by Butcher, Jim
What the hell was that stuff?
Never mind. It didn’t matter. Or, rather, it could wait for further investigation. The important thing was that the game had just changed.
I no longer had to get Thomas away from the skinwalker and then find a way to defeat it. All I had to do was get Thomas away. If I could grab my brother and drag him into the circle of the broken tower or into the sheltering walls of the cottage, it seemed as though we would be fine. If the very stones of the cottage repulsed the skinwalker’s presence, then all we’d need to do is let Molly activate the crystal and wait the naagloshii out. Regardless of the outcome of this night’s battle, the Council would win the day, eventually—and even the worst thing they might do to us would be a better fate than the skinwalker would mete out.
In an instant of rational clarity, I acknowledged to myself that there were about a million things that could go wrong with that plan. On the other hand, that plan had a significant advantage—there was at least one thing that could go right, which was exactly one more right thing than the previous “take back my brother away and beat the skinwalker up” plan could produce if I tried it unassisted.
I might actually pull this one off.
“Wizard,” the skinwalker called. It faced the cottage and began walking in a slow circle around it. “Wizard. Come forth. Give me the doomed warrior.”
I didn’t answer him, naturally. I was busy changing position. If he kept pacing a circle around the cottage, he would walk between me and the empty doorway. If I timed it right, I might be able to unleash a kinetic blast that would rip Thomas out of its grip and throw him into the cottage.
Of course, it might also fail to rip Thomas out of the skinwalker’s grip, in which case it might whiplash his limp body severely enough to break his neck. Or it might succeed and hit him hard enough to stop his heart or collapse a lung. And if my aim was off, I might be blasting Thomas out of the skinwalker’s hands and into a stone wall. Given how badly off he looked at the moment, that might well kill him.
Of course, the skinwalker would kill him if I did nothing.
So. I would just have to be perfect.
I got into position and licked my lips nervously. It was harder to work with pure, raw kinetic energy, with force, than almost any other kind of magic. Unlike using fire or lightning, summoning up pure force required that everything in the spell had to come from the wizard’s mind and will. Fire, once called, would behave exactly like fire unless you worked to make it otherwise. Ditto lightning. But raw will had no basis in the natural order, so the visualization of it had to be particularly vivid and intent in the mind of the wizard using it.
That was one reason I usually used my staff, or another article, to help focus my concentration when I worked with force. But my staff was several minutes away, and my kinetic energy rings, while powerful enough to handle the job, were essentially designed to send out lances of destructive energy—to hurt things. And I hadn’t designed the magic that supported them with on-the-fly modifications in mind. I couldn’t soften the blow, so to speak, if I worked with the rings. I could kill Thomas if I used them.
“Wizard!” the naagloshii growled. “I grow weary of this! I have come to honor the exchange of prisoners! Do not force me to take what I want!”
Just a few more steps, and it would be in position.
My legs were shaking. My hands were shaking.
I stared at them in shock for a second, and realized that I was terrified. The mind specter of the skinwalker hammered at the doors of my thoughts and raked savagely at my concentration. I remembered the havoc it had wrought, the lives it had taken, and how easily it had avoided or overcome every threat that had been sent its way.
Anything less than a flawless execution of the spell could cost my brother his life. What if the skinwalker was good enough to sense it coming? What if I misjudged the amount of force I needed to use? What if I missed? I wasn’t even using a tool to help me focus the power—and my control was a little shaky on the best of days.
What about the seconds after the spell? Even if I managed to do it right, it would leave me out in the open, with a vengeful and enraged naagloshii to keep me company. What would it do to me? The image of the half-cooked Lara ripping out Madeline’s intestines burned in my thoughts. Somehow I knew that the naagloshii would do worse. A lot worse.
Then came the nastiest doubt of all: what if this had all been for nothing? What if the traitor escaped while I flailed around here? What if the politics of power meant that Morgan would pay the price for LaFortier’s death despite everything?
God. I really wanted that cold beer and a good book.
