“Is he dead?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
“I think a Darklord doesn’t die this easily.”
“I think you’re right.” I moved toward the bird slowly, keeping my gun trained on it the entire time. It didn’t so much as move a feather as I approached and stood over it.
“What kind is it?” I asked.
“An eagle, I think,” Devona answered. “I’ve only seen them in books, though.”
I carefully toed the eagle and its body collapsed into dust. I bent down, intending to get a closer look, but within seconds, the dust too was gone.
“Perhaps we got lucky,” Devona suggested.
“I don’t believe in luck.” I stood. “We’d better-” My sentence was cut off as a snarling piece of darkness detached itself from the night and slammed into me, knocking me to the ground, spitting and clawing. Ivory fangs glinted in the starlight as the panther buried its teeth in the undead flesh of my neck.
But as sudden and hard as the impact had been, I still had hold of my gun. As the big cat worried my neck, I calmly raised my pistol to its head, pressed the muzzle against its black fur, and fired.
The panther let out a cry and fell limp.
“Devona, could you help haul this thing off me?” I asked. “It’s pretty heavy. Oh, and be careful. Its teeth are still lodged in my neck.”
Together we got the panther off without much additional damage to my already ravaged neck. Devona then helped me to my feet, and I noticed that my head was canted to the left. I tried to hold it upright, but it wouldn’t stay. One more repair to add to the list for Papa Chatha-if I found a way to survive past the next couple days.
“Matt, your neck…” Devona sounded concerned and, although she was trying to hide it, mildly disgusted. She knew intellectually that I was a zombie, but I think this was the first time she’d really understood what that meant.
“It may look bad, but believe me, I’m okay. Now let’s check out Sylvester here.” I kicked the kitty corpse as I had the eagle’s, with the same result: it collapsed into dust.
“Amon must be cheating,” Devona said indignantly, “sending other shapeshifters in his place.”
“I don’t think so. Lykes don’t disintegrate like this when they’re killed. I think we have been fighting Amon, but he’s a far different kind of shapeshifter than his subjects. When we shoot him, we kill the body he’s wearing at the time-not him.”
“You mean he discards his shape, leaves it behind?”
“Like a snake shedding his skin. He’ll keep coming at us in different forms until I’ve used up my three remaining silver bullets. And then he’ll have us.”
“Not if we can get to the other side of the glen first,” Devona said.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. We ran for a while before Amon attacked, right?”
“Yes, I’d estimate for perhaps five minutes.”
“Me too. And in that time, we should’ve been able to cover a significant amount of ground, right?”
She nodded warily.
I pointed in the direction we had come, toward the line of trees where Rolf had left us-trees that were only a few feet away. “Then how come we haven’t moved?”
EIGHTEEN
“No wonder Amon steered us to this glen,” Devona said. “It’s enchanted.”
“I hate Darklords,” I said. “I really do.”
“I don’t know if we’ve been running in place, running in circles, running in a straight line through warped space, or have been standing still and just think we’ve been running.”
As an experiment, I stepped back to the treeline-keeping an eye out for Amon’s next attack, of course. I didn’t seem to have any trouble getting there. I even reached out and touched the trunk of an elm. I looked back and saw Devona standing several feet away.
“Start walking.”
She did, and it was the oddest thing. On one hand, she appeared to be walking away from me, but on the other, she seemed to stay in place. It was as two different films were being played at once on the same screen.
“Keep walking, but look back over your shoulder,” I called. “And tell me what you see.”
“All right.” A pause. “This is strange; I appear to be moving away from you, but at the same time you seem to be almost right next to me.”
“Okay, stop walking.”
My vision lurched, and I experienced a dizzying moment of vertigo that might very well have nauseated me if I still had a working stomach. The far-off image of Devona was gone, and only the close-up Devona remained.
I returned to her side. “Well, that didn’t help any.” I scanned the sky and ground for any sign of Amon, but there was none. Maybe he had to recover, build up his strength again from having been shot twice. Or maybe he was just enjoying our confusion over the nature of his glen.
“No, it helped a great deal,” she said. “The effect we experienced is similar to that of certain wardspells which operate by making someone believe he is walking toward the object warded, when in reality he cannot approach it.”
“So how do we break the spell?”
“I said this spell is similar; I didn’t say it was the same. We’re talking about a spell laid by a Darklord. Even if I had the mystical ability to circumvent the normal version of this spell-and remember, my father made certain I was trained only in the monitoring of wardspells, not the laying or breaking of them-I couldn’t begin to touch the enchantment on this glen.”
“Just because Amon cast this spell doesn’t mean it can’t be broken. The Darklords can’t afford to waste much power on such trifles as this, can they? They have the Renewal Ceremony to think about, let alone trying to defend themselves from each other. Maybe you didn’t receive any formal training in getting around wardspells, but that doesn’t mean you can’t extrapolate from what you did learn. And if a person knows how a lock works, he stands a good chance of picking it.”
“But I’m not a magicworker,” Devona protested. “I’m a curator, and I suppose really little more than a glorified security guard.”
I sighed. “Look, I’d like to do this gently, but we don’t have time. What you are, Devona, is a half-breed vampire who gets her entire sense of sense of self-worth from basically dusting another man’s treasures. Because of the way you were brought up and the attitude of other vampires toward your mixed heritage, you feel that being the keeper of your father’s Collection is all you can do, that there isn’t any more to you.
“But in the short time I’ve known you, I’ve seen much more. I’ve seen a woman who when faced with danger doesn’t run, doesn’t back away-she fights. I’ve seen a woman who when faced with a problem doesn’t give up-she keeps working at it until she finds a solution. I’ve seen a woman who’s intelligent and caring…and,” I said softly, “who sees the man inside me, the man I thought had died along with his body. I’ve seen a woman who, having ventured beyond her tightly circumscribed life, is starting to find out who she really is and what she’s truly capable of. Well, it’s time to find out some more, Devona. It’s time to find us a way out of here.”
I didn’t know how she’d react: tell me to go to hell, start crying, or haul off and belt me. Maybe all three. But she just looked at me for a long moment, her expression blank, eyes unreadable in the dark. And then she nodded.
“Let’s start walking again. I need to examine the spell while it’s functioning.” She headed off without waiting for my reply.
I smiled as I hurried after her. Wholly human or not, she was some woman.
While we walked and walked and got nowhere, Amon came at us again, this time in the more classic form of a large gray wolf. He managed to take a hunk out of my right leg before I dispatched him, or rather, his shape.
Two bullets left.
“I have an idea,” Devona said not long after Amon’s wolf facade had disintegrated. “I’m not sure it’ll work, though.”
“I’m rapidly running out of ammunition. Anything’s worth a try at this point.”
“I don’t have the mystical training to break the spell, but I do think I understand how it’s constructed. It’s really very simple, a mere matter of aligning psychothaumaturgic energy structures in a constantly rotating-”