Of course, if I didn't hurry up and stop the Darkhallow, every house I was now passing would be filled with its dead.
I checked the sky during the next long flicker of lightning and didn't like what I saw. The clouds were spinning faster, more broadly, and unnatural colors and striations had appeared in their formation. And we were almost under its center.
I guided Sue down another side street, and that's when I felt the cloud of power gathering before me. It swirled and writhed against my wizard's senses, sending tingling shafts of heat and cold and other, less recognizable sensations running through me. I shuddered at the disorienting strength of it.
There was magic being wrought ahead. A lot of it.
"There!" Butters shouted, pointing. "Down that way, that whole block is the campus!"
Lightning flashed again as I turned Sue down the street, and it was over the dinosaur's broad head that I saw Wardens battling for their lives in the street ahead.
They were in trouble. Luccio had them moving in a tight group around a cluster of… Hell's bells, around a group of children in colorful Halloween costumes. Morgan was at the head of the group, Luccio brought up the rear, and Yoshimo, Kowalski, and Ramirez were on the flanks.
Even as I watched, I saw dozens of rotting forms lurch out of the shadows ahead of them and charge. More came running in behind them, letting out wails of mad anger.
Luccio whirled to deal with them. And dear God, I suddenly saw the difference between a strong but somewhat clumsy young wizard and a master of the magic of battle.
Fire lashed from her left hand-not a gout of flame like I could call up, but a slender needle of fire so bright that it hurt the eyes to see. She swept it in an arc at thigh level, and every one of the zombies coming behind went tumbling to the ground amidst crackling sounds of shattering muscle and singeing meat. Another wave surged up behind the first. Luccio caught one of them in a grip of invisible power and hurled the un-dead into the ones behind, sending more of them to the ground, but a pair of the zombies got through.
Luccio ducked the grasping arms of the first, caught the thing by a wrist, and sent it stumbling aside with a twist of her body that reminded me of one of Murphy's moves. The second zombie drove a hammer-heavy blow at her head, but that slender blade she wore at her side swept up out of its scabbard and took off its arm at the elbow. Another move brought a chiming surge of some power I could feel even from half a block away singing through the silver steel of her sword, and she flicked it lightly at the zombie's head. The blade touched, there was a flash of light, and the zombie abruptly fell limp to the ground, the magic that had animated it disrupted and gone.
In less than five seconds, Luccio had simply wiped out thirty undead, and it hadn't even been a contest.
I guess you don't get to be commander of the Wardens by collecting bottle caps, either.
My eyes flicked back to the front of the group, where Morgan met the shock of another wave. His style was rougher and more brutal than Luccio's, but he got similar results. A heavy stomp of his foot sent a ripple through the earth that knocked undead to the ground like bowling pins. A gesture of his hand and wrist and a cry of effort drew grasping waves of concrete and earth up to clamp down on the fallen zombies. He closed his fist, and the earth tightened, drawing back down into the ground, cutting and tearing its way through undead flesh and ripping the zombies to shreds. One of the creatures was still mobile, and with a look of contemptuous impatience on his face, Morgan drew the broadsword at his hip-the one used for executions of wizards guilty of breaking one of the Laws of Magic-paused a beat to get the timing right, and then swung, once, twice, snicker-snack, and the zombie fell apart into a number of wriggling bits.
Several others got through here and there. Kowalski hammered one to the ground with unseen force, while beside him Yoshimo twisted a hand and the branches of a nearby tree reached down of their own accord, wrapped around the undead's throat, and hauled it up off of the ground. Ramirez, a fighter's grin on his face, lashed out with some kind of bright green energy I had never seen before, and the zombie nearest him simply fell apart into what looked like grains of sand. As an afterthought, he drew his sidearm as a second creature charged him, and calmly put two rounds into its head from less than ten feet away. He must have been loaded up with hollow points or something, because the creature's head exploded like rotten fruit and the rest fell twitching to the ground.
None of the zombies got within ten feet of the terrified children.
More of them materialized out of the rain and the night, but Luccio and the Wardens kept moving steadily forward, burning and crushing and slicing and dicing their way across the street, furiously determined to get the children clear.
Which is probably why they didn't see the sucker punch coming.
Out of nowhere there was the roar of an engine, and an old Chrysler shot forward along the street. The driver pulled it into a sharp left turn as it got close to the Wardens and their charges, and the wet rain turned it into a broadside slide. The car swept forward like an enormous broom of iron and steel, and none of the Wardens were looking that way.
I cried out to Sue and hung on to the saddlehorn.
The car slid, sending out a bow wave of sheeting water from the wet street.
Ramirez's head snapped around toward the car and he shrieked a warning. But it was too late to get out of the way. The group was still under attack, and the mindless creations that assaulted them cared nothing for self-preservation. They would continue the fight, and even if the Wardens could have run from the car, they would never survive being mobbed by the undead in the chaos. In a flash of insight, I realized that these were the same tactics Grevane had used at my apartment- ruthlessly sacrificing minions in order to defeat the enemy.
Everyone else's head turned toward the oncoming car.
The muscles of Sue's legs tensed, and the saddle lurched.
One of the little girls screamed.
And then the Tyrannosaur came down from the leap that had carried her over the besieged Wardens. Sue landed with one clawed foot on the street, and the other came down squarely on the Caddy's hood, like a falcon descending upon a rabbit. There was an enormous sound of shrieking metal and breaking glass, and the saddle lurched wildly again.
I leaned over to see what had happened. The car's hood and engine block had been compacted into a two-foot-thick section of twisted metal. Even as I looked, Sue leaned over the car in a curiously birdlike movement, opened her enormous jaws, and ripped the roof off.
Inside was Li Xian, dressed in a black shirt and trousers. The ghoul's forehead had a nasty gash in it, and green-black blood had sheeted over one side of his face. His eyes were blank and a little vague, and I figured he'd clipped his head on the steering wheel or window when Sue brought his sliding car to an abrupt halt.
Li Xian shook his head and then started to scramble out of the car. Sue roared again, and the sound must have terrified Li Xian, because all of his limbs jerked in spasm and he fell on his face to the street. Sue leaned down again, her jaws gaping, but the ghoul rolled under the car to get away from them. So Sue kicked the car, and sent it tumbling end over end three or four times down the street.
The ghoul let out a scream and stared up at Sue in naked terror, covering his head with his arms.