Targeting carat

My heart started beating faster. It took me a second to realize that it was pounding in time with rapid footsteps coming down the hall. Women’s heels. Click, clack, click, clack—firm and purposeful.
I had a couple of seconds to realize that my fear and the footsteps were connected, and then, just in case that hadn’t been enough, an open square, maybe four by four feet, made of red light, appeared on the wall, evidently tracking the movement of something hostile coming down the hall toward the door to Stan’s room.
I eyed the ceiling and muttered, “I get the point.” I looked around the room and weighed my options as my terror increased, and then ratcheted up more, and I panicked. I stepped into the bathroom and shut the door until it was almost all the way closed, and held very still.
The monster stepped into sight. She wasn’t much of a monster as they went —maybe five-four in the low heels, a woman of slender build with dark hair. She was of Asian extraction, and her name tag read DR. MIYAMUNE. Behind the thick, dark rims of her glasses, her eyes were absolutely crystalline blue.

Brief Cases, Day One, Page 368


I could barely see. And I couldn’t hear anything but my goofy, beautiful polka, one of the songs I knew perfectly at that, which was kind of the point.
In the hallway, I could feel the emptiness stretching out around me and the low fear in the air. The baka baku had run everyone off the floor—I could dimly see hollow yellow squares retreating, tracking the workmen and nurses and doctors all leaving the floor by the stairs and elevators, leaving it to just the two of us and the trapped, dreaming victims.
The fluorescent lights were all flickering and flashing as if they needed changing.
I didn’t see the hostile red targeting carat.
But I didn’t need it.

Brief Cases, Day One, Page 377


The Fomor army seemed to be organized in warbands. Each one had maybe three hundred creatures in it, in a distinct group, gathered around a central standard. No two groups looked the same. Some were simply a collection of turtleneck handlers, each holding a pair of large, hairless, vaguely canine animals. Some were packs of shapeless, deformed . . . things, naked, neither human nor animal, their faces and bodies twisted and ugly, the cruelest combinations of expressed genes imaginable. Some were orderly ranks of armored warriors, their arms a little too long for their bodies, their shoulders too wide. Some looked like troops of more modern militaries and were armed with rifles. And at the center of each warband was a knot of Fomor proper, frog-faced jerks in badly clashing clothing, seven feet tall.
There were a couple of thousand of them. And those were only the ones I could see. The haze must have been concealing the rest.
When I was spotted, things got a little crazy.
Shots rang out and my shield lit up like a disco ball. Butters yelped and jumped behind me. I pressed forward. I had to get far enough up the bridge to bring it down.
Someone shrieked something, and one of the groups of those tormented abominations came howling toward me, their locomotion ragged and swift.
Butters peeked out from behind me and said, “Wow, red carats everywhere.”
I blinked and poured more energy into the shield. With this much available, it wasn’t hard to hold it up. “What? What the hell do vegetables have to do with anything going on right now?”
“It’s kind of a Knight thing.”

Battle Ground Chapter 25, Pge 227-228