Broken Hero Read Free Page B

is a popular one. She is half-bowled over by a fleeing man, somehow still hanging onto his pint.
    Across the room another man lets out a loud, “Ooph!” and drops to the floor with his hands buried between his thighs. It’s the man who had Tabitha in a headlock. He seems to have recovered enough of his senses to let her go. Her knee is still raised after delivering a powerful blow to his genitals.
    “I said save them!” I snap. “Not engage in family planning!”
    I try to move toward the man but there’s a careening robot screaming “
Da shek! Da shnek!
” between me and him so that plan has to be put on hold.
    “Kayla,” Felicity snaps, “listen to Arthur and get that idiot out of here!”
    “Oh, because you totally don’t feckin’ need me.” Kayla, I think, is still out of sorts after her conversation with Ephie.
    “Clyde,” I say. “Hit the robot again.”
    Clyde mutters. His arms fly outward. The robot staggers back, good arm pinwheeling afresh as it tries to stay on its one working foot.
    “Feckin’ point taken,” Kayla grumbles, then blurs into motion, darting between staggering feet, and snatching up both the man and Tabitha.
    “Hands! Remove!” Tabitha yells. Kayla ignores her as she bodily drags her toward the door.
    The robot recovers itself, props its head against a thick wooden beam. “
Nell vick shnigh!
” Now it’s not worrying about the whole balance thing, it seems to be taking stock of its surroundings more. The insectile eyes flicker back and forth across the room. It lowers its head, hunches its shoulders, stalks one stumbling step forward.
    “Again, Clyde!”
    “Right on it.” Clyde is edging around the quivering walls of the pub, one hand wafting away clouds of plaster dust. “Totally hearing you and about to make my move. Never worry. It’s just I’m trying to get line of sight on his foot. Sort of want to make every spell count. Want to do that always, of course. Not suggesting frivolous spellcasting is my usual modus operandi. Very focused at all times. Professional at work. It’s just Elkman’s Push is hell on battery life.”
    “
Nar bin gest!
” The robot snatches a length of fallen timber from the floor and starts swishing it back and forth. A table sails toward a wall, lands minus three of its legs. Pint glasses become well-batted grenades.
    “How many batteries do you have left?” I duck under a tangle of fallen wiring. I want to get close enough so that I have a decent chance of shooting the robot in an eye, but not so close that I get turned into a cricket ball by that stick it’s wielding.
    “There’s a slim chance that I’m down to three AAs and a nine volt.”
    I pause in my approach to allow my incredulity to have its full moment. “That’s it?” That is less of a magical armament and more of a massive blow to my chances of surviving long enough to watch the six o’clock news.
    “Well, in my, you know, defense… And well, hindsight benefitting from the acuity of vision that it does, in retrospect this may resemble a phrase my mother was always fond of saying: assumptions make an ass out of both you and me. Though, mostly I think she meant me. As you probably will. Not an unfair call, I suspect. But as I was saying, I was rather assuming that the afternoon would involve more of a quiet pint and less of a battle to the death, and that affected my packing plans.”
    Which is about as catty as Clyde gets. What’s more he has a point. I peer back at the exposed electrical wiring I just ducked beneath. “Can that help you?”
    Clyde’s eyebrows pop up and he grins.
    “See,” Felicity says between potshots at the robot’s head, “that’s why I made you field lead.”
    If I wasn’t busy avoiding being beaten to death it would be quite a cool moment. As it is, the robot’s bat smashes into the ground one foot to my left. Splinters stitch a path up my leg as the beam’s end impacts on the floorboards.
    I snap off a shot, see it raise sparks