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.”