Then the motorcycle slowed.
“What are you doing?” I screamed.
“We can’t hit the beach at this speed,” Karrin shouted back. “We’ll pancake ourselves into those trees!”
“I don’t really feel like taking a swim tonight!”
“Don’t be such a pussy,” Karrin snapped. She leaned the bike into another turn, one that angled our direction to run parallel to the shore, and cut out the accelerator.
I felt the Harley slowing, and for a second I thought I felt it beginning to sink.
Then the Erlking cried out again and dived, his horse sprinting straight down, trailing the fire of the Hunt from its hooves. The rest of the hounds and riders followed in formation, and their horns and cries rebounded around the night.
Then, maybe a second before they hit the water, the Hunt changed.
Suddenly the Erlking wasn’t mounted on a horse, but on a freaking killer whale, its deadly-looking black-and-white coloration stark in the night. Behind him, the other steeds shifted, too, their riders screeching with excitement. The hounds changed as well. Their canine bodies compressed into the long, lean, powerful shape of large sharks.
Then the whole lot of them hit the water in a geyser of spray, and the Harley promptly fell into the water of the lake—
—and onto sand just under its surface. The bike slowed dramatically, pushing me up against Karrin, nearly pushing her over the handlebars, but she locked her arms straight and held, drawing the bike up onto the shore of the island. She rode the brake until we’d come to a halt, about five feet short of hitting one of the big old trees on the island.
“See?” Karrin said.
“You were right,” I said.
She looked back up at me, her eyes twinkling. “You are so hot right now.”
I burst out into a hiccuping laugh that felt like it could have veered off into manic or depressive at any second, the pressure and terror of this entire stupid, ugly day finally getting to me—but it didn’t. There were no enemy ships right on hand, and no one had launched grenades at the island since the Wild Hunt’s attack had begun. There might have been Outsiders in the water, but apparently the Hunt was occupying their total attention. For the moment, we were alone, and Karrin started laughing, too. We laughed like that for several moments. We each tried to speak, to say something about the day, but it kept getting choked off by the half-hysterical laughter.
“Grenades,” I said. “As if a date has to have—”
“. . . look on Molly’s face . . .”
“. . . know he’s a dog but I swear that . . .”
“Santa Claus smackdown!” Murphy gasped finally, and it set us both into gales of laughter that had no wind to support them, until finally we were just sitting with her small warm form leaning her back against my chest, in the darkness.
Then she turned her head, slowly, and looked up at me. Her eyes were very blue. Her mouth was very close.
Then I noticed something.
The second barge, whose tug Murphy had torched with her grenade, was moving.
I stood up and climbed off the bike, my eyes widening. “Oh, crap,” I said.
From there, I could see that Sharkface stood calmly on the surface of the lake at the rear of the barge, his cloak twining and writhing all around him. His arms stretched forward in what was clearly a gesture of command. The waters at the rear of the barge boiled with Outsiders, most of them at least partly out of the water, and it took me only a second to work out what was happening.
They were doing an Evinrude impersonation, slamming their combined mass and preternatural strength against the rear of the barge. The burning tug was still a massive column of smoke and flame in front of the barge, but the barge was definitely moving—and it was close to shore.
Eerie green and scarlet light flashed in the depths of the lake, soundless and random. Sharkface had been smart. When the Hunt entered the water, he must have sent the lion’s share of his Outsiders against them—while he and a few others came back up to the surface to ruin the crap out of my potential romantic moment.
“Oh, stars and stones,” I breathed. “If they get that boat to shore . . .”
“The Harley can’t get us there,” Karrin said. “Not through this terrain and brush.”
“You can’t keep up with me here,” I said.
Murphy gritted her teeth at that, but nodded. “Go,” she said. “I’ll come as fast as I can.”
And then I thought to myself that if I kept on waiting for things to quiet down and be more appropriate and safer before I took action, I was never going to get anywhere in life.
So I slipped a hand behind her head, leaned down, and kissed her on the mouth, hard. She didn’t stiffen. She wasn’t surprised. She leaned into it, and her mouth tasted like strawberries.
I gave it two heartbeats, three, four. Then we both drew away at the same time. Her eyes were slightly wide, her cheeks high with color.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her.
Then I turned and sprinted toward the stretch of shore at which Sharkface had pointed the last barge.
Chapter
Forty-five
For me, running across the island wasn’t a physical effort. It was mostly a mental one.
My awareness of the place was bone-deep, a total knowledge that existed as a single, whole body in my mind—a kind of understanding that some medieval scholars had called intellectus. It came to me on the level of reflex and instinct. When I ran, I knew where every branch stood out, where every stone lay ready to turn beneath my foot. Moving happened as naturally as breathing, and every step seemed to propel me forward a little faster, like running across the surface of one of those bouncy cages at a kid’s pizza place.
I didn’t have to run across the island. I just had to think about it and let my body effortlessly follow my mind.
I came out of the woods on the beach above where the barge was headed, which was roughly twenty-three yards, one foot, and six and one half inches from the nearest edge of the Whatsup Dock. One of the three major pulsing ley lines ran out from the island at almost that exact point, and if the barge managed to ground itself in contact with the line, Chicagoans were going to have a really rough morning commute.
Now that the Hunt and the Outsiders had taken their fight mostly below the waves, it was quiet enough to hear the barge approaching. Someone had already begun chanting on the deck of the barge. I couldn’t see them through the smoldering wreckage of the tug out in front of the barge, but voices were certainly being raised in unison in a steady chant of some language that sounded as if it were meant to be spoken while gargling Crisco.
“Whatever happened to Ia, Ia, Cthulu fhtagn?” I muttered. “No one has a sense of style anymore.”
Behind the chanting, I could hear the bubbling, sloshing water as the Outsiders pushed the barge nearer and nearer.
I rested the butt of the rifle on the ground next to my foot, crouched down, and squinted out at the boat. It was going to be here shortly, but not instantly, and I was pretty sure I’d get only one chance to stop it. I started gathering power to myself, an action I’d done so many times over the years that it was all but a reflex now, and squinted at the barge.
If the ritual was already in progress, then there was a chance that they were simply in a holding pattern, maintaining the skeleton of the spell with their own limited energy and waiting until the right moment. Once they were close enough to use it, they’d drop their circle and channel the energy of the ley line, shaping it into the spell’s muscles and organs, filling out the frame that was prepared to accomodate it. I had to make sure they never got that chance.
A hole in the hull would work, but by the time the barge came within my limited range, it would be too late to drown it. I’d already tried killing its engine once, so I wasn’t terribly excited about the prospect of taking out the creatures pushing it.