Granted, some of them were slightly more furry and hornier, in a nonmetaphorical sense.

As that tension rose, time slowed, and slowed, and slowed… and my helmet kept slipping. I kept pushing it back. Then it would slip again. I could feel a bead of sweat leaking out from under my hair to trail down my cheek, where it trembled on my chin before falling. It felt like it traveled for eons, and while I knew my heart was thudding out of control, because of the trick time was playing it sounded, in my ears, like a slow bass drum beating ominously in the background. And still time continued to slow, until I thought it might stop again. Then, just as suddenly, the great thumb moved again to press another button and kick everything into hyperspeed.

All at once, the breach teams were shouting and pounding through the door with their battering rams, and I could hear an explosion from inside the building. Before I could even register that it was, apparently, the time for bringing pain, the breach team had stepped aside, making way for the first members of our entry team. I could already hear gunfire from the front members of the line, and I could feel the shots reverberating down my spine.

Anyan’s hand met that tingle on my back as he pushed me forward with the rest of our stick. The woman in front of me had her rifle raised and ready, till we heard the cold, clear call of the ifrit commander’s voice shouting, “Magic!” She smoothly sheathed her weapon into a holster she wore on her back, even as she raised a mage ball with her other hand. The supernatural silence ended just as the physical one had, with a sudden cacophony of blasts and hums as an onslaught of magic was unleashed: mage balls let rip, shields went up, and the raid suddenly went from normal to paranormal.

Everyone seemed to be everywhere, shouting at once. Our stated ROE had required we try to catch the bad guys alive, so we could pump them for information. That said, Isolde had declared that hostage safety came first, and the sniper had been instructed to take out the “doctor” whose desk had been set up right between two of the hostages’ cells. He’d been a little too close to the females for comfort, considering the predilection for offing their prisoners demonstrated by other guards.

Sure enough, when I looked to my left, I saw a male in a lab coat slumped back in his office chair, a neat hole between his eyes and a lot of blood and brain-goop spattering the wall behind him. Our sniper had done her job and that part of the raid, at least, had gone according to plan.

Unfortunately, the rest of the raid had not gone quite so well. By the time we’d all gotten into the lab, all three of the bad guys were dead, and only two by our own hand. For the kappa, as soon as he’d realized what was happening, had taken out the other doctor himself. Then he’d tried to start in on his hostages. He’d blasted a hole in the poor havsrå, but before he could finish her off, the first members of our entry team took him down. One rifle blast from one side of the room, coupled with a mage ball from the other, had been the end of the evil mutant turtle, and our only chance of finally getting some real, insider information on what was happening in these labs.

That said, the havsrå would live, and her life was more important.

I learned all these details afterward, however. For what I can actually remember of the raid goes something like this:

loud noises, shouting, hand on back—Anyan’s—moving forward moving forward moving forward oh my god I really don’t want to be moving forward shit I’m moving forward, shit we’re inside, maybe Iris is in here? lots of smoke, eyes burning, ohmigod I’m gonna pee in my pants, dude that’s blood, what if it’s one of us, what if it’s Iris, lab coat, oh good it’s a bad guy, the women, the poor women, I don’t see Iris, I knew she wasn’t in here but what if drude-lady was wrong and she was hidden, there’s that fucking kappa, he’s dead too, Sea Code, biatch! oh no he got one of the hostages, but he’s dead and so are the other two, WHERE IS IRIS, I didn’t even do anything, is that it?

And that was, indeed, it. For after all that chaos and that fear, the great thumb pressed another button and time went back to normal. I was left standing in the center of the room, one of Anyan’s big hands still at the base of my spine, while his other hand cupped an unnecessary mage ball.

After a moment, I realized I was shaking. Everything was done and over, but I was still trembling like a medieval virgin on her wedding night. I was shaking so hard, in fact, that the damned helmet fell down over my eyes. But this time I let it stay there, blocking everything else out, till Anyan gently moved it back away from my face.

“You okay?”

I looked at him, mute. A mixture of fear and adrenaline had captured my tongue.

“Jane?”

I searched for and finally found my ability to speak. “Is that it?” I reiterated, still unable to think past the idea that it was all over.

“Yeah, honey. That was it. And you did great.”

I stood there, blinking. “So everything’s over? We’re safe?”

“Yeah, honey,” Anyan said gently. “It’s all over and we’re safe. And all the women are safe now, too. But are you okay?”

My heart was still beating in my throat, my limbs were still shaking with adrenaline, and I could feel the blood surging through my brain as if I were about to have a stroke. But despite all of this, I felt… to be honest, and despite the chaos around me, I felt… awesome.

“That was so fucking cool,” I said finally. “I mean, I didn’t do anything, but it was still so fucking cool. This must be how people who jump out of planes feel…”

Anyan laughed, his crooked nose wrinkling with pleasure.

“Honey, you were awesome. And you did do something. When I told you, ‘Move forward,’ you moved forward. Do you know how many newbies bolt on their first raid? And besides, this was never about you taking somebody out. There were only a few bad guys, but a lot of hostages. This was about getting enough firepower in that door as quickly as possible, so that we could get those females out alive. And you were part of that.”

I grinned at Anyan’s words, suddenly seeing some truth in what the barghest had said. For I’d ended up standing directly between the spot where the kappa had made his stand and one of the cells with a hostage.

I was a human shield, I thought rather proudly. Well, a halfling shield… but speaking of shields, why didn’t the havsrå shield herself from the kappa’s attack? And how could three creatures hold five to begin with?

I’d been standing there, dumbly staring about the room, for long enough that the supes brought in to search the place for clues were already making inroads. Various beings were pawing through the desks and the filing cabinets, while others bagged and labeled the various medical instruments strewn higgledy-piggledy around the room.

I saw Isolde stride in with two of the other high-ranking officers, stopping to congratulate various members of her team.

“So you did good, Jane,” Anyan was concluding, and I couldn’t help but grin.

“It was kind of fun,” I admitted. “But I was terrified. I don’t know how much good I would have been if I’d had to fight.”

I watched as Isolde approached Ezekiel, who was going through some filing cabinets near one of the desks. She stopped to talk to him, and then he was digging through the cabinet again.

“Well,” Anyan said, “that’s what we’re going to work on next. I wish I could tell you that fighting didn’t matter, that you wouldn’t have to duke it out with anybody. But with everything that’s been happening, that’s not realistic. Now that your shields are strong—” he began, reminding me of what I’d been thinking. Before he could continue with his master plans for me, I interrupted.

“Anyan, why didn’t the women just bust out of here? Where were their powers? And…”

Before I could continue, I saw Isolde approaching from the corner of my eye. Ezekiel was with her, and she was holding a file folder.

“Zeke just found this,” the baobhan sith said, her expression grim. She passed the folder over to Anyan but studiously avoided my own eyes.

Anyan read the writing on the folder, then opened it. I watched his big features fall, and I knew. I held out my hands, and he looked at them for a moment before balancing the file in my outstretched palms.

The tab at the top of the file folder read “Succubus, Iris.” Inside was a bundle of half-completed forms, but they weren’t important to me. What was important was the word stamped on the front of the top paper.

That word was “Terminated.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When I heard the scratching at my door, I was lying on my belly, half under my bed, trying to flush out my deodorant. I’d dropped it and it had rolled away like a captured thing finally offered release.

It was only a few hours since I’d read about Iris’s death in that file folder. Anyan had checked us into a hotel in downtown Providence, where we’d be staying for a few days. There were witnesses to question, and Ryu’s team was meeting us tomorrow. So I’d focused on what we had coming, rather than what had happened. I’d deal with Iris’s death later, when Jarl had been brought down.