The Valkyrie reached up and silently withdrew the four-bore from the scabbard on her back. The gun would make as much noise as your average battle tank when she fired it, but on the other hand she could probably club a killer whale unconscious with it without ever pulling the trigger.
I moved out slowly. It was after eleven, and that meant it was very late by the standards of a society that was, at least temporarily, mainly reliant upon daylight to conduct everyday business. The nearest functioning streetlight was blocks away. The light mostly came from barrel fires and spotlights reflecting from the distant Sears Tower, now the Willis Tower, which had become a kind of orienting beacon. Neither did much more than separate the night into dark and very dark, and I slipped across the street with as little noise as I could manage.
Fitz muttered under his breath and I glanced back to see a blurry haze in the air behind me. As far as veils went, the kid wasn’t exactly a natural talent, but he’d be damned hard to focus on in the darkness, and it was as safe as I could make him without leaving him back at the castle.
Bear came along behind us, making me sound clumsy bycomparison, never mind our mass difference. She moved as lightly as a bird despite her bulk, and mostly I knew she was there because I could smell the gun oil on her cannon until she took a spot behind a dead car on the side of the road, crouching down.
A single guard remained awake in the camp as Fitz and I approached, a tired-looking man in his fifties, holding his hands out to the last still-burning barrel fire, his shotgun leaned against a cooler within arm’s reach, and he might as well have left it home. The first ghoul I saw was nothing more than a glassy gleam of light reflected from large eyes less than a foot from the ground as it spider-crawled forward toward the guard.
I lifted my hand and flashed my palm toward Bear.
She dipped a hand into the pocket of her leather biker jacket, produced a pistol with an abnormally thick barrel, and fired a shot. A canister hissed into the air, and within a couple or three seconds, a red flare glared in the air high above the camp.
The guard flinched and then goggled up at the light for a second, and the ghoul came slithering over the ground toward him, its muzzled jaws opening wide in anticipation.
I lifted my clenched right fist, where every finger was covered in a braided metal ring, and triggered all four of them at once.
Enough stored kinetic energy to flip over a parked tractor trailer lashed out, focused on an area about the size of a coffin. I had aimed at the ground just in front of the ghoul, and shattered concrete and dirt flew up in a bone-crushing wave, simply burying the supernatural predator in a couple of tons of earth and stone.
“Arm up!” I shouted toward the guard, and sprinted forward, shifting my wizard’s staff from my left hand into my right as three more gleaming sets of eyes appeared in the dimness behind the first and came bounding toward me in rapid quadrupedal motion through the scarlet light of the flare.
I pointed my staff, and more kinetic energy stored in the rune-carved wood lashed out and took the second ghoul in the face with more or less the energy of a medieval battering ram. There was a crushing,crackling sound and a burst of dark fluid and the ghoul went down, arms and legs alike flailing wildly.
Bear’s four-bore spoke like the god of thunder, and the third ghoul’s torso simply collapsed in on itself in a spray of green-black ichor, followed by that of the fourth ghoul, who had unwittingly stood in a straight line for the Valkyrie’s aim. The huge round passed through both horrors, came out the other side, and smashed a portion of still-standing concrete wall behind them into a shower of gravel. The ghouls fell in opposite directions, twitching like crushed bugs.
I straightened from my fighting crouch, eyes raking the shadows created by the overhead flare for more ghostly reflective eyes. I kept tabs on the downed ghouls peripherally. Ghouls were like cockroaches: They didn’t die easily, and even when they did, it was messy.
“Harry!” Fitz shouted, and I felt him give me a hard shove in the lower back.
A shotgun bellowed. Pellets went by in the space I’d just occupied, close enough to hear them burring through the air like angry wasps.
I hit the concrete and heard Fitz grunt as he went down next to me. I whipped my head up to see the old sentry toss his double-barrel to one side and drop to all fours, his expression twisting, a feral muzzle erupting from his face, his eyes going wide and glassy, forearms lengthening, hands stretching into talons as he bounded forward over the ground.
Ghouls erupted from every tent in the scavenger camp.
More appeared from the direction of the next camp down the block.
Still more came bounding out of the ruins, ten yards at a time, thirty or forty of them altogether, and absolutely all of them were focused intently and exactly upon me.
I swept the end of my staff at the nearest one, the one who’d been posing as a sentry, reaching out for the hatred I had for ghouls and what they did to innocent people and…
…nothing happened.
No rage flooded through me. No power kindled inside me. No magic flowed through me into the staff. And when my lips formed the word,“Fuego,”absolutely nothing happened. No power.
No fire.
Nothing.
I just felt tired.
“Fitz!” I spat. “Run!”
And twoscore ghouls descended upon me.
Chapter
Fifteen
