A little belatedly, I realized that these things had been created by somebody sucking all the essential force out of seven people, and that throwing bolt after bolt of life magic into them was probably not the best way to defeat them.
For just an instant I wished the snarky little voice in the back of my head was still there. The one that told me when I was being an utter ass, and when I was making really stupid mistakes. Unfortunately, that voice had been the lingering ghost of a much younger me, and she and I had fully integrated now. All I had left was my own voice muttering, “Moron,” and somehow it just didn’t have the same ring to it. I reined in the magic and even drew it out of the sword, so it was just me and a silver rapier against seven wights on a mountainside.
It was the moment they’d been waiting for. They moved as one, so fast I could barely see them. One actually sacrificed itself, leaping belly-first onto my sword. It slid all the way to the hilt, wrapped its long-fingered hands around my wrist, and held on.
Like Carrie, it didn’t weigh very much, but it didn’t have to weigh a lot in order to completely inconvenience me. Apparently being skewered by a relatively ordinary sword wasn’t enough to hurt an undead, never mind kill it, because its grip on my wrist didn’t loosen at all. I couldn’t shake the thing off, and while I was trying, five others did their best to tear me apart. One jumped on my back and wrapped its arm around my throat, going for a rear naked choke hold. I thrust the idea of a fender between its arm and my throat, creating a little more barrier, strengthening my shields there a little, but then another one started gnawing on my ankle and I started to discover inherent shields were one thing, but fighting half a dozen enemies at once were another. I ran backward as best I could, planning to smash the one on my back against the mountain. Instead I tripped on the one chewing my ankle and fell over.
On the positive side, while I didn’t think it was possible to knock a dead man breathless, the impact did at least cause the wight to loosen its grip around my neck. I kicked frantically and rolled away, feeling the earth rumble beneath me. There was a vehicle on the mountain somewhere, a huge roaring V-8 engine like Petite’s eating up the road. I thought it was a kind of nice sound to die by, and surged to my knees against the weight of two more wights pulling me back toward the ground. None of my spirit animals were about strength. Rattler was fast, Raven was clever, Renee was...timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly, as best I could tell. I needed a freaking bull to draw on.
Or a burst of healing magic used entirely on myself, rather than shoved out into the world. I’d never done that before. It was worth a shot. I concentrated on the idea of a turbo thruster, where the stoked-up, over-oxygenated engine was the muscles in my arms. Blue fire lit up in my biceps, triceps and deltoids. I bellowed from the bottom of my diaphragm, using all that focused energy to fling the wight on my sword upward. Straight up, with the intent to not just dislodge it, but toss it halfway across the mountains.
It would have worked better if the damned thing hadn’t still been clinging to my wrist like a leech, but its unnaturally long fingers lost their grip and I shook the sword free. The wight flopped over instead of flying off, and dragged my arm right back down with its weight. But I was now firing blue power on all muscular cylinders, and bashed my left hand into its face. It drove straight into the earth. I surged to my feet, twitching with the need to act and trying without much success to fight down an unholy glee. This had to be what Olympic athletes felt like at the top of their game: purely unstoppable, fully in their bodies, utterly certain of the physical response they would achieve.
I bet Olympic athletes hardly ever had wights shove a fingertip against their foreheads and begin to siphon off their physical prowess. The wight’s blank face curdled into a hideous smile, and beyond it I saw the others, including Carrie, coming toward me for a final time. My shields slipped and scrambled even as I fundamentally understood what was happening: I was pouring so much power into my own body that there was bleed-off, enough that the monsters could suck some of it up as it spilled out of the shields. And I’d overloaded myself just like a nitroed-up engine: it wasn’t going to come down until the fuel ran out. I had a lot of fuel for them to burn through. I hated to think what they would do with it, once I was depleted and they were all topped up.
My vision got woozy, way faster than I’d have thought possible, and I had the utterly childish thought “this is not fair!” before I dropped to my knees, wondering faintly how I was going to get out of this one.
Petite, my big, beloved 1969 Boss 302 Mustang, custom purple paint job and Washington State vanity plates declaring her name, hit the brakes behind me, spun a flawless 180 in a spray of red dust, and came to a shuddering stop not ten inches from my nose.
Morrison flung her door open, stood up with his duty weapon in hand, and shot Carrie Little Turtle between the eyes.
Chapter Eleven
Carrie dropped. The wight siphoning off my magic screamed and leapt backward, soaring over Petite and landing on her opposite side, closer to Morrison than me. He sighted and fired again, smooth and cool and calm. The wight dodged, taking the bullet in a shoulder instead of the throat, but it wouldn’t go any closer to Morrison. Or to me, for that matter, which was good, because I was too busy being astounded to do anything but gape.
Morrison was in jeans, which was utterly unheard of. Jeans and a snug white T-shirt, equally unheard of. He was also wearing his shoulder holster, which pinned the shirt against his chest even more snugly, and emphasized the line of his shoulders and waist. His silvering hair was bright in the morning sunlight, and he looked absolutely unconcerned that five of the six remaining wights were edging closer to him.
Not much closer, though. They got within fifteen feet, then hissed like they were burning and backed away again. Morrison shot the second one a second time, this time catching it in the forehead as he’d done with Carrie. It collapsed, too. The others howled, rushed forward, came within a few feet of Petite, and screamed their rage and fury as they fell away again.
“Steel.” I whispered the word, and it gave me the strength to stand. Petite was a classic, her sweet body made up of steel, not fiberglass or aluminum or carbon fiber like modern cars. And there wasn’t a monster in the books that didn’t have a revulsion to cold iron. Still whispering, I said, “Keys.”
Morrison, who shouldn’t have been able to hear me, reached into Petite’s interior, turned the engine off and tossed me the keys without ever dropping his weapon’s training on the wights.
I snatched the keys out of midair, took three long steps to Petite’s trunk, opened it, and popped the sawed-off shotgun out of its custom holder. I loaded it and another few steps brought me to Morrison’s side. He, still very steady and calm, said, “Shoot or run?”
I cocked the shotgun, and by the time we started pulling triggers, the wights were running for the hills. The dust from Petite’s arrival wasn’t yet settled when they disappeared from sight entirely. Morrison lowered his weapon and cast me the very slightest hint of a smile in his sideways glance. “Do we go after them?”
“Sure, if you’ve got boots of seven leagues so we can catch up to them WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?!?!” I threw the shotgun aside and flung myself into Morrison’s arms, which would have been a lot cuter if I was eight inches shorter and seventy pounds lighter than he. Instead we were of a similar height and he probably only had thirty, maybe forty, pounds on me. Instead of a romantic-lovers-reunited embrace it was more of a crashing, staggering thud against Petite’s frame, while I howled and shrieked and beat my fists against his back in utter, stupefied joy. “Oh, my God, Morrison, did you see yourself, holy shit, you were freaking fantastic what are you DOING here how did you FIND me what the HELL!!!”