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.Nikki and Father Jack both turned away from their windows to shoot him a quizzical look.Peter gestured out the windshield toward the hole the Slogute had made in the road.The things that leaped out of that hole, scrambling on top of one another like a colony of ants, were hideously thin.The creatures had long arms with talons like black knives, their skeletal forms covered in something that looked for all the world like the carapace of some enormous insect.Their heads were plated as well, dark tongues like rapiers jabbing from beneath those blank, blue-black skull coverings.An image flashed through Peter’s mind of horseshoe crabs, their shells and tails, and then he saw that this was truly what they looked like, these things, their faces were like the shells of horseshoe crabs, tongues like the crabs’ tails.He did not have to ask Keomany if these were the same demons she had run up against before; their indigo carapaces gleaming a filthy purple in the rotten pumpkin daylight matched her description perfectly.“There are more,” Keomany said behind him.Peter glanced over his left shoulder and saw the things leaping and almost dancing out from behind the houses they had just passed.Then, like ants, they were swarming from everywhere, from among shrubbery and from overturned cars and from the wreckage that had once been a neighborhood.The Slogute had begun to burrow into the ground again as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.Or perhaps it was frightened.Not of him and his companions, Peter was sure.Of them.“Just drive!” Keomany cried.“They’re not letting us go any further,” Nikki said, voice cold.“So we do it here,” Peter said.He killed the Navigator’s engine and opened the door, both of his hands crackling with green energy.The indigo demons were swarming, more coming up from the collapsed street every moment.When the first of them leaped atop the hood of the Navigator, its taloned feet scraping the vehicle with a shriek of metal, Peter raised his right hand and with a gesture he crushed the demon in a circlet of green flame that cracked its shell and snapped it in two.The magick flooded through him and his entire body was engulfed in brilliant, verdant power that lifted him up off the ground, crackling around him as though he were cradled with a ball of green lightning.As one, the swarm of demons paused.A whine like hydraulic engines rose up from the skittering beasts, and then they swept in toward the Navigator.10Nancy Carling and her sister Paula had carefully mapped out their trip to Spain with the travel agent before departure, knew where their hotels were, how many hours it would take to drive their rental car from place to place, and what to expect when they got there.Neither of the sisters had ever been to Spain before, but both of them had long desired to explore this nation where romance and history echoed in every architectural flourish.Upon their arrival in Seville, Nancy and Paula had been disappointed.Driving from the airport to the hotel had taken them past long rows of enormous apartment buildings that seemed to have been transported from some gritty dystopian future.The mazelike interior of the city had them hopelessly lost until they chanced on a sign pointing to their hotel, which they at last discovered on a narrow street with barely enough room for a single car to pass a pedestrian.The hotel had been attached to some kind of church—an older building but without the grandeur of the religious edifices they expected to find here—and a U-shaped courtyard in front of the two buildings was all the parking that was available.The inside of the hotel was beautiful with tiled fresco walls and hanging plants, as well as smaller interior courtyard gardens whose flowers gave the whole place a wonderful, wildly aromatic bouquet.After they had checked in, they walked deeper into the San Juan area of Seville and discovered the city’s heart, a sprawl of alleys lined with restaurants and shops and inconspicuous doorways where men promised live flamenco dancing later that evening [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]