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Billy Joe laughed, but it didn’t sound happy. “Sure, and you think our mage is gonna last that long?”
I glanced at Pritkin and couldn’t argue the point. His eyes were bulging and several blood vessels must have popped, because it looked like he was crying red tears. But I was in no position to help him. I’d seen a lot of magic worked through the years, but I’d just performed the only bit I knew, and Billy Joe couldn’t replace that kind of energy loss twice. But if I didn’t do something soon, my trip to get revenge on Jimmy might end up costing three lives.
“Okay.” I gulped some air. “Do it.”
I couldn’t see Billy Joe when he was inside me, but I could feel his emotions better than I could read his face, and he was skeptical. “You sure? ’Cause I don’t wanna have to hear about this for eternity if you end up a spirit permanently. I know you. You’d haunt me.”
“I thought you said that won’t happen!”
“I said it probably won’t. I’m new at this.”
“Like you asked me, have you got another plan? Because if not—” That was as far as I got before Billy Joe crashed into me like a linebacker tackling a quarterback. He kept pushing until I would have called the whole thing off, done anything, said anything, to stop that awful pressure, except I couldn’t move. It was like getting trapped between a steamroller and the side of a mountain; there was nowhere to go. A second after I decided I was going to die if the pressure didn’t stop, I was suddenly flying free. It was a major relief, but the nice, floaty feeling lasted only about a second before I slammed into something that felt like a brick wall. It hurt so badly that I would have thought every bone in my body was broken, except that it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t have a body.
I heard a laugh echo around me. “Oh, no, little ghost. I already told you. You won’t trick me again so easily. Go home to your mistress before I send you somewhere you won’t like.”
I realized what the wall was; it represented the mage’s wards, and they were a lot more formidable than I’d expected. But I couldn’t follow his advice. I didn’t know how to get back without Billy Joe’s help, so I had to go forward. Getting through those wards was matter of life and death, literally.
You can shield with anything as long as it has meaning for you: rock, metal, water, even air. It’s simply a way of visualizing and manipulating your power. Eugenie had shielded with mist, which I’d thought was weird, but it seemed to work for her. The mage’s wards were strong, but of a fairly normal type: like me, he imagined a wall, only his was wood and mine has always been fire. When I concentrated, I was able to see a fortress of huge trees, like California redwoods, stretching up so high that their tops were lost to sight. In reality, of course, they didn’t have “tops”; I knew that wherever I went along his ward line, I would see this same, impenetrable wall.
I looked back to where I had “landed” and saw that an imprint of my body had been burned into the logs, splintering the wood all around it from the impact. That must have been how he had felt me, and it gave me an idea. I hadn’t ever heard of anyone doing this before, but then, that went for most of the stuff that had happened to me today. I concentrated, not on his wards, but on mine.
I don’t usually feel my wards. The technique is so ingrained that it’s like walking upright: it’s hard when you’re nine months old, but by the time you’re an adult, you don’t have to think to cross a room. But now I took a few seconds to concentrate, and the familiar curtain of flame rose up around me, a comforting warmth instead of a searing heat. I focused and, slowly, a tiny tendril of fire, shaped like a child’s hand, reached out from my ward to touch the nearest log. It caught like dry tinder touched by summer lightning, and soon a whole section of the wall was ablaze. I vaguely heard the mage cursing me, making threats and swearing to bind me to the lowest hall of Hell for eternity. I ignored him. It was taking everything I had to keep the fire blazing and refuse to allow new wood to knit up around the old. I didn’t have the strength for smart comebacks.
Finally, after what felt like a week, a tiny hole appeared in the wood. I didn’t wait for it to get bigger, but squeezed through. It was a tight fit, and it felt like my sides were being scraped into bloody lines by splinters, even though I knew that was impossible. All of a sudden, the smoke and fire of the burning forest melted away and I could see. The dark parking lot spread around me and a breeze blew across my face. Pritkin, Tomas and Louis-César were across the lot, and my body was looking at me with wide eyes.
I yelled at Billy Joe. “It’s okay! I’m in control!”
“Then drop the damned attack! Pritkin’s about to have a stroke!”
I looked around in confusion, then peered inside. “I’m not doing anything!” It was true, as far as I could tell. I’d assumed that taking over would break the mage’s concentration and solve the problem. But I could see that Pritkin’s shields had shrunk to the point where they barely covered the three men and would likely fail any second. “What now?”
I saw my body bend over and whisper to Pritkin. He looked across at me and I waved. His eyes got big. He said something, but I couldn’t make it out. “What?”
“The bracelet!” My voice bellowed across the parking lot as Billy Joe yelled at the top of my lungs. “He said to destroy it!”
