My thoughts flashed back to Thorned Namshiel’s spell, the one he’d been carrying out behind his concealing veil. A detail I’d barely noticed at the time suddenly leapt out at me. I’d been worried about what spell he was getting ready. I should have been paying attention towhere he was getting ready to cast it—directly underneath a set of large vents. He’d probably been getting ready to set a wind spell in motion, to keep air pumping through the vents and spreading the gas through the Oceanarium.

Could I smell something sort of mediciney? Had the end of my nose gone numb? Hell’s bells, Harry, this is no time either to panic or to suddenly pass out. I had to warn Ivy.

I turned my head back toward her and caught Tessa’s gaze halfway. “Worked it out, did you?” Mantis Girl murmured. “If he speaks,” she said, presumably to Obsidian Statue, “crush his chest.”

A weirdly modulated voice issued from the general area of the androgynous statue’s head. “Yes, mis—”

And then there was a whup and a slap of air pressure against my skin, and Statue’s head—and Shaggy Feathers’s too—exploded in simultaneous eruptions of distinctly different forms of gore. The statue went out like some kind of faulty street-paving machine, splattering black sludge that looked like hot asphalt everywhere in a steadily spurting stream. It flung itself onto its back, then bounded to its hands and knees and started hammering its fists at the concrete. I guess it intended to smash me. I guess without a head, it didn’t know that it was actually six feet away, and digging a hole through the bleachers and into the material beneath.

Shaggy Feathers just fell in a welter of very human-looking, -smelling, and -tasting blood, and maybe three hundred pounds of limp, rubbery muscle landed on my chest.

“Ivy!” I screamed. “Gas! Get clear!”

And then things got noisy.

A series of cracking thumps came down faster than you could rapidly snap your fingers, and Denarians began to scream in pain and rage. I was vaguely aware of them bounding left and right, and saw a muzzle flash from the far side of the Oceanarium. At least I knew where Kincaid had been—getting into a position to kill both demon-taken madmen holding me down with a single freaking bullet, since anything less would have meant my certain death.

“He is nothing!” howled Tessa. “Tarsiel, take the Hellhound! Everyone else, the girl!”

Come on, Harry. Time to pay Kincaid back by getting the kid clear. Somehow. My right hand wasn’t moving much, and my singed left arm didn’t like it, but I heaved and strained and got enough of the dead Denarian off me to let me begin to squirm out from under it. Just as I was about to pull free, a silver coin rolled out from amidst the ruined tentacles that had passed for the thing’s head and dropped toward my face. I jerked my head aside in a panic.