our friends have made it past my guys.”
With a groan of dismay, I forced myself away from the wall that had been holding me up. We ran down the stairs and into the parking garage. Sam had magically sealed the doors behind us, but the zombie gargoyles just burst through. Sam and his security gargoyles hampered our enemies while we ran up the driveway to the sidewalk and then aimed for the nearest park entrance.
There were still a few of the zombie gargoyles pursuing us as we raced down Fifth Avenue, but once we plunged into the park, we had some cover among the trees. We got off the paths and ran an indirect route, keeping to the tree cover and away from the lights. I hoped Owen knew where he was going because all I could tell in the darkness was that we had crossed Seventy-ninth Street.
I’d developed a stitch in my side, and I was gasping for each breath, but I kept running as well as I could, with Owen practically dragging me along. This was more intense exercise than I was used to, but Owen sounded like he was barely breathing hard. I could still hear gargoyles overhead, and I figured if they were ours, they’d give us the all-clear and guide us to safety, so I didn’t have any choice but to keep running.
At least no late-evening joggers had yet tried to mug me to get at the brooch, and none of the brooch-crazy museum gala power brokers seemed to have followed us. Our situation wasn’t ideal, but it could have been much worse.