by Butcher, Jim
—and got a really nice view of the barrel of the .44 revolver I’d pulled from my duster’s pocket with my left hand. The hand cannon roared, snapping the ghoul’s head back, and it slammed into me. My back hit the wheelhouse hard enough to knock the breath from me, but the ghoul fell to the deck, writhing and screaming madly.
I put two more shots into the ghoul’s head from two feet away, and emptied the revolver into the skull of the one I’d stunned with my staff. Watery, brownish blood splattered the deck.
By then, three more ghouls were on the deck, and I heard thunking sounds of impact over the side of the ship as two of the ghouls I’d knocked into the water sank their claws into the Water Beetle’s planks and began swarming over the sides.
I hit the nearest ghoul with another blast from one of my rings, sending it flying into its companions, but it bought me only enough time to raise my shield into a shimmering quarter-dome of silver light. Two ghouls slammed against it, claws raking, and bounced off.
Then the ghouls coming up the sides of the ship gained the deck, behind the edge of my shield, and hit me from the side. Claws raked at me. I felt a hot pain on my chin, and then heavy impacts as the talons struck my duster. They couldn’t pierce it, but hit with considerable force, a sensation like being jabbed hard in the side with the rounded ends of multiple broom handles.
I went down and kicked at a knee. It snapped, crackled, and popped, drawing a scream of rage from the ghoul, but its companion landed on me, forcing me to throw my left arm across my throat to keep him from ripping it out. My shield flickered and fell, and the other ghouls let out howls of hungry glee.
A woman’s voice let out a ringing, defiant shout. There was a roar of light and sound, a flash of scything, solid green light, and the ghoul atop me jerked as its head simply vanished from its shoulders, spraying foul-smelling brown blood everywhere. I shoved the still-twitching body off me and gained my feet even as Elaine stepped past me. She whirled that chain of hers over her head, snarling, “Aerios!”
Something that looked like a miniature tornado illuminated from within by green light and laid on its side formed in the air in front of her. The baby twister immediately began moving so much air so quickly that I had to lean away from the spell’s powerful suction.
The far end of the spell blew forth air in a shrieking column of wind so strong that, as it played back and forth over the back end of the ship, it scattered ghouls like bits of popcorn in a blower. It also had the effect of ripping the thick, choking smoke away from the stairway leading belowdecks, and I hadn’t even realized how dizzy I had begun to feel.
“I can’t hold this for long!” Elaine shouted.
The ghouls began trying to get around the spell, more of them climbing the sides after being thrown into the lake again. I couldn’t try whipping up a fire—not with all these fine wooden boats and docks and brimming fuel containers and resident boaters around. So I had to make do with using my staff—not using magic, either. That’s the beauty of having a big heavy stick with you. Anytime you need to do it, you’ve got a handy head-cracking weapon ready to go.
The ghouls tried climbing up the sides of the ship, but I started playing whack-a-mole as their heads or clawed hands appeared over the side.
“Thomas!” I cried. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
I could barely see anything through the smoke, but I could make out the shapes of some of the ghouls clambering up onto the dock—cutting us off from the shore.
“Get the boat loose!” Elaine shouted.
The ghouls’ smoking vessel actually cruised into the rear of the Water Beetle, the impact forcing me to grab at the wheelhouse to keep my feet—and to stagger the other way a second later as the Water Beetle smashed into the dock. “Not a chance! He’s too close!”
“Down!” Thomas shouted, and I felt his hand shove down hard on my shoulder. I ducked, and saw the blued steel of his sawed-off shotgun as it went past my face. The thing roared, the sound painfully loud, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t hear anything out of that ear for a while. The blast caught the ghoul that had somehow sneaked up onto the top of the wheelhouse and had been about to leap down onto my shoulders.
“Ow!” I shouted to Thomas. “Thank you!”
“Harry!” Elaine shouted, her voice higher, now desperate.
I looked past her and saw that her pet cyclone was slowing down. Several of the ghouls had managed to dig their claws into the deck and hang on, rather than being blasted off the end of the ship.
