Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter
Fifty-Two
I came out of my upstairs room, ready to go, and almost tripped and fell over Matias.
The middle-aged father blinked as he looked up at me and swallowed. He looked a hell of a lot paler than he usually did, but beneath his greying beard, his jaw was set in determination, and he was carrying one of the shotguns from Marcone’s stash during the battle.
His eyes, though. They looked sick with fear.
Not fear of what was in front of him—but what was already behind him.
Fear that piles up in your stomach like thick, acidic mucus.
Makes you feel sick. Makes you feel weak.
Makes you feel like the ghosts of horrible times past are holding a dance party in your guts, all singing at the same time, It’s happening again!
It’s happening again! IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN!
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 stick you 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 the seidrmadr I’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.”
We took a few steps forward and looked over the castle’s battlements.
There must have been a thousand people on the street outside the front gates, and they were loud.
Chants were going back and forth. Arms were being waved.
There was a lot of screaming, a lot of flushed faces, a lot of inappropriate fingers being flown.
Phones were being held up everywhere. There were probably three times as many people on the far side of the street as on the near one.
Here and there, there were people trying to talk, remonstrate, hold things back, moderate things.
But there weren’t enough of them, and over five minutes, the heat went up observably.
Some folks started across the street, and it wasn’t really clear which side went first, getting in one another’s faces.
“This is going to come to blows pretty soon,” Bear said calmly.
“Yeah? How do you know?”
“A person is difficult to predict. The more of them there are, the easier it gets,” she said. “Most people need to get a little worked up before they’re willing to do violence. They’re doing that now. This is going in one direction. Only question is how many minutes it will take to get there.”
I narrowed my eyes for a moment. Then let them go a little unfocused, sweeping the crowd again, observing. There was plenty of dramatic movement and noise out there.
Very distracting dramatic movement and noise.
So I started looking for the opposite.
And I spotted them. Little islands of stillness.
People who were just quietly standing. Not in the back, but in the middle ranks of the crowds in ones and twos.
In the rear on the far side, there were several folks who seemed to be just standing and waiting, not really talking, not even looking interested.
All of them were wearing backpacks. I mean, most of the crowd were, so that wasn’t in itself odd—but every one of the folks in back biding their time had them on.
I had to lean out over the battlements to look down at the sidewalk below. There were some standers there, too, spaced among the crowd, and as I did I felt a surge of fear and anger out of nowhere.
I suppressed it with a deep breath, leaned back, and frowned, thinking. Closed my eyes. Touched my fingers to the spot between and just above my eyebrows and opened my Sight, giving the street below a quick glance.
The fading daylight made it harder, but I could see the energy swirling among the crowd as their fear and anger grew, red and yellow and orange auras dominating—and centered around the standing figures among the crowd, generating that energy like individual campfires, spaced to spread warmth to as many as possible.
At the back on the far side of the street, the people standing and waiting in their backpacks were surrounded by a mad swirl of nauseating color, spinning wildly through the spectrum—utter emotional chaos coupled with their absolute stillness in a way no normal human mind could bear.
And, among the front lines on both sides, I could see auras of gleeful anticipation, rather than fear, around maybe thirty or forty of the participants, something feral and terribly hungry about them.
I dropped back, gasping, fighting my Sight closed again.
“What?” Bear demanded. “What did you see?”
“They’re using human shields,” I snarled.
“House Malvora of the White Court are fear-eaters. They’re working the crowd up, feeding on it, pushing more fear.
So the mortals are getting angrier and angrier.
” I fought to keep from throwing up. “And across the street, the ones with the backpacks. I think they’re Renfields.
Humans the Black Court have made into their puppets.
Plus at least forty ghouls starting the aggression. ”
The shadows were stretching longer and longer, their edges getting softer and more nebulous as the sun went down.
“Od’s fucking bodkin,” Bear swore. “If you attack them—”
“I’ll be killing mortals, and the Council will come after me. Assuming I survive.”
“They’ll try to smash their way in with rioters and ghouls,” Bear said. “Timing things for sundown, when the Black Court can be their hammer.”
I lifted my head and studied the sky for a moment. Considered the setting sun. The distance to Lake Michigan, no longer icy, but still too cold to swim in.
“We’ve got to get the people clear,” I said quietly. “And we’ve got to do it fast.”