“Don’t screw this up,” I whispered to myself. “Don’t screw it up.”
The skinwalker passed in front of the empty cottage doorway.
And, a second later, he dragged Thomas into line between the doorway and me.
I lifted my right hand, focusing my will and aligning my thoughts, while the constantly shifting numbers and formulae of force calculation went spinning through my head.
I suddenly spread my fingers and called, “Forzare!”
Chapter Forty-five
The naagloshii walked over to me and stood there, smiling, as its inhuman features shifted and contorted, from something bestial back toward something almost human. It probably made it easier to talk.
“That was hardly pathetic at all,” it murmured. “Who gifted you with the life fire, little mortal?”
“Doubt you know him,” I responded. It was an effort to speak, but I was used to meeting the rigorous demands of life as a reflexive smart-ass. “He’d have taken you out.”
The skinwalker’s smile widened. “I find it astonishing that you could call forth the very fires of creation—and yet have no faith with which to employ them.”
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “I get sick of sadistic twits like you.”
It tilted its head. It dragged its claws idly across the stone, sharpening them. “Oh?”
“You like seeing someone dangling on a hook,” I said. “It gets you off. And once I’m dead, the fun’s over. So you feel like you have to drag things out with a conversation.”
“Are you so eager to leave life, mortal?” the naagloshii purred.
“If the alternative is hanging around here with you, I sure as hell am,” I replied. “Get it over with or buzz off.”
Its claws moved, pure, serpentine speed, and my face suddenly caught on fire. It hurt too much to scream. I doubled up, clutching my hands at the right side of my face, and felt my teeth grinding together.
“As you wish,” the naagloshii said. It leaned closer. “But let me leave you with this thought, little spirit caller. You think you’ve won a victory by taking the phage from my hands. But he was hanging meat for me for more than a day, and I left nothing behind. You don’t have words for the things I did to him.” I could hear its smile widening. “It is starving. Mad with hunger. And I smell a young female caller inside the hogan,” it purred. “I was considering throwing the phage inside with her before you so kindly saved me the bother. Meditate upon that on your way to eternity.”
Even through the pain and the fear, my stomach twisted into frozen knots.
Oh, God.
Molly.
I couldn’t see out of my right eye, and I couldn’t feel anything but pain. I turned my head far to the right so that my left eye could focus on the naagloshii crouching over me, its long fingers, tipped with bloodied black claws, twitching in what was an almost sexual anticipation.
I didn’t know if anyone had ever thrown a death curse backed by soulfire. I didn’t know if using my own soul as fuel for a final conflagration would mean that it never went to wherever it is souls go once they’re finished here. I just knew that no matter what happened, it wasn’t going to hurt for much longer, and that I wanted to wipe that grin off the skinwalker’s face before I went.
I wasn’t sure how defiant you could look with a one-eyed stare, but I did my bes
t, even as I prepared the blast that would burn the life from my body as I unleashed it.
Then there was a blur of light, and something darted past the naagloshii’s back. It tensed and let out a snarl of surprise, whirling away from me to stare after the source of light. Its back, I saw, bore a long and shallow wound, straight across its hunched shoulders, as narrow and fine as if cut by a scalpel.
Or a box knife.
Toot-toot whirled about in midair, a bloodied utility knife clutched in one hand like a spear. He lifted a tiny trumpet to his lips and piped out a shrill challenge, the notes of a cavalry charge in high-pitched miniature. “Avaunt, villain!” he cried in a shrill, strident tone. Then he darted at the skinwalker again.
The naagloshii roared and swept out a claw, but Toot evaded the blow and laid a nine-inch-long slice up the skinwalker’s arm.
It whirled on the tiny faerie in a sudden fury, its form shifting, becoming more feline, though it kept the long forelimbs. It pursued Toot, claws snatching—but my miniature captain of the guard was always a hairsbreadth ahead.
“Toot!” I called, as loudly as I was able. “Get out of there!”