A dark shape started running at me from across the lot. It had the same deeply unhealthy feeling I’d received from the mage, so I didn’t need introductions. Somehow, the other dark knight had figured out what was going on, and he didn’t like it.
I looked down and found a bracelet on the mage’s left wrist. It was silver and formed of what looked like tiny, interlocking daggers. I couldn’t find a clasp; it seemed to have been soldered onto his arm. I looked across at Pritkin and saw desperation on his face. Damn it, this thing had to go now. When tugging didn’t work, I bit it, tearing at it with his teeth, concentrating on the bit where two of the daggers came together. Finally, after his fingers were a bloody mess, it came loose.
I didn’t have to ask whether I’d gotten it right, because Pritkin slumped to the ground, panting in relief, and the vamps around him sprang into action. Louis-César sent a knife flying into the vamp at my side, which would have taken off the head except that it collided with the oversized steel choker he was wearing. It didn’t buy him much time, though. Tomas held out a hand and I finally got to see what had happened back in the storeroom. The vamp dropped to his knees and gave a choked gurgle, and his heart literally leapt out of his chest. It went sailing across to Tomas, who caught it like it was a slightly oversized baseball.
The other dark knight was less than two car lengths away from me. He stopped and raised a hand, and suddenly I couldn’t move. But before I could panic, the three witches I’d helped free from the casino stepped out from behind a parked van and formed a circle around him. I was about to yell at them to run for it, when the mage suddenly collapsed, screaming, and the pressure on me let up.
It was a relief, but I didn’t feel better for long. What felt like an icy stream of water began lapping at my feet. I couldn’t see anything, but my wards started to sizzle out around the bottoms. If I concentrated, I could see a stream rising up from the ground to flow around me. Clever mage; he could shield with more than one element. And my fire didn’t seem to be doing so hot against his water. As the flames went out, tiny tendrils of wood, some bearing twigs with leaves, began to wind up my metaphysical legs. Great. The dark mage was going to be seriously pissed off when he got back in charge, which at the rate he was going would take all of about two minutes.
“What’s wrong with you?” A vampire ran up to me. I recognized him vaguely from Tony’s court, a big, shaggy blond whom I’d always thought needed a tan—his surfer looks didn’t go well with dead white skin. “You said you could neutralize him! He’ll wipe the floor with us!” I followed his gesture to where the fight had resumed big-time. I wondered which “he” the guy meant, because all three looked pretty deadly to me.
Pritkin might
be a hostile son of a bitch, but he was a damn good guy to have in a fight. He was on the ground, but his amazing hovering knives were back. In fact, it looked like his whole arsenal was on the move. As I watched, he blew apart a vamp with a shotgun blast while five knives went hurtling into another, one almost severing his head. The vamp must have been a master, because he didn’t go down, but the animated knives followed him about, sticking in and pulling out like a swarm of especially lethal bees. He swatted at them as blood started to pour out of a couple dozen deep cuts, but they kept coming back. He roared in rage but preferred getting sliced to ribbons to running. But a couple of other vamps, who were being pursued by grenades, chose not to follow his example. I decided if that’s what Pritkin fought like when half dead, I really didn’t want to see him at full strength.
Tomas was doing okay, too, tying up two vamps in a knife fight that was so fast and furious I couldn’t see any of it, except for an occasional blade flashing in the parking lot lights. Several others lay around him with the now familiar gaping holes in their chests. Louis-César, meanwhile, had decided to take the attack on the offensive all by himself. While Pritkin and Tomas kept the attackers busy, he charged the cluster of vamps around me. The beach bum must not have heard of the Frenchman’s reputation, because he leapt for him and lasted all of about a second. That wicked-looking rapier was back in action, and skewering him didn’t cause Louis-César even to break his stride. He threw a knife at the second dark mage, but it bounced off him like he was wearing body armor. But whatever the three witches were doing was having more of an effect. The mage was on the ground, scrambling for purchase as ineffectively as a beetle turned upside down, as they began closing in, chanting something in unison.
I was initially pleased to see the Frenchman, since it took only one look at him for the remaining vamps around me to take off, but I quickly changed my mind. I blinked, and Louis-César’s bloody blade was somehow under my chin. The look in his eyes made it very clear that he had no idea who I was. “Your Circle made a mistake challenging us,” he told me calmly, as if we were chatting at a party. “Fortunately, monsieur, I do not need you alive to send a declaration of war. It should be sufficient that I have your body left somewhere your people frequent.”
“Louis-César, no!” I couldn’t speak for fear of jamming his rapier farther into my throat, but the voice coming from behind him was mine anyway, as was the hand clutching his sword arm. It looked like Billy Joe had decided to earn his keep.
“Mademoiselle, please go back to Tomas. This will not be pleasant.”
