“Val!” Crow yelled, “The sprayer…the sprayer!”
He didn’t know if she heard him or had just run out of bullets, but there were no more shots. Mike was still fighting, still holding the moment. Crow looked wildly around for a weapon and saw something on the ground near him; he set his teeth against the pain and used his hands to pull himself toward it. He grabbed it, kissed it, and rolled onto his back, bracing the butt of the Roadblocker against the ground.
Griswold’s roars were ear-shattering; they tore chunks out of the night. And each one sounded stronger. Mike’s arm was tiring, his strength failing, and Griswold was regaining his strength despite the wounds the dhampyr inflicted. Whatever supernatural force the boy possessed was not doing the job; he just wasn’t causing enough damage.
Crow pulled the trigger of the big Mag-10 and the recoil buried the stock four inches into the mud. The bear-shot caught Griswold under the chin and snapped his head back like a boxer’s when he stepped into an uppercut. Half of Griswold’s porcine snout was gone, the raw meat seething with insects.
The air in front of Crow shimmered—just like it had after LaMastra died—and for a moment, just for a fraction of a second, Crow thought he saw a man standing there. Gray skin that had once been chocolate brown, intelligent eyes that were now dusty, a smile that Crow still remembered after all these years. The Bone Man looked at him and his mouth formed the words, “Little Scarecrow.”
The Bone Man turned and leapt at Griswold, flying high into the air as if he had no weight. Then he was gone, but Griswold staggered as if struck and Crow knew that the Bone Man had dealt his blow. But there was far more to the Bone Man’s attack than that. Suddenly the air was filled with a new sound and Crow looked up as the air was rent by the screams of ten thousand birds and the dry, hysterical rustle of countless wings. The night sky above the clearing coalesced into a funnel of black that spiraled down and down and down as all the night birds of Pine Deep came at the Bone Man’s call.
Griswold turned his ruined face upward—a face that even now was starting to reconstruct itself—and Crow saw fear on those features. Real fear. Crow jacked a round into the breech and fired again just as the wave of crows hit Griswold like a fist. The combined impact drove Griswold to the ground with a thunder that shook the valley. Hundreds, thousands of the birds died in that first moment, their skeletons shattered as they hit, but the birds kept coming in wave after wave.
Crow jacked another round and fired, knowing that the blast would kill some of the birds, too, but it had to be done. He fired, pumped, fired.
Mike stood his ground on the far side, slashing at his father’s flesh, releasing the vermin, watching as the crows attacked them.
There was a hissing sound and Val was there, the spray tank on the ground where she’d dragged it, the pistol grip in her left hand, the gasoline splashing Griswold’s torso and throat and chest.
Crow fired his last shot and dropped the gun. He dug into his pocket for his lighter and started crawling again, needing to be near for this. Mike was sobbing as he hacked at Griswold; Val was screaming. The noise of the birds was maddening, and throughout it all Griswold’s voice shook the heavens and his fists smashed down and slaughtered the birds.
Crow yelled and he tasted blood in his mouth as he flicked the lighter on and slammed it down onto the gas-soaked mud.
“Go back to hell!”
The night opened its great dark mouth and roared with a tongue of flame. A sheet of fire shot into the air and Crow rolled away, beating at the flames on his arm and hair. Val dropped the sprayer and rushed to him, and they clung together in the furnace heat. Griswold roared in terror and pain as the fire attacked him like a living thing, like a white-hot predator. Together they crawled over to where Sarah lay, and when Crow pressed his fingers to her throat, there was a slow but steady rhythm.
The heat slammed into Mike like a fist, but he stood his ground. Even when his eyebrows singed to ash and his hair began to melt Mike held fast and his sword cut and cut through the flames. Mike knew—if he knew nothing else in life for sure—that this was his moment. This truly was what he was born to do. Griswold had not yet fed on Sarah Wolfe’s blood; he had not yet tasted the innocent blood that would send his power soaring off the scale. He could still be hurt, as the flames were hurting him; and he could still be killed, as Mike so dearly wanted to do. If the sword in the hands of a dhampyr was a holy weapon, then so was the fire so long as he touched it, shared the essence of what he was with it. And with the birds. He felt the wings brush him and he knew that it was deliberate, that something—or perhaps someone— was orchestrating the moment. The air shimmered around him and Mike thought he heard the sweet sound of blues music like a calming eye of this dreadful storm. The music put iron back into his muscles and deep in Mike’s soul the eye of the dhampyr finally and completely awoke. Power raced through him like lava, burning through his veins, igniting in his muscles, and as he renewed his attack the inferno around Griswold flared brighter, and the birds plunged and died.
Ubel Griswold screamed even louder, a shriek that rose up to the heavens.
The fire burned Mike’s sword black as it cut, and then the metal began to glow as if it had been buried deep in a forge. He rent and tore at his father as the crows in the air ignited and fell onto Griswold, their own mass adding fuel to the blaze. Thunder cracked above and lightning forked through the sky as if nature itself, finally appalled at the perversity of what had come to life in Dark Hollow, now cried out in protest.
Griswold climbed back to his feet, a flaming god wreathed in fire; he opened his mouth to cry his rage and the flames flooded inside. He thrashed and beat at the birds and the fire, but the fire burned with a greater will even than his. As Val and Crow watched, Griswold’s mighty legs buckled and he dropped to his knees. For a long time he knelt there, burning, his arms still flailing, but with each moment there was less power in his fight, less belief in his own survival. Val and Crow lay there in the mud and the blood and watched the oldest evil, perhaps the oldest sentient thing on earth, burning to death as above them the remaining night birds circled and circled endlessly.
All around Griswold, around the swamp and through the woods to where his house still stood, the trees were on fire. Despite the thunder and lightning, the clouds overhead had parted and a swollen orange moon rode the heavens above the pyres of Halloween.
Mike’s clothes were catching fire, but he stepped closer still so that he could bring his sword high over his head and with a final grunt of effort he chopped down, cleaving between the horns and cutting all the way into Ubel Griswold’s brain. There was a burst of black light that flashed outward and struck Mike like a shock wave so that he staggered back, his eyes rolling up in his head; his sword fell from his twitching fingers as he stumbled backward and finally fell.
It seemed to take forever, but Griswold finally toppled forward onto his face and as he did so the force of will that held his shape together failed. The flesh blackened and burned away and the millions of insects that made up his body popped and hissed and steamed as they were charred to ashes. What the fire did not consume the surviving birds did.
After thirty years of planning, after centuries of hunting as man and wolf, after the meticulous ambition of the Red Wave, Ubel Griswold was dead and all his dark dreams with him.
Crow heard a sound and saw that Mike was crawling painfully toward them, and when he was near Val and Crow pulled him close and slapped out the embers on his clothes. He curled up like a child against them, weeping uncontrollably, clinging to them with absolute need, and they in turn held him, and each other.