Mickey sat in one tree, and I sat in another, patiently waiting for whoever Alec sent for us.

  The battle was mostly done by now. With our defensive positions and the power of Hell and marks on our side, a quick survey of the bodies below me suggested that we had taken out at least twenty of Alec’s men for every one of our goons that went down — and only a single baldy died that I could see. It was the one that could heal, ironically enough. Their body was propped up against a tree with dozens of holes in the skull. I guess they couldn’t heal that up quickly enough. Most of the remaining soldiers that were still alive had retreated, so there was only the occasional burst of gun shots every couple of minutes, and it was always somewhere in the distance.

  The winged man came over the trees and landed right in the middle of the gorge. For a second, I thought our plan was fucked. Surely he saw us in the trees as he flew overhead. But he looked up at me, gave me a wink and a thumbs up, and retracted his skin back into his arms and popped his bones back into the shape of our double agent.

  Of course.

  The bird, the dwarf, the man — all the same guy. That was good news. Fighting someone that could fly seemed like it’d be annoying as shit. At least there was a chance it wouldn’t come to that.

  “I saw them run this way!” Shane twisted his body around and yelled into the trees. He could twist his torso much farther than a normal person. He turned the top half of his body almost completely around while his legs faced the other direction. Then he snapped his body back into its proper shape, looked up at us and mouthed

  Get ready.

  A few seconds later, three people barged into the grove — two women and a man. The first woman was old, plump, and had big white hair. She was what Paula Deen would probably look like without the makeup and studio lighting. The second woman was shorter, leaner, and much younger. She might have been a teenager, and she had straight black hair that went all the way down to her ankles. The man looked like he was supposed to be trading stocks on Wall Street — a fitted black suit, red tie, and perfectly sculpted hair that was forced to stay in place with an excessive amount of hair gel. All three of them had marks that covered both arms and up their necks.

  They looked around, expecting Mickey and I to be standing there ready to greet them.

  “Well?” The man said, looking at Shane. “Where are they?”

  Shane sprouted his wings and flapped his arms until he was above the trees, then came back down after a second.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “I don’t see any movement nearby. They must be hiding,” he said.

  Is this motherfucker going to give us away?

  The three looked over their shoulders, clearly on edge. They seemed anxious. Good.

  I sat still, hoping they wouldn’t look up and ruin our element of surprise, hoping that Shane wasn’t fucking us over. They seemed anxious, sure, but with their marks covering so much of their bodies, they had to be powerful — extremely powerful. The more I thought about it, the dumber it seemed for Shane to turn on these three, to help us try to kill him.

  “Oh! I think I just heard them over here!” Shane yelled and pointed at the ground, towards a group of trees nowhere near either of us. All three of them walked cautiously up to the trees and tried to see what Shane was talking about.

  “I think I see them!” he whispered. “Over there — do you see?”

  They leaned in and squinted.

  “Riiight over there.”

  They squinted harder. They man held his hand above his eyes to shield them from the sun.

  Shane approached the woman with the long black hair from behind. He grabbed her shoulders, which clearly made her uncomfortable, and turned her body.

  “See? Right… there!”

  He grabbed ahold of her arms and yanked them hard. They popped out of their sockets and she let out a howl that was equal parts pain and fury. Shane compressed down as small as he could — about the size of a toddler, by the looks of it — and scurried into the woods.

  “Your guys’ turn!” he shouted to us before he vanished from sight.

  The three of them spread out around the grove to look for us. The dark haired girl was grimacing any time she turned even the slightest amount. She was taking the pain well though, I had to give her that. I looked at Mickey, whose head was just barely poking out of his tree, and motioned for him to jump down first.

  Pussy, he mouthed, and I gave him the finger. But he did what I asked.

  When Paula Dean got a little too close to Mickey’s tree, he leapt out from cover and onto her back. He put his hands on either side of her head and… she didn’t pop. Nothing happened. The man really didn’t have many other tricks up his sleeve — he was kind of a one-trick pony, though that one trick was pretty goddamn devastating to most people — so he went with the old fashioned option of punching her in the side of the head. That didn’t work either. His fist just bounced off her temples. She laughed, and the other two marked men didn’t even bother to come to her aid; they stood on the sidelines and laughed with her.

  “Ya powas won’t work pon me ya eediat,” the Paula Dean looking motherfucker said in a thick Jamaican accent.

  “What the fu—”

  Was all Mickey was able to get out before she grabbed his arm and flung him over her shoulder, halfway across the grove. We found out that her plump, round figure wasn’t just for show when she jumped into the air, tucked her knees into her chest like she was doing a cannonball into a pool, and started boing-boinging on her ass towards Mickey, gaining an impressive amount of momentum in a short time. She was probably only two more ass-bounces away from him when I shot a glob underneath her and made her slide and bounce off at a weird angle, forcing her to plant her feet on the ground.

  I was hoping to hit them with a better surprise attack than that, but nothing can just go the way you want it to, can it?

  The man looked up at me first, locking eyes with me almost immediately after I shot off the slime. He closed his eyes and his skin started to bubble gently. White foam pushed out from his pores and condensed into a thick cloud that headed my way.