With a little help from an allied Sasquatch, I’d bailed Matias and his family out when they’d been attacked by Huntsmen of the Fomorian forces when the battle began. I remembered the howling sound the blasts from their blood-iron spears made. Their animalistic shrieks as they became more and more frenzied. The smell of death and blood and rotten meat on them. The smoke and fire of burning homes.
But by the time I’d met the Huntsmen, they’d been just one more terrifying thing on a long roster of terrifying things I’d run into. And dealt with.
Matias had been dozing off to a late-night cowboy movie while his wife and children slept in the house behind him.
He nodded briskly at me. “Everyone is on the lowest level. The men are all armed, covering the stairwell, with the children and most of the women in the rooms behind them.”
“Most?”
He gave me a rather grim smile. “My wife and some others insisted on learning shotgun.”
“Any luck, it won’t come to that,” I said, and started down the hall for the stairway to the roof. “Get down there with them.”
I went several steps before he said, “I…I can’t.”
I stopped and turned to face him.
He struggled several times to swallow, and finally did, croaking out, “I can’t just hide. Wait. I can’t do that.”
“Matias,” I said quietly. “You wouldn’t be hiding. I don’t know what’s going to happen. If I can’t stop whatever is coming, it might be up to you and the others.”
He squared his shoulders and faced me, an ordinary-looking, medium-height man in work pants, an A-frame undershirt, and a green and blue flannel overshirt. “I. Can’t. Hide.” He shook his head. “I have to stand up. You’ve done much for us. One of us should be here for you.”
“This isn’t a bar fight,” I said quietly. “Things could get bad.”
“I have seen bad,” he said quietly.
I took a deep breath.
“Yeah,” I said. “You have.” I looked down for a moment, thinking. Then I nodded. “Your job,” I said, “will be to stick by the entrance to the stairs. Be extra eyes for me. If you see trouble I don’t, warn me. If you see me go down, get to the basement and warn them that trouble is coming.”
“But—”
“I know what I’m doing. I’ve done it a long time. You haven’t. Anything else and you won’t be helping. You’ll be dividing my attention. You want to help, I’m good with that. But you’ll damned well do it in a way that’s actually useful or I’ll take that gun away from you and stickyou in the room with your kids.” I let that hang in the air and said, “Clear enough?”
Matias took an unsteady breath. Then his expression firmed and he jerked his head once in a nod.
I went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Good man,” I said, and tilted my head toward the stairway. “Let’s go.”
—
I strode onto the roof wearing my duster and my shield bracelet, carrying my staff in one hand. My newly restored blasting rod hung on its thong inside the duster. My mother’s old silver pentacle necklace with its red stone hung outside my black T-shirt, which read, in simple white text across my chest,Find Out.
And I was feeling every bit of the shirt.
I hadn’t felt like this in a while.
It felt pretty good.
Bear was up on the roof waiting for me. She probably weighed close to four hundred, and she’d gone up and down the stairs, a lot, and faster than I had. She was wearing her biker leathers, a double-bladed axe on a sling over one shoulder, a big-bore revolver on either hip, either .500s or .45-70s, and carried the four-bore rifle in her hand. In addition, she’d added a round-topped Nordic helmet with a nasal guard, evidently held in place by the braid wound about her head beneath it. The skin on the back of her thick neck looked pale, and she turned to regard me coming across the roof and gave me a sudden, wolfish grin.
“Now, there,” she said, “is theseidrmadrI’ve heard about.” She glanced past me to Matias, who had quietly emerged with his shotgun. Her eyes raked over him once, paused briefly on his face, and then she gave him a short, sharp nod of greeting and approval. He returned it.
“Good man there,” she said quietly as I drew close to her. “Fighter.”
“His family is behind him,” I said.
She looked at me as if I’d said something childishly obvious. “Pshhh. I’ve been watching battlefields a long time now, wizard. That’s why good men fight.”