“This is bad, this is bad, this is bad,” Thomas said.
“I know that!” I shouted at him. A glance over my shoulder showed me Olivia’s pale face on the stairs, and the other women and children behind her. “We’ll never get them out of here on foot. They’ve got the docks cut off.”
Thomas took a quick glance around the ship and said, “We can’t cast off, either!”
“Harry!” Elaine gasped. The light began to fade from her spell, the howl of wind dropping, the ugly, heavy smoke beginning to creep back in.
Ghouls are hard to kill. I’d done for two of them, Elaine for a third, but the others had mostly just been made angrier by getting repeatedly slammed in the kisser with blasts of force, followed by tumbles into the cold lake.
Cold lake.
Aha. A plan.
“Take this!” I shouted, and shoved my staff at Thomas. “Buy me a few seconds!” I spun to Olivia and said, “Everyone get ready to follow me, close!”
Olivia relayed that to the women behind her while I hurriedly jerked loose the knots that secured my blasting rod to the inside of my duster. I whipped out the blasting rod and looked out over the side of the ship farthest from shore. There was nothing but thirty feet of water, then the vague shape of the next row of docks.
Thomas saw the blasting rod and swore under his breath, but he whirled my staff with grace and style—the way he does pretty much everything—then leaped past Elaine’s fading spell and began battering ghouls.
It’s hard for me to remember sometimes that Thomas isn’t human, no matter that he looks it, and is my brother to boot. Other times, like this one, I get forcibly reminded about his true nature.
Ghouls are strong and disgustingly quick (emphasis on disgusting). Thomas, though, drawing upon his darker nature, made them look like the faceless throngs of extras in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. He moved like smoke among them, the heavy oak of my staff spinning, striking, snapping out straight and whirling away, driven at the attackers with superhuman power. I wanted to fight beside him, but that wouldn’t get us away from this ambush, which was our only real chance of survival.
So instead of rushing to his aid, I gripped my blasting rod, focused my will, and began to summon up every scrap of energy I could bring to bear. This spell was going to take a hell of a lot of juice, but if it worked, we’d be clear. I reminded myself of that as I stood frozen, my eyes half closed, while my brother fought for our lives.
Thomas outclassed any single ghoul he was up against, but though he could cause them horrible pain, a bludgeoning tool was not a good weapon for actually killing them. He would have had to shatter several vertebrae or break open a skull to put one of them down. Had he stopped to take the focus he would need to finish off a single ghoul he’d temporarily disabled, the rest would have swarmed him. He knew it. They knew it, too. They fought with the mindlessly efficient instinct of the pack, certain that they could, in a few moments, wear down their prey.
Check that. It wouldn’t even take that long. Once that smoke rolled in again, we’d last only a minute or three, breathing hard in exertion and fear as we all were. The gunfire and shrieking would have prompted a dozen calls to the authorities, as well. I was sure I would be hearing sirens any minute, assuming the ear my brother had left intact was pointed that way. It was at that point that I realized something else:
Someone was still on the boat pinning the Water Beetle against the dock. Someone who had brought the ghouls over, who had been
lying in wait near Thomas. Ghouls are hell on wheels for violence, but they don’t tend to plan things out very well without outside direction. They certainly do not bother operating under a smoke screen. So whoever was driving the other boat probably wasn’t a ghoul.
Grey Cloak, maybe? Or his homey, Passenger.
That’s when I realized something else: We didn’t have even those couple of minutes it would take for the smoke to strangle us. Once the mortal authorities started arriving, whoever was in charge of the ghouls was sure to goad them into a more coordinated rush, and that would be that.
A ghoul’s flailing claw ripped through Thomas’s jeans and tore into his calf. He lost his balance for a second, caught it again, and kept fighting as if nothing had happened—but blood a little too pale to be human dribbled steadily to the Water Beetle’s deck.
