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And what I could see, I didn’t like.
The weird lighting caused strange crisscrossing shadows to fall everywhere, turning the area under the trees into a half-lit maze. A foggy, half-lit maze, with the light beams sifting apart, like the eerie, otherworldly illumination UFOs gave off in the movies. I swallowed, suddenly really wishing for a Scully from The X-Files—some thoroughly prosaic presence to inform me that everything in life had a nice, comforting, scientific solution.
Of course, she’d gotten knocked up by some alien, hadn’t she? So maybe it was just as well that my companion was more like Mulder. A coked-out Mulder with a lot of weapons, who knew that the monsters under the bed were real and would gut you.
Pritkin was certainly looking more than usually cautious. Or maybe he just didn’t like fighting something he couldn’t even name. Whatever the reason, he stopped at an outlying oak, standing like a vanguard a dozen yards in front of the rest, and pulled the weird, big-barreled gun I’d seen at Dante’s.
“What is it?” I asked, suddenly tense. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t sense anything.”
“But . . . that’s good, right?” I asked, watching him spin open the cylinder like an old-fashioned revolver.
“That’s good if your information was wrong,” he told me grimly, shoving some weird bullets from a leather case into place. They looked like tiny potion vials, with different-colored liquids sloshing against the transparent sides. I didn’t know how something that looked so delicate would survive being fired from a gun, but then, I guessed they weren’t actually made of glass. “How sure are you?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Then it’s not so good,” Pritkin said dryly.
“Meaning?”
“One of two things. Either there are no demons in there . . .”
“Or?” I prompted, because he’d trailed off to scan the tree line again.
“Or we’re dealing with something old enough and powerful enough to shield itself from detection—even in numbers.”
I tried to fit my spine a little more snugly into the unyielding bark behind me. “So . . . that would be bad.”
“Yes. Which is why you’re staying here.”
I started to say something and then bit my lip, because that had been in his don’t-argue-with-me voice. Which I tended to pay attention to since it only got trotted out when the shit was already on its way to the fan. “You may need to leave fast,” I pointed out, after a second. “I can get you out of there quicker than any weapon.”
He clicked the gun shut. “Not if you’re dead.”
“If we stick together, I won’t be. I’m telling you—”
I suddenly found myself jerked to within inches of a face with a tight jaw and hot green eyes. “No. You tell me nothing, not about this. You do what I say.”
“Damn it, Pritkin!”
The moonlight had washed all the color from his face, leaving it stark black and white. Uncompromising, like the hand on my arm, or the low timbre of his voice. “There are only two choices. You listen to me and we go forward; you refuse and we go back. You asked for my help; you do this my way. I haven’t spent more than a century battling these creatures not to know exactly how dangerous they can be. Do you understand?”
Yeah, I understood fine. The problem was that he didn’t. He thought he was protecting me, but if he ended up dead b
ecause I wasn’t there to shift him away, we’d both be screwed. But I couldn’t explain that, without explaining more than was safe for him to know right now.
“How much of a risk are you planning to take?” I whispered.
“No more than need be. I will find and draw off whatever is in there. When you see my signal, run for the house. Shift back here when you’re done and I’ll be waiting. But only move when I signal you. If I do not, you stay put.”
“And if you don’t come back?” I asked angrily.
“Then get out of here. Go back to your time—”
“The hell I will! I won’t just leave—”
“Then I won’t go.”
