One shot, and missed, but Jess didn’t. He placed his shots carefully, and both men dropped.

Santi looked angry and ill with it. “Get them in,” he said. “Look after Glain. We still have to take the Translation Chamber, and there may be more guarding it . . .” His voice trailed off, and his eyes fixed somewhere beyond Jess, toward the other end of the tunnel.

Jess heard a ringing, echoing roar.

He turned his head to see the Roman lion—the one he’d turned off on their way to rescue Thomas—racing toward them in a flat-out run, claws digging into the stone floor of the hallway as it ran, and flinging up chips behind it. His weapon wouldn’t matter to it, not at all, and from the tenor of the roar and the red shine of its eyes, it didn’t intend to take them prisoner. It would crush them, rip them, leave them bloody rags on the stones.

He heard Santi’s quiet sigh behind him and recognized the resignation in it. Santi was giving up.

Jess damn well wasn’t.

He dropped his gun and, as Morgan and Khalila ducked through the opening, with Glain held up between them, he went straight at the lion at a run. Not this time, he thought. This time I won’t miss. He couldn’t. They were in the path now, and the lion would crush them all, Scholars and Obscurists and High Garda alike. They were now enemies, and enemies had no safety.

Now.

He flung himself forward into a tight ball and rolled, slammed his legs down flat to stop himself as the lion passed over him, and then he was up, behind it, as it passed him.

“Jess!” Morgan screamed. She thought it had trampled him, and, near enough, he’d felt one paw graze his shoulder and leave a massive bruise, but he was alive. And now he grabbed hold of the automaton’s whipping tail, careful of the barb at the end, and swung himself up on the broad, muscular back.

It was like riding a storm. The lion reacted instantly to the pressure, twisting and writhing, slamming against the wall; he dodged the barbed tail that tried to spear him from behind and locked his arms around the massive neck before he swung his legs off and let momentum throw him forward. For a second he was dangling from the lion, and his head wedged in under the lion’s jaw, preventing it from biting.

Now.

He let go, and as he fell, he stabbed his fingertips up onto the switch. It gave with a sharp click, and then he hit the floor and scrambled backward as the lion lunged at him, snapping its jaws.

It came to a frozen halt a handbreadth from his face.

“Dio mio!” Santi said, lapsing just for a moment into his native Italian, and then recovered a second later to lunge forward, grab Jess, and drag him backward to his feet. For just a moment, the captain looked at him with silent approval, and then he turned and said, “We have to get to the Translation Chamber. Move.” As the others began to go, he said to Jess, “I thought we were dead.”