The naagloshii spat out an acidic-sounding curse as Toot avoided its claws again, and slapped a hand at the air itself, hissing out words in an alien tongue. The wind rose in a sudden, spiteful little gale, and it hammered Toot’s tiny body from the air. He crashed into a patch of blackberry bushes at the edge of the clearing, and the sphere of light around him winked out with a dreadfully sudden finality.
The naagloshii turned, kicking dirt back toward the fallen faerie with its hind legs. Then it stalked toward me again, seething in fury. I watched him come, knowing that there was nothing I could do.
At least I’d gotten Thomas away from the bastard.
The naagloshii’s yellow eyes burned with hate as it closed the distance and lifted its claws.
“Hey,” said a quiet voice. “Ugly.”
I turned and stared across the small clearing at the same time the skinwalker did.
I don’t know how Injun Joe managed to get through the ring of attackers and to the summit of the hill, but he had. He stood there in moccasins, jeans, and a buckskin shirt decorated with bone beads and bits of turquoise. His long silver hair hung in its customary braid, and the bone beads of his necklace gleamed pale in the night’s gloom.
The naagloshii faced the medicine man without moving.
The hilltop was completely silent and still.
Then Listens-to-Wind smiled. He hunkered down and rubbed his hands in some mud and loose earth that lightly covered the rocky summit of the hill. He cupped his hands, raised them to just below his face, and inhaled through his nose, breathing in the scent of the earth. Then he rubbed his hands slowly together, the gesture somehow reminding me of a man preparing to undertake heavy routine labor.
He rose to his feet again, and said, calmly, “Mother says you have no place here.”
The naagloshii bared its fangs. Its growl prowled around the hilltop like a beast unto itself.
Lightning flashed overhead with no accompanying rumble of thunder. It cast a harsh, eerily silent glare down on the skinwalker. Listens-to-Wind turned his face up to the skies and cocked his head slightly. “Father says you are ugly,” he reported. He narrowed his eyes and straightened his shoulders, facing the naagloshii squarely as thunder rolled over the island, lending a monstrous growling undertone to the old man’s voice. “I give you this chance. Leave. Now.”
The skinwalker snarled. “Old spirit caller. The failed guardian of a dead people. I do not fear you.”
“Maybe you should,” Listens-to-Wind said. “The boy almost took you, and he doesn’t even know the Diné, much less the Old Ways. Begone. Last chance.”
The naagloshii let out a warbling growl as its body changed, thickening, growing physically thicker, more powerful-looking. “You are not a holy man. You do not follow the Blessing Way. You have no power over me.”
“Don’t plan to bind or banish you, old ghost,” Injun Joe said. “Just gonna kick your ass up between your ears.” He clenched his hands into fists and said, “Let’s go.”
The skinwalker let out a howl and hurled its arms forward. Twin bands of darkness cascaded forth, splintering into dozens and dozens of shadowy serpents that slithered through the night air in a writhing cloud, darting toward Listens-to-Wind. The medicine man didn’t flinch. He lifted his arms to the sky, threw back his head, and sang in the wavering, high-pitched fashion of the native tribes. The rain, which had vanished almost entirely, came down again in an almost solid sheet of water that fell on maybe fifty square yards of hilltop, drenching the oncoming swarm of sorcery and melting it to nothing before it could become a threat.
Injun Joe looked back down again at the naagloshii. “That the best you got?”
The naagloshii snarled more words in unknown tongues, and began flinging power with both arms. Balls of fire like the one I had seen at Château Raith were followed by crackling spheres of blue sparks and wobbling green spheres of what looked like Jell-O and smelled like sulfuric acid. It was an impressive display of evocation. Had a kitchen sink gone flying toward Listens-to-Wind, conjured from who knows where, it wouldn’t have startled me. The naagloshii pulled out all the stops, hurling enough raw power at the small, weathered medicine man to scour the hilltop clean to the bedrock.
