3.5. Black Magic Woman Read Free

life-sucking monster to hide than in the costume contest. Now hurry up!” I poured on the speed and made the length of the convention center in about eight seconds. The contest was in a big ballroom, some distance from the dealer hall, so I sent Sabrina a text telling her where to meet us. 
    Greg and I skidded to a stop at the door to the ballroom, trying our best to look nonchalant. “Don’t worry, fellas, the hot Catwoman costumes haven’t even started yet,” offered the pervy guy in a Silent Bob trenchcoat at the back of the room. I shot him a dirty look and started to make my way to the front of the crowd, annoying no small number of fanboys and video camera-toting momma’s boys who had traded their one weekend of the year out of the basement to come to the costume contest. There were the usual contenders - the juvenile Slave Leia we’d seen earlier, a cavalcade of Batman villains all working the scene together. One guy went deep into the comic book backlist and pulled out an Ambush Bug costume, much to Greg’s delight. I will admit to a glance or two at the Black Cat and Harley Quinn costumes, but it took me only a few seconds to lock onto my most likely target - a statuesque blonde in a toga with a slit in the leg that went about half a mile past decency, and a golden circlet glittering on her brow.
    About half a dozen con-goers were following her like she was dropping ice cubes in the Sahara, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes continually scanned the crowd, looking for something but obviously not finding it in the gathered nerd herd. I waved Greg over to me and pointed, trying to get close enough to her to get a whiff of her scent. Greg breathed deeply, then nodded to me. “That’s her. Or she’s it. Or whatever. You know what I mean.” 
    “Yep.” I moved to intercept the woman, but her eyes locked on me as I approached and she waved an arm negligently at her sycophantic followers. Suddenly they transformed from sappy loverboys to a half-dozen angry humans, all focused on yours truly. I did the best duck and weave I could, trying to avoid hitting any of them. They didn’t make things easy on me, throwing their own punches and trying to wrestle me down to the ground. I shoved a couple of them back and got a good look at the men attacking me, and what I saw made me gasp. I could see them aging almost before my eyes. I glanced back over to Nightmare Barbie, and saw that she was getting obviously stronger and more beautiful as she drained the life from the men attacking me. 
    “We gotta get the fight out of here!” I yelled to Greg. “She’s got too many people to draw from! We’ll never stop her in here!”
    “You’ll never stop me anywhere, mortal!” The blonde bombshell laughed. “I’ve been feeding off souls since before your ancestors dragged themselves from the mud and grew legs!”
    I stopped short and stared at her, open-mouthed. “Wow, lady, you’re worse at witty repartee than I am. And I thought nobody was that bad!” That gave the biggest fanboy time to catch up to me and clock me in the head with his Green Lantern Power Battery, and I went down like a sack of scrawny potatoes. I gave my best Hercules impression, and tossed the heap of flailing nerds off of me. I continued my mad dash for the door, hot on Greg’s heels as he sprinted down the hall into the atrium, looking for any place that would give us some room to maneuver.
    We got into the atrium, and started thumping hypnotized nerds. While somewhat satisfying, nothing we did brought us any closer to actually taking down our psycho Aphrodite, until I got a bright idea and chunked a Storm Trooper at her head. She deflected the flying cosplayer with barely a twitch, but the distraction did momentarily break her hold on the rest of her geek army. I put as much mojo into my voice as I could muster and shouted, “Sleep!” in my best James Earl Jones impression. Admittedly, I sounded more like C. Thomas Howell in Sixteen