“I thought you said this thing fed on magic,” Lena said. Sweat shone on her face as she continued to strike.

“Lead it in here.” I ran through an open wall into the cool shade of what had once been an assembly line. Rust and graffiti covered the metal support pillars. A rat scurried through a gap in the far wall. Overhead, sparrows fluttered angrily from their nests in the steel rafters, protesting my intrusion.

They were going to be a lot more upset soon.

Lena smashed the thing to turn it around, then struck again, knocking it after me. She reminded me of a hockey player controlling the puck. Her jacket was torn, and her cheekbone was vivid red.

I pointed the handle away from me and activated it. A monofilament wire shot out, held in place by a powerful magnetic field which had probably fried every one of the credit cards in my wallet. I extended the blade to its maximum length and flicked my wrist. The pillar to my left shivered. Dust and flakes of old green paint rained down. The cut was invisible at first, but then the pillar shifted ever so slightly out of alignment. “Can you pin it to the floor?”

“Not for very long.” Lena landed an overhead blow that bent the creature double. Its hands grabbed Lena’s knee, and she yelled in pain. She brought her other knee into its jaw, but it clung tight. She had to jab the bar through the thing’s hand and pry the arm back to free herself.

It grabbed the other end of the bar, and Lena’s mouth tightened into a smile. She stepped back, yanking it off-balance, and speared the end of the bar through its chest.

Lena lifted the opposite end of the bar, then thrust downward. Steel punched through the old concrete floor. Lena bent the end of the bar double like an oversized staple through the thing’s chest, then jumped backward, collapsing to the floor as her leg gave out.

I swung at another pillar, then grabbed Lena’s arm. She did her best to keep up as I all but dragged her away.

The first pillar shifted and ripped free of the roof, showering metal and rust as it slammed to the ground with an impact that swayed the whole building, but the roof remained standing.

I cut through several more pillars from the doorway, then flicked off my weapon. “This would probably be a good time to get the hell out of here.”

What followed sounded like a drawn-out explosion. I stopped only long enough to grab Smudge as we hobbled away, taking shelter in an open doorway of the next building. The center of the ceiling collapsed first, steel and concrete and tarred roof crumbling inward. The ground shook, and dust shivered down from above.