The gunshots ended with professional discipline. Then there were quieter commands and the sound of dozens of boots coming closer, flashlights sweeping left and right and all around the area.
“Medic!” called a calm male voice, and footsteps hurried over to me.
Daniel Carpenter, eldest son of Michael Carpenter, suddenly crouched down beside me, his handsome face concerned. He’d filled out with even more muscle since I’d seen him last, and he wore a short, thick beard like his father. He was wearing military boots, dark fatigues, and what looked like body armor under a padded, insulated plaid work shirt, and he held a .45-caliber pistol at a low ready, careful to keep the muzzle from fanning anyone. A Celtic cross made out of what looked like high-quality silver bounced against his chest.
“Harry,” he said intently, kneeling down beside me. “You’re an almighty mess, man. Where are you hit?”
Maybe twenty-five or thirty guys, most of them dressed like Daniel, came out of the night, all of them armed, all of them wearing the same silver Celtic cross as Daniel.
The adrenaline was buzzing through me so hard that the lights hurtlike hell, and the shadows were harder to see into than they might have been otherwise. I stared at him for a long second before my body started to understand that the fight was over, and I was alive.
“Uh,” I said. “Uh.”
But Bear was already hauling me up to a sitting position and going over me. “I told you that you weren’t ready for a fight,” she said, scowling, “much less going hand to hand with ghouls. Od’s bodkin, Dresden, that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Several of the guys with crosses went from ghoul to ghoul holding pistols and canteens. They methodically went from one fallen foe to the next, putting bullets into any of them that were still wriggling, and then poured some fluid out of the canteens that began to smoke and sizzle the second it hit the bodies. A man holding a medical pack hurried up and knelt down beside me.
“Scalp wound,” Bear reported to him. “Bleeding pretty good. And some scratches on his jawline. He’s going to need those wounds cleaned out as if he got them in a sewer. Maybe a tetanus shot, too.”
“Got it,” the medic said quietly. “Anything else?”
“I’m sitting right here,” I complained. “Probably cuts on my hands. Long time no see, Daniel.”
Without moving his eyes from a constant scan of the ruins and the streets around us, Daniel grinned. “How you doing, Harry?”
I spat foulness out of my mouth onto the ground. “Oh, you know. Can’t complain. You make some new friends?”
“Hold still,” Bear said firmly. She began examining my hands in more minute detail as the medic broke open his pack.
“Something like that,” Daniel said. “I’ll let him explain it to you.”
“Him who?”
“Clear!” came a shout from one end of the street.
“Clear!” came a shout from the other direction.
Daniel nodded and waved a hand back at the dark. “Okay!”
Three men came walking in from the night, and Fitz walked beside them.
One of them was an elderly man in black clothing, a thick winter coat, and a celluloid collar. He moved calmly and carefully, and whilehe had more wrinkles and less hair than the last time I’d seen him, his eyes were still bright, clear, and robin’s-egg blue behind his spectacles. I hadn’t seen Father Forthill recently, but the old priest was one of the kinder people I knew.
Next to him was an even more elderly man with a bushy beard. He wore a shawl and a yarmulke and carried what looked like a long, twisting animal horn on a baldric over one shoulder, and I suddenly realized what that horn call had been. It was a shofar, a traditional Jewish instrument.
Bringing up the rear, by virtue of walking while heavily leaning on a cane, was Michael Carpenter in his usual jeans and flannel shirt under his sheepskin jacket. He hitched his way up to us, grinning broadly at me. “Thank God,” he said with relief. “I thought we were going to be too late.”
I felt myself smile back at him and offered him my hand. “Timing,” I said.
We shook and Michael nodded to the other two men. “Harry, you know Father Forthill. This is Rabbi Aaronson.”
The medic poured something over my jawline and the area tingled and vanished into the vague staticky sensation I felt now instead of pain, ever since donning the mantle of the Winter Knight. I didn’t flinch. “Rabbi,” I said. “That’s a real shofar, huh?”
“Obviously,” the old man said, squinting around skeptically. “And I’m a real rabbi and I forgot how hard they are to blow. My lips are still buzzing like bees. But those ghouls liked it even less, I think. Did anyone bring coffee?”
“I’ll make you some at St. Mary’s,” Forthill assured him.
“Save the day, not even a coffee,” Aaronson said. “Typical. Typical.”
