Eleanor cursed fluidly in several languages, one of which would have caused milk to curdle had there been any nearby. Her phone was buzzing angrily in its cradle but she didn’t dare pick it up. There was no telling who was entangled with Mal at the moment, and the horns that blared as she wove through traffic encouraged her to keep her attention where it belonged. Fortunately she passed no lurking police cars, perhaps a lingering effect of the luck altering spell she had used, as she raced towards the gas station leaving behind the freeway and busy roads. At first she harbored the pitiful delusion that Mal was handling things in a professional manner, but the subtle pricking in her thumbs, and the decidedly less subtle flash of gunfire from within the dirty glass windows, assured her otherwise. She disengaged her steering assist and hauled on the wheel, sliding into the parking lot with a screech of tires, bumping over the covers to the subterranean tanks. A crown vic, identical almost exactly to the one that had been tailing her, was parked infront of the gas station, doors still open. She could see figures inside, two big men with their backs to her in the front of the store. One of them was picking himself up from an avalanche of candy bars and beef jerky. They didn’t appear to have noticed her yet, and she sprang from the car and ran towards the front of the store. She was a half dozen steps from the door and reaching for her pistol when a white light flared from inside.
 
“Shit,” she breathed and threw herself sideways. The white light lit up like the igniter for Satan’s propane burner. There was an audible wuuuump as air rushed in, rattling the glass, and then a thunderous detonation. Glass fragment blasted out on the shockwave like a million glittering knives, sleeting against the fuel bowsers like angry hail. Eleanor hit the ground hard and rolled, protected from the worst of the blast by the sturdy cinderblock walls of the gas station. Her ears rang and it took a moment of conscious effort to force her stunned diaphragm to resume drawing breath. Debris rained down around her. Burning bags of gummy bears and catchphrase flavored potato chips. A half case of miller lite hissed and spat where it had been blown from a cardboard carton. A can of pringles rolled by forlorn. The ringing in her ears was unbelievable.  She drew her weapon, seized with the entirely justifiable urge to shoot Mal in the face. It struck her as somewhat ironic if the danger Emmaline had foreseen was that she would put a bullet into him. A giggle escaped her lips, though she suspected that if she could hear anything it would sound somewhat crazed. Then two figures walked from the inferno. Just walked out as though they were heading back to their car after buying snacks. Both were male and both were naked, the blast having stripped their clothes from their bodies in the same instant it had hurled half the contents of the store into the parking lot. Their hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, had been burned away and their fingernails were smoldering but if they were concerned by this in anyway they didn’t show it.
 
“Shit,” she repeated as one of the pair turned to regard her. One of its eyes had been transfixed by what looked to be a piece of modular shelving. The heat had cauterized blackened optical tissue around it in a weeping mess. He/it regarded her for a moment and then intoned in a clear pleasant voice which reminded her uncannily of Mr Rogers: “Suffer not the Witch to live.”
 
“Ohhhkay,” Eleanor wheezed, skootching back a foot or so and pulling her pistol from its holster. It was a custom desert eagle with a pearl and ivory inlaid grip. The words: Ergo augue conjectus, were picked out in simple engraving along the barrel. She fired. Fifty miles away in Eleanor’s basement the massive truck suspension spring which hung from a rafter leaped into the air as it compressed from no visible source, back at the gas station the gun roared but recoiled no more than a child’s bb gun as it thaumaturgically dissipated the massive force of its discharge. The heavy, thumb thick, shell, engraved with the seven orders of banishment with a microlathe, punched through the neck of Evil Mr Rogers. The upward slant of the shot blew the back of the things head to pulp, all but decapitating it. The body pitched sideways and struck one of the bowsers with a dull clang dishing in the Shell Oil logo. Eleanor had a weird moment of clarity in which she was thankful that the fuel pumps themselves hadn’t gone up along with the late and unlamented miller lite. Evil Mr Rogers shifted and tried to lift himself up, the minor inconvenience of having only a few strips of flesh for a head apparently not insurmountable.  Then the body slumped and was still, save for an odd undulation at the top of the neck. With a spray of blood and gristle something silvery and cruciform burst free and launched itself at Eleanor, too fast to see. She shouted a macro and flung her hand upward in warding. Whatever it was sailed through the spell without so much as slowing but the barrel of the pistol hit it and knocked it up and over her, sending it sailing away into a pile of empty milk crates. Lurching to her feet, Eleanor dodged the second creature and dived into her lexus. The car alarm was wailing and her phone was still ringing, and while she could probably do to speak with someone about her extended warranty, that would have to wait. The second corpse thing, a beefy looking man with half his fingers blown off was staggering towards her, the explosion having shattered a kneecap. She slammed the accelerator and the powerful vehicle leaped forward and sent him sprawling with an audible crack. The passenger side airbag deployed with a screech and the reek of burning superglue. Feeling the ‘thunk thunk’ as she drove over what she hoped but doubted was a body, she hauled on the wheel, squealing out onto the road. She fired once out the window and was audible reminded of why firing a hand gun in car was a bad idea. The muzzle blast crazed the windshield and shattered one window into neat squares that rained down like a waterfall, and she swerved and nearly lost control. The wheel of the crown vic exploded with a jet of air and a thump throwing pieces of rubber in all directions. Monsters or not they wouldn’t be driving it anywhere. Eleanor got the fishtail under control and accelerated down the road, sticking her head out the window to see past her ruined wind shield. Blood or some other fluid dripped into her eyes and she wiped irritably at her face, her hand coming away red. In the rear view she saw what might or might not have been a man stumbling towards the road but she didn’t slow down.