I have no idea how the old man countered it all, even though I watched him do it. Again he sang, and this time shuffled his feet in time with the music, bending his old body forward and back again, the motions obviously slowed and muted by his age but just as obviously part of a dance. He was wearing a band of bells on his ankles, and another on each wrist, and they jingled in time with his singing.
All of that power coming at him seemed unable to find a mark. Fire flashed by him as his feet shuffled and his body swayed without so much as singeing a hair. Crackling balls of lightning vanished a few feet in front of him, and resumed their course a few feet beyond him, apparently without crossing the space between. Globes of acid wobbled in flight and splattered over the earth, sizzling and sending up clouds of choking vapors, but not actually doing him any harm. The defense was elegant. Rather than trying to match force against force and power against power, the failure of the incoming sorcery to harm Listens-to-Wind seemed like part of the natural order, as if the world was a place in which such a thing was perfectly normal, reasonable, and expected.
But as the naagloshii hurled agony and death in a futile effort to overcome Listens-to-Wind’s power, it was also striding forward, closing the distance between them, until it stood less than twenty feet from the old medicine man. Then its eyes glittered with a terrible joy, and with a roar it hurled itself physically upon the old man.
My heart leapt into my throat. Listens-to-Wind might not have come down on my side in this matter, but he had helped me more than once in the past, and was one of the few wizards to hold Ebenezar McCoy’s respect. He was a decent man, and I didn’t want to see him get hurt in my defense. I tried to cry out a warning, and as I did, I caught the look on his face as the naagloshii pounced.
Injun Joe was smiling a fierce, wolfish smile.
The naagloshii came down, its mouth stretching into a wolflike muzzle, extending claws on all four of its limbs as it prepared to savage the old man.
But Listens-to-Wind spoke a single word, his voice shaking the air with power, and then his form melted and shifted, changing as fluidly as if he’d been made of liquid mercury that until that moment had only been held in the shape of an old man by an effort of will. His form simply resolved itself into something different, as naturally and swiftly as taking a deep breath.
When the naagloshii came down, it didn’t sink its claws into a leathery old wizard.
Instead, it found itself muzzle to muzzle with a brown bear the size of a minibus.
The bear let out a bone-shaking roar and surged forward, overwhelming the naagloshii with raw mass and muscle power. If you’ve eve
r seen a furious beast like that in action, you know that it isn’t something that can be done justice in any kind of description. The volume of the roar, the surge of implacable muscle beneath heavy pelt, the flash of white fangs and glaring red-rimmed eyes combine into a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s terrifying, elemental, touching upon some ancient instinctual core inside every human alive that remembers that such things equal terror and death.
The naagloshii screamed, a weird and alien shriek, and raked furiously at the bear, but it had outsmarted itself. Its long, elegantly sharp claws, perfect for eviscerating soft-skinned humans, simply did not have the mass and power they needed to force their way through the bear’s thick pelt and the hide beneath, much less the depth to cut through layers of fat and heavy muscle. It might as well have strapped plastic combs to its limbs, for all the good its claws did it.
The bear seized the skinwalker’s skull in its vast jaws, and for a second, it looked like the fight was over. Then the naagloshii blurred, and where a vaguely simian creature had been an instant before, there was only a tiny flash of urine yellow fur, a long, lean creature like a ferret with oversized jaws. It wiggled free of the huge bear and evaded two slaps of its giant paws, letting out a defiant, mocking snarl as it slid free.
But Injun Joe wasn’t done yet, either. The bear lifted itself into a ponderous leap, and came down to earth again as a coyote, lean and swift, that raced after the ferret nimbly, fangs bright. It rushed after the fleeing ferret—which suddenly turned, jaws opening wide, and then wider, and wider, until an alligator coated in sparse tufts of yellow fur turned to meet the onrushing canine, which found itself too close to turn aside.
The canine form melted as it shot toward the alligator’s maw, and a dark-winged raven swept into the jaws and out the far side as they snapped shut. The raven turned its head and let out mocking caws of laughter as it flew away, circling around the clearing.