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To be perfectly honest, though, I would have ju before I look

As luck would have it, I landed next toto the pitch-black space, I dove for the sword, but so kicked it out of the way

"E rune its," the thing hissed

I froze in place The voice speaking to me was so cold, so inhued to pass thehta voice like that I was not entirely of ht mind so my pants stayed dry, but the rest of me broke out in a cold sweat

"E cants beee here"

It took lish

"Secret," Holden called froaze darted to the left, searching the ground for where the thing h I could see in the dark, it wasn’t quite the sahts on I could tell there was a creature standing about five feet away from me with its arms limp at its side, but I couldn’t make out any distinctive features The darkness was too coles, ht in order to show me the full picture

"Heads up!"

I sidestepped in ti He’d had the presence of htened up, the rooht We stood side by side, so close our arood look at theall over Manhattan

Beady black eyes blinked at us, as if the ht cast by the lantern was too much for it to bear

"Ayyy e thaaaa"

Holden held the light higher and thrust the lantern towards the creature It was hard to refer to it as a creature once I could see it properly It lookedstood about two inches taller than me, on the shorter side for a man, and had a rounded potbelly and cue-ball head Its skin had the pallor of a desk jockey whose only tanning option was loatt office fluorescent bulbs

"This is our monster?" Holden asked

"Ot," it demanded It had fleshy lips that flapped aardly as it tried to speak, giving our tubby accountant the appearance of being a drunk tubby accountant rather than just a boring one "Git ot"

Get out That e in those charcoal eyes than any of the pseudo-words it was speaking

"Not without the ht I could see et to it without passing the fae Behind him I could see a hole with bars and a lock A pair of hands rapped around the bars and a boy’s face was trying to wedge through the space to get a look It obviously wasn’t Penny, but I recognized the cinna brown eyes from one of the school pictures

We weren’t too late

"Not fur e" The slurring, s in an aard, unnatural way made it hard to understand the words, but I could ist of it