Her castle wasn’t huge and imposing—the damned thing was invisible. Made of mirrors, covered in fog, wrapped in darkness, and generally hard even to pin down, much less besiege; anyone who went into her head had better bring a GPS, a seeing-eye dog, and a backup set of eyeballs. Worse, her offense was like dealing with a Mongolian horde. She’d send in waves and waves of every kind of mental construction imaginable, and while you were busy looking at those, ninja thoughts would be sneaking through your subconscious, planting the psychological equivalent of explosives. We’d practiced against each other a lot—immovable object versus irresistible force. It generally ended in a draw, when Molly had to quit and nurse a headache, at which point I would join her in scarfing down aspirin. A couple of times, my thuggish constructions had stumbled over her defenses and started breaking mirrors. A couple of times, her horde had gotten lucky or particularly sneaky. We’d had the same thought-image set up to signal victory—Vader swooping down in his TIE fighter, smugly stating, “I have you now.” Once that got through, the game was over.
But outside of practice, that thought could just as easily be something more like, “Put your gun into your mouth and pull the trigger.” We both knew that. We both worked hard to improve as a result. It was a part of the training I’d taken every bit as seriously as teaching her theory or enchantments or exorcism, or any of a hundred other areas we’d covered over the past few years.
But we’d never done it for blood.
The Corpsetaker moved Butters’s hands up to gently frame Molly’s cheeks and said, “My, my, my. Training standards have improved.”
Molly slammed Corpsetaker’s head back against the wall with a short, harsh motion, and said, “Stop squirming and fight.”
Corpsetaker bared Butters’s teeth in a slow grin, and suddenly surged forward, slamming Molly’s back against the opposite wall while simultaneously moving up a stair, so that their eyes were on the same level. “Slippery little girl. But I was crushing minds like yours centuries before your great-grandfather’s grandfather left the Old Country.”
Molly suddenly let out a gasp, and her face twisted in pain.
“They never have the stomach to hurt their darling little apprentices,” Corpsetaker crooned. “That’s called pain. Let me give you a lesson.”
“Lady,” Molly panted, “did you pick the wrong part of my life in which to mess with me.” She took a deep breath and spoke in a ringing, furious voice. “Now get the fuck out of my friend. Ideru!”
I felt the surge of her will as she spoke the word, and suddenly reality seemed to condense around my apprentice. There was a terrible, terrible force that ripped forth from her, pulling hungrily at everything around it. I’d felt something similar once, when a nascent White Court vampire had unintentionally begun to feed on me—an energy that spiraled and swirled and pulled at the roots of my senses. But that was only one facet of the gravity that Molly exuded with the spell.
Corpsetaker’s eyes widened in surprise and sudden strain. Then she snarled, “Have it your way. The little doctor was my second choice, in any case.”
And then I saw Corpsetaker’s dark, mad soul flow into my apprentice on the tidal pull of the beckoning she’d performed.
The expression of Butters’s face went empty and he collapsed, utterly without movement of any kind. Three feet away, his shade’s helpless, confused gaze locked onto his fallen physical form, and his eyes went wide with terror.
Molly screamed in sudden shock—and fear. In that instant, I saw in her eyes the reflection of her terror, the panic of someone who has come loaded for bear and found herself face-to-face with a freaking dinosaur instead.
My drifting, dream-slow advance had finally gotten me close enough. With sluggish and agonizing grace, I stretched out one hand . . .
. . . and caught the Corpsetaker’s ankle as she slithered into my apprentice.
I settled my grip grimly and felt myself pulled forward, into the havoc of the war for Molly’s body, mind, and soul.
Chapter Forty-nine
I landed in the middle of a war.
There was a ruined city all around me. The sky above boiled with storm clouds, moving and roiling too quickly to be real, filled with contrasting colors of lightning. Rain hammered down. I heard screams and shouted imprecations all around me, overlapping one another, coming from thousands of sources, blending into a riotous roar—and every single voice was either Molly’s or the Corpsetaker’s.
As I watched, some great beast somewhere between a serpent and a whale smashed its way through a brick building—a fortress, I realized—maybe fifty yards away, thrashing about as it fell and grinding it to powder. A small trio of dots of bright red light appeared on the vast thing’s rubble-dusted flanks, just like the targeting of the Predator’s shoulder cannon in the movies of the same name, and then multiple streaks of blue-white light flashed in from somewhere and blew a series of holes the size of train tunnels right through the creature. Around me, I saw groups of soldiers, many of them in sinister black uniforms, others looking like idealized versions of United States infantry, laying into one another with weapons of every sort imaginable, from swords to rocket launchers.
A line of tracer fire went streaking right through me, having no more effect than a stiff breeze. I breathed a faint sigh of relief. I was inside Molly’s mindscape, but her conflict was not with me, and neither was the Corpsetaker’s. I was just as much a ghost here at the moment as I had been back in the real world.
The city around me, I saw, was a vast grid of fortified buildings, and I realized that the kid had changed her usual tactics. She wasn’t trying to obscure the location of her mental fortress with the usual tricks of darkness and fog. She had instead chosen a different method of obfuscation, building a sprawl of decoys, hiding the true core of her mind somewhere among them.
Corpsetaker had countered her, it would seem, by the simple if difficult expedient of deciding to crush them all, even if it had to be done one at a time. That vast beast construct had been something more massive than I had ever attempted in my own imagination, though Molly had tossed some of those at me once or twice. It wasn’t simply a matter of thinking big—there was an energy investment in creating something with that kind of mental mass, and Molly generally felt such huge, unsubtle thrusts weren’t worth the effort they took—especially since someone with the right attitude and imagination would take them down with only moderately more difficulty than small constructs.
Corpsetaker, though, evidently didn’t agree. She was a lot older than Molly or me, and she would have deeper reserves of strength to call upon, greater discipline, and the confidence of long experience. The kid had managed to take on the Corpsetaker on Molly’s most familiar ground, and to play her hand in her strongest suit—but my apprentice’s strength didn’t look like it was holding up well against the necromancer’s experience and expertise.
I stopped paying attention to everything happening—all the artillery strikes and cavalry charges and shambling hordes of zombies and storms of knives that just came whirling out of the sky. The form of any given construct wasn’t as important as the fact of its existence. A flying arrow that could pierce the heart, for example, was potentially just as dangerous as an animate shadow reaching out with smothering black talons. As long as one could imagine an appropriate construct to counter the threat, and do so in time to stop it, any construct could be defeated. It was a simple thing at its most basic level, and it sounded easy. But once you’re throwing out dozens or hundreds—or thousands—of offensive and defensive constructs at a time . . . Believe me—it takes your full attention.