Chapter Twenty
Tripp!” I shouted, and opened fire on Estevez.
His guns went off several times. Rounds hit my shield a couple of feet from my face and skipped off or shattered—he absolutely was a gunfighter, and if I hadn’t had the shield up, he’d have drilled me in the head.
I’m not entirely incompetent with a pistol, but firing it onehanded while splitting my attention on keeping a shield up and trying to track what was happening around me, too, was a far cry from a session at the practice range.
There was no cover on the open sidewalk, no concealment, nowhere to run, and Estevez didn’t bother to try.
He snarled, teeth showing white, brought his other pistol up and kept firing at me grimly, every shot aimed at my face, three more rounds, and then the slide locked open as the weapon ran empty.
Estevez released the magazine with a motion of his thumb, and his left arm twitched as he tried to reach for a replacement, but the limb didn’t obey his commands.
Even then, he didn’t run. He squared off on me and lowered the emptied gun, spreading his right arm out to his side in a gesture of invitation, lifting his chin with a small smirk on his mouth.
If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought he was deliberately trying to keep my attention on him.
I whirled, raising my shield as Emilio, his eyes swollen and bloodshot solid red, hurled a comet of translucent purple fire at me.
I turned my face away from the impact as the black magic hit my shield, corrosive and nauseating.
Once again, it tore away at the orderly fabric of the spell I’d been holding, ripping it into random chaos and stray energy, sending off a hail of blinding sparks and strange, wailing sounds that came somewhere between an animal’s scream and the sound of metal straining not to break.
As my shield failed, I brought the big revolver around, took a breath to aim, and fired my last couple of rounds at Emilio. The slender man swatted his hands through the air twice, as if slapping down slowly moving flies, and my bullets were deflected.
Bear was down on one knee, being swarmed by the Lurker-infested baboons, struggling mightily—but every time she was able to focus her attention on one of them, the others tore at her flanks and back with coordination that was nearly perfect, and she was being overwhelmed.
Emilio snarled and thrust both hands out at me, and a pair of tendrils of the Lurker seven or eight feet long, presumably escaped from the dead baboons, came slithering out of the dark behind him and toward me.
He rushed ahead of them, hands flickering through complicated motions as he screamed in a language I didn’t know, a bulwark of purple energy building between us even as I raised my staff and triggered the release of a lance of pure unseen force stored inside the magical tool.
It lashed through the air and was dispersed and absorbed by Emilio’s shield.
I started backpedaling as the tendrils and the dark wizard rushed me, knowing that the only thing awaiting me was a fall into the cold waters of Lake Michigan.
“Bear!” I screamed.
And the Valkyrie surged up from one knee. One of the baboons was sinking canines into her trapezius muscles. One had seized her around one leg and was biting into her thigh. She’d dropped both the shield and club and grabbed limbs of the other two in her huge, scarred hands. She sprinted toward me.
The tendrils and Emilio collided with me, driving me back through the air.
Bear dove forward, carrying every other living receptacle of the Lurker upon the field.
And we all crashed into the freezing water at once.
One of the tendrils of the Lurker slithered around my throat and closed down hard, while the other wound about my head, across one eye, and started pressing at my lips.
Emilio screamed and got a double handful of my hair, forcing my head under the water.
The sickening presence of the demon trying to get inside me was overwhelming. If my windpipe hadn’t been compressed so badly, I’d have had to fight to keep from vomiting. As it was, I felt nauseated, dirty, like I’d been rolled in filth and wanted nothing so badly as to get clean.
And I had to fight not to smile.
Because we were exactly where I’d wanted us all to be.
See, I’m not just the Wizard of Chicago. I’m not just the Knight of the Winter Court. I’m not just the homeowner of Merlin’s Fortress. I’m not just a nonstop witticism machine and a snappy ballroom dancer.
I’m the Warden of Demonreach.
Demonreach was an island in Lake Michigan, a supernatural prison containing the worst of the worst of evil, demonic, weird, and violent beings that had at various times rampaged about the elder world.
As the island’s Warden, I ran that prison.
I had the power to decide which, if any, of the beings within would be released.
And I decided who would go in.
I sank into the freezing water, feeling the cold as a thrill of excitement more than a sensation.
And, from the east, there came a rushing, green-gold light.
