Stay,his hound's voice echoes through my mind. I nod.
"Not like I have a choice," I say, gesturing to my bleeding hand.
He bounds toward the nearest beast. It's hunched and hairy with glowing red eyes. Conall grabs it by the middle between his jaws, shakes it, and crunches down. The thing falls limp. But there are far too many others. Walking skeletons, oversized cyclopes, pale women floating above the ground with ever-screaming jaws. Huge snakes and dead-looking horses clopping toward us at an uneven gait. And those are just the things close enough to see. More appear with tiny light-filled pops around the edges of the clearing.
"What is happening?" Amy picks up a stick and backs up to where I'm standing, brandishing it like a baseball bat.
Laz grits his teeth. "Completing the spell must temporarily take the wards all the way down until we reset them the way we want. Fuck!"
"How did you not know that?" Ada hisses.
Laz snaps the book shut. "I am working with half-information from books I can only half-read. The fact that I even found the right spell is a shot in the dark."
That last part stirs something in me.
"How did you find it?" I ask, still holding my hand out, still bleeding, still watching Conall fight a skeleton and a two-headed bear at once.
Laz answers distractedly, still searching his book. "There was this light. I thought I might have, by accident, conjured a seeking charm that actually worked. I wasn't sure."
A light. Like the one that had led me to the cottage basement and my aunt's journal.
A wolf shifter with dark red hair and coal-black eyes pounces toward me before Laz says something strange in Latin, and a small bubble of protection springs up, blocking it off. It smashes against the bubble, and the whole thing ripples. Laz looks worried, and I know it won't hold.The creatures
Sure enough, two large swipes of its claws and the bubble pops like soap. A scream tears through the air, high and piercing enough to hurt my eardrums. Dolly stands a few feet off, completely on her own. None of the creatures are anywhere near her yet, but with that sound, she's certainly drawn their attention. The red wolf turns from me, lowers its head, eyes fixed on Dolly, rivulets of drool hitting the ground. Just as it's about to pounce, a streak of black passes Dolly and collides with the wolf shifter with such force that it's knocked clean off its feet. There's a scuffle in the dirt before they right themselves. But the thing that attacked is ready, and its mouth clamps around the red wolf shifter, teeth driving down, neck snapping. It goes limp.
The black thing turns, and I freeze, heart thundering, lungs seizing. Its body is tall and stretched, skin so tight it shows every bone. Twisted deer antlers protrude from its head. Too-long limbs make its proportions morbid in the moonlight. Its sunken eyes stare past me. I turn and find it's looking at Dolly. Her gaze is wide but shining with trust.
"Protect my friend, Puppy," she says quietly.
I turn back. That is not a puppy, but I'm not questioning Dolly's logic. Puppy turns and slices apart a snake the size of my old car before it can get any closer to me. It turns back, overlong fingers hooking around the skirt of Dolly's pink dress to pull her forward. He squishes Dolly next to me. She smells of bubble gum and cherry blossoms. One of his long, knife-like fingers punctures the ground in front of my blood patch and then pulls, tracing a circle around us. He points to Dolly and then to the circle. His meaning is clear. Stay. She nods.
Puppy returns to the fray, joining Conall as he fights a big humanoid that I can only assume is a cyclops from its single eye. Laz is lobbing small lightning bolts. Conall and Puppy are fighting viciously. Amy's hitting the smaller things that get through with her tree branch, mostly little men as tall as my forearm with red caps and sharp teeth, and angry-looking spindly pixies with black wings.
Conall backs up and stands just in front of me, back muscles rippling. Puppy comes back after killing a few more feral monsters. I'm still bleeding onto the ground. The thin ribbons of light are pink, but Laz showed me the color it should be. As red as my blood.
Dolly has an arm around my shoulder. "You're doing great," she murmurs, and I catch her pink eyes, wide and sincere.
Conall and Puppy look back at us. Conall's hound eyes drag over me, clearly distressed at the blood pooling at my feet. I'm starting to feel dizzy, the edges of my vision blurring. Puppy looks to Dolly, an expression crossing its gaunt face. It could be called possessive, but I have the distinct feeling it's more like obsessive. More monsters come, and both are pulled back into the fight.
Ada is flying, those beautiful translucent wings flapping fast as she lobs balls of what look like sparkles at oversized mutant bats. But itmust be far more than sparkles because they scream and their skin bubbles.
Layla is reading.
"What the fuck, Layla?" Amy calls out as her bat sweeps away a particularly angry-looking sprite. Layla sits cross-legged on the ground. Her cat eyes slice across the page in front of her as she mouths the words. Whether she's reading them aloud is anyone's guess. The growling, hissing, barking, and screaming from the fights has risen to such a pitch that I couldn't hear her either way. She finishes and raises one delicate hand to the sky. A beam of light shoots from the book straight up like a beacon. Many of the flying creatures become distracted and look away. Several fly directly into the beam. A screaming, bare-breasted woman with the wings, feet, and back of a bird disintegrates the moment she touches it.
When it cuts off, the book snaps shut.
"Did you just make a giant bug zapper?" Ada shouts down as she mangles another flying creature with her death sparkles.
"No," Layla says, standing. Her joints begin popping, and I recognize that she's shifting into her true form—the way Conall does when he lets his hound out. "I put out a call for help."
Her mouth transforms. Layla is much bigger in her true form, her head atop the body of a lion, massive wings erupting from her back. She lifts from the ground and joins Ada against the onslaught from the sky.
Huge sounds rise up, like the roars of mighty beasts. Conall sees them at the same time I do. Massive forms. Bigger than anything so far.
Conall reduces, becoming the man, and turns to face me. "Freckles, I want you to get out of here. Run down to the dock. If Colt, the ferry driver, is there, he'll take you across on the ferry. If he's not, steal thedamn ferry. If you get off this island, they might not realize until you're already across. I'll distract them. We're still magically connected, so it'll confuse them."
My mind can't process what he's asking. Leave him?No.It takes me a moment to realize I'm already shaking my head.
