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The Outsiders closed on my grandfather, talons and tentacles tearing. Flashes of light, humming howls of electricity, the stench of charred flesh, and basso moans filled the air as the old man fought them, his body encased in armor of pure will that made my own defensive spells seem crude and primitive by comparison.
I sprinted to help him, and as I did, I felt the plummeting tone of a subsonic roar hit my back, a sensation weirdly like that of a low-pressure stream of water.
One second I was moving fine. The next I was staggering, the entire garage a sudden blur. My guts had turned to water, my knees to jelly. It was everything I could do to get a hand on the ground and shift to a modified three-point gait, in order to keep from simply falling over and spilling the bucket and its contents everywhere. As I moved forward, the ground kept rotating counterclockwise, no matter how much my rational brain insisted that couldn’t be happening—my inner ears weren’t having it.
Behind me, the hounds came forward in sudden streaks of oily speed.
I gollumed across the lower end of the circle the old man had cut in the floor around him, with the hounds in full pursuit—and two more flying toward me from the circle’s upper end. They were already in midleap.
From the floor, from beneath a mound of foes, the old man shouted and a burst of wind suddenly swept up from the floor. It caught the two hounds with exactly enough force to lift them over my head and past me, sending them crashing into the pack pursuing me, briefly disrupting their advance.
And the old man did that from a under a pile of nine more of the things trying to seize him with their tentacles and tear him into quarters.
That is a wizard, people.
I covered the rest of the ground toward the uphill end of Ebenezar’s circle. I couldn’t have dropped the gas into the circle at its lower end. Gravity wouldn’t have been our friend. But I got to the uphill side of the circle and poured out the gasoline as quickly as I could without sloshing it out of the little trench in the concrete.
One of the cornerhounds let out an ululating cry, the sound distressed, and half the creatures atop Ebenezar peeled off him and flung themselves at me.
The cornerhounds probably should have thought their way through taking pressure off a man of my grandfather’s skills. A shouted word sent a burst of flame roaring out from the surface of his body in an expanding Ebenezar-shaped wave of blue-white fire, and the cornerhounds around him recoiled. The old man slammed his right palm on the earth, growling a low phrase, and gravity suddenly increased around the hounds coming toward me, dragging them to earth as they fought in vain against the weight of their own bodies.
The hounds on Ebenezar recovered from the blast of flame and threw themselves onto him again. Now he couldn’t fight back—not and hold the hounds coming toward me, anyway.
The Outsiders went at him, and there was another light show as the old man’s personal defenses resisted and spat sparks of defiance back at them. In that moment, only the power of my grandfather’s mind and will stood between him and death.
Meanwhile, the four who’d originally been on me came darting spastically back into the fray, circling out around the field of increased gravity that held their companions.
I looked up to see cornerhounds blurring toward my face, which was exactly where I did not want them—but I flung my face into the circle, because that was where I absolutely did want them, spinning as I went so that I could look back and see the cornerhounds leaping toward me in a group so tight that each of the four hounds was touching the others, talons and tentacles outstretched, in one of those moments that, at the time, seemed to last forever.
And as I went, as their tails cleared the line of the circle, I focused my will on the trough in the floor, snapped my fingers, and shouted, “Flickum bicus!”
My will carried fire to the gasoline in the circle, a single small static spark of eye-searing brightness, and flame leapt up with a low sound like something huge taking a deep breath, the fire racing swiftly around the circle’s exterior and burning with a clear, cold blue light.
Working magic inside of circles is intense. Doing it in a ring of fire, where the flames close the circle is … like being inside a room where the walls and floors and ceilings are all sheets of mirror, with infinities of reflection spinning in every direction. Anything you do with magic inside a ring of fire has a tendency to build power very, very rapidly, and to send fragments of energy rebounding around inside of it, recombining in potent and unpredictable ways—so potent and unpredictable, in fact, that while the technique was not black magic per se, it was nonetheless on the list of prescribed spells and actions that the Wardens used to assess the warlock potential of any given wizard. It was that dangerous.
Think of a ring of fire as, oh, an experimental fusion reactor. One way or another, something big is going to happen. If this banishing got out of hand, something closely resembling a small nuke could go off in the middle of the Gold Coast.
The good news was that this was the kind of magic I was good at—moving massive amounts of energy in a straight line. Even better, the fact that the Outsiders were in the circle with me meant that I didn’t need any of their bits to create a channel for the spell.
Of course, it also meant they could rip my face off while I tried.
God, I love working under pressure.
I hit the ground and slid a ways as the first of the hounds closed on me. I kicked its squishy nest of tentacles as hard as I could with one booted heel along the way. That pushed me back a bit from the thing and seemed to disorient it long enough for me to shout, “Hounds of the corners, I banish thee!”
I infused my voice with my will, and the normally invisible screen of the circle suddenly came to green-gold life, myriad ribbons of tiny flame stretching up to the ceiling of the garage, but rather than remain a steady column, the ring of fire pulsed and swelled and subsided again. Flickers and sparks began to spit from the stone where Ebenezar’s will held gravity against four of the hounds. More sparks began whirling off his defensive spells, larger and brighter, moving more like fireflies, with an eerie emulation of biological purpose.
When I added my voice to that, the flames brightened to an almost unbearable intensity—and a basso wail went up from thirteen throats at once, and every single hound turned to fling itself at me.
Once the old man was loose of them, he promptly raised his left hand and smacked his palm down on the concrete, and concrete groaned as gravity increased again, dragging at the hounds, who despite their resistance were crushed inexorably to the floor.
And the old man’s face had gone purple with the effort of the spell, his expression twisted into an agonized rictus.
My God, he could be killing himself right in front of my eyes.
He couldn’t keep up an effort like this for long.
“Cornerhounds, servants of the Outer Night, this world is not meant for you!” I shouted at them. “I banish thee!”
Again came a chorus of basso moans, but the helpless hounds couldn’t break the grasp of Ebenezar McCoy’s will.
Except for one—the one who happened to be nearest me.
The old man, while holding his defenses and an earth magic working that would take me at least a minute to even assemble, had done a second earth spell with such precision that he had excluded me from the excessive gravity while catching all the cornerhounds in his mind’s net.
