The minotaur gives chase.
Back around to the front yard.
Andrew follows the action, peeking out the front window now, Michael Rudnick next to him, drawing one missed shot from the sniper’s roost at the Dawes house.
This starts Shakedown barking again.
“We need to take care of that,” Andrew says.
Michael nods.
“You have something?”
“I was saving it,” Andrew says, “but, yeah.”
He puts a finger down his throat.
Regurgitates a golf-ball-sized chicken’s eye onto the oak floorboards.
It floats up, hovers, blinks at Andrew.
Heads across the lawn toward the Dawes house.
108
Anneke wakes up from an awful dream about a snake on her mouth into an equally disturbing dream in which a teetering hut is being knocked down by a giant.
She is in the hut.
Hanging suspended, upside down.
Things slide across the floor, fly up, banging into her.
A bucket busts her lip.
Pain in her shoulder.
The hut has lurched, fallen sideways; she has careened with it, her cuffed arms and feet jerking her short.
The beardy man has fallen, too, yelping as coals from the stove scatter around the hut.
He grunts and puts these out with his hands.
109
Andrew sees Buttercup intercept the hut; the chase was almost comical.
But now he concentrates on the eye.
Eagle’s eye could have done it from here.
He guides it near, nearer.
Puts his own vision into it.
Sees them.
Two Russians, two rifles.
One in some kind of steel breast-gear.
Big mustache.
They lie side to side.
Close enough.
This spell is old Slavic forest magic.
He says “Strike!” in medieval Russian.
The men both look up at the eye, more in wonder than fear.
They have their helmets off, so he gets to see their hair stand up on end.
Bright flash!
Now his sight switches dizzyingly back into his own head; he sees the lightning bolt originate from the chicken’s eye, incinerating it, leaping down into the two soldiers, lighting Dawes’s curtains on fire.
Thunder cracks and booms.
He knows both men are dead.
He is blind in his right eye, as if it has stared at the sun.
Believes his sight will return, but isn’t sure.
110
In the yard, the hut has fallen.
The chicken’s legs scrabble ineffectually at the minotaur.
It grabs one, breaks it over its knee.
“Buttercup,” Andrew says.
It stops with the broken leg in its hands, like a woman interrupted in the business of dressing a hen for the oven.
“Get Anneke out safely. Bring her here.”
Now it peels part of the roof back.
Peers in.
Another flash.
Starting in the woods.
BANG!
The minotaur’s right shoulder explodes, the arm turning back into tree, rocks, car parts, raining down the steep driveway.
Buttercup falls on its huge ass, its weight causing the house to shudder.
It struggles to get to its feet, wanting to use the missing arm, falling heavily, getting back up to its knees.
The hut, too, tries to stand.
It manages.
Holds its broken leg up, hops to the tree line.
The minotaur is almost up.
BANG!
The shell catches it in the throat, blowing its head up and off.
The whole monstrosity turns back into cars and boulders, some of this airborne.
“Oh shit,” Andrew says.
He and Rudnick both drop, cover their heads with their hands.
The old Mustang, on fire, flips end over end, clips the top of the house off, exposing stars and sky and letting in cold air.
Debris rains down on them.
And snow.
Andrew looks back into the yard.
The T-34 tank grumbles out from behind a stand of maples, exhaust farting behind it.
“You okay?” Andrew says.
“Think so. You?”
“Yeah.”
Andrew finds the night-vision binoculars, looks at the tank.
Two figures ride its turret, shielded behind its round hatches.
A very dead man, grinning a skeletal smile.
And a woman wearing a Soviet general’s cap and wool coat.
His long-ago lover, Marina Yaganishna.
From that awful season in Russia.
From the witch’s hut.
Her smallest, most traumatized daughter.
The one who freed him.
She’s not here to help you now.
The turret swivels.
111
Michael Rudnick looks up into the sky through the new hole in the roof.
Parts of the roof burn, but these snuff themselves out quickly thanks to the fireproofing spells Andrew cornered the house with.
Michael has a very powerful spell bottled up, and thinks it’s time.
He fingers an oddly shaped piece of iron hanging around his neck by a leather thong.
He scans the sky, trying both to see and feel.
Feels several, mostly too small, one too big.
This has to be Goldilocks.
And he has to be fast.
And lucky.
Hears the tank fire again.
BAM!
Feels the house rock, start to sag, knows the living room was blown in, one load-bearing wall.
Interrupts the spell he was working on, now feels where the shell hit; he can’t help the lost furniture and electronics, but he opens his palms like a conductor, causes the blown-out bricks and wood to re-adhere—the house jolts and rights itself.
He sees a stuffed owl animate and fly out the window.
Good—Andrew’s up to something.
He glances at the other wizard, sees him fish a pill out of his shirt pocket, dry-swallow it.
He’s holding together.
Andrew has stronger magic than Michael—the minotaur was mostly him, mostly car-magic.
But weaker character.
They might win if Andrew doesn’t lose his shit.
The tank fires again, but Michael is ready for it: The house shudders, but the fragments from the shell don’t blow out two yards before the structure seems to inhale it all back in. Like an incendiary rose blooming and unblooming in the blink of an eye with an echo like rolling thunder. The fires started by the blast wink out in less than two seconds.
A woman swears viciously in Russian.
They know they can’t knock the house down.
Now they’ll shoot high.
At us.
If it hits the attic, we’re hamburger.
He looks at the sky again.
Snow falling, but no clouds.
Feels what he wants.
Exactly the one he wants, just the right size, as near as he can tell.
Oh, this will be dangerous.
This will be the hardest thing he’s ever done.
He did it once in the Arizona desert, but there weren’t houses nearby, precision wasn’t the issue.
He calls it.
Andrew sends the owl and pops a Klonopin.
Where is Sal? Is Sal okay?
The shelling is getting to him.
Two direct hits on the house.
They won’t survive a third.
Killing the tank is on Andrew.
His nerves are frazzled.
Everything is happening at once.