I didn’t need to sense what they did. I could see it.

A clawed hand, a massive hand, punched through the mirror right next to Carnades’s. The hand was attached to and followed by a scaled arm corded with thick muscle. Nothing that big should have been able to move that fast, but apparently no one had ever told that to it—whatever it was. There wasn’t any need to shatter the mirror it was coming through; the monster did that all by itself, squeezing its hunched shoulders and horned head through the glass, snapping and reducing the frame to splinters. That it had destroyed its own escape hatch didn’t seem to bother it at all. In fact, judging from its dingy, yellow eyes and a mouthful of smiling fangs to match, it looked downright happy about where he was.

Happy and hungry.

Piaras launched into a litany of curses in Goblin. Someone had been around Talon too long. Then I saw what Piaras had seen. Spellsongs wouldn’t do any good on this thing, either. It didn’t have plugs in its ears.

It didn’t have any ears.

Though I was betting it’d bleed. Problem was getting close enough to stick it with something sharp without having it do the same to us, namely with the hooked claws attached to the fingers that were dragging the ground.

“Down!” Justinius roared.

The old man didn’t have to yell twice. I hit the floor, with Piaras a split second behind me. At that moment, Justinius Valerian, archmage of the Conclave of Sorcerers and the most badass spellslinger there was, opened up on the monster. It was beautiful—in a seriously gory way. Justinius’s hands glowed incandescent white as he hit the monster with a fireball hard enough to embed the thing into the bedrock on the other side of the room.

At least that was what should have happened.

The fireball punched a hole the size of a shield through the monster’s midsection, but instead of the monster’s insides spilling onto the outside, suspiciously shaped blobs plopped wetly onto the floor.