Elgin
*You should never believe the Djin, for he will tell you true ninety nine times and then lie you into a grave the one hundredth.* Cutter muttered in their shared mind as the great black wolf loped across the loft area. He found another staircase, but staircases were dangerously unstable in the shadow realm. Twisting back into the real world he went through the door, leaping from one landing to the next at a bound.
Three floors down, two above the ground floor, sense and instinct saved him from an ugly encounter when he heard a thump and hiss from below. He leaped at a door, halfway there he twisted back into the shadow realm, and smashed through the door, then twisted back into the real world before hitting the floor on the other side.
An instant later the real world door to the stairwell blew off to spin and bound in pursuit of him. Elgin yipped and dodged, the door missed, just, and slid to a stop a couple of dozen feet further away. Flame gushed from the concrete tube for a few seconds before fizzling out.
Crouched in the shadows panting the wolf realized that he could hear gunfire from below him, and then a building shaking crump of a significant explosion. Windows on the wall to the east flickered with light and bloomed with the light of another explosion, this one outside.
For the first time the Iffrit gathered his power and let it flow out, looking for Olga and Rachel, hoping that they were still alive, trying to spot where everyone else was. He realized that somehow he had gotten himself involved with something like a full scale war. The ground floor and the first basement level were the backdrop for a platoon level gunfight, with four werewolves lurking in the wings.
The second basement level had more werewolves, another vampire, a BabaYaga and a half dozen armed humans. There were also eleven unarmed women in a container jail, Olga and Rachel were among them.
There was a BabaYaga, Myyr, on the floor above him, with more fighters including two werewolves and something else, a big still something else. She sent a gush of her sulfurous fire his way the instant she detected the sensing sweep. The ceiling above blew down, showering the the black wolf with fragments that would have been death to a flesh and blood creature.
Bullets screamed off the concrete column above his head and then slammed into his barrel as he spun and ran. The BabaYaga was directing her infantry like a first rate commander and she was the backup artillery. A heavy bullet caught his leg and sent him staggering, but he was up and then smashing through the window into the cold, snow filled darkness.
The Iffrit unfolded with a crack of massive wings, the next instant he landed on a familiar black Escalade, which caved in like a cheap toy. The Iffrit reared up on his rear legs and hurled himself skyward with a great sweep of long golden wings, bullets from several directions impacted with stinging force before he was hidden by the snow.
He was extremely angry with quite a few people at this point. A lot of people were already dead and many more were going to die for no purpose. The Djin had woven a wonderful web from disparate strands creating the potential for mass death, and it would be the Iffrit’s fault. He had let the Djin trick him once and he had lost control of that situation. Just like he had lost control of this one.
The Iffrit hit the wall on the third floor like a diving bird hitting the water, three sets of claws drove full length into masonry and the wall buckled under the impact. His right true hand slammed through a window in a blizzard of glass fragments to take his target and an instant later he was up and away, his launch ripping down a whole section of wall in a roaring avalanche of brick.
One of the cruel talons had driven through Myyr’s body about where a heart would have been if she had been human. In the BabaYaga’s case the Iffrit had pierced her secondary brain, a fatal blow but a cruelly slow one. The BabaYaga Myyr shrieked her rage and clawed weakly at the part of the Griffin she could reach, her magic dead with her second brain.
“Myyr, I told you and your sisters and brothers to stay away from human entanglements. I think this is a quite complete abrogation of your promises to me.” The voice that spoke her language was ancient, cold, pitiless.
“You were dead...”
“There was no clause canceling the agreement if you thought I was dead Myyr. You knew the Djin was my enemy much more than he was my friend, and I cannot believe that you ever believed anything he said regarding a matter of such importance.”
“The magic, the realms, it was so hard without...”
The Iffrit growled, both Cutter and Elgin were feeling pity for the creature, a creature that had undoubtedly killed and eaten hundreds of their species.
“Know something you don’t,” the creature somehow combined a giggle and whimper, and then she shuddered and died.
The Iffrit let the creature’s body fall off his claw, vanishing into the snow and mist in its long fall into the river as he banked hard, cursing himself again.
*What happened?* Elgin asked.
*Soul shed herself, killed herself, it means she had some kind of undead shell ready for animation.*
*Another vampire?*
*She would not have wasted her soul on a simple vampire.* The flying creature that blasted fire at the Iffrit as he approached was proof that she hadn’t
*A Dragon!?* Elgin yelped as the Iffrit snapped past in an vertical turn, flying between buildings; his wingtip not more than ten feet above the traffic that clogged the road below.
Cutter muttered something unkind in ancient Aramaic that Elgin chose to ignore.
The Iffrit rolled upright and beat wing for altitude, he made an odd summoning motion and suddenly something long, heavy and very beaten up appeared in his hand. He tucked it up under his body.