half‑blinded with the sweat dripping in her eyes, her lungs aching.
Beside the lit window was a closed door. Kayla shoved at it; to her surprise, it opened, apparently unlocked.
She slipped inside and shut it quietly behind her. She looked around quickly to find a light switch, planning to hide herself in the darkness, and found herself face‑to‑face with a short, wrinkled old woman dressed in tattered, filthy rags, looking at her with an odd smile on her face.
“My, my,” the old woman murmured, in a voice thick with a foreign accent, “what have we here?”
“Two guys, chasing me,” Kayla gasped. “They're . . .”
“I know,” the old woman said. Kayla could recognize the accent now as Irish, but a heavy, slow Irish accent, not like what she'd always heard on television. “But they won't dare to enter here,” the old woman added.
“B‑but, they're . . . they're . . .”
The old woman smiled, showing several pointed, yellow teeth. “You're not very observant, for one who bubbles with magic like Bridget's Well,” the woman said. “Can't you see it? Can't you feel it?”
Kayla shook her head, wanting to explain to this nice old woman that they were in terrible danger, that they had to do something, call the cops, get the Feds, call in the U.S. Marines. . . .
There was something else here, something that Kayla realized with a start. She's not . . . there's something very different about this bag lady. That odd face . . . the heavy cords of muscle beneath the rags, this lady could be a pro weightlifter without any training . . . the teeth, too long and pointed to belong to a human . . . the long fingernails, crusted with dirt . . . no, they're claws, sharp claws. She's not human, not anymore than the elves, she's something else, something completely different. . . .
She felt more than saw the burst of magic, flowing from the old woman like dark water, racing toward Kayla .