A shout echoed over the gates. I flinched. A strange pattering sound followed it, almost like a thousand fat raindrops had started hitting the pavement.
No, not raindrops. They were footsteps. Hundreds of tiny footsteps. Children, running somewhere. Lots of children. And they were swarming. My heart started hammering. “Dad. Do you know what a banwyn is?”
“Sure do, love. Nasty little fuckers. My great-great-great-great granddad was a quarter banwyn.” He let out a snort. “Good thing we’re never invited to their realm for the holidays, because they eat their own when?—”
The line cut out. “Dad?”
In the silence, I could hear grunts and smacks through the thick hedge to my left. The sounds of a fight. A clang of metal on blacktop. A sword dropped? A dagger?
“—then you have to scrub that shit out before it sticks. If you don’t, it’s worse than Gorilla Glue. There’s nothing that will shift?—”
Cress’s voice, shouting a battle cry, came from my right,then, the telltale zing and crash of blades clashing. There was a battle going on just outside the gates, just around the corner, hidden by the thick hedge that surrounded the manor house property line. I stood, frozen, my phone to my ear.
A kid ran past the gate, moving too fast for me to really focus on. Then, another. Another. Little kids. I caught a flash of one running closer to the gate. Five or six years old, flaxen-haired, wearing adorable school uniforms. The banwyn swarm was running.
“—sure that you hit them in the right place, or they explode and make a damn mess. Anyway, darl,” he said cheerfully. “We’re coming up on the Pilbangabanga now. Before you go, just remember, and this is really important. Don’t—” His voice cut out.
“Dad? Dad?”
The phone beeped. Connection lost.
A chill ran through me. Goosebumps rose on my skin, and I shivered. The temperature was dropping; it wasn’t an emotional response. My breath came out in clouds of vapor.
A low gravelly voice cut through the silence, colder than the grave, vibrating with a preternatural timbre. “Heir. Get out of our way or perish.”
Donovan’s voice was just as cold. “The scribe stone is already closed. You are wasting your time here, Agarthon.”
I edged closer to the gate and slowly, heart thudding wildly, moved to the left so I could see out into the street.
Donovan stood there, poised in a half-crouch, with his sword held out in front of him, glinting silver in the dim light. He rolled his shoulders and shifted on his feet like a dancer, graceful but deadly.
Eryk and Nate flanked him. Eryk held two jeweled daggers in his hands, his reptilian battle leathers had visible cuts and tears on the trousers, glimpses of a sticky-tar substance splattered the bare skin. Nate’s enormous muscles bulged, his arms outstretched, hands clawed and shimmering with an eerie blue glow.
To the right, Cress was in a warrior pose, a low crouch, a dagger in her fist, eyes blazing with fury. One of her sleeves was torn completely, her silky tan skin splattered with blood and dotted with what looked like tiny bite marks.
Horror gripped me. While I’d been eating bruschetta and drinking four-hundred-dollar bottles of pinot noir, they’d been fighting for their lives out here, trying to protect me.
Cress was injured.
“No,” I mumbled, my lips numb.
A huge man—at least seven feet tall, his wide, enormous frame encased almost completely in pitch-black armor that seemed to swallow all the light—stepped into my line of sight. A helmet covered his head completely, sharp-looking spikes jutting out in a ring on the top, like a sinister crown. His footsteps clanged on the blacktop like the toll of a funeral bell. He walked two more steps forward, the rainfall-like pattering sound accompanied him. A crowd stepped with him, shadowing him.
Banwyn. Hundreds of them, surrounding the terrifying big armor-plated man in the middle of the street. A hundred little kids in neat, clean school uniforms—gray woolen shirts and knee-length trousers, crisp bright-white shirts, yellow and black striped ties—stood silently, blank-faced, wide-eyed, their dead-straight flaxen hair shining in the dim light
I’d never seen anything so damned scary in my life. At first glance, they might look like little kids, but I could never mistake these things for human children. They were horrifying. They stood too still. Their hair was too thick, too straight. Their uniforms were too clean. Their eyes wereunmistakably alien, shimmering with an eerie light and glowing with a desperate hunger and cruel intent.
The enormous, armored man stepped forward again and raised a dull iron-gray broadsword. “If the stone is closed, we will take her instead. The rightful King will have his prize, one way or another. Perhaps another experiment is in order.”
Donovan growled. “Over my dead body.”
He lifted the sword higher, moving into a fight stance. “So be it.”
The banwyn rushed forward. Donovan charged, lifting his sword. I let out a squeak as the swarm streamed past Donovan, running towards the others, leaving him to the enormous armored man.
Cress whirled in a circle, cutting down banwyn as they charged at her, their teeth flashing. Bursts of flame exploded from Eryk’s palms, cutting gaps in the swarm’s charge.
“No,” I whispered. I had to help.
