Fitz took off like a shot, panic shredding his concentration and with it his veil. He flicked a terrified glance back over his shoulder, freckles standing out against a face gone green-white with terror.
Good man. It would let me focus on keeping him alive.
I came to my feet with my staff gripped firmly in hand. Humans don’t run faster than ghouls. We just don’t. If we both ran, we’d just get hounded down. If I stood and fought, it would give the kid precious time to escape. I opened myself to the power of the Winter mantle and let the cold flood into me. I shouted my defiance, my breath pluming out into visible mist like a fog machine.
The sentry was the first ghoul to get to me. Ghouls are strong and fast, but when they attack, they function like animals—all muscle and power and savage instinct. It makes them predictable, and I caught it under the chin with a two-handed upward sweep that snapped its jaws shut hard enough to send chips of broken teeth flying out of its mouth. The ghoul staggered, and I landed two skull-cracking blows that sent it to the ground.
Then half a dozen more of them came in.
I landed another hit with the staff, managed to duck away from one that came diving at my face, and then one of them got hold of my duster from behind and dragged me down to one knee. Ghouls were animal-strong, pound for pound more powerful than any human, even theWinter Knight, and in the time it took me to try to gain leverage against being pulled down, three more of them piled onto me, dragging me to the ground. My staff was torn from my grip.
Claws came at my face. I threw up my right arm to block them, trusting the enchantments on my duster to protect me. Jaws closed on my left biceps, crushing down on muscle and tendon and bone despite all my spell-armored coat could do. Something wrenched at my ankle, despite my kicking.
More ghouls piled onto me, sheer weight beginning to crush me down, all of them panting and slavering and screaming. Fangs scraped my scalp and jaw, drawing blood, and I realized that the only reason I hadn’t already been torn to pieces was that there were simply too many of the damned things, getting in one another’s way.
This wasn’t standard ghoul operating procedure, I noted idly, my brain whirring smoothly as the Winter mantle blocked out any feeling of physical pain. Ghouls tended to hunt solo, or in small groups unless gathered together by a greater power—and they didn’t tend to use thoughtful tactics, like setting up a whole apparent camp of mortals, or sending out a small group of bait to tempt out an opening attack.
I’d been set up. And I should have seen it coming.
Bear had been one hundred percent correct.
I sank my teeth into a muscled forearm and tasted something fetid and disgusting. Something that I could only assume was a scrambling ghoul’s ass smashed against my face, and I knew that I was about to die.
Then the ground shook.
A ghoul let out a squealing scream of pure agony and terror. Thunder roared so loudly that the hearing in my right ear vanished into a high-pitched tone. Something splattered across my neck. Some of the weight vanished from my right side, and I found a rock under my fingers, seized it, and smashed maybe ten pounds of concrete against a skull, letting out a scream.
A huge motorcycle boot smashed down on a ghoul’s head, flattening it like a melon, sending grotesque liquid everywhere, and I fought with renewed vigor as Bear, her face fixed in a psychotic grin, swung thefour-bore in a scything arc with so much power that it might as well have been a sword, simply smashing its way through ghoul bodies as if they’d been so many disgusting piñatas.
Bear stomped and kicked and swung the four-bore, but as strong as she was, she was only one person, and more and more ghouls poured in.
“Get up, Dresden!” she snarled. “Get on your fucking feet!”
I blocked a ghoul’s claws with my forearm an inch shy of my throat, but the ghoul that had locked its jaws on my arm ripped my balance away and I went down again.
Bear looked down at me, and her green eyes had become intense, otherworldly, an arc of every color in the spectrum reflected in them.
In an instant that felt like a long minute, the Chooser of the Slain met my gaze, and I felt the soulgaze begin, andsawBear, saw her in an endless haze of battle, saw men and women dying around her, dying in hopeless battle, dying wounded and outnumbered, dying with screams of defiance, or terror, or laughter upon their lips, and in the skies beyond her, I saw formations of winged beings, shining with the wild rainbows, diving toward battlefields across the span of millennia, sweeping down to take fallen warriors to their reward.
And I matched her wild grin, slammed my head into a ghoul’s muzzle, and twisted to hammer a blow into the head of the ghoul on my arm, determined to smash the bastard’s skull in before the life was ripped out of me. All I could hear was the thunder of my heart, the high-pitched tone in my right ear, the hollow thud of my fist crashing against the ghoul I was taking with me.
What came next was the sound of a horn.
It rang out with a clarity, a purity the likes of which I had never heard. The very air shivered with the clarion sound, and it hit the ghouls like a goddamned truck. As one, the monsters flinched and screamed, raising their talons around their heads, their eyes wide with sudden panic and pain. An instant later there came a sudden gust of cool, clear wind that swept away the stench of the mob of corpse-eating creatures and brought with it another smell entirely.
Propellant.
And gun oil.
A man screamed, “Give it to them, boys!”
And the night went wild with thunder, with flashes of light, with a flood of illumination from dozens of what must have been flashlights. Boots hammered on the pavement. Gunfire passed within three feet of me with ugly zipping sounds, smashing into a ghoul and sending it screaming and running. The ghoul on my arm let go, scrambling to escape, and as it did, I spitefully seized its ankle, screaming, “Bear!”
Gunfire chewed into ghouls all around me, and I stayed low. Four hundred pounds of Bear came down on the ghoul I had grabbed, and Bear wrapped an arm around its skull and, with a brutal twist of her body, tore the monster’s head right off its shoulders.
Ghouls fled, but whoever was shooting knew what they were doing. Of a couple of score of them who had come to the fight, maybe half a dozen got back into the ruins and got away.
“Cease fire!” came a clear shout. “Cease fire!”
