And all I had to do was let Tessa kill Harvey.
No. I wasn’t ready to hand over anyone to one of the monsters if I could help it. I might have made some bad choices along the way, but I wasn’t that far gone. Besides, I couldn’t trust her word anyway. She was just as likely to kill me for the fun of it as to let me walk away in one piece.
“Why don’t you go back to the roach motel you crawled out of?” I replied.
She shook her head and sighed. “Such a waste of potential.” Then she turned her head to one of her minions and nodded. “Take them both.”
The gunmen did something I hadn’t expected, at that point-they dropped their weapons and started shucking out of their coats and jackets. As they did, they began to jerk and contort. Joints popped and flesh rippled. Their shirts distended as their shoulders hunched to inhuman proportions, and their faces stretched out into almost canine muzzles, teeth extending into fangs and tusks. Their hands thickened and lengthened, with long claws extending from their tips.
“OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod,” Harvey whispered, his breath coming in panicked gasps. “What is that?”
“Ghouls,” I said grimly. “Strong, fast, hard to kill.”
“What are they going to do?”
“Rip through the walls, come at us from all sides, kill us, and eat us,” I said.
And, in professional silence, the ghouls started ripping at the drywall on both sides of my defensive position in the doorway, to do exactly that.
Eighteen
Tearing through drywall is a surprisingly noisy process. It breaks with loud crunching, snapping noises. Ghouls have been known to claw their way through inches of stone mausoleum wall to get to a nice rotten corpse to eat, and they had very little trouble with drywall and wood, their claws and hunched shoulders ripping through it at a steady pace.
We had maybe sixty seconds, at most, before they would be romping through the wall and into the building on either side of us.
“They’re coming,” Harvey gasped. “They’re going to get us. What do we do?”
My own heart was beating a lot faster than it had been a moment ago. Ghouls were no joke. And a close, confined space like this was the worst possible situation in which a wizard could take them on. My spell-armored duster wouldn’t be of much help when one of them was chewing on my head. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve faced danger. When your life is under threat and you know it, you’re scared, end of story.
Fear-real, silvery, adrenaline-charged fear-rocketed through me.
“Um,” I said, not panicking. “We. .”
I was going to say “back up.” I really was. But Tessa was staring at me with a smug, gloating expression on her face, and I was suddenly infuriated. Tessa was special. The last time I’d seen her, she’d put a good man in the hospital for months and left him permanently maimed. It was a miracle, literally, that he’d lived at all.
She hurt my friend.
The Winter surged up inside me in time with my rage, and I suddenly put a much higher priority on the fact that I still owed her for that.
“Get behind me and stay close,” I growled instead.
“What?” Harvey blurted.
I had the satisfaction of seeing Tessa’s gloating expression falter for a fraction of a second, tipped off by something in my face, maybe, before I dropped my shield, extended my staff in my right hand, called upon Winter, and snarled, “Infriga!”
A howl of arctic air billowed out onto the display floor, blanketing every object in it-the floor, the ceiling, and the walls-in an instant layer of flash-frost. The sudden shift in temperature condensed the air into frozen mist, a fog thick enough to cut visibility to five or six feet-a situation that would be much more to the advantage of the team with fewer members, making it harder for the enemy to coordinate their superior numbers.
I strode forward through the fog, closing the distance on Tessa so that I could get her in sight again before she recovered and started maneuvering on me. In a perfect world, I would have found her frozen into a block of bitterly cold Winter ice-but she was a sorceress, and not a dime-store amateur, either. As I came in sight through the fog, I saw her stumbling back, her foremost insect-arms crossed in a defensive gesture, her image blurry on the other side of a C-shaped wall of ice that had not quite managed to engulf her entirely.
I gestured with the staff and snarled, “Forzare!”
The frozen wall exploded into chunks and shards of knife-edged, crystalline ice, as deadly as a cloud of shrapnel. She tried to fling herself to one side, but stunned by the intensity of the attack, she didn’t account for the ice-coated tile floor beneath her legs-floor that provided me with footing as sure and solid as a basketball court. Insect legs skittered wildly, and the ice tore into her chitin-covered body, sending splatters of dark green ichor everywhere, even as the mantis-head half slithered up over her human face, swallowing it down again. Hotly glowing green eyes opened above the insectoid mantis-eyes of Tessa’s demonform, blazing with immortal rage, and as the swirling mists closed around them, the eyes of Tessa’s patron Fallen angel were all that I could see of her.
“Hey, Imariel!” I snarled. “I got some for you, too! Fuego!”
As I spoke the words, I hurled the fusion of my will and elemental flame through my staff, imbuing the spell that ran through it with the silver-white fire of Creation itself. A basketball-sized comet of blazing soulfire soared through the air like a chord of triumphant choir music and detonated upon those glowing eyes in thunder and fury, in steam and even more mist. The eyes vanished in time with a teakettle scream of hellish fury and a thunderous crash of shattering brick from the far end of the building.
That bought me a little time, at least. I whirled and dragged Harvey behind me just as the quickest or luckiest of the ghouls loomed out of the mist and flung itself bodily at my head.
No time for a spell. No need for one. With the full power of Winter still singing through my limbs, I whirled my heavy oaken quarterstaff and met the leaping ghoul with a strike that used the full power of my arms, shoulders, hips, and legs. I struck it across one shoulder, and there was a wet, sickening crack of breaking bone and limbs being torn out of joint. I hammered the ghoul to the floor with the same blow, as if it had been an overeager kitten jumping at me, and drew a yowling shriek of surprised anguish from it as it landed.
My mind flashed to a pair of young wizards, brother and sister, tormented to death by ghouls on my watch, a few years back-and I remembered that I owed them a debt, collectively, as well. I kicked the downed ghoul hard enough to send it sliding away over the icy floor, and though it was already taxing my reserves to call up that kind of power, I again unleashed Winter, snarling, “Infriga!”
The ghoul had no defenses against that kind of magic. An instant later, there was a white, vaguely ghoul-shaped block of ice where the creature had been. The block kept sliding, grinding over the icy floor. .
. . and fetched up against the clawed feet of the other three ghouls.
The three stared at the block of ice for a startled quarter-second, and then, as one, fixed me with hate-filled eyes and let out snarls of utter fury.
Yikes.
Time slowed down as they crouched to spring toward me.
Entombing one ghoul in ice was one thing. Doing it to three of them was something else entirely. If I took the time to take out one of them, the other two would be upon me almost before the words had left my lips, and four ghouls minus two ghouls is two ghouls too many. When you’re outnumbered as badly as I was, inflicting two-to-one casualties is just another way to say that you lost and got eaten.
I had to change the footing of this fight.