Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [28]
“Don’t shoot!” I screamed, shoving at the dog and trying to see Lucky through the gradually clearing smoke.
If his next shot came closer to the dog, he might kill me, since the creature was huddled on top of me, whining and drooling in my hair.
Max shouted something in another language as he pointed at Lucky. Suddenly the mobster’s gun flew out of his hand and turned into a bat—the nocturnal kind with creepy looking wings. The bat hovered over Lucky for a few moments, as if contemplating biting him.
Lucky’s eyes got as big as golf balls. He fell to his knees and crossed himself.
Then the bat flew toward me. I don’t like bats, so I screamed again and covered my head with my arms. The dog thought I was trying to play and, recovered from the emotional crisis inspired by Lucky’s gunshots, it started jumping up and down on top of me.
“Max! Help!” I cried.
“To the rescue!” A moment later, Max grabbed the dog around the neck and heaved backward with all his body weight.
The dog resisted for a moment, then decided to play with Max instead of me. The two of them flew backward together and landed with a thud. The dog got up and wagged its tail, looking from me to Max, who lay prone and motionless.
I sat up, trying to catch my breath as I looked around warily for the bat. I saw it sinking to the floor on the far side of the room. To my relief, it was dissolving and oozing back into its original shape, the inanimate weapon which had given it such brief life. Moments later, Lucky’s gun lay on the floor where the bat had been.
I glanced at Lucky. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he was praying fervently in Italian.
“Max? Are you conscious?” I asked hoarsely.
“More or less,” came the faint answer. After a moment, Max sat up slowly, disheveled and panting. He rubbed his shoulder as he asked me, “Are you all right, Esther?”
“Sort of.” I coughed again and waved smoke away from my face. “How about you?”
“I think I’m being robbed,” he said, eyeing Lucky anxiously.
“Oh! No, no,” I said, “he came with me.”
Max looked confused. “Are you being robbed?”
“I didn’t know he had a gun with him. I swear.” But I supposed it should have occurred to me that a notorious hit man—even a semiretired one—probably never left home without his piece. “He’s a friend of mine, Max. The gunfire was, um, a misunderstanding.”
“Well . . .” Max watched Lucky praying. “At least he seems repentant.”
After the smoke cleared and we felt strong enough to haul ourselves off the floor, it took us some time to convince Lucky to stop praying and have a seat while we restored order to Max’s laboratory. It took even longer to clean up the mess.
The room was cavernous, windowless, and shadowy. The walls were decorated with charts covered in strange symbols and maps of places with unfamiliar names. Bottles of powders, vials of potions, and dried plants jostled for space on the cluttered shelves. Beakers, implements, and tools lay tumbled and jumbled on the heavy, dark furniture. Today there was also a lot of shattered glass to clean up, as well as crumbling pieces of dried animal parts and a sticky blue liquid that was staining everything it touched, including me and the dog.
“Max, is this stuff ever going to come off?” I asked, rubbing at my arm.
Lucky, who still seemed dazed, muttered, “There’s some on your face, too.”
“Damn,” I said.
Jars of herbs, spices, minerals, amulets, and neatly assorted claws and teeth sat on densely packed shelves and in dusty cabinets. There were antique weapons, some urns and boxes and vases, several Tarot decks, some runes, two gargoyles squatting in a corner, icons and idols, a scattering of old bones, and a Tibetan prayer bowl. An enormous bookcase was packed to overflowing with many leather-bound volumes, as well as unbound manuscripts, scrolls, and even a few clay tablets.
For weeks, there had also been piles of feathers all over the lab. Today, for