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Behind her, one of her sisters shifted one hand very slightly.
Lightning flashed overhead, and thunder forced a pause into the conversation. The wind picked up again, and Listens-to-Wind suddenly lifted his head. His gaze snapped around to the north, and his eyes narrowed.
An instant later, I sensed a new presence on the island. More people had just touched down onto the far side of the bald hill where Demonreach Tower stood. There were twelve of them, and they began moving toward the hilltop at inhuman speed. White Court vampires, they had to be.
Seconds later, another pair of humanlike presences simply appeared in the woods four hundred yards away. And if that wasn't enough, two more people arrived on the northwest shore of the island.
Mai took immediate note of Injun Joe's expression and tilted her head, staring hard at Lara. "What have you done?" she demanded.
"I have signaled my family," Lara replied calmly. "I did not come here to fight you, Ancient Mai. But I will recover my brother."
I focused on the two smaller groups, both of them pairs of new presences, and found that their numbers were growing. On the beach, many, many more pairs of feet had begun beating the ground of Demonreach, thirty of them or more. In the forest nearby, a presence that the island had never before encountered appeared, followed by more and more and more of the same.
There was only one explanation for that-the new arrivals were calling forth muscle from the Nevernever. I was betting that the pair on the beach was Madeline and Binder, and that he had begun calling out his grey men the moment his feet hit the ground. The two who had simply appeared in the forest had to have taken a Way and emerged from the Nevernever onto the island directly. It was possible a second summoning like Binder's was under way, but I thought it far more likely that someone had gathered up support and brought it with them, through the Way.
Meanwhile, Mai and Lara were beginning to bare their claws.
"Is that a threat, vampire?" Mai said in a flat tone.
"I would prefer that you regard it as a truth," Lara replied, her own tone losing the charm and conviviality it had contained in some measure throughout the conversation.
The Wardens behind me started getting nervous. I could feel it, both for myself and through Demonreach. I heard leather creak as hands were put to the grips of holstered guns and upon hilts of swords.
Lara, in response, rested her fingertips lightly upon her own weapons. Her two sisters did the same.
"Wait!" I snapped. "Wait!"
Everyone turned to look at me. I must have looked like a raving mad-man, standing there with my eyes half focused, looking back and forth out of pure instinct and force of habit as the island's intellectus informed me of the rapidly transpiring events. The White Court reinforcements had bypassed the tower hill and were headed for the beach to support Lara-which was something, at least. Lara's helicopter hadn't dropped them up there specifically to look for Morgan. It must have come up low, from the north, using the terrain of the hilltop to mask the sound of its arrival.
I forced my attention back to the scene around me. "Holy crap. I knew this would put the pressure on him. But this guy's gone to war."
"What?" Listens-to-Wind asked. "What are you talking about?"
"Don't start in on one another!" I snapped. "Lara, we need to work together or we're all dead."
She turned her head a little to one side, staring at me. "Why?"
"Because better than a hundred-one hundred ten, now-beings have just arrived at different points of the island and they aren't here to cater the little mixer we've got going. There are only nine of us and fifteen of you. We're outnumbered five to one. Six to one, now."
Mai stared at me. "What?"
Howls slithered into the air, muffled by the falling rain, but were made all the more eerie by the lack of direction to them. I recognized them at once-Binder's grey men. They were coming, moving with mindless purpose that cared nothing for the danger of a forest at night.
The second group was nearer. They'd stopped growing at a hundred and twenty-five, and were already on the move toward us. They weren't as fast as the grey men, but they were moving steadily and spreading out into an enormous curved line meant to sweep the forest and then encircle their quarry when they found it. Red light began to pour through the trees in their direction, casting eerie black shadows and turning the rain to blood.
I forced myself to think, to ask Demonreach the right questions. A second's consideration revealed that the two forces would converge on us at exactly the same time-they were working together.
The numbers disadvantage was too great. The Wardens might get some spells off, and the Senior Council members would probably leave mounds of corpses piled around them-but outnumbered six to one, on a dark night, when they would have trouble seeing their targets before they were within a few steps, they wouldn't prevail. The large group would hit them from one side, and the smaller one would come from the other, boxing us in.
Unless...
Unless we could get to one of the two groups first and eliminate it before its partner reached us and hit us from behind.
Outnumbered as hideously as we were, the smartest thing would have been to run like hell-but I knew that no one would. The Council still had to recover Morgan. Lara still had to recover Thomas. Neither of them enjoyed the advantage I did. To them, the danger was only a vague threat, some howls in the dark, and it would remain so until it was too late to run.
Which left us only one option.
We had to attack.
The grey men howled again, from much closer.
I gave Ebenezar a desperate glance and then stepped forward, lifting my staff. "They've got us boxed in! Our only chance is to fight our way clear! Everyone, with me!"
Lara and her sisters stared at me in confusion. The Wardens did the same-but the fear in my voice and on my face was very real, and when one human being displays a fear response, those nearby it tend to find it psychologically contagious. The Wardens' eyes immediately went to Ancient Mai.
I started jogging, beckoning as I went, and Ebenezar immediately fell in with me. "You heard the man!" Ebenezar roared. "Wardens, let's move!"
At his bellow, the dam broke, and the Wardens surged forward to join us.
Lara stared at me for another half a second, and then cried, "Go, go!" to her sisters. They began running with us, effortlessly keeping pace, their motion so graceful and light that it hardly seemed possible that they would leave footprints.
I looked over my shoulder as I slowly increased the pace. Ancient Mai had turned toward the hateful red glare coming from the forest to the south, facing it calmly. "Wizard Listens-to-Wind, with me. Let us see if we can slow the progress of whatever is coming this way."