I clenched my teeth as the power rose in me. The hairs on my arms stood up straight, and there was a kind of buzzing pressure against the insides of my eardrums. My muscles were tensing, almost to the point of convulsing in a full-body charley horse. Stars swam in my vision as I raised the blasting rod.
“Harry!” Elaine gasped. “Don’t be a fool! You’ll kill us all!”
I heard her, but I was too far gone into the spell to respond. It had to work. I mean, it had worked once before. In theory, it should work again if I could just get it to be a little bit bigger.
I lifted my face and the blasting rod to the sky, opened my throat, and in a stentorian bellow shouted, “Fuego!”
Fire exploded from the tip of the blasting rod, a column of white-hot flame as thick as my hips. It surged up into the smoke, burning it away as it went, rising into a fiery fountain a good twenty stories high.
All magic obeys certain principles, and many of them apply across the whole spectrum of reality, scientific, arcane, or otherwise. As far as casting spells is concerned, the most important is the principle of conservation of energy. Energy cannot simply be created. If one wants a twenty-story column of fire hot enough to vaporize ten-gauge steel, the energy of all that fire has to come from somewhere. Most of my spells use my own personal energy, what is most simply described as sheer force of will. Energy for such things can also come from other sources outside of the wizard’s personal power.
This spell, for example, had been drawn from the heat energy absorbed by the waters of Lake Michigan.
The fire roared up with a thunderous detonation of suddenly expanding air, and the shock wave from it startled everyone into dead silence. The lake let out a sudden, directionless, crackling snarl. In the space of a heartbeat the water between where I stood and the next dock froze over, a sudden sheet of hard, white ice.
I sagged with fatigue. Channeling so much energy through myself was an act that invited trauma and exhaustion, and a sudden weakness in my limbs made me stagger.
“Go!” I shouted to Olivia. “Over the ice! Run for the next dock! Women and children first!”
“Kill them!” shouted a man’s voice from the general direction of the attacking ship.
The ghouls howled and leaped forward, enraged to see prey making good their escape.
I leaned on the rail and watched Olivia and company flee. They hurried over the ice, slipping here and there. Crackling protests of the ice sounded under their feet. Spiderweb fractures began to spread, slowly but surely.
I gritted my teeth. Even though Lake Michigan is a cold-water lake, this was high summer, and even in the limited space I had frozen, there was an enormous amount of water that had to be chilled. Imagine how much fire it takes to heat a teakettle to boiling, and remember that it works both ways. You have to take heat away from the kettle’s water if you want to freeze it. Now, multiply that much energy by about a berjillion, because that’s the amount of water I was trying to freeze.
Olivia and the women and children made it to the far dock and fled in a very well-advised and appropriate state of panic.
“Harry!” Elaine said. Her chain lashed out and struck a ghoul that had slipped by Thomas.
“They’re clear!” I cried. “Go, go, go! Thomas, we is skedaddling!”
I stood up and readied my shield bracelet.
“Come on,” Elaine told me, grabbing my arm.
I shook my head. “I’m the heaviest,” I told her. “I go last.”
Elaine blinked at me, opened her mouth to protest, then went very pale and nodded once. She vaulted the rail and ran for the docks.
“Thomas!” I screamed. “Down!”
Thomas hit the deck without so much as looking over his shoulder, and the ghouls closed in.
I triggered the rest of the kinetic rings: all of them at once.
Ghouls tumbled and flew. But I’d bought us only a little time.
Thomas turned and leaped over the side. I checked, and saw that Elaine had reached the other dock. Thomas bounded over the ice like something from one of those Japanese martial arts cartoons, leaped, and actually turned a flip in the air before landing on his feet.
I didn’t want to come down too hard on the ice, but I didn’t want to wait around until a ghoul ate me, either. I did my best to minimize the impact and started hurrying across.
Ice crackled. On my second step, a sudden, deep crack snapped open beneath my rearmost foot. Holy crap. Maybe I’d underestimated the energy involved. Maybe it had been two berjillion teakettles.
