“No,” I said, softly and with enough power that the house shuddered with it. The unarmed man closed his too-wide mouth and smiled like he’d won something. He glanced down at Carla, but she didn’t see it. She was staring at me.
The report of my father’s gun was deafening, but it was only sound. Without the power of will behind it, it was empty as an echo. The unarmed man’s hand flickered, plucking the bullet from the air. Carla shrieked and put her hands up over her ears. My father fired twice more. The man batted the bullets away, his face twisted in concentration. His eyes fixed on me.
He was young. His shaved head left him looking thin and oddly fragile despite the tattoos and the intense power burning off him. I had the brief image of a boy trying to hold on to a fire hose. His will arced out, invisible and unmistakable as a pressure change, and with an almost physical click I was in the familiar space just behind my own eyes.
I was being ridden.
My body went still as a stone, and I could see the wizard’s eyes narrow. He’d sensed the change. My father was shouting, holding the gun in front of himself like a cross. I squatted a little, lowering my center of gravity, and kicked gently at the back of his knee, taking him out of the fight without actually hurting him. As he went down, the rider in me moved past him. The other two—the ones with the shotguns—were an older man with brown skin and a dusting of white hair and a thin, pale woman with eyes the color of gas flame. I remembered the first time the Invisible College had attacked me, Midian Clark walking among the conquered firing bullets into their heads. One of them had been a woman who could have been this woman’s twin.
My body didn’t hesitate. With one hand on the rail to steady me, I swung up the three steps from the TV room to the kitchen. The shattered glass glittered on the floor. The older man started to turn his shotgun away from Chogyi Jake and toward me. In the corner of my vision, my father hunched behind his overstuffed chair as if it would give him cover. My left hand slapped the shotgun barrel up, not grabbing it but striking hard enough to make the man stagger back. I kicked three times at his left knee. He fired the shotgun as he fell, shattering the overhead lights, but Chogyi Jake was on him, controlling both the shotgun and the fall.
“Surrender!” the young man shouted, his will pressing against me like a storm wind. Behind him the woman shifted, her shotgun tracking away from Ex and Carla. The Black Sun kicked past the young man, slamming my foot into the kitchen table. It slid across the room, breaking against the woman’s hip. I saw the tabletop scar from my jack-o’-lantern carving snap in half.
I stepped in, driving my elbow up toward the young man’s throat, but he was at least as fast as I was. I felt his counterstrike in my stomach without seeing where it came from. My breath left me, and it was my turn to stagger. My feet slipped on the glass and I dropped to my knees. I caught a glimpse of my mother and Curtis huddled under the dining room table. Good, I thought, stay there.
The young man stood above me, his hands out before him. His eyes had turned a uniform bloody red. The rider paused, resting on my fingertips and the balls of my feet. Distantly, I could feel her uncertainty. He turned his palms toward me with a word I didn’t recognize, and an invisible sledgehammer hit me in the chest.
I heard Ex calling my name, but it seemed to come from a long way away. Carla was screaming too. I wondered where Jay was. Getting help, I hoped. Calling the police. By the time they came, it would all be over, one way or the other, but at least he wasn’t in the room. It was one less person I needed to protect. Time seemed to be moving strangely. Slowly but discontinuously. I was falling to the floor, my heart a bloom of pain, and then I was on my knees again. I felt the rider’s will gathering in my right hand, and I tried to add my own to it. When I hit the wizard, the blow lifted him off his feet and threw him against the counter. His head hit the cabinet, splintering it. Half a dozen coffee mugs skittered down around him like snow, shattering on the floor. I leaped, but he was already elsewhere.
“You cannot defeat us!” he shouted, but it wasn’t true. His strength was fading. A feral grin pulled at my lips. He was already growing weaker. The Black Sun and I? We were just warming up.
I surged across the debris-strewn kitchen, hammering at him with my fists and my will. I felt him shifting from assault to defense, and I leaned into it. The blue-eyed woman staggered to her feet, and I spared enough attention to kick the shotgun out of her hands and send her back into the living room. I felt a little explosion behind me, and the older man Chogyi Jake had been fighting ran past me, unarmed and limping, for the front door. The rider glanced back. Chogyi Jake was on one knee in the dining room, blood running from his nose and mouth. He had the shotgun in his hand. Behind him, Mom was curled against the far wall, her face pale. I didn’t know where Curtis had gone. I could only hope he wasn’t chasing after them.
The unarmed wizard’s eyes had lost their bloody look and gone for a soft brown.
“What do you want from me?” the Black Sun asked. The power in her words reached into the man, pulled at him. He choked a little, trying not to speak, then bit down on his tongue hard enough that blood pinked his teeth.
“Jayné!” Ex shouted. “Behind you.”
I turned.
In the TV room, my father had found his feet. He stood at the end of the couch, holding the pistol with both hands. The barrel shifted from the wizard to me, then back again, as if he wasn’t sure who was the real threat. Fear boiled off him like steam. He was a middle-aged man with a paunchy belly and jowls that were starting to sag. Redness like a rash crawled up his sternum toward his neck. This was the man I’d feared so much. This was the man who’d dominated my life so deeply that I’d fled my home and my friends—a whole life—just so I could say I’d done something of my own.
And now he was going to shoot me.
“Gary!” my mother shouted, her voice low and rough. “You put that down!”
I could count on one hand the number of times my mother had used Dad’s given name. He shifted the gun toward the boy again, then back toward me. I waited for the muzzle flash, horrified. He lowered the gun. As I turned back toward the wizard, he drove his forehead into the bridge of my nose. I heard the cartilage break more than felt it. He opened his mouth and shouted wordlessly.
The Oath of the Abyss was the common name of a terrible spell. The rough guess I’d been given was that each time someone used it, it dropped their life span by about a year. I’d seen it done twice, both times by Aubrey. From a normal human, it was enough to rock back a rider. Now, from the wizard and whatever spirit was riding his body, it was like getting a hurricane full in my face. The Black Sun staggered, and I felt it lose control of my muscles for a moment. We were both standing there, trying to keep my feet. The overheated iron scent broke, and the kitchen only smelled like the cold breeze through the broken windows. The young wizard sagged, his gaze unfocused and lost.
“Stop him,” I tried to say, but my face felt like a rubber mask, and it sounded more like Ob em. The wizard turned, hobbling for the front door, and I went after him as best I could. The ground seemed to be shifting more or less in time with my heartbeat. When I got to the front yard, the older man was gone and the sound of a motorcycle blatting away was already fading. The blue-eyed woman was on another motorcycle, and she started it as I staggered down the front steps. The young wizard threw himself across the back of the bike, his arms going around the woman, his head collapsing against her like a puppet with its strings cut. The motor screamed out, and they started moving.