CHAPTER 20: ESCAPE

            With the amulet and Angel in hand, Nicole stormed through the basement.  I followed behind her.  I gave the miniature city a brief glance, but that would have to wait.  Leila was in extreme danger upstairs.  Bursting into the main room, a couple girls saw us and stood up, alarmed at the sight of a normal-sized male.  Nicole immediately shrank them and kept walking.  The light appeared to have no effect on me anymore.  Running up the stairs, another girl came out of her room, demanding to know what was going on.  FLASH!  She was reduced, too.

            The door to Jayne’s room was locked.

            “Let us in Jayne,” Nicole called.

            There was no response.

            I kicked the door in near the knob, and we marched inside.  At first, the room appeared empty, but then a wooden chair crashed onto my head.  Apparently, whatever invulnerability Angel’s first ritual bestowed upon me had expired after the second one, because I felt the full impact of that strike.  Blood immediately poured from my scalp into my right eye, and I fell to one knee.  Jayne lunged at Nicole and grabbed for the amulet, which went flying across the room.  In all the commotion, Jayne dropped Leila from her hand.  I reached out and caught her safely in my palm.  Nicole also dropped Angel’s still-unconscious body.  I didn’t bother to catch her.  She landed on the wooden floor rather hard.

            Looking in my hand I saw that Leila was unharmed.  She looked up at me and pointed to the amulet.  I nodded.  I got back onto my feet, woozy from a probably concussion, and stumbled to where the amulet lay.  I grabbed it with my free and looked down at it.  It began to glow very softly in my palm.

            “What now?” I asked Leila.

            “Use it.  You can use it now.  You have the power,” she called up to me.

            “How?  What do I do?” I asked frantically.  Across the room, Nicole was getting handled pretty badly by the athletic Jayne.  Nicole didn’t appear to be taking damage, but she was being subdued rather easily.  I didn’t have much time now.  Nicole looked up and shouted a word.  I repeated it, questioningly.  A green flash enveloped the room.  When the light dissipated, a fully restored Leila blinked at me with surprise.

            “You did it,” she said.

            I turned around just in time to see Jayne charging me.  She buried her shoulder into me and tried to shove me through the glass window.  I twisted as hard as I could and use her own momentum to let her crash into the glass.  She fell two stories and landed flat on her back.  I tried to think of a great one-liner to shout out the window, and then I realized she’d taken the amulet from me.  Crafty, I thought.

            “Are you ok?” Leila asked me.

            “Yes, but she took it.  The amulet,” I said.

            “We need to get out of here.  Now.”  The voice was Nicole’s.  She was unscathed for someone who just had her ass handed to her.   She must have been affected during Angel’s transformation.

“Guys?” Leila asked.  “Where’s Angel?”

The area where she had landed was empty.

“Another reason to leave.  Let’s GO,” Nicole said.

We marched down the stairs, passing a few of the miniature women Nicole had taken care of earlier.  But another full-sized girl came running at as.  Nicole and Leila dispatched her the old-fashioned way, with a hair pull here and a right cross there.  Nicole grabbed a jean jacket by the doorway as we left through the front door.  Leila and I followed her to a vehicle parked outside.  Reaching into the jean jacket she fumbled for a second and pulled out some keys, then tossed the jacket aside.  I jumped into the back, realizing I’d been in this car before, under radically different circumstances.

“Where’s Angel?  What happened to her?” I asked.

Nicole and Leila looked at each other and said nothing.  The car peeled onto the dirt road, and we were gone into the afternoon haze.

“What about the other men?” Leila asked.

“It’ll have to wait until another day,” Nicole said.  “But Jayne’s got the amulet.  You and Leila are not invulnerable.  Mine will wear off in a couple days, but I still can’t physically fight off the rest of the girls and Jayne all at once.  We won’t abandon those men to die. I promise we won’t.”

Leila turned to me in the back.  She smiled at me for the first time.

“You still up for the job?” The client asked.

EPILOGUE – ONE MONTH LATER

A torrential downpour of rain washed over the city streets.  The night was young, but fully blossomed.  In the darkness of the alley behind the nightclub, a man, moments ago in eager anticipation of a casual sexual encounter, finds himself standing two inches tall in a woman’s hand.  He looks up at her, horror and confusion are in his face.

“Are… are you going to hurt me?” He asks.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” a female voice responds.

Sadistic green eyes glare at him as Jayne brings his tiny body close to her face.

“I want to break you.”

THE END… SEQUEL COMING SOON (deviant1568@gmail.com)