I took the next step, and felt the ice groaning under my feet. More cracks appeared. It was only twenty feet, but the next dock suddenly looked miles away.
Behind me, I heard ghouls charging, throwing themselves recklessly onto the ice once they saw my turned back.
“This is bad, this is bad, this is bad,” I babbled to myself. Behind me, the ice suddenly screeched, and one of the ghouls vanished into the water with a scream of protest.
More cracks, even thicker, began to race out ahead of me.
“Harry!” Thomas screamed, pointing over my shoulder.
I turned my head and saw Madrigal Raith standing on the deck of the Water Beetle, not more than ten feet away. He gave me a delighted smile.
Then he lifted a heavy assault rifle to his shoulder and opened fire.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I screamed in order to summon up my primal reserves and to intimidate Madrigal into missing me, and definitely not because I was terrified. While I unleashed my sonic initiative, I also crouched down to take cover. To the untrained eye, it probably looked like I was just cowering and pulling my duster up to cover my head, but it was actually part of a cunning master plan designed to let me survive the next three or four seconds.
Madrigal Raith was Thomas’s cousin, and built along the same lines: slim, dark-haired, pale, and handsome, though not on Thomas’s scale. Unfortunately, he was just as deceptively strong and swift as Thomas was, and if he could shoot half as well, there was no way he would miss me, not at that range.
And he didn’t.
The spellwork I’d laid over my duster had stood me in good stead on more than one occasion. It had stopped claws and talons and fangs and saved me from being torn apart by broken glass. It had reduced the impact of various and sundry blunt objects, and generally preserved my life in the face of a great deal of potentially grievous bodily harm. But I hadn’t designed the coat to stand up to this.
There is an enormous amount of difference between the weapons and ammunition employed by your average Chicago thug and military-grade weaponry. Military rounds, fully jacketed in metal, would not smash and deform as easily as bullets of simple lead. They were heavier rounds, moving a lot faster than you’d get with civilian small arms, and they kept their weight focused behind an armor-piercing tip, all of which meant that while military rounds didn’t tend to fracture on impact and inflict horribly complicated damage on the human body, they did tend to smash their way through just about anything that got in their way. Personal body armor, advanced as it is, is of very limited use against well-directed military-grade fire—particularly when exposed from ten fee
t away.
The shots hit me not in a string of separate impacts, the way I had thought it would be, but in one awful roar of noise and pressure and pain. Everything spun around. I was flung over the fracturing ice, my body rolling. The sun found a hole in the smoke and glared down into my eyes. I felt a horrible, nauseated wave of sensation flood over me, and the glare of light in my eyes became hellish agony. I felt suddenly weak and exhausted, and even though I knew there was something I should have been doing, I couldn’t remember what it was.
If only the damned light wouldn’t keep burning my eyes like that…
“…it wouldn’t be so bad out here,” I growled to Ramirez. I held up a hand to shield my eyes from the blazing New Mexico sun. “Every morning it’s like someone sticking needles in my eyes.”
Ramirez, dressed in surplus military BDU pants, a loose white cotton shirt, a khaki bush hat folded up on one side, wraparound sunglasses, and his usual cocky grin, shook his head. “For God’s sake, Harry. Why didn’t you bring sunglasses?”
“I don’t like glasses,” I said. “Things on my eyes, they bug me.”
“Do they bug you as much as going blind?” Ramirez asked.
I lowered my hand as my eyes finished adjusting, and squinting hard made it possible to bear the glare. “Shut up, Carlos.”
“Who’s a grumpy wizard in the morning?” Carlos asked, in that tone of voice one usually reserves for favorite dogs.
“Get a couple more years on you and that many beers that late at night will leave you with a headache, too, punk.” I growled a couple of curses under my breath, then shook my head and composed myself as ought to be expected of a master wizard—which is to say, I subtracted the complaining and was left with only the grumpy scowl. “Who’s up?”
Ramirez took a small notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “The Terrible Twosome,” he replied. “The Trailman twins.”