Demonreach itself, its spirit, its genius loci, had been put on alert earlier and had been standing by and waiting for me. Two points of light, like the eyes of some enormous oceanic being, rushed closer, a bow wave of pressure in the water running before it.
My heart was beating hard, my head aching under the pressure, and my vision was beginning to fill with red as the tendril of the Lurker choked me out. I reached up and seized a loop of the thing around my throat and the end of the tendril trying to get into my mouth.
And suddenly, the Lurker seemed to sense that something was wrong.
The stranglehold on my neck loosened. The serpentlike length of tendril on my head suddenly tried to escape. Emilio suddenly released my hair, and I heard him trying desperately to splash away.
I held on to the tendrils tighter, digging my grip in hard.
The two enormous glowing eyes exploded into luminescent, translucent, twisting tree-roots of magical energy, shooting forward through the water, winding around all the struggling forms there.
Roots whipped around the two tendrils I held, and tiny, glowing thorns emerged from the roots, digging into their spongy substance, subsuming them as readily as a boa constrictor wrapping around a rabbit.
Others shot through the panicked forms of the possessed baboons as the Lurker sought to escape Demonreach’s grasp, tearing their physical bodies asunder, while more twining roots seized the tendrils of the Lurker that had been inside them.
I started kicking for the surface, watching as more writhing, glowing roots seized Emilio’s arms and legs, stretching him out into an X shape, while more plunged into his screaming mouth, forcing it wide open, and plucked from him still another writhing, spongy mass that bled clouds of red into the water around it.
Even more of the island’s roots wound around Bear and began to gently drag her toward the surface of the lake.
I broke the surface, spitting out a breath through my aching throat, kicking hard to stay above water in my heavy coat and clothing, and gasped out to the spirit of the island. “Alfred! Bring Bear and the mortal to me!”
I managed to get close enough to the shore to get a foot on a rock, and hauled myself up against the side of the concrete wall that supported the walkway we’d been on before we went in.
I gulped in a couple more breaths, then reached out and grabbed Bear’s hand.
I hauled her onto the shelf beneath me until she gained her own feet.
Then glowing roots dragged Emilio over to me through the water. I grabbed his long braid and dragged him to me, where he choked and gasped and made panicked sounds as his trembling hands flapped feebly against his mouth and his belly and he moaned, “No! No, no, no, no, no! Come back!”
“Hold him,” I said to Bear. The Valkyrie spat some water out, glowered at Emilio as she rolled a shoulder and winced, then took his braid in one hand and dragged him into an unceremonious headlock under one of her beefy arms.
“You’re paying for new leather, boss,” she said firmly.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
The green-gold light withdrew swiftly beneath the water, vanishing toward the east, toward the island, where Alfred would be taking the pieces of the Lurker to be entombed beneath the lake with the rest of the horrors in my charge.
I fumbled my mother’s old pentagram necklace out from under my shirt. The battered old silver star began to glow with blue wizard light at a murmur from me, and I held it up and started peering around to look for a handhold so that I could climb back up to the walkway.
And that was when I saw Estevez staring down at me, holding his reloaded pistol in his right hand.
He had it leveled at my head.
I was soaked through in freezing water, cold enough that, in the wind by the lake, even my generally winterized body was starting to shiver just a little. I didn’t have any of my spells up, and my armored duster and Kevlar vest would do nothing for me if Estevez put a round through my skull.
I raised my hands, palms up and open, very slowly. “You don’t want to do that,” I said.
Estevez lifted an eyebrow. “That is where you are quite wrong,” he told me.
I saw it on his face. The instant he decided to shoot. The tightening of the skin around his eyes.
And then Tripp Gregory brought the aluminum baseball bat down hard on Estevez’s wrist.
There was a crunching sound, and Estevez screamed.
Tripp hit him again, and the gangster went down and out of sight. Then Tripp stuck his head over the edge, his face twisted with pain and concern and said, “Harry? Bear? You guys okay?”
“Heh,” I said. “Heh. Heh, heh, heh.”
I looked at Bear, whose expression went from startled to relieved and then faintly annoyed.
“Wizards,” she muttered. “Can you see a way up?”
“Yeah,” I said. Something bumped my leg, and I recovered my staff from where it floated in the water. “This way.”