"Damn, you're right." Seventeen swore, his eyes gone wide behind the cloth mask. In a single smooth movement, he withdrew a cellphone from his pocket, flipping it open and hitting a single button quickly. "Time to make an exit, Cu."
"Sergei and Aleksander aren't heading for the parking lot." Hammond said suddenly, leaning in over Erin's shoulder to watch.
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No sooner had the door to the Curio Room closed than the two Russian guards had broken into a run. This was not a slow, ambling walk for the car. Nor was this a breakneck run of panic. Rather, it was the kind of running jog that athletic men entered into when they needed to cover distance, and quickly, but without tiring themselves.
The Museum of the Industrial Revolution was basically a rectangular brick block with a single loop of a corridor within it, the long sides facing north and south, the short sides facing east and west. The main entrance faced south, and the parking lot was to the north. Sergei and Aleksander were heading west, however, towards one of the side-exits.
They skidded to a stop by a janitorial closet, and Aleksander all but ripped the door off it's hinges in his hurry. The big man grabbed a long, narrow package wrapped in paper and tossed it to Sergei, who caught it easily. For himself he drew something similar, but broader and shorter. They exchanged a few words.
Hammond frowned, then looked at Whim. "Can you get sound for them too?"
"I'm trying, I'm trying. This isn't as easy as it looks, you know?" Whim said, brow furrowed, sketching little arcane designs in the air with her knife. "Here we go... Hell, anyone speak Russian?"
Their conversation was brief, no more than a minute, and then the two men rushed for the west exit. Sergei was cradling the oblong object in his hands carefully, but Aleksander tore the paper off his. In short order the form a short-barrelled shotgun emerged.
The two men emerged outside, and you switched to a different camera, one directly above the door. After another few words, Sergei headed north, towards the parking lot, disappearing from the cameras fields of vision for the time being. Aleksander turned and locked the west exit, snapping a heavy padlock onto the door, then he headed south along the wall of the Museum, before likewise going off-screen. The external cameras, unfortunately, only watched the doors and parking lot.
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"I am liking this situation less and less with every passing moment." Rakesh observed. One supposed that it shouldn't have been a surprise that a man known as an international arms dealer would have easy access to firearms, even in Britain, but it was still unpleasant. "Any sign of the changeling hunters?"
There was none. Cycling through the rest of the cameras in the Museum rapidly failed to reveal the Venatores. Rakesh muttered something under his breath. "Where are they?"
"Shut up. Something's happening with Cu." Whim said without a trace of guilt, and fiddled with her magic to bring up the sound."
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As Seventeen dialed his phone, something beeped in the vicinity of Cuchulainn-as-Gary's shirt pocket. He withdrew a small pager, then put it back before wriggling out of Chernenko's 'friendly' grasp.
"Someone's paging me." Cu-as-Gary said, striving to look apologetic. "I better go see who it is, I'll be right back."
"Pah, it can wait. Who would be calling at this hour of the night?" Chernenko said with a grinning sort of joviality. His thick accent gave his words a homey air. "Anyone who is smart is home in bed, or soon to be in bed. Just us crazy people up now."
"Heh, can't argue there, but I still better see who it is." Cu-as-Gary said with a strained smile. "Might be important, I'm expecting a call from my doctor."
Chernenko sighed, casting his eyes heavenward as though appealing to a higher power for patience. Seeing perhaps that none was forthcoming, he shrugged and raised one hand towards Cu-as-Gary, flicking his wrist as he did so. What happened next happened very quickly.
With a metallic sort of hiss, a tentacle shot out of the underside of Wormwood's wrist. A long, ugly length of viscera, muscles and tendons bunched into a prehensile rope an inch in diameter, tipped with a foot-long shard of slightly curved bone. It lashed out like a pneumatic spike, aiming direct for Cuchulainn's heart, and had the mage been just a little bit less on the ball, he would have died then and there.
Instead, the Guardian dodged to the side, causing the spike to miss the heart and instead slice through Cuchulainn's upper torso just to the left. It actually emerged from the other side, the pale bone-tip of the tentacle now covered in gore. As quickly as it had entered, Wormwood reeled it back in, preparing for another strike.
Cuchulainn didn't give him the chance. Bleeding freely, he slammed into the Curio Room's door hard enough to make it burst open, scrambling down the corridor away from the creature that was Wormwood. For a moment, Chernenko paused, considering pursuit, then turned on his erstwhile allies.
The first young thug died before even realizing what happened, Wormwood's bone-tentacle boring an inch-wide hole in his brain. The second actually proved to be more competent than he looked, withdrawing a small pistol and managing to put a bullet into Wormwood's body at point-blank range, though it didn't help him much before the creature speared his heart out. The third, still gibbering in terror, was killed with a negligent slice across the throat, allowed to bleed out on the hardwood floor.
Wormwood retracted his spiked instrument of murder and regarded the scene of carnage for a moment. Absently, he flicked open a cellphone and put it to his ear. "Aleksander, Sergei, naidite direktora i ubeyti evo."
He snapped it shut, then with a long-suffering sigh, picked up the corpse of the man who's brain had been hollowed out and dragged him towards Schafer's surgical bed. That done, Wormwood withdrew a hacksaw from underneath it, tapping his finger along the corpse's cranium in a line. The creature paused, then smiled towards the Schafer Movement, the clockwork brain still sitting in its case.
"Soon."
