Looking back, I saw Ty, one hand raised with a stack of paper on it. He did the ‘make it rain’ effect, slapping it to send the papers flying forward, and each one soared like a paper airplane.
Several others retreated downstairs.
It bought me time to deal with the twins.
The pair had turned around to face me, shielded from the flying paper by the mountain man’s bulk, their facial expressions and body language were identical. Solemn, frowning, and yet somehow conveying a great deal of displeasure with me. I’d actually hurt them.
Then, acting out of sync, the brother turned his head to look at his sister. She continued facing me.
She sheathed a knife, then used the one existing knife to cut her shirt. She rasped her arm with the side of the blade with three quick motions, until it started bleeding. She caught one drop of blood with the blade, then flicked the knife out, casting it aside.
Only when she was done did she draw her knife.
When I looked at him, I saw where the corner of the drawer had clipped him.
Torn shirt, light scrape.
The trickles of blood on each arm matched.
They broke into runs, heading my way.
Well, I wasn’t above using the same strategy twice.
I gripped and hurled another drawer.
It was heavier, with some contents, and in trying to compensate for it, I threw it too high. The twins stepped away, to either side of the hall.
It hit the mountain man, further down the hall. He had to shift his footing, and the clothing fell out to disturb his footing, but that was all the damage it did. Eva was on the assault, and gory wounds marked his back. Green Eyes dragged clawed fingertips through the gore with far too much ease. The mountain man’s muscle broke away with a weird stringy quality, like the contents of a spaghetti squash.
Before the twins reached me, I moved across reflections. Toward the mountain man.
The twins had reversed direction to face me by the time I’d emerged. I grabbed the drawer I’d just thrown. They came after me.
A blunt, blind, wild swing to the side, much like the reckless way I’d thrown it.
Crudity to match finesse.
The sister caught the drawer before it could hit her head. Her sibling lunged to capitalize on my shifted focus.
I ignored the lunge, the stabs to my side, and I pressed the attack. I charged, pushing forward, using raw strength to just ram her back. Her brother shifted his stance, skipping back with rapid steps to match.
Pushing the girl at a diagonal, I knocked her into the wall. When she stopped, fairly abruptly, the corner of the drawer hit the corner of her eyebrow, near the bridge of her nose.
Wait for it…
The brother drew his knife.
He struck himself with the hilt.
My eye flickered over to his sister. She was watching him.
But she had a fleck of blood.
I was almost too late. He brought the knife up, point moving to the injury-
I brought the drawer up, helping him along with a quick bludgeon. Hitting the butt end of the knife.
When I lowered the drawer, the knife was stuck through his eye socket, just above his eyeball.
The one time they’re out of sync.
The sister watched her brother wobble, then collapse.
Long seconds passed.
Like lightning, she slammed her own knife into her eye socket.
When she collapsed, dead her body was a parallel to her brother’s. Their arms crossed in the middle of the hallway.
When I turned to look, the mountain man had fallen. His head was charred, like it had been burned, while his wounds bubbled like someone had poured hydrogen peroxide on them. My friends had done the former, I was guessing, while the latter had to do with Green Eyes. In the midst of it, her body slick with foamy gore, Green Eyes had her teeth around his spine, pulling it free from the bloody ruin of his back, arms straining to help her pull it up and away.
Eva stabbed the broken curtain rod between body and spine, then leveraged it to one side until the spine broke.
“Here,” Tiff said. She grabbed the Hyena, holding the pommel with two fingers so she wouldn’t impale her hand on spikes, and tossed it in my general direction.
I reached through the water, only to grab it. My hand barely made a ripple.
Green Eyes smiled as she saw me. There was gore between her teeth. “We did it!”
I wasn’t able to muster the same enthusiasm.
There were an awful lot of Others at the end of the hall. The automaton, one skeleton with what looked like praying mantis arms made of bone, swaddled in cloth, and one very large, very fat goblin. Some were still migrating upstairs. Others were hanging back, focused on us.
“Upstairs,” I said. “They got upstairs.”
I could see my friends behind Eva, shifting position, as if ready to retaliate against her.
But Eva didn’t do anything.
Thing was, when she did decide to do something, she’d do it in a flash, and one of my friends would be dead.
A chunk of the mountain man broke away, the surrounding flesh dissolving.
“We’re fighting our way through, then.” Eva asked, her eye on the end of the hall. “We’ll need something that hits a hell of a lot harder.”
“We don’t have-”
“We’ll need something,” she said, raising her voice.
It wasn’t an option. If we said no, if we gave up on the chance that somehow Ellie and Evan were holding out against the same caliber and quantity of Others that we’d just barely managed to fight, then she had no reason to keep cooperating with us.
She was going to save her brother. No question.
Her and her brother. The twins I’d just dealt with…
Why couldn’t I have that kind of relationship with Rose? I mused.
Then I thought about how the twins had gone down together. How the witch hunter so willing to go down fighting if it meant helping Andy.
Maybe not.
“Something,” I said. “I don’t suppose anyone has the key to the library?”
“Yeah,” Alexis said.
“We’ll need elbow room,” I said.
“I can help,” Ty said. He held up the stack of papers. “Did these a bit ago.”
“Those are?”
“Command words. Ofuda. A Japanese style of practitioning. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I went down the list and copied out words. Figured it’d be better to get a virtually guaranteed one or two out of the deck right than risk getting none or all.”
“Don’t suppose you have any paper?” Alexis asked. “I wouldn’t mind something to write on.”
Ty reached into a pocket and handed some over. “Go for it. Runes work, but you really need to frame it, so the paper is the diagram and contact with anything but the ends or the edges releases the word. Runes will just go off right away, indiscriminate.”
“I’m… just going to do regular runes. How do you throw it?”
“The spirits carry it forward. They’ll find the right target. Path of least resistance.”
“Right,” Alexis said.
The press of bodies made one or two Others advance a bit, flanking the automaton. The bone mantis and a fat man who looked like some schlub off the street, but with eerie dead eyes. I took one look at him and thought Gacy.
They were dangerously close to the bedroom with the Thorburns inside.
Green Eyes, Eva and I moved forward, ready to confront the mass. At our approach, they retreated.
Still had to get the Thorburns out of the